American Cinema’s Sixties Crack-Up

Saada: We should stress that there’s a political climate in the U.S., a moment that I think cinema is ready to grasp. There’s been Kennedy’s murder. There’s the beginning of the Vietnam War. There’s the civil rights movement. There’s a lot of violence erupting everywhere in every level of society.

Peña: I think these men feel like they’ve lost control, and that’s when they start going crazy, because the world has changed in a way that they haven’t been able to stop. It’s a world in which men can no longer take decisive actions, because to do that often leads to disaster.

It’s interesting to remember that most of what we think of as the New American Cinema was made by people who were much younger than the people we’re looking at. And while I think much of this caused panic for that older generation, the post-’68 filmmakers accept it, or at least they’re more used to it. They see that this is simply the way the world has changed.

Peña: Movies still needed to distinguish themselves from television, and sex and violence were two means to do that. There were basically three networks, and there were very strict rules about what they could show. And after The Moon Is Blue (1953) and Baby Doll (1956), studios routinely ignored the Production Code. So there’s a moment where there’s no formal structure for rating films. I think when we get to the ’60s, it’s just become part of the vocabulary of these filmmakers. They now know that they can include sex and violence as major themes or ideas in their films.

Saada: For a long time the cornerstone of that was claimed to be Bonnie and Clyde. But Bonnie and Clyde was released the same year as In Cold Blood, 1967. And I think In Cold Blood is a far more disturbing film, in terms of what’s shown and not shown. And also look at another Arthur Penn film, The Chase, which is a year earlier. That brawl—that long scene where Brando is almost beaten to death in a lifelike way—is one of the most disturbing moments of Hollywood ’60s cinema. That shooting scene from Targets (1968) is also very disturbing. Violence is let loose, and I think it reflects the violence of the time.

Saada: It’s visible in the daring moves in terms of lighting, for instance. There’s a moment of In Cold Blood that’s one of the starkest, darkest scenes ever filmed. I think it’s something that David Fincher must have watched. I always say to friends of mine, “the first David Fincher film is In Cold Blood,” because it’s an exercise in lighting and framing. Also there’s the influence of European cinema in montage effects, which are used to depict mental illness by collaging images that have nothing to do with one another. You can see it in The Manchurian Candidate; you can see it in Lilith and Uptight. There are a lot of important editors of that period (like Dede Allen, for instance) who are looking at European films and saying, “we’ve got to use this for our movies.” And in this series you can see some of the great cinematographers—Haskell Wexler, Stanley Cortez, Boris Kaufman, James Wong Howe, Conrad Hall—doing some of the boldest work of their careers.

Just like [Albrecht] Dürer traveled to Italy and changed the shape of German painting, these people—cinematographers, editors, directors, actors—went to see films by Fellini, by Bergman, by Godard, and tried to see how they could use the form to talk about what was going on in the U.S. at the moment. Arthur Penn was a big fan of Godard, and Truffaut visited him during the filming of Mickey One (1965). I think that long party scene in The Chase wouldn’t exist without La dolce vita (1960). At the same moment, other things are going on in the artistic American world. The free jazz movement, action painting, the new theater. All the emerging new trends in the arts are also influencing the style of these movies.

In our conversations, we realized that the New American Cinema is the aftermath. It’s a hangover moment. Those movies are kind of relaxed, cool, almost muted down. And when you look at these movies, they’re so extreme and high-octane.

Saada: I have this fantasy that movies happen in a parallel world, and that sometimes they coexist in the same time and space. So I always regret that the main character of Targets didn’t get a visit from the psychiatrist from Pressure Point. There’s a connection of mood between these movies that makes you feel that they’re all like a collection of short stories.

Saada: I think the word avant-garde is overused. But it can be applied to some of the montage effects in The Manchurian Candidate and Point Blank. There’s something going on in these movies that is jarring, disturbing, and really new in terms of Hollywood film language.

Peña: Well, it’s a loaded term. There was, going back from the ’40s, a tradition of what you could call Hollywood independents, which basically meant you produced the film and then the studio distributed and exhibited it. So you partially left the studio system, but you didn’t totally leave it. The idea of actually setting up a completely separate system—I think Faces (1968) is one of the first films to really do that. John Cassavetes distributed his own films. [But most of the films in this series] are more in the tradition of Hollywood independents. Studios got rid of studio contracts. And by the midfifties, there was hardly anybody under contract anymore.