United States

Motion pictures

In some respects the motion picture is the American art form par excellence, and no area of art has undergone a more dramatic revision in critical appraisal in the recent past. Throughout most of the 1940s and ’50s, serious critics, with a few honourable exceptions (notably, James Agee and Manny Farber), even those who took the cinema seriously as a potential artistic medium, took it for granted that (excepting the work of D.W. Griffith and Orson Welles), the commercial Hollywood movie was, judged as art, hopelessly compromised by commerce. In the 1950s in France, however, a generation of critics associated with the magazine Cahiers du cinéma (many of whom later would become well-known filmmakers themselves, including François Truffaut and Claude Lelouch) argued that the American commercial film, precisely because its need to please a mass audience had helped it break out of the limiting gentility of the European cinema, had a vitality and, even more surprisingly, a set of master-makers (auteurs) without equal in the world. New studies and appreciations of such Hollywood filmmakers as John Ford, Howard Hawks, and William Wyler resulted, and, eventually, this new evaluation worked its way back into the United States itself: another demonstration that one country’s low art can become another country’s high art. Imported back into the United States, this reevaluation changed and amended preconceptions that had hardened into prejudices.

(From left) Lauren Bacall, Marcel Dalio, and Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not (1944), directed by Howard Hawks.© 1945 Warner Brothers, Inc.; photograph from a private collection

Robert Duvall (centre) in Apocalypse Now (1979).© 1979 Omni Zoetrope; photograph from a private collection

Lee, AngFilm director Ang Lee on the set of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).Chan Kam Chuen/Sony Pictures ClassicThe new appreciation of the individual vision of the Hollywood film was to inspire a whole generation of young American filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas, to attempt to use the commercial film as at once a form of personal expression and a means of empire building, with predictably mixed results. By the turn of the century, new waves of filmmakers (notably Spike Lee, Stephen Soderbergh, John Sayles, Ang Lee, and later Richard Linklater, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell, and J.J. Abrams), like the previous generation mostly trained in film schools, had graduated from independent filmmaking to the mainstream, and the American tradition of film comedy stretching from Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin to Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges, and Woody Allen had come to include the quirky sensibilities of Joel and Ethan Coen and Wes Anderson. In mixing a kind of eccentric, off-focus comedy with a private, screw-loose vision, they came close to defining another kind of postmodernism, one that was as antiheroic as the more academic sort but cheerfully self-possessed in tone.

As the gap between big studio-made entertainment—produced for vast international audiences—and the small “art” or independent film widened, the best of the independents came to have the tone and idiosyncratic charm of good small novels: films such as Nicole Holofcener’s Lovely & Amazing (2001), Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me (2000), Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s Little Miss Sunshine (2006), Jason Reitman’s Juno (2007), Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010), and Todd Haynes’s Carol (2015) reached audiences that felt bereft by the steady run of Batman, Lethal Weapon, and Iron Man films. But with that achievement came a sense too that the audience for such serious work as Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films and Chinatown (1974), which had been intact as late as the 1970s, had fragmented beyond recomposition.

Iron ManRobert Downey, Jr., appearing as Iron Man/Tony Stark in a scene from the film Iron Man (2008). Paramount Pictures/Marvel Entertainment