The New Hollywood era of the late 1960s and early 1970s has become one of the most romanticized periods in motion picture history, celebrated for its stylistic boldness, thematic complexity, and the unshackling of directorial ambition. The Limits of Auteurism aims to challenge many of these assumptions. Beginning with the commercial success of Easy Rider in 1969, and ending two years later with the critical and commercial failure of that film's twin progeny, The Last Movie and The Hired Hand, Nicholas Godfrey surveys a key moment that defined the subsequent aesthetic parameters of American commercial art cinema. The book explores the role that contemporary critics played in determining how the movies of this period were understood and how, in turn, strategies of distribution influenced critical responses and dictated the conditions of entry into the rapidly codifying New Hollywood canon. Focusing on a small number of industrially significant films, this new history advances our understanding of this important moment of transition from Classical to contemporary modes of production.
NICHOLAS GODFREY is a lecturer in Screen and Media at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia.
Introduction: open roads Which new Hollywood? Easy rider Variations on a theme: five easy riders Five easy pieces Two-lane blacktop Vanishing point Little Fauss and Big Halsy Adam at 6 a.m Politicizing genre. Dirty Harry The French connection The limits of auteurism. The last movie The hired hand Conclusion: the end of the road
"Godfrey moves with skill between the landmarks of New Hollywood, plotting novel routes, excursions and detours in order to give us a masterly and compelling guide to the era's films."- Peter Stanfield, author of Hoodlum Movies: Seriality and the Outlaw Biker Film Cycle, 1966-1972 "The Limits of Auteurism is a completely new interpretation of the New Hollywood as a period and as an industrial/aesthetic phenomenon. Godfrey's scholarship is very nearly exhaustive, and his writing exquisite and cogently organized."- David Cook, author of Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979 "For those who are interested in the New Hollywood period and American cinema, this is a book that contributes usefully to the body of scholarship on this fertile time. One of its strengths is the way in which it balances its academic preoccupations with general accessibility, facilitated through writing that elucidates rather than obscures. Godfrey's panoramic view of cinematic creation - from production conditions, to textual features, to historical reference, to critical reception - importantly places his analysis in a broad context, ensuring that there are no reasons to question his thoroughness."- Film Matters
