Beyond the film industry, Green also drew direct connections between Hollywood's malaise and the state of the American city.
As he summarized in his singular style, "All media in 1970 reflected in day-by-day downbeat the madness, modness, moodiness of a year of crisis and confusion." Inflation, cutbacks and recession had been consistent themes not only for the national economy but also more specifically for Hollywood, where writedowns, layoffs and liquidation of assets had dominated the trade press headlines. And through its central investigational narrative and evocation of two key visual tropes - the planner's gaze and the editor's gaze - it engages with the transformation of San Francisco and with new modes of authorship and spectatorship in the emerging New Hollywood.Īt the end of 1970, Variety's veteran editor Abel Green looked back over a year of exceptional turmoil and critical self-examination in the American film industry. Shot on location by Coppola's independent company American Zoetrope in disused warehouses, condemned buildings and newly-built skyscrapers, The Conversation evinces the material role of the film industry in the shifting productive capacities of the city. While conventionally viewed through the prism of Watergate and national politics, reframing or remapping the film in its specific urban context provides an alternative perspective on New Hollywood filmmaking and its participation in new paradigms of production, consumption and labor. In this article, I explore San Francisco's distinctive role through close analysis of The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), a key text of seventies cinema. As a rapidly redeveloping city at the cutting edge of high-tech, post-Fordist production, San Francisco offered the spaces and capital arrangements necessary to allow Hollywood sufficient breathing room to reconfigure both its relationship to its own talent and its viewers' relationship to films in ways that would fully enlist both groups in the post-industrial economy. This article examines the role played by the city during a decade of crisis and reorganization for the film industry, arguing that its contribution to New Hollywood went deeper than iconic cityscapes or countercultural surface. In the 1970s, San Francisco gained a new importance for post-studio Hollywood.
0 kommentar(er)
