Benjamin Reilly Hawthorne - Final Project

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S FILMS: The Social Impact of Film 1967-1979

“Every single standard… by which we lived our lives up through the 60’s got questioned… every single one.” (Sydney Pollock, A Decade Under the Influence: 2003). It was no secret that by the end of the nineteen-sixties a large counter culture emerged in the United States. People began to question their ideas of what power, sexuality, morality, and even gender were. The Vietnam War didn’t have the same feelings of Patriotism and Nationalism as the great wars of the past. The people began to stand up and speak out against the excepted beliefs of the American dream and way of life. This civil unrest also translated into motion pictures. The time of major studio films was coming to an end. People didn’t want to see Hello Dolly or The Sound Of Music anymore; they wanted to see the world as it was. Film production and creation was turned over into the hands of the Filmmaker as opposed to the studio. This was true renaissance for American cinema. Films like Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, Annie Hall, All The Presidents Men, Jaws, Hearts and Minds, The Godfather, and many more reinvented the 70’s throughout the decade into a slap in the face to Film standard and moral understanding.

The films created in the 70’s eventually were buried in the 1980’s by the rise of the Conservative Right and the feel good blockbusters of the 80’s. However, the independent films of the 90’s and 00’s have the same feel and structure as their cold war era predecessor. Arguably the first film to grab the attention of the country and usher in the era of independent “New Hollywood” was the 1969 Dennis Hopper film Easy Rider.

For production companies and studios, Easy Rider became somewhat of an unprecedented phenomenon. Author of Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam 1970-1979, explains that the success of Easy Rider became a money making scheme for several production companies.

“…The runaway success of the generationally savvy road film Easy Rider, produced by independent BBS Productions for $375,000 and returning $19.2 million, convinced producers that inexpensive films could be made specifically for you culture…” (Cook, 2000).

Although it would not necessarily work for many companies, the films success could be credited to the creation of hundreds of equally successful independent films for decades to come. However, it could be argued that the financial importance of Easy Rider would pale in comparison of the immense social impact the film had on youth and counter culture. “The film [Easy Rider] really took off because the people felt we were doing something real… we were going to say ‘my god look at what society is doing to the outcast…” (Fonda, 1970 - A Decade Under the Influence: 2003). The audience began to feel for the outlaw and the underdog, films soon followed. Sexual ambiguity and promiscuity, drugs, and violence became something that people desired in films, and also something filmmakers didn’t want to ignore. Outside of mainstream filmmaking many underground and independent organizations began to immerge as a voice for the socially oppressed.

“…Filmmakers were committed to using film and video as instruments of social change. The oldest of these was Newsreel, established in 1967 as a network of activist collectives centered in New York and San Francisco” (Cook, pg 426-428, 2000). Eventually Newsreel would take many transformations and end up focusing on films that would be centralized on the struggle of civil rights for the African American community. The underlying difference between the “major independent films” and the community action films was that funding came from public institutions, government agencies, as well as individual institutions (Cook, pg. 427, 2000). Also that Newsreel was created for the purpose of having an alternative to the “biased and unfair coverage by the local and network news organizations. It was not an outlet for entertainment but more so an educational tool for the far left political activist.

“The Newsreel is a radical news service whose purpose is to provide an alternative to the limitied and biased coverage of television news. The news that we feel is significant… has been constantly undermined and suppressed by the media. Therefore we have formed an organization to serve the needs of the people…” (Cynthia Young, Pg. 101).

Although the idea of education over entertainment was prominent in the independent activist community, mainstream films were still a conduit of social change. People were still suffering from the hangover of the Vietnam War, when another scandal rocked the country. On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested at the Watergate Hotel after breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. The following two years would see the President resign as a know participant in the case, thus giving birth one of the most influential films of all time. In 1976, some two years after President Nixon’s resignation, the incident was immortalized in film. An adaptation of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book about how they broke the scandal, All the President’s Men, became a huge success for moviegoers and an educational tool for decades to come. The director, Alan J. Pakula, used his “…affinity for political material…and documentary-like respect for facts…”(Cook, 116), thus allowing the film to not only be entertaining but overwhelmingly informative to those who knew little about the major events in the country. Films like Apocalypse Now and Hearts and Minds, used a variety of visual and auditory styles to show the horrors of the Vietnam wars.

Hearts and Minds, the 1974 documentary by Peter Davis, takes audiences directly into the ugly and horrifying moments of the war. Davis went where the American news and media dared not go. He showed the dead bodies of American and Vietnamese soldiers without censorship. These images of course juxtaposed with the perception of the war back home and a score that would be better fit to a documentary about ballet or opera.
(An image of an execution in the streets of Vietnam also shown in Hearts and Minds (1974).)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), although an adaptation of the novel Heart of Darkness, used the same intense use of sound and imagery to illustrate an important and rarely seen view of the Vietnam War. During the film there is a scene involving helicopters bombing and eventually destroying a Vietnamese village. The scene is an important moment in film history do to the use of juxtaposed sound and imagery. As the American soldiers bomb the village they play loud classical music, a startling and emotional moment in the film.








(Shot from the helicopter bomb sequence in the 1979 film, Apocalypse Now.)

Both of these films, as well as All the President’s Men, boycott the feel good happy times of cinema past, and focus on the ruthless truth of war and scandal. Just as organizations like Newsreel used their films as tools, many 1970’s mainstream motion pictures refused to pull any punches when it came to the awful truth of Government lies and world wars. These films not only made important impacts on their audiences, but were also personal creations of meditation for the filmmakers. Cook explains, “The makers of such films combined explorations of history with explorations in the realm of the personal… capturing intimate moments of their private lives… and in some cases meditating on the filmmakers personal feelings as well” (Cook, pg. 440).

“Like America, cinema was discovered several times…”(Ruiz, pg.73). The 1970s was another step in the evolution of film and its ability to influence and discover the world that we know. Not only was it a medium to recreate image for those who may not have been able to read or know what was happening outside of their own community or minds, but it was a way for the filmmaker to explore and understand their own place in the world that they lived in. The films of the 70s began to take their toll on the public by the end of the decade. The people of the country were becoming very tired of seeing the things that were wrong with the world and began to desire a need for more fantasy. Something that could continue to give them hope. As the 80’s took full swing the nation saw a change in politics and film. Ronald Reagan, a former actor, became President of the United States and ushered in a new era of hope that most people were longing for. It was a new beginning and an end to the unsettling truth of Watergate, racial tensions, the Vietnam War, and social unrest in general.

Film too took the same kind of dramatic step. It went back to the ideas of entertainment and escape from the hard reality of life. The late 70’s and early 80’s saw a rise in feel good films like Star Wars and Rocky. “When Rocky came my way there was a great depression in the land and frustration with Vietnam everybody needed an injection of hope and optimism”(John Avildsen, 2003 - A Decade Under the Influence: 2003). People began flying to ht e theatres in flocks to see the next big budget film that would help them forget about their troubles even if only for two hours or so. It wasn’t until the early 90’s that the industry again began to see a rise in the efforts and artistry of independent films.

“Thank God for the independent film movement, because that’s re-enlivening the art of cinema. Films like Memento, Hedwig and The Angry Inch, and Reservoir Dogs… they’re very personal and interesting statements, there is an artist at work there” (A Decade Under the Influence: 2003). Once again films are beginning to show the social questions in film. Directors like Quentin Tarantino are reaching back to the old French New Wave, and the homage film noirs of the 70’s American Cinema, to once again ask the important and often forgotten questions. In the 1990’s and 00’s the public has once again been plagued by war and political scandal and the independent films have become an educational and enlightening tool to the public while also allowing for an escape through entertainment.
(Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs was a throwback to 70’s cinema and French New Wave for a new Generation of Independent Filmmakers and Cinema Goers.)


The impact of the cinema of the 1970’s has been profound and important. Not only to that time period or today, but for long time to come. It truly reinvented and shaped film for the filmmaker, distributor, and audience. Not only was it entertainment, but it was important in shaping and changing the Social acceptability of sex, race, gender, and political control. Although having gone through a spurt of tiredness, the style and importance of independent and new Hollywood cinema continues to live on in the movies of today. Whether they be home movies available on the World Wide Web, or distributed independently to the masses, Film continues to find a way to change and shape our lives.


WORKS CITED AND RESEARCHED

Cook, David. Lost Illusions: American Cinema in The Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam 1970-1979. Los Angeles: University Of California Press, 2002.

Nichols, Bill. Newsreel: Documentry Filmmakeing on the American Left (1971-1975). New York: Arno Press, 1980.

Ruiz, Raul. Poetics Of Cinema. Barcelona: Dis Voir, 2005.

Young, Cynthia. Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of A U.S. Third World Left. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

A Decade Under the Influence: The 70’s Films That Changed Everything. Dir. Richard LaGravenese and Ted Demme. DVD. IFC Films, 2003.