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22 1 a blood renaissance screen violence and the rise of the new hollywood auteurs the idea that the late 1960s and most of the 1970s represent a period of radical change in the American cinema is a given in virtually all recountings of postclassical Hollywood film history. According to David A. Cook, “The American film industry changed more between 1969 and 1980 than at any other period in its history, except, perhaps, for the coming of sound” (Lost Illusions 1). Thus, this era is viewed as a historical rupture of massive proportions, a time during which Hollywood production practices, ideologies, audiences, and the films themselves changed so drastically that the subsequent years were labeled the “New Hollywood.” The reasons for this revolutionary transformation of the industry are numerous : the recession that put the major studios in severe financial straits and made them vulnerable to takeover by international conglomerates, the demise of the longstanding Production Code and its replacement with the Motion Picture Association of America rating system, the box-office failure of so many formerly successful genres (particularly the musical and the western), and changing audience demographics, not to mention the various corollaries between changes of attitude in Hollywood films regarding sexuality, criminality, and politics and the social upheaval taking place in the streets of America. In the midst of this industry-wide turmoil rose a new generation of filmmakers who were fundamentally different from their classical Hollywood predecessors. Rather than old-school artisans who had worked their way up through the system, learning the trade of filmmaking from those above them, the so-called Film School Generation was composed of young, brash, self-proclaimed artists who were raised on television and who had A BLOODY RENAISSANCE 23 studied film in school. Well-versed in the history and aesthetics of world cinema, these filmmakers were in tune with the youth market that made unexpected hits out of fringe films like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider (1969), and they were primed to revolutionize the American cinema. Which, in a way, is exactly what they did, creating an “‘American film renaissance’ of sorts” (Schatz, “New Hollywood” 14). The reservation inherent in that statement—the idea that it was a renaissance “of sorts”— reflects its relatively short duration and the fact that it was eventually subsumed back into the conservative ideological agenda of the industry in the 1980s. Robert Kolker has usefully characterized the New Hollywood of the Film School Generation as a temporary intervention in the tradition of Hollywood filmmaking. At the same time, “despite the influence [of the French New Wave], no ‘new wave’ in America occurred, no movement. That brief freedom . . . was really a freedom to be alone within a structure that momentarily entertained some experimentation” (9). However, experimentation did take place, and out of this willingness to experiment, in terms of both reworking the old and bringing in the new, was a reimagining of the role of violence in the cinema—visually, narratively, and thematically. The New Hollywood filmmakers reimagined screen violence by bringing it to the fore of their most important films in ways that both highlighted and subverted the established and understood narrative and thematic tropes of violence in Hollywood filmmaking; at the same time, they gave it a brash visual intensity and level of gut-churning graphic realism that had, with only a few exceptions, never been seen before. Thus, the screen violence of New Hollywood films had the dual edge of radically reworking old and comfortable themes and narrative structures while also introducing what can only be described as “a new way of seeing” violence on-screen. Although these new forms of screen violence are central to the films of virtually every major figure of the New Hollywood, scholarship has made violence at best secondary in the study of their careers. Here I will argue that these new and innovative depictions of screen violence were of primary importance to these young filmmakers and served as a concrete means for them to distinguish themselves from their classical Hollywood forebears. It marked their arrival as the bold, visionary leaders of the New Hollywood. In this chapter, I will first offer a brief historical overview of representations of violence in the American cinema, starting with the silent era and ending with the rise of the New Hollywood directors in the late 1960s and their dominance throughout the 1970s. I am using the term “auteur” not in the highly romanticized sense of...

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