Revolution!: The Explosion of World Cinema in the Sixties

by Peter Cowie

An evocative and unique exploration of the most important era in international filmmaking

In film history, the sixties are commonly known as the golden age of international cinema. The period from 1958 to 1969 saw a brilliant explosion of talent not just in Europe but throughout the world. From Sweden and Poland to India and Japan, from Brazil and Hungary to Spain and Czechoslovakia, young filmmakers seemingly sprang out of nowhere, challenging the stale conservativism of fifties cinema. With films like Jules et Jim , 8 1/2 , and Breathless , to name but a few, they flouted taboos both sexual and political while bringing sharper, fresher, franker, more violent, and more personal visions to the screen than ever before.

In Revolution! , Peter Cowie discusses the themes, trends, and creative filmmakers of the period--including Antonioni, Bergman, Cassavetes, Fellini, Godard, Kurosawa, and Truffaut--while focusing on those whose voices still evoke the struggles and achievements of the sixties and set the creative and intellectual standard by which today's finest films are still held.

Genres: Film

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Peter Cowie is a film historian and author of more than thirty books on film. In 1963 he was the founder/publisher and general editor of the annual International Film Guide, a survey of worldwide film production.

Reviews

[Under Milkwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being a dedicated fan of sixties and seventies cinema, I was thrilled to stumble across "Revolution.." in a bargain book basement. Its author, Peter Cowie, was vaguely familiar to me as the long-running editor of the International Film Guide, and more recently as a commentator attached to the classic films of the prestigious Criterion Collection.
Initially I was a little unsettled by the format of the book because it felt like I was doing a friend a favour by reading over their latest Uni thesis. You know the drill - where your friend's 'labour of love' is padded out to the point of verbosity, foreign expressions et al, and most alarmingly, it is supported by quotes and references. But then the film sprockets, so to speak, started smoothing out and the projection became seamless.
It's a fascinating journey as we follow the transition of world cinema from late fifties to late sixties via the innovative New Wave directors, Neo-realists and confronting taboo breakers. The cultural spirit of the sixties is proudly on show here and the added bonus of the author's twenty-first century interviews with an impressive collection of the celebrated film mavericks of the time is icing on the cake.

[Al Bità · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the West, the ’60s have become associated with the term “youth revolution”, when the so-called baby-boomers resulting from the survivors of the Second Word War (who only wanted peace and prosperity while replenishing population figures to replace those who had died) found their progeny revolted by the unquestioning passivity this created. This resulted in a turning against traditional values and ideas which they found wanting on many levels; and the increasing anger and frustration of the Vietnam War served, among other things, to stimulate that aversion, culminating in the student revolts of ’68 and its consequences (in a sense we are still feeling those repercussions today). Part of that insurgence was the revolution that was started during that decade in the world of cinema.

Peter Cowie took the opportunity in 2001-2 to interview many of the surviving members of that time, and these interviews are represented in this book, together with Cowie’s lucid and informative narrative knitting of this all together, beginning with an introductory overview of the ’50s. The result is an impressive and satisfying historical record of the complex and wide-ranging dreams and aspirations of that time. The spread is quite global: French, British, German, Scandinavian, Czech, Danish, Yugoslavian, USA, Polish, etc. — and while it is not possible that every individual and every film is covered, enough is provided to give a solid idea of what was going on in each country’s equivalent of the “New Wave”.

This book was a nostalgic read for me. One of the sad things about the inexorable march of time is that things which were common knowledge at the time become forgotten. During the ’70s I was very much involved in the Film Society Movement in Australia, first as a member from the late ’60s of the Film Study Group (as it was then known) of the Workers Educational Association (WEA) in Sydney, then as President of the WEA FSG (1972-82), President of the New South Wales and Associated Film Societies (1972-83) and President of the Australian Council of Film Societies (1980-83). This wonderful and unforgettable decade of my life was enriched by access to the works of the contributors to new ways of seeing, but who, through their own approaches, and their re-evaluation of the cinema of the past, very much advanced the idea of Cinema as an Art form worthy of study. The existence, for example, of the French Cinémathèque provided both the opportunity to view extensive archives of many international films, enabling them to be viewed and reviewed, studied and discussed, and then written about and disseminated through such eminent magazines as Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight and Sound to wide audiences globally. As a result, many names were familiar to us then: Andrzej Wajda, Agnès Varda, Volker Schlöndorf, André Delvaux, Miloš Forman, Dušan Makavejev, Krzysztof Zanussi, Miklós Jancsó, Vilgot Sjöman, Karel Reisz, Jörn Donner, etc. etc. Added interest was thus provided to such great luminaries as Alain Resnais, Bernardo Bertolucci, Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, Roberto Rossellini, Bo Widerberg, Kenji Mizoguchi, Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu, Francesco Rosi, Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, etc. etc. — things would never be the same again…

A crucial element in the successful promotion of this “revolution” lies in the development of technologies such as light-weight cameras and sound equipment, and more sensitive materials for the recording of images in natural lighting and sound in natural settings. These enabled individuals to break away from the controls imposed by studio-based restrictions. For better or worse (and there were both!) filmmakers felt free to explore whatever, wherever, whenever, and then find outlets where they could communicate their experiments and findings with others with similar interests.

Of course, the French nouvelle vague were, perhaps, central to Western dissemination of the need for re-evaluation (in particular “auteur” theory — the argument that the director should be considered the “author” of his film). François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Chris Marker, etc. including (unfortunately) Jean-Luc Godard (I say unfortunately because Godard’s influence has perhaps been most pervasive (I don’t quite understand why (I have always found his films boring, banal, shallow, cynical, patronising, and perhaps even condescending to his audiences: perhaps it is his complete disregard for rules of any kind that appeals to the rebellious for its own sake) particularly since in my opinion Godard in just about every film he has made, has consistently and continually averted that “cinema is dead”, yet mercifully no one seems to have paid any attention!).

All this youthful activity stimulated cross national and international boundaries, exchanging ideas and concepts at Film Festivals everywhere, sparking new interest in the special qualities of cinema. This book is a tribute to those first flickerings of awareness in those early days.

[Peter Sumby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peter Cowie says - in Sight and Sound's 1962 L'avventura was voted 2nd greatest film of all time. By 2002 it had disappeared from the list.

[Andrewh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an enjoyable whizz through a decade of tumultuous change and upheaval in cinema, and Cowie is a very knowledgeable guide, though he does drop a few too many names for my comfort ('I was having coffee in Cannes with Agnes Varda,...' and so on), but the overriding feeling is that this was knocked off rather quickly without much effort, from some old notes. There are a lot of potted biographies of directors and film movements, from neo-realism to the east europeans (which I knew very little about) up to the ubiquitous nouvelle vague and the US independents, and some interesting interviews, but not much depth - often seems like a series of Sight & Sound articles. It is great for filling in the gaps in one's world cinema Lovefilm list though (not that they bother to license many of these movies any more...) and a reminder of how cinema used to be a vital part of the wider culture and society even - as Volker Schorndorff says in an interview at the end 'Films were the medium of the generation of the 60s' (we have, well, the internet).

There is also a whole chapter on the 'events' of 1968, which, bizarrely, were kicked off in Paris when Henri Langlois, legendary head of the Cinematheque Francaise (where directors such as Godard and Truffaut learned about film), was fired by one Andre Malraux, minister of culture (equivalent to Maria Miller, in today's terms). After the riots erupted in Paris, there was also a bizarre uprising at the Cannes Film Festival with the main directors refusing to show their films in solidarity with the students and the general strike - that all looks slightly ridiculous now, of course (Richard Lester, of Hard Day's Night fame, watched it on board a yacht in the harbour, drinking champers), but it is hard to imagine anyone at Cannes now demonstrating about anything except the quality of the canapes. It all seems like tremendous fun, basically, but if you care at all about films, and most people don't to judge by the crud that gets produced now, it is a vital era in history.

[Jimmy Cline]

I pretty much fell in love with Cowie after listening to his commentary track for Bergman's the Seventh Seal. He's also recorded one for Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour. Cowie's insights are ridiculously well researched and perceptive. He's basically in the same league as Bogdonavich, McCabe, Bordwell, and Richie.

[Srikanth Mantravadi · Rating 4 out of 5]

My guide to the nouvelle vague and neo realism cinema of the sixties. The writer,Peter Cowie, does not make the mistake of excluding other blooming cinema powerhouses like the Polish directors or the Swedish. Lucidly written, Cowie gently takes you on a tour of the landmarks and cornerstones of the period.A quintessential reference guide to start off watching cinema of the period.

[Mike Bourke · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is mostly made up of interviews with the main french/english/eastern european directors of the time. I would have liked for a bit more analysis of the movies mentioned but it is a helpful primer to guide through arthouse cinema in the 60s.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author's love of independent cinema from the Sixties is evident and is capable of making the reader want to see these movies as soon as possible.

[Wytterry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frustrating 60s