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Beyond Recall. The new thrust in movies took inception from the collapse of Hollywood in the early '50s and the revival of Europe as a center of film production. Since the European industry was small and loosely organized, such directors as Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard could pretty well shoot them as they saw them and let the censor take the hindmost. As a result, they made a number of fine far-out films (The Bicycle Thief, Wild Strawberries, 8½, L'Avventura, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, The 400 Blows, Breathless) that made a startling amount of money.
U.S. producers were impressed. Unable to beat the new movement, they decided to join it. New Hollywoods, largely supported by U.S. capital, arose on the Seine and the Isar, the Tiber and the Thames. In 1966, every other movie made with American money was made abroad, and many of them (A Man for All Seasons, Blow-Up, Taming of the Shrew) were made by European directors and actors. Moreover, moviemaking at last fell out of the pockets of the moneymen in the front offices and into the hands of directors, writers and actors who suddenly found themselves with more freedom than they had ever known in the dear dead days that were happily beyond recall.
Less Hypocrisy. Along with this shift came the fresh realization that audiences and their attitudes have changed. They are younger and they carry more intellectual clout. Says Karel Reisz, who directed Morgan!: "The literacy gap between the people who are making films and those who are seeing them has narrowed." The kids still flip for spoof spectaculars like Goldfinger, but they just don't believe in 40-acre bathrooms and proscenium-size smiles. "The grand image no longer awes the spectator," says Director Claud Lelouch (Un Homme et Une Femme). "He recognizes a smooth but forced décor and performance as unnatural. There is much less hypocrisy in films today."
Also much more sex and nudity. But in the new films, sex is rarely prurient. If it is sometimes startlingly explicit, it is nevertheless unself-conscious and often functional to the plot—or what plot there is. It is also unstereotyped. People make love on the couch (Georgy Girl), in cars (Alfie), and in a susurrous sea of blue backdrop paper (Blow-Up). And the girl hardly ever waits any more to be asked; she communicates sex like a banner headline.
The new cinema is realistic yet not merely representational. The reality the films are aiming at is often a subconscious or transcendent experience. To communicate its quality, the new moviemakers have taken some weird flights of imagination and made nervy innovations in style.
Directors are undertaking instead a sort of radial reorganization of experience in which the elements of a story occur in no necessary order and the sense of succession subsides in the illusion of a permanent present. Fantasy heightens reality. Cause and effect are denied, and in the more extreme experiments such as in Last Year at Marienbad, a fundamental reorientation in time and space takes shape. Even as it strives to entertain, the new cinema is part of the broad cultural movement of an age that is searching for a contemporary redefinition of man's place in the universe.