Cinephiles, filmmaker and critics, like Peter
Biskind in his seminal history
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And_Rock ' N ' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, have long
heroicized Seventies cinema. But in England the Seventies were something else. In his piece "Camera Obscurity" in
The Guardian this weekend, John Patterson remembers the 70s as the decade that never was. He finds proof of what it could have been in Terrence Davies’ lyrical
Distant Voices, Still Lives. (For more on the film, see Adrian Danks’s "
The Art of Memory: Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives" in
Senses of Cinema.) Patterson writes:
After the American studios took their money home with them after 1970, thus ending the so-called "British New Wave", the homegrown cinema wilted. The established talent decamped for Hollywood or stayed home and worked as local directors-for-hire to US backers. The up-and-comers who'd later become famous - Mike Leigh, Steven Frears, Alan Clarke - sought shelter in television, or, like Ken Loach, returned there after forays into features. It was as if British cinema had gone into internal exile. Other talent - Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, the brothers Scott - remained in advertising, emerged at the end of the decade with cheesy Hollywood calling-card movies, then flew west once the call came.
see
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posted by Peter Bowen @ 4/15/2007 08:10:00 AM
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