There were some good noirs before; there were some good indies after; otherwise American movie making (with a few exceptions) was ALWAYS chasing after the big bucks.
Agreed that the Assassination of Marat was great. But that was Peter Brook, right, a brit.....with British actors. If I remember right, Glenda Jackson played Charlotte Corday.
So, though I agree that that was a bright era in film making, it was a blip. The current dreck is pretty consistent w American movie making in general. Citizen Kane was the exception, not the rule.
So, the thesis of the article didn't quite make sense to me. Plus, whatever Star Wars' pretensions might be, all it is, is a remarkably successful film series -- another flavor of Look Who's Talking 1, 2, 3, and 4. And that's all it wants to be.
Excluding American "cinema," there has been some great work done in the last twenty years by Romanian film makers, by Iranian directors, and by the Dardennes brothers. Every once in a while, I even see a great Indian "art" film of recent vintage.
Joanna
----- Original Message ----- John Wight, writing in Counterpunch, sees Star Wars and other contemporary shallow fare as cultural expressions of the neoliberal zeitgeist, a reaction to the more creative and critical culture of the rebellious 60’s.
This rings true insofar as today’s heightened competitive individualism, job insecurity, indebtedness, stress, despair and anomie provoke a more frantic search for various forms of escape, including through childhood comic book superhero and terror fantasies spectacularly reproduced on film.
Wight neglected to mention on his list of 60’s productions one of my great favourites, Peter Weiss’ The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, staged in 1964 and filmed in 1967. Nothing of such depth and imagination has appeared since.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/30/star-wars-and-the-death-of-american-cinema/ ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk