When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited

by Jonathan Kirshner (Editor), Jon Lewis (Editor)

In When the Movies Mattered Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis gather a remarkable collection of authors to revisit the unique era in American cinema that was New Hollywood. Ten eminent contributors, some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood movement as it unfolded across the 1960s and 1970s, assess the convergence of film-industry developments and momentous social and political changes that created a new type of commercial film that reflected those revolutionary influences in American life.

Even as New Hollywood first took shape, film industry insiders and commentators alike realized its significance. At the time, Pauline Kael compared the New Hollywood to the "tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the 1850s" and David Thomson dubbed the era "the decade when movies mattered." Thomson's words provide the impetus for this volume in which a cohort of seasoned film critics and scholars who came of age watching the movies of this era reflect upon and reconsider this golden age in American filmmaking. Contributors: Molly Haskell, Heather Hendershot, J. Hoberman, George Kouvaros, Phillip Lopate, Robert Pippin, David Sterritt, David Thomson

Genres: Film

224 pages, Paperback

Published June 15, 2019

Reviews

[Tonymess · Rating 4 out of 5]

As per a lot of collections, this has some great chapters (including the bemoaning of 70s cinema) but also some ordinary ones and one shocker. The Altman piece is an atrocious piece of gobbledygook self indulgent wank that makes no sense other than highlighting the writer as a tool.
Overall a nice insight into the era.

[Magnus Stanke · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have similar feelings for collections of essays as I have for short story collections. I prefer novels or non-fiction books written by one author about a given subject. I prefer to immerse myself than to take consecutive dips as it were. On the other hand, it's hard to fault a book about New Hollywood in which some of the best-known critics get to share their expert insight into an era that I revist every year in summer. I can't get enough of it.
The films treated here are not particularly left-field so the danger over chewing over the overly familiar is constantly present. Having said that, I enjoyed most of what I read, and yet I wouldn't claim anything was radically enlightening.

[Mark Schoen]

"For one brief moment, it was the best of all worlds: American directors got to make European films with Hollywood money but without studio restraints. And it is to take nothing from their achievement to remark that it was mostly a guy thing."

Molly Haskell's essay on the role of women in 70s films is definitely worth seeking out.