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Hollywood's Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America Jonathan Kirshner. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012.
There is an extensive literature on American film in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These years were a time of transition and experimentation that followed the collapse of Hollywood censorship and ended with the era of big budget blockbusters like Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977). This period launched the careers of innovative young filmmakers like Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese who would have a profound influence on American cinema in the coming decades. In retrospect, a remarkable number of American movies produced during the turbulence of the Vietnam War and Watergate seem to express an artistic individuality unusual in Hollywood before or since.
Jonathan Kirshner is Professor of Government at Cornell University. Though a longtime enthusiast of Seventies film, Kirshner does not approach his topic through the lens of a professional student of film; he is a political scientist. This is important because his goal is not primarily to discuss the aesthetics of Seventies film. He is interested in situating this moment of cinematic creativity in...