Capturing Turmoil: New Hollywood as Political Discourse

75 pages. Presented to the Department of Cinema Studies and the Robert D. Clark Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts June 2018This thesis is an argumentative close analysis of themes, aesthetics, and political meanings within three New Hollywood films. It emerged out of an interest in the films of the 1960s and 70s and the changes within that era’s film industry. Those changes granted young, educated filmmaker opportunities to helm studio-driven projects, weaving material into their narratives that would have been impossible in a system ruled by the Hollywood Production Code. The era also included significant social and political unrest, and the films therein reflect that reality. In this project, I perform content analyses for three films within the New Hollywood movement — Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Nashville (1975) — in order to understand how films in the movement used themes of celebrity, violence, and oppression to act as a form of discourse. All three films employ on-screen violence to complicate the audience’s initial assumptions of characters, and each film critiques the social and political issues of its time through this violence. For each analysis, I discuss several sequences’ mise-en-scène — the arrangement of elements within the entire frame — and connect them to broad socio-political ideas. Conclusions from this analysis identify thematic and narrative trends across the selected filmography