The Other Hollywood Renaissance

In the late 1960s, the collapse of the classic Hollywood studio system led in part, and for less than a decade, to a production trend heavily influenced by the international art cinema. Reflecting a new self-consciousness in the US about the national film patrimony, this period is known as the Hollywood Renaissance. However, critical study of the period is generally associated with its so-called principal auteurs, slighting a number of established and emerging directors who were responsible for many of the era’s most innovative and artistically successful releases.

With contributions from leading film scholars, this book provides a revisionist account of this creative resurgence by discussing and memorializing twenty-four directors of note who have not yet been given a proper place in the larger history of the period. Including filmmakers such as Hal Ashby, John Frankenheimer, Mike Nichols, and Joan Micklin Silver, this more expansive approach to the auteurism of the late 1960s and 1970s seems not only appropriate but pressing -- a necessary element of the re-evaluation of ’Hollywood’ with which cinema studies has been preoccupied under the challenges posed by the emergence and flourishing of new media.

Dominic Lennard is a Teaching Fellow in the Pre-degree Programs at the University of Tasmania. He is the author of Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors: The Child Villains of Horror Film (SUNY Press, 2014) and Brute Force: Animal Horror Movies (SUNY, 2019).

R. Barton Palmer is the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University, where he directs the film studies program. He is the author, editor, or general editor of many books including Hollywood’s Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir (1994), After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality (2006), and A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film (2011).

Murray Pomerance is an independent scholar living in Toronto and Adjunct Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is the author of The Film Cheat: Screen Artifice and Viewing Pleasure (2020), Grammatical Dreams (2020), Virtuoso: Film Performance and the Actor’s Magic (2019), A Dream of Hitchcock (2019), and Cinema, If You Please: The Memory of Taste, the Taste of Memory (2018), among many other volumes, and editor or co-editor of more than two dozen books including The Other Hollywood Renaissance (2020). He edits the ＂Horizons of Cinema＂ series at SUNY Press and the ＂Techniques of the Moving Image＂ series at Rutgers. A Voyage with Hitchcock and Color It True: Impressions of Cinema are both forthcoming.