The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s

Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwarth, Noel King (eds.)

2004
Amsterdam University Press, 391pp

The Last Great American Picture Show brings together essays by scholars and writers who chart the changing evaluations of the American cinema of the 1970s, sometimes referred to as the decade of the lost generation, but now more and more recognized as the first New Hollywood, without which the cinema of Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Tim Burton or Quentin Tarantino could not have come into existence.

Contents

Part One Introductions

The Impure Cinema: New Hollywood 1967–1976

Alexander Horwath 

"The Last Good Time We Ever Had": Remembering the New Hollywood Cinema

Noel King 

chapter
2004

American Auteur Cinema: The Last – or First – Great Picture Show

Thomas Elsaesser 

Incomplete

Part Two Histories

The Decade When Movies Mattered

David Thomson 

A Walking Contradiction (Partly Truth and Partly Fiction)

Alexander Horwath 

The Exploitation Generation. or: How Marginal Movies Came in from the Cold

Maitland McDonagh 

New Hollywood and the Sixties Melting Pot

Jonathan Rosenbaum 

Part Three People and Places

Dinosaurs in the Age of the Cinemobile

Richard T. Jameson 

"The Cylinders Were Whispering My Name": The Films of
Monte Hellman

Kent Jones 

Nashville contra Jaws, or “The Imagination of Disaster”
Revisited

J. Hoberman 

For Wanda

Bérénice Reynaud 

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: The Uneasy Ride of Hollywood and Rock

Howard Hampton 

Auteurism and War-teurism: Terrence Malick’s War Movie

Dana Polan 

Part Four Critical Debates

The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 1970s: Notes on the Unmotivated Hero

Thomas Elsaesser 

Trapped in the Affection Image: Hollywood’s Post-traumatic Cycle (1970–1976)

Christian Keathley 

Grim Fascination: Fingers, James Toback and 1970s American Cinema

Adrian Martin 

Allegories of Post-Fordism in 1970s New Hollywood: Countercultural Combat Films and Conspiracy Thrillers as Genre Recycling

Drehli Robnik