English 320-011
Authorship and the New Hollywood Cinema: Robert Altman, Sydney Lumet, Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, Bob Rafelson, Martin Scorcese
Instr: Blasini, Gilberto
Office: CRT 487; 229-4540
e-mail: gblasini@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: MTWR; 10:00am-12:40pm; CRT 104 (5/30-6/24)
Course Description
The course examines the figure of the film auteur during the transition period of U.S. cinema called "the New Hollywood." This 13-year period (1967-1980) was marked by the emergence of a new generation of directors who reinvigorated filmmaking as an artistic practice by intimately linking it both to (macro and micro) politics as well as to formal and aesthetic experimentation. Class discussions will focus on the way in which six particular film directors-Robert Altman, Sydney Lumet, Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, Bob Rafelson, Martin Scorcese-created new cinematic versions of the U.S. as a nation by engaging and reconfiguring the social discourses circulating in the U.S. during the late 1960s and the 1970s. In particular, the course will pay particular attention to the way in which these auteurs reconfigured genres such as the Western and film noir, as well as to their articulation of discourses of masculinity in relation to the mythology that populates the U.S. social imaginary.
