![]() ![]() But the results in movies were an enormous reliance on the tried-and-true, and an increasingly derivative, formula-driven approach to storytelling and craftsmanship alike that does not make, at any rate, for a terribly exciting cinema culture, even if you can cherry-pick masterpieces here and there, for masterpieces are of course to be found in every era, even among the carefully market-driven Hollywood products of this period. ![]() The results, in the political and social and economical spheres, are beyond the scope of this project. The dominance of the anglosphere's politics by Thatcherism and Reaganism doesn't have a one-to-one relationship with the kind of movies being produced - there wasn't exactly a wave of anti-union propaganda or popcorn epics about supply-side economics - but both come from the same general impulse to slowing down and consolidating and trying really hard not to rock the boat. It is an exaggeratedly safe time in American cinema but then, it was an unusually conservative time in culturally, in both little-c and big-C senses. And it's perhaps not even the case, exactly, that the quality of the filmmaking in the '80s was at a particularly low ebb, but that it was an era of extreme caution and a level of conscious anti-creativity. Masterpieces can be found - masterpieces can be found in any era, of course - but the standard level of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking reached, I think, its lowest level during this period. The first thing the writer on film must do is to confess to all biases, and here is the one that matters the most for me: the 1980s are my least-favorite decade in the history of American film. ![]()
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