TNR Film Classic: Movie Brutalists (1966)
The basic ideas among young American film-makers are simple: the big movies we grew up on are either corrupt, obsolete or dead, or are beyond our reach (we can’t get a chance to make Hollywood films)—so we’ll make films of our own, cheap films that we can make in our own way. For some, this is an attempt to break into the “industry”; for others it is a different approach to movies, a view of movies not as a popular art or a mass medium but as an art form to be explored. READ MORE >>
TNR Film Classic: ‘A Man for all Seasons’ (February 25, 1967)
TNR Film Classics: 'Band of Outsiders' (September 10, 1966)
Jean-Luc Godard intended to give the public what it wanted. His next film was going to be about a girl and a gun—”A sure-fire story which will sell a lot of tickets.” And so, like Henry James’ hero in The Next Time he proceeded to make a work of art that sold fewer tickets than ever. What was to be a simple commercial movie about a robbery became Band of Outsiders. READ MORE >>
TNR Film Classic: ‘The Bible’ (1966)
Pauline Kael and Woody Allen
TNR Film Classics: 'Fahrenheit 451' (1966)
Tourist in the City of Youth
TNR Film Classics: ‘Falstaff’ (1967)
What makes movies a great popular art form is that certain artists can, at moments in their lives, reach out and unify the audience—educated and uneducated—in a shared response. The tragedy in the history of movies is that those who have this capacity are usually prevented from doing so. The mass audience gets its big empty movies full of meaningless action; the arthouse audience gets its studies of small action and large inaction loaded with meaning. READ MORE >>
