Film History Test Site

First, the traditional Hollywood film aesthetics

"Hollywood" is synonymous with American films. In its development process, it not only produced entertainment products and cultural idols, but also controlled the entire American film industry and established a global film market. More importantly, Hollywood films infiltrated the American lifestyle and political ideals to global audiences and established the global cultural hegemony of American imperialism. Hollywood has become the representative and symbol of American culture. The traditional Hollywood film mode has several distinct characteristics.

1. Adhere to the creative concept of genre films

"genre films" is a unique film creation phenomenon in the United States. The so-called genre films refer to films that tell stories according to the psychological mode of the public and are produced in batches according to different styles. They are a creative concept that is created according to the aesthetic psychology and aesthetic taste of popular culture and classified according to theme elements, artistic elements and artistic effects. Hollywood films have long formed a language stereotype, which has cultivated a fixed reading expectation among the audience. genre films can be said to be the most concentrated and successful embodiment of Hollywood production methods.

2. Formulated narrative plot

The plot of narrative story shows formulaic characteristics and adheres to some existing moral and ethical frameworks. The central idea of Hollywood film creation is to shoot movies that tell stories. In the plot arrangement, Hollywood movies usually have a fixed relationship between characters and a certain prominent environmental atmosphere. Some movies often have similar images in space, such as dark street corners, bars and haunted houses in black films. In the image combination, it often shows formulaic characteristics.

For example, between good people and bad people, it is the contradiction between life and death, the final contest between good and evil, and between good people and good people, it is the conflict and contrast between personalities and the confrontation between ideas. These stylized plots all have a basic conflict point, showing a certain fate, mood or interpersonal relationship change process brought about by the conflict, conveying the meaning of moral education, and propagating ethical concepts such as glory, dream, courage and gentleness with distinctive American characteristics.

3. Stable Theme

From the theme of film performance, each type of Hollywood film has a relatively stable lyric tone. The emotions expressed in Hollywood movies are mainly characterized by praising heroes, patriotism, the truth, goodness and beauty of human nature, punishing evil and promoting good, revealing fear, showing vitality and imagination. The theme of each type of Hollywood movies shows relative invariance. For example, eliminating violence in science fiction films and disaster films, growing up and struggling in biographies, heroism in historical films and so on.

4. Attach importance to "movie stars" and establish a star system

The earliest star system was invented by Carl Reimer, a global producer. The consistent creative attitude of Hollywood films is to adhere to the actor-centered theory, and the center of the picture is also prominent characters, through which various artistic meanings are conveyed. Hollywood films emphasize people as the center, and people are the important factors that affect the eyes of the audience, and they are also the main images of spatial modeling. In the whole film, the actor's performance has always become the focus of narrative, and the important part of appreciating Hollywood films is to appreciate the actor's performance. Under the star system, the film and the actor have achieved a win-win situation.

Second, the rebellion of new Hollywood against old Hollywood

The directors of new Hollywood stepped onto the historical stage in the contradiction between the old and the new. Their main representatives are francis coppola, Martin Scorsese, stanley kubrick, arthur penn, george lucas, Steven Allan Spielberg, Woody Allen and others. Some people call them "Hollywood children" and "movie kids", not only because they belong to the younger generation in age, but also because "they know the past of movies like scholars; They grew up with it and went through the whole process. In their world, everything can be traced back to movies. "

Coppola and Scorsese studied in the film department of UCLA and new york University (where they learned traditional production methods, not pure artistic personal expression). Most of the others came from the film and television industry and had the experience of directing, photographing and performing under the old mainstream film standards. They know everything about traditional movies, no matter its advantages or disadvantages. On the other hand, due to the different times, the new generation is more influenced by European films than their predecessors.

The masters of European art films, such as Ge Daer, Truffaut, Chabrot, Bergman, Visconti, etc., always have admiration, and the masters of the French new wave have no experience in making traditional films. The directors of New Hollywood grew up under the influence of traditional films. Therefore, this generation has an ambivalent attitude towards cultural traditions: they want to inherit the tradition and reject it. They hope to find their roots in the films and get rid of the past relatively.

This contradictory attitude and their coexistence of the old and the new determine the compromise they adopt in reforming traditional movies: partly absorbing some programs of art movies, partly relying on people's fixed views on what movies are and what they do for many years, and exploring in various ways to make movies continue to prosper under the new situation.

From old Hollywood to new Hollywood is a slow and gradual process. The exact time when the new Hollywood film will begin is not very certain. In general film history, arthur penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is the dividing line between the old and the new. The reason for this is that this film fully embodies the characteristics and values of the new Hollywood film, which has had a far-reaching impact on subsequent American films. Compared with traditional movies, we can find that "new" is mainly manifested in the following aspects:

1. Inversion of values

Most of the main characters in the movies are people who resist the environment and get out of the right track or criminals, and their opposites are just the positive heroes who used to protect and abide by the law. In films such as Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider (1969) and Thieves Like Us (1974), the protagonists are not unkind villains. On the contrary, they are charming, kind and compassionate. "They try to realize the myth of happiness instilled in people by society, and even have certain social virtues."

Thus, the pursuers in police uniforms become inhuman and cold-blooded animals. However, because the hero of the film is a "bad guy", the ending of the film must be tragic rather than happy. The hero dies or fails, and the law wins, but the winning law is the enemy of good.

For the audience, what is important for these new anti-hero heroes is not the ending of their death, but their enviable lifestyle-freedom, freedom, sincere yearning and pursuit of ideals. Besides, The Last Movie (1971), Thieves Like Us, They shot horses, didn't they? Movies that are popular with the audience still rely on the idealized romantic love stories of the protagonists.

2. New lens language

New Hollywood movies don't require the audience to believe everything on the screen, and there are often traces of artificial processing and certain alienation effects in the films. Instead of covering up the film skills, directors try their best to strengthen the atmosphere with skills. Slow motion, freeze-frame, skip, interweaving of black and white pictures and color pictures are common techniques in new Hollywood movies. They aim to strengthen the visual impact and make the picture more emotional.

3. Pursuit of Reality

The era of setting shooting in old Hollywood has passed, and directors in new Hollywood use real-life shooting and catching imperfect reality to increase authenticity and credibility, such as messy and shabby rooms, uneven lighting and unavoidable environmental noise. Here we can clearly see the influence and infiltration of European film aesthetics.

4. Pay attention to characterization

Characters are no longer buried in the plot, but they stand out and become the main performance objects of the film. American movies have learned useful experience from Ge Daer's Exhausted and Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1961), that is, taking the event as the background, we can trace the inner emotional changes of the protagonist through the event. Such as Taxi Driver, deer hunter, Conversation and The Last Action (1974).

5. Emphasize sound design

The creation of new Hollywood movies in sound is remarkable. The traditional music method-silent source music that comes at the call to strengthen the emotional power of a scene is no longer rare. Music directly enters the plot and the emotional world of the characters, enriching the content of the picture. For example, in Thieves Like Us, the tune of "Villains" was inserted in a bank robbery scene, and in a love scene, "Romeo and Juliet" was played on the radio.

Coppola put the experiment of acoustics directly into his life in Talk, and eavesdropping and recording are the themes of the film. In Cotton Club, the popular music of that year was divided into many segments, interspersed and embedded in various scenes. These creations add a sense of the times to the films, and also make the environment and space more realistic. In addition, after Easy Rider and American Style Painting, a large number of films have adopted rock music, which shows that new Hollywood films respect social fashion and pay tribute to young audiences.

However, no matter how innovative these films are, they are the descendants of the old types of films-westerns, robbers, police films, comedy films with a little nervousness, etc.-and the new types are constantly born and grown out of the old types. The old genre keeps disappearing and reappears after innovation, which is the continuation of the spiral development of old Hollywood movies.

The directors of the new Hollywood also made no secret of their relationship with the old Hollywood: De Palma transformed Hitchcock; Lucas took Warner Bros.' war films and Universal Picture's serial films as the prototype of Star Wars, and bogdanovich tried to revive the crazy comedies and musicals. Scorsese studied the musical films of the 194s before filming new york (1977).

The directors of New Hollywood rebelled and reformed the tradition by walking on two legs.

The first leg was explored by Kubrick and Payne. One of them pays attention to the reference of European films, and the other focuses on the revision of traditional films. Coppola and Scorsese combine their strengths, further making the film find the intersection between art and popularization. In the 197s, there were Woody Allen and others in this team.

The second leg is the commercial film packaging school headed by Lucas and Spielberg. They armed commercial films with high technology, which made the technocratic films develop in the 197s and 198s and become the mainstream films in the contemporary era.

New Hollywood movies experienced the rise in the 196s, the upsurge in the 197s and the maturity, and then entered a period of steady development in the 198s. Post-modern culture integrates production, technology and cultural consumption, and integrates upper aristocratic culture and mass culture. The closed state of the past self-contained system no longer exists, and the boundaries between them are no longer distinct. At that time, the explorers still produced new works, but compared with the 197s, they paid more attention to finding the right degree between personalization and popularization.

The world is changing, so are movies. But in what direction and how to change is an important topic for film theorists. The whole process of the development of new Hollywood movies has proved a common truth to us. If the film regards tradition as the standard, the creation can only be conservative and difficult to make progress; However, if we kick off the tradition and start a new stove, art will become passive and life will be difficult to last. Americans advocate change, and they regard change and progress as the same thing.

However, the changes advocated by Americans are based on the synchronization with social progress, and it is unacceptable to blindly advance and be conservative. China pays attention to the golden mean, but in practice, there are few Americans who are impartial. If China's changing films can correctly absorb the experience of American films, I believe that China's films will be promising.