JCMS Teaching Dossier Vol 5 (2) Revisiting the Film History Survey Amelie Hastie, Amherst College
The Context
I teach in an interdepartmental Film and Media Studies (FAMS) program in a small liberal arts college. Our core Film and Media faculty are dedicated to an integration of critical and creative practices, the ethos of our program. To begin the major, students are required to take foundations courses in Critical Studies, Production, and in integrated approaches to Film and Media. Our foundations courses in Critical Studies rarely include broad historical surveys, but rather focus on film theory, television history, or formal movements. Our historical “surveys” are largely electives, focusing on particular national cinemas and offered by faculty in language/areas departments. My approach to teaching film history bridges these pedagogical sites through my semester-long focus on US feature films of just one decade: the 1970s. As an immersion in the era—a microcosm of film history—my pedagogical approaches attempt to meet our semester-long goal: to consider how we might know, write, and see cultural and political history through and of film.
US film in the 1970s was evident of tremendous aesthetic and economic innovation. Rife with conspiracy, disaster, love, and war, 1970s popular films range from the counter-cultural to the commercial, the independent to the industrial. The common narrative concerning the era is that the first half of the decade is known for the work of groundbreaking maverick “auteurs,” whereas the second half witnessed an industrial transformation through the emergence of the blockbuster. My course recognizes the examples that suggest this argument but also interrogates that trajectory. For instance, we start off with the pairing of the wild financial successes of the commercial hit Love Story (Arthur Hiller, 1970) and the independent Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969). We therefore consider what ways these two films set the stage for the decade as a whole in style and content, production and reception. With this starting point, throughout the semester we focus on the cultural and historical factors shaping filmmaking and film-going practices alongside close attention to film form.
The Decade
Our immersion in the decade is developed in part through the number of films I show: it’s my only class in which I show a weekly double-feature. The number of films, coupled with the emphasis on a period of roughly ten years in one national arena, represents this course as a magnified historical “survey.” At the same time, I remain leery of seeing the decade as a concrete demarcation of a historical period. The division of history into ten-year spans, purely based on numerical order, is an artificial structure. Indeed, to duly understand films of the 1970s is to understand what took place in the years before the decade began, or to see the directional shift that takes place for some filmmakers mid-way through the 1970s that will continue into the 1980s. As an example, like many significant filmmakers of the 1970s, LA Rebellion artists began to emerge as a group of filmmakers in the late 1960s, and their collective work can be traced beyond the 1970s (with individual cases traced into the 1990s and after). But even while the decade approach may be artificial, I lean on the convenience of the division, particularly as much scholarly work follows this schematic. Doing so means, then, that we situate a film by LA Rebellion makers in relation to films of other independent or auteurist arenas. Thus I may teach Bush Mama (Haile Gerima, 1975) alongside Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978), and I can position them both on a continuum with films such as Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970), Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese, 1974), and Girlfriends (Claudia Weill, 1979). This particular set of films enables us to consider the 1970s “tradition” of on-screen women leaving home or in dealing with a “home” that has left them, through stories with both shared characteristics and divergences from the others, whether through issues of class, race, or geography. Such a grouping also enables us to investigate the work of women’s authorship in this era, whether as directors, producers, or stars.
Recognizing the intersections between film and US cultural and political history, I move between a rough chronological order within the course, yet, as I suggest above, I offer the coupling of films from different years in my double-feature screenings. In so doing, we maintain a focus on historical movements and transformations, but we also seek those continuities, complementarities, and contrasts among ideas, content, and film style. Surely any film survey ideally functions simultaneously as a sketch of an era or a national arena and as a foundation for deeper study and understanding. My course certainly serves in part as such a sketch or foundation. But it is also, as with our other courses in our major, a model for a critical approach to film of any era. As such, particularly through the constraints of just ten years, it has enabled me to experiment with methodology in my choice not just of films but also of critical materials.
Course Materials
Besides one textbook that focuses on the industrial history (David Cook’s Lost Illusions), all assigned readings for the class were published in the 1970s. These include autobiographical excerpts (such as Angela Davis’s Autobiography), journalistic accounts (like All the President’s Men and reporting in the newly founded Ms. Magazine), non-fiction essays (by authors such as James Baldwin and Joan Didion), short format pieces (such as from the 1970 volume Sisterhood is Powerful) and occasional theoretical analyses of films (published, for instance, in Women and Film or Jump Cut). Halfway through the semester, together the students also create a database of contemporaneous reviews, spanning a range of publications. The key to this “survey” — and in taking advantage of its very constraints, by looking at only a decade’s worth of work — therefore is the admixture of course materials. Essentially, by combining both a range and a limit of sources, our goal is to continuously ask: what was on the minds of viewers and makers as they watched and created films during this era? What events were they exploring? What ideas were simmering in the broader culture, and what issues were coming to a boiling point? We then see film production and film viewing as part of a series of national conversations, often mirroring the very challenges of the era. For example, Cooley High (Michael Schultz, 1975) implicitly interrogates George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) by resituating the “nostalgia” film—replete with music of the decade before in which it is set—at a largely black high school in Chicago. And in both the narrative of the film and its post-script (another mirrored element from American Graffiti), it also highlights issues of race and class largely swept under the sea of nostalgic pop music in Lucas’s film. While American Graffiti might have turned to the year 1962 as a means of thinking about life before Vietnam and, seemingly, outside of the Civil Rights movement, those very historical events implicitly shape Schultz’s Cooley High (set in 1964). Through class readings we extend the conversation further, adding gender to the concerns of race and class of Schultz’s film by looking at high schooler Alice de Rivera’s “On De-Segregating Stuyvesant High,” published in Robin Morgan’s landmark volume Sisterhood Is Powerful. We further include Joan Didion’s tenacious, if somewhat oblique, essay “In Hollywood” to think about the culture of Hollywood in this day, asking: What was possible for mainstream film in the 1970s? What room was there for change? In this way we are situating film as a cultural object amongst other cultural objects, movements, and national events.
Thus throughout the course, we attempt to understand the discrete history of Hollywood production and the larger cultural history in which these films are set, particularly through those voices we’ve added to the conversation outside of film studies canons and conventions. Such is the drive of the writings that complement a double feature of John Cassavetes’ Woman Under the Influence (1974) and The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973). Two very different films, but both about a subject who is “under the influence”—of the potential horrors of family life and of broader cultural expectations of what it means to be a woman or, in the case of The Exorcist, a teenaged girl. I feature readings that take on and expand these questions but that also expand what we might think of as film scholarship, criticism, or theory. Hence we consider two feminist pieces originally published in Ms. magazine: Marjorie Rosen’s review “Who’s Crazy Now? A Woman Under the Influence” and Molly Haskell’s essay “What Is Hollywood Trying to Tell Us?” We add to these texts James Baldwin’s essay “Where the Grapes of Wrath Are Stored,” from his book-length study of the film The Devil Finds Work. Written during the period of theoretical analyses of spectatorship based on Classical Hollywood Cinema, these essays instead consider contemporary films to think through cultural and ideological impacts on filmmaking and film viewers.
Critical Junctures
As the course moves forward, it finds its rhythms—of connections, of movement, and of time. These rhythms often come from the films we watch, and we are often guided by their own form as we think through the period as a whole. The seeming aimlessness of Barbara Loden’s eponymous character Wanda comes back again and again to haunt the students and to function as a model of both aesthetic and cultural movement in the class. If Wanda moves aimlessly, Warren Beatty’s George of Shampoo (Hal Ashby, 1975) dashes frenetically from one scene, or one woman, to the next against the backdrop of the 1968 presidential election; in Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), the narrative movement is more like the spokes of a wheel, in which interwoven stories are each haunted by an absent political candidate and a lurking danger. These films glide and lurch, like the title character of Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971) who commands New York City as he moves through it, caught between the law and the lawless.
And then the films move the class as well. If art and politics both directly and atmospherically collide over the course of the term, so do they come to bear on the students who watch them. Each time I’ve taught this course I’ve witnessed a kind of natural consciousness-raising amongst the students, which has in turn informed how I might rethink the frameworks and texts for the next iteration. With this immersion in the 1970s, wrought by the junctures of a range of films and writings, we remake the era’s intersections in our own experience.
Bibliography
Baldwin, James. The Devil Finds Work. New York: Random House Inc., 1976.
Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Touchstone, 1998.
Cook, David. Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam 1970-1979. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2000.
Davis, Angela. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. New York: International Publishers Company, Incorporated, 1974.
Didion, Joan. White Album. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.
Elsaesser, Thomas, Noel King and Alexander Horwath, eds. The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s. Amsterdam University Press, 2004.
Ephron, Nora. Scribble Scribble: Notes on the Media. New York: Bantam Books, 1979.
Field, Allyson, Jan Christopher Horak, Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, eds.. LA Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015.
Morgan, Robin, ed. Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: Random House, 1970.
Woodward, Bob and Carl Bernstein. All the President’s Men. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1974.
Amelia Hastie has been teaching as a full-time faculty member since 1999; for eleven years she taught in the film and digital media department at University of California–Santa Cruz, where her courses largely focused on theoretical approaches to film and television. Her primary “survey” course at UCSC was an introduction to film theory, and her primary history course focused on the work of Ida Lupino in film and television. Since 2010 she has been at Amherst College, where she moved to start an integrated program in film and media studies. Her courses at the college vary between introductions to writing and film; foundations courses and seminars in film and television theory; and special topics electives. Many of her courses offer a history of theoretical production, but her course on US film of the 1970s is the only one she currently teaches which functions as a “history survey.” Given its structure and aims, it is as much an “intellectual history” of the period as a film history course.
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