Politics, Paranoia & Porn 'staches: '70

POLITICS, PARANOIA AND PORN 'STACHES: '70s
GENRE REVISIONISM

Course available by permission of instructor
only.
The "New Hollywood" of 1967-1975 was an endlessly
rich and eccentric period of American filmmaking.
A generation of young filmmakers took advantage
of the freedoms afforded by the desperation of
the failing studio system and the collapse of the
Production Code to make a body of work that
managed to be both personal and occasionally
quite popular. This class will explore this era
through its genre filmmaking: many of the major
films of the Hollywood Renaissance are
self-conscious attempts to rethink genre,
employing the Western, the road movie, the horror
film, the musical and the gangster film to
explore and embody the divisions and conflicts of
a particularly charged, divisive era.

The class will be taught as a seminar, with short
contextual lectures introducing screenings,
followed by discussion.

The readings will include historical/critical
assessments of the films discussed, contemporary
criticism and accounts of the history and
politics of the era. Auditing is encouraged
depending on class size.
The class consists of brief lectures, screenings
and discussions.

Requirements include strict regular attendance,
weekly readings, weekly journals, a final
project, and active
participation in class discussions.

Students will demonstrate their developing ideas
both in weekly journal writing and in class
discussions that will take in both the
critical/theoretical readings and the films
screened in class. They will develop an original
research topic to be completed either as a
research paper or a creative work accompanied by
a short paper.