Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema

Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema Todd Berliner. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.

Jim WelshSalisbury University, EmeritusThe last two chapters examine the "limits of seventies narrative design" as evidenced in two films, Scorsese's Taxi Driver and the John Cassavetes film, Woman Under the Influence (1974), each intended to demonstrate both the "extremes" and the "commercial hazards" of this newly discovered "narrative perversity." Of course, other scholars (like David Cook, for example) noticed that many of the films of the 1970s were artistically innovative. Peter Lev linked that innovation to the decade's "conflicting ideological currents." But explaining ideology and culture won't necessarily explain box-office popularity, or what, exactly, the "innovations" involved, or why they caught on with popular audiences. Todd Berliner does just that, and that is why this book is so important. In conclusion: Don't attempt to teach the 1970s without it. This is surely one of the most important film books of the decade, pure and simply. Ignore it at your own risk.Berliner is especially interested in American filmmakers influenced by European and Asian art cinema, who then began creating odd, moody, ambiguous, and unpredictable characters populating looser narrative structures dominated by elliptical, disrupting flashbacks, and flashforwards, influenced by films as diverse ad Kurosawa's Rashomon and Bergman's Persona, and rendering both characters and plots mysterious and inscrutible. Especially influenced himself by the narrational notions of David Bordwell and others, Berliner should be able to press forward with more confidence than he sometimes seems able to muster. Nonetheless, during this experimental period, American cinema became less parochial and more interesting, more mature, and sophisticated than it had heretofore been. Some films got multiple viewings because viewers just were not sure what had conspired (in such films as Antonioni's Blow-Up or Kurosawa's Rashomon, for example). Berliner takes a particular interest in the creative implications of many of the films Tino Balio describes in his book Foreign Film Renaissance (2010).1 cannot possibly assume that a regular cup or mug could be utilized in measuring the amount of flour or sugar that you'll use for the batter. In baking, one needs to be precise. This indicates utilizing accurate well defined measurements in sorting your ingredients. These cups aid in measuring liquid components like h2o, milk, juice in milliliters, ounces, pints or fractions of a liter. Measuring cups also offer level measures for dry ingredients such as sugar and flour.Todd Berliner's book is certainly one of the best I have seen about 1970s cinema. Berliner noticed that the films of that decade just didn't make sense in the usual way that Hollywood studio cookie-cutter films of the 1940s and 1950s did. Leslie Halliwell, once a presumptive touchstone of popular taste, complained about the "arrogance" of the 1970s filmmakers, objecting to the narrative peculiarities of their films. But that alleged "arrogance" was exactly what made them appealing to audiences of the generation after Halliwell's. Berliner calls that "arrogance" narrative perversity, and celebrates it as one component that set the films of that decade apart from all others, and also helped to make them popular.

Salisbury University, Emeritus

Author: Welsh, Jim