Through the Looking Glass: the American Art Cinema in an Age of Social Change

Abstract

By 1970 film's recognition as an art form had not been in quest toil for some tone Yet film, as it was mostly being made above ground in the United States at that moment, had very little aesthetic identity in the minds of its chief practitioners and enthusiasts, or at any rate its most vocal ones There ale more ironies than one hare unquestionably better, more mature, more salient and thematically sophisticated as many of America's new films had become, superior as a class as they were to the great bulk of American movies for a generation. they caused in excitement, an intensity find vigor or response, much beyond what was then accorded the current theater or new fiction But this had almost nothing to do with any perennial or universal conceptions of 'art' and almost everything to do with political, sociological, and psychological phenomena that,ire either indifferent or actively hostile to such conceptions