Magical History Tour - Between New American Cinema and New Hollywood – American Cinema of the 1960s and 70s

"We have had enough of the 'Big Lie' in life and the arts. We don't want false, polished, slick films – we prefer them rough, unpolished, but alive; we don't want rosy films – we want them the color of blood." This is stated in a manifesto by the New American Cinema Group, a group of independent New Yorker filmmakers that formed at the beginning of the 1960s to create a discussion and distribution platform for artistic, avant-garde, independent cinema. But not only in distant New York is the "heartless mediocrity" (Blumenberg) of 1960s-Hollywood cinema decried. Hollywood is in a deep crisis: the movies produced here are met with a lack of understanding and disinterest by an increasingly younger audience, whose reality is shaped by the protest and student movement, but also by pop and youth culture. Only toward the end of the 1960s, are a number of directors able to revive and renew Hollywood cinema, among them, Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, Sam Peckinpah, Terrence Malick, Peter Bogdanovich, F.F. Coppola, Dennis Hopper, Martin Scorsese, and others. Strongly influenced by contemporary European cinema, their movies break with traditional narrative conventions and taboos.