Film in a Time of Crisis: Blake, Dead Man, The New Math(s), and Last Days

Abstract

American independent filmmakers have worked with and against the grain of classic American cinema styles and narrative forms, the tradition that Leo Braudy, in relation to Coppola, Scorsese, and De Palma, described as ‘the sacraments of genre’ (17). From the ‘New Hollywood’ of the 1970s at least, the appropriation of genre by independent American directors and auteurs has often taken the form of a re-examination of the ideological valences of American cinema with the aim of subjecting them to critical scrutiny; although it is possible — as Guerric de Bona has argued is the case in films by John Huston such as The Red Badge of Courage (1951) — to see such critical re-evaluations of specific genres, such as the western, from the 1950s onwards, with movies from the period of the Korean war being increasingly infused with Cold War anxieties (de Bona 57–8).