week 4 questions

What is meant by “modernist” in the passage: “Critics engaged with a self-declared ‘New American Cinema’ exemplified by the work of writers and directors such as Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger, and John Cassavetes, certain aspects of which constituted, according to David Bordwell, a conscious ‘modernist’ break with Hollywood classicism?”

modernism - The deliberate departure from tradition and the use of innovative forms of expression that distinguish many styles in the arts and literature of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century.

modernist - an artist who makes a deliberate break with previous styles

New American Cinema was/is a conscious break in form and style from traditional classical Hollywood films.

What does Kramer argue was characteristic of the bulk of Hollywood-centred film criticism in the 1960s?

the critics only focused on a small set of directors, trained in classical Hollywood style, who worked mainly in established genres, like Hawks or Hitchcock.

What was Kael’s critique of art cinema and the New American Cinema, and why was Bonnie and Clyde “the most excitingly American American movie” at the time?

Kael said that the problem with art cinema is that incoherent crap can be celebrated as art, when it's absolutely nothing but incoherent crap. And i totally agree with her. There's a difference between absurdity and art.

Bonnie and Clyde "made a different kind of contact with American audiences from the kind that is made by European films." The film managed to combine classical Hollywood qualities with the New American Cinema qualities.