Dennis Hopper who directed Easy Rider didn't like what was being done in most Hollywood films at the time
by the early 60s the studio system was falling apart and by 63 several studio lots had been knocked down ad many studios were in fear of being bought out and nobody knew what to do.
When the one of the 20th century fox studio lots had been taken down a lot of the sets of western towns and stages were still up but had been abandoned making it look like a ghost town.
"Television annihilated the habit audience for movies." - Peter Bart
As a consequence of Foreign films gaining popularity, the majority of new wave directors were brought up on French and other European directors more so then American which was a big inspiration for their own films.
by the mid 60s, producer and director Roger Corman and American international pictures had made a thriving business off of making low budget b pictures which big studios felt like beneath their dignity, and because he had been so successful he started looking for young directors who couldn't get into filming and directing through studios.
Peter Fonder a new wave actor believes that Roger wasn't very talented himself but he was vey good at recognising other peoples talents.
The early 60s had saw Hollywoods first film buffs who saw film making as an art form rather than a way to make money.
Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda had seen the success of biker movies and saw that there was an audience that they could tap into so Bert Schneider said he would give them the money to make Easy Rider if they could shoot a bit of the film with 50mm lenses and if he liked it he would give them the rest of the money to shoot the entire film. So Dennis got 6 of his friends who wanted to be directors and shot for 4 days at a festival in New Orleans.
The Searchers 1956 John Ford is one of the main American films that inspired young new wave directors like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Francis Coppola, Brian de Palma and Martin Scorsese etc.
According to a famous critic named Joseph Mcbride, the Searchers is a cult movie for the new generation.
As a teenager Steven Speilburg even filmed a small image to The Searchers in his garden.
All the young directors of the 70s site the searchers as an inspiration and quote it in their own films like Michael Cimino in The Deer Hunter.
Martin Scorsese recalls when watching it in cinema at 13 that he picked up on details in the film due to the big screen that symbolised characters feelings and relationships because of it being projected onto a big screen which clearly influenced them as one of the main reasons that major studios were dying was due to televisions becoming increasingly common for people to have but like other young directors that would go on to become big new wave directors realised that there were things that could only be conveyed to an audience through a large screen.
Because people felt liberated for the first time in amerecia in terms of the political aspects going on that expressionism was put into films.
The main reason the new wave ended in the 80s and 90s because the political movement in America had ended, as much as there was still and always will be political and social issues in society there wasn't as many that took as big of a hold over a country like they did in the 60s and 80s, so when it all died down so did the passion for not only film makers making films but also audiences going to watch films.
Jaws being arguably the first American blockbuster, ended up paving the way for future big budget blockbusters to be funded like Star Wars. Speilburg was the only one who believed in Star Wars predicting it would make millions after seeing a rough cut of the film. And it did of course becoming the highest grossing film of all time surpassing Jaws and The Exorcist and also ended directors movies by starting franchises and spin offs as we know them today with franchises like, Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones and Aliens.
Star Wars finished what Spielberg started with Jaws a few years earlier
It was the decade to release some of the most audacious films to come out of Hollywood in a long time and the cultural revolution that directors had dreamed of was eventually overtaken by studio blockbusters. But it also paved the way for a new generation of independent American film makers.
Create a short 2-3 minute silent film that is based loosely on a fairy tale.
This film is a modern take on the original fairytale of the ugly duckling as our concept we had to develop from was a fairytale. We had to use non-diegetic sound and visuals of mise-en-scene, cinematography lighting and editing to tell the story.
One of the main problems we had with this film was the fact that we took the wrong lens out for the last two scenes and as it was a 60mm static lens it didn't zoom in or out so we had to stand really far back from the subjects we were filming and move back for the tracking shots to prevent blur, so in the future, I would definitely check that we bring the right lens out with us.
Overall I think the shots and lighting were really good due to planning individual shots out.
For health and safety, when holding the reflector we had to make sure we weren'tshining it in peoples eyes and at cars.
As you can see from the clips and pictures below we took time planning out individual shots, and where we would filming which is why the film ended up being very good looking from a visual and lighting perspective.
American Independent Cinema - An Introduction (Yannis Tzioumakis)
In the Paramount Decree and the post-World War II recession ushered American Independent cinema towards its second major phase, the factors that led to its further evolution in the late 1960s were once again economic, though changes in American society and culture played also a significant part. (pg 169)
The end of the 1960s was one of the most volatile periods in the history of the country. All these factors contributed to a remarkable change in attitudes and mores in American culture which, reflected in the films of the period, make even the most liberal films of the late 1950s/early 1960s (like the social-problem films by Stanley Kramer) look like fake Hollywood constructions with naive ideological messages. (pg 169)
While the country was amidst social and cultural upheaval, the American film industry had to face its own set of severe problems as well as keep up with the transformations in the American social and cultural fabric. These problems included: the financial over-exposure of the majors, (expensive films failing at the box office); the continual audience decline, whited reached an ultimate low of 15.8 million people a week in the early 1970s; the decrease in the number of theatres; the entrance of the television networks to the theatrical market which increased competition and contributed to a glut product; and an extremely outdated Production Code which the industry was still trying to enforce at a time of sweeping changes in sexual mores. Grouped together with the larger social and political issues the country was experiencing, they represented another life-threatening set of obsticals for the film industry, which had only recently started establishing after the effects of the Paramount Decree. (pg170)
Combing a mixture of exploitation strategies, art-house filmmaking techniques and an emphasis on distinctly American themes within not always clear-cut generic frameworks, the Hollywood renaissance films can be seen as the product of a new marriage between independent film production and the majors.
As the established cinema had its own codes and conventions, grammar and syntax, the young filmmakers of the new independent cinema had to create their own language. In a short span of time, a large number of cinematic techniques, mainly associated with art-house filmmaking in Europe and Japan, were imported to American cinema. These included: improvisational acting, repeated actions, camera zooms, jump-cuts, freeze frames, telephoto shooting, hand-held camerawork, split screen, more frequent use of extreme close ups and extreme long shots, image-sound mismatches and many others. (pg179)
As film style in mainstream American cinema
had been obeying the rules of classicism and, for that reason, had largely remained unobtrusive, subordinate to the needs of a causally driven narrative, the sudden appearance of these new cinematic techniques and their infusion with existing staples of Hollywood style changed dramatically the ‘look’ of American films.
