New Canaan Library Presents: Making a New Hollywood: The Transformation of American Cinema in the Late 1960s

Join New Canaan Library for a Movements in Cinema talk as Michael Cramer, Professor of Film History at Sarah Lawrence College, presents the lecture “Making a New Hollywood,” a period defined by a seismic shift in filmmaking. This lecture, with film clips and images, is part of the Library’s cultural series,” Movements in Cinema,” and will take place via live webinar on Tuesday, May 18 at 7 PM EST. Zoom sign in information will be provided upon registration at newcanaanlibrary.org.

By the second half of the 1960s, film attendance in the United States had declined drastically from its post-war peak, and Hollywood studios were in poor financial shape. This crisis of the film industry, however, opened the way for far more experimental and unconventional films to be made, as the industry began to turn its attention to connecting to a youth audience and producing lower-budget films. Thus began the so-called "New Hollywood," a period in which innovative, envelope-pushing films, far more radical in content than their Hollywood predecessors, appeared in quick succession.

Michael Cramer holds the position of Professor of Film History at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. His areas of teaching and research expertise include Italian, French, and American cinema of the 1960s and 70s, as well as film and media theory. He is the author of the book Utopian Television: Rossellini, Watkins, and Godard Beyond Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and co-editor of the forthcoming Fredric Jameson and Film Theory (Rutgers University Press, 2021).