Movies

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

Gio writes:
"1970? Add: Five Easy Pieces, Chabrol's This man must die, & Rohmer's My
night at Maud's.  (That's three off the top.)  BUT the difference b/n '50 &
'70 has a lot to do with the impact of television on film.  During the '50's
& early '60's TV was dismissed as a bastard child, all context to film's
content:  TV was regularly scheduled advertising; movies were vital, about
*something*.  On the other hand, if you watched TV, film became slow,
quirky, foreign (in language or content), and, unlike Sturgis, Ford, etc.,
didn't reach the large audience ready for TV entertainment, good or bad.
But, for a time, there was a division.  (Compare that to today's market, as
one shills for the other; where, in many cases, they are the same industry.)"


Just to bring this back to a Pynchonian context, one big change in those twenty
years was the restructuring of Hollywood itself--the studio system in which each
major studio was its own self-enclosed feudal kingdom, with its own staff o
f producers, directors, writers, stars and technicians by 1970 was well into t
eh the process of metamorphosing into the current episteme--where the studios
essentially serve to fund and distribute projects brought to them by producers
and writers from outside.  Part of the impetus for this complex change was--
guess who?--our friends the multinationals, who were snatching up studios like
cookies at a buffet.  Sony's acquisition of Columbia was just the latest
example.  Rather than emphasis particular films of one year, look at the
directors who were vital at the time--Altman, Peckinpah, Penn, Kubrick, the
very young Woody Allen, u.s.w.  Many of them had backgrounds in tv and were
also strongly influenced by foreign directors, especially Fellini, Bergman and
the French New Wave.

Notice that it has taken TRP a while to make his piece with pop culture, which
is always a part of his context.  One thing that seems to annoy people about
VINELAND is that it is not as apparently judgmental about the Tube as, say,
COL49.  It is often detrimental (as in the influence of cop shows on notions
of civil liberties) but most of all it is There--something that has to be
reckoned with, not unlike that hayloft of marijuana planted in Zoyd's house.


Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)