1965-1975

So far all of my posts on this blog have been more formal, an essay with a thesis and all that jazz, well I decided for this one I am going to be less formal and just kinda ramble. BUT it will not be just pure rambling, recently a friend of mine asked me what my favorite decade was for film and with out hesitation I said 1965-1975. When she asked me why I had a hard time explaining it, so finally here is my answer to that second question. Well to really answer this question I will have to talk about what was also happening socially at the time because it had a large effect on film. So kind of the calling card of the 1960’s was that it was a rebellious decade, people, especially the teenage age group, were breaking away from the stuffy post war society where people were expected to do certain things. So as a way of rebelling from this post war attitude a new group of people called teenagers began experimenting with drugs, sex, music and they formed the entire counter culture movement. This idea of rebellion and doing a complete 180 to what the previous generation had done really caught on with directors and much to the disappointment of Hollywood executives people loved it. Before the mid ‘60s everything in Hollywood was controlled and done in a very exact manner, everything was shot on sets built inside sound stages, every light was placed in an exact spot with an exact intensity, every camera motion would stop and start at the most optimal point with absolutely ZERO shaking or unintended motion. One of my favorite examples of this type of movie is Casablanca, one of the greatest love stories of all time. But to counter act this the directors and film makers of the 60’s just went out and shot. One of the best examples of this is in Easy Rider in the scenes in New Orleans director Dennis Hopper just found some of his friends how owned cameras and they just went out and shot. This concept of little to no pre-planning was mind blowing to the directors and other people who had been on the Hollywood scene for a while. I could talk about technical reasons why I personally love this decade for days but I think I would bore anyone who happens to be reading this so Ill talk about some of the other reasons why this decade kicks ass: subject matter. To go along with the social revolution of the 60’s things like sex and drugs lost their taboot status and became seat filling subjects for box office films. On the topic of sex no other movie was as ground breaking as the Graduate, a film in which a young man (Dustin Hoffman) who has recently graduated college is seduced by a much older woman (Anne Bancroft). When this first came out it people were shocked, they didnt know how to react to what they had seen. Another great example of this topic comes from 1975 with Rocky Horror Picture Show, a film about “a sweet transvestite, from Transsexual Transylvania” (“the rocky horror”). Then the other subject that had been only talked about behind closed doors was drugs, once again in Easy Rider the two protagonists were constantly smoking pot or doing some other kind of drug, and this very open attitude about showing what life was really like went directly in the face of the previous generation. The final thing I want to bring up about subject matter is that during the post war Hollywood boom what you saw in movies was fantastic, epic, wonderful, amazing......NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU! Take Casablanca for example probably the best love story of all time but its so fantastic that it could never actually happen. So to go against this the filmmakers of the 60’s were making movies that were believable. In Midnight Cowboy a young man goes to New York in dreams of making it big there but instead of becoming rich and famous, he becomes a male prostitute. The Godfather is a very realistic example of how Italian mobs and gangs worked during the time and it showed what could really happen. And then finally just the sheer number of amazing actors and directors and everything else that came out of this decade is why it is my favorite.

and p.s all of my citations except for the one quote come from the movies A Decade Under the Influence and Visions of Light both of which are documentaries about making movies and are both wonderful and i suggest that you watch both of them.

"The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) - IMDb." The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Web. 12 Jan. 2011. .