Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema
Book
Overview
Overview
Abstract
During the 1970s, for the only time in film history, mainstream Hollywood filmmakers pursued a narrative design that regularly challenged the harmony, felicity, and linearity of classical Hollywood cinema. Although present, in a more subdued form, since the early days of studio filmmaking, this relatively deviant narrative design reached its greatest prominence, popularity, and intensity in the seventies, when Hollywood filmmakers repeatedly set out to create the kind of narrative disharmonies that most of their predecessors had spent so much energy trying to avoid. Hollywood Incoherent identifies the period’s defining narrative strategies and explains their aesthetic contribution to Hollywood cinema. It further demonstrates the centrality of the seventies to the history of Hollywood’s formal development and the lasting impact of seventies modes of narration on contemporary film.
