Strategies of cinema: Cultural politics in the new Hollywood, 1967--1981 (California)

During the late 1960s a new generation came to power in Hollywood. Connected to the counterculture and the New Left in spirit and ideas, if not by organization, they remade Hollywood, momentarily, into a democratically responsive and culturally subversive set of institutions. They took advantage of new industrial possibilities arising in the midst of crisis to experiment with decentralized forms of production. They invented new relationships between culture, politics and economics, merging the commercial and the anti-commercial, the dominant and the marginal. They produced many of our current assumptions about the politics of culture and the culture of politics. The cultural Left is a fundamental part of dominant US culture. Its history guides our political future.; My dissertation describes and criticizes the emergence of the cultural Left in Hollywood by encircling it and envisioning it from three different but interrelated standpoints. Each of my chapters tells a linear story based on new forms of industrial and political agency in Hollywood, yet each chapter also covers the same period of time. The dissertation thus follows an essentially non-linear form. Chapter 1 details the BBS company and its struggle to invent a new role for independent companies in Hollywood alongside new ideas about a cultural Left with mainstream influence. Chapter 2 builds that story through the career of Jane Fonda. She, I argue, is an invaluable precursor to an unfulfilled politics of the popular image because of her attempted merger between the identity politics of celebrity and the range of emergent identity movements in the culture at large. Chapter 3 dissects the concept of the "auteur" by arguing that it functioned like a mask or camouflage for the production of radical cinema with Hollywood financing. Recounting the linked production histories of the radical auteurs Haskell Wexler, Bernardo Bertolucci and Warren Beatty, I argue that "auteurism" forms a horizon of possibility for contemporary radical imaginations. Despite its empirical "untruth," auteurism remains a concept that must be used strategically to advance the project of the next cultural Left.