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12/9/2003

The Spectacle of 1960s

Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria

The purest power in America...is the fantasy of having one's fantasy realized onscreen-and hence played in a hundred million minds. During this period, this fantasy was highly contagious.

J. Hoberman (from The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties; The New Press, October 2003)

In the era of the missile gap and the space race, the black and sexual revolutions, the Vietnam War and Watergate, American politics and mass media combined in a new social spectacle, merging fantasy and reality. The American Museum of the Moving Image will present an ambitious, wide-ranging film series exploring this phenomenon, from September 13 through 28, 2003.
The series, From the Dream Life: American Movies and the Mythology of the 1960s, has been curated by film critic J. Hoberman, author of a new book on the subject called The Dream Life, to be published in October by the New Press. Hoberman will be present for a book signing following a screening of Dr. Strangelove on the opening day of the series, Saturday, September 13.

Revealing time capsules of the era, from the days of Camelot to the fall of Richard Nixon, the works to be shown include Hollywood and independent feature films, documentaries, political commercials, and cartoons. Included are such milestones as Easy Rider, Medium Cool, and Shampoo, as well as a number of rarely screened features by two iconic, and iconoclastic, figures of the 1960s, Dennis Hopper and Norman Mailer. Hopper's avant-garde western The Last Movie, starring Peter Fonda, will be shown in a brand new 35mm print provided by the director. Mailer's existential psychodrama Maidstone, conceived in the aftermath of the Robert Kennedy assassination, will also be shown in a 35mm print from the director's archive.

The series has been organized into six thematic days: "Coups in Camelot", "Great Society Disasters", "The Summer of '68", "Outlaws of Amerika", "Terminal Westerns" and "Warren Beatty, Sixties Man." States Hoberman, "From The Dream Life is the world of archetypal figures: the Hollywood Freedom Fighter, the Secret Agent of History, the Righteous Outlaw, the Legal Vigilante, and the Sixties Survivor." These figures, he continues, "would haunt the political discourse of the period and after." By juxtaposing such disparate but related, and fictional and real figures as the John F. Kennedy of Robert Drew's documentary Primary and Peter Fonda's "Captain America" in Easy Rider, the series draws together the competing qualities that came to define the era: aspiration, rebellion, and madness.

"The key movies of the period," says Hoberman, "were cult films writ large--their meanings determined by the reception and metaphoric use given them by their audience, whether counterculture or silent majority. These were movies that America could have been said to have given to itself, films that emanated from and returned to shape the nation's dream life."

SCHEDULE

Saturday, September 13 (Coups in Camelot)
1:00 p.m. PRIMARY
Time Life Broadcast, 1960, 53 mins. Directed by Robert Drew.
Media-savvy candidate John F. Kennedy played himself as the star of Robert Drew's cinema verite documentary.

2:00 p.m. SEVEN DAYS IN MAY
Warner Bros., 1964, 120 mins. Directed by John Frankenheimer. With Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas.
JFK encouraged star-producer Douglas to make this cautionary tale of a right-wing military coup--its opening announced on the very morning of November 22, 1963. Hollywood, The New York Times complained, was out to "scare us all to death with dire speculations of what might happen any day in Washington."

4:30 p.m. DR. STRANGELOVE
Introduced by J. Hoberman.
Columbia, 1964, 93 mins. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. With Peter Sellers, George C. Scott.
Replaying the Cold War for laughs, Kubrick dramatized the catastrophe America had been dreading. Its release delayed by JFK's assassination, Strangelove was received with euphoria; the apocalypse had happened but we remained! Followed by a book signing with J. Hoberman in the Museum shop.

Sunday, September 14 (Great Society Disasters)
1:00 p.m. MAJOR DUNDEE
Columbia, 1964, 124 mins. Directed by Sam Peckinpah. With Charlton Heston, Richard Harris.
Peckinpah's ambitious studio-mangled fiasco about a megalomaniacal American major's pursuit of Indian raiders across the Mexican border was released the same day Lyndon Johnson went on TV to explain his escalation of the Vietnam War--in terms suggesting a western. Preceded by CHOICE (Mothers for a Moral America, 1964, 23 mins.) This Republican campaign film, disowned by candidate Barry Goldwater, shows America as a nightmare of depravity ruled by a brazen Texan.

4:00 p.m. THE CHASE
Columbia, 1966, 135 mins. Directed by Arthur Penn. With Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford.
High Noon modified by mounting social chaos, Penn's fascinating debacle envisioned LBJ's Great Society as a rich, racist, violent Texas town ineffectually policed by Brando. Robin Wood called The Chase a key vision of "American apocalypse."

Saturday, September 20 (The Summer of '68)
2:00 p.m. MAIDSTONE
Supreme Mix Productions, 1970, 110 mins. Directed by Norman Mailer. With Mailer, Rip Torn.
Mailer's third and most elaborate independent feature, an existential psychodrama shot in five days, was conceived after the RFK assassination and stars the novelist as a movie director contemplating a run for the presidency.

4:15 p.m. MEDIUM COOL
Paramount, 1969, 110 mins. Directed by Haskell Wexler. With Robert Forster, Verna Bloom.
Famed cameraman Wexler staged a fictional drama about a disillusioned TV reporter against the actual backdrop of the Chicago convention--as well as the ongoing police riot during which he himself was temporarily blinded by tear gas. Preceded by A HOT TIME IN THE OLD TOWN (1968) Nixon campaign commercial.

Sunday, September 21 (Outlaws of Amerika)
2:00 p.m. EASY RIDER
Columbia, 1969, 94 mins. Directed by Dennis Hopper. With Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson.
A wildly successful generational manifesto, Easy Rider reveled in countercultural values, promoting drugs, sex, and rock' n 'roll--not to mention brown-rice millennialism and the fatalistic sense that long-haired freaks would soon have to fight for their lives against killer redneck straights. Preceded by BUNNY AND CLAUDE (WE ROB CARROT PATCHES) Warner Bros. cartoon (1968, 7 mins.).

4:00 p.m. TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE
Universal, 1969, 96 mins. Directed by Abraham Polonsky. With Robert Redford, Katharine Ross, Robert Blake.
In Polonsky's account of a one-man revolutionary insurrection, the righteous outlaw is an Indian. Variety wrote that Polonsky came closer than any American filmmaker to saying "that our present civilization must be destroyed and built anew." Preceded by AMERICA (Newsreel, 1969, 30 mins.) A documentary about the growing American protest movement.

Saturday, September 27 (Terminal Westerns)
2:00 p.m. THE LAST MOVIE
Universal, 1971, 110 mins. Directed by Dennis Hopper. With Peter Fonda.
The most avant-garde Hollywood feature of its day, Dennis Hopper's post-Easy Rider head trip begins as a fictional western directed by Sam Fuller. What follows is part imaginary ritual, part comic documentary, and ultimately a denial of representation altogether. New 35mm print.

4:30 p.m. DIRTY LITTLE BILLY
Columbia, 1973, 100 mins. Directed by Stan Dragoti. With Michael J. Pollard.
Pollard, sidekick to Bonnie and Clyde, stars as a young Billy the Kid in this unrelentingly miserablist Western. "Everything is gray: the landscape, the light, the morality," Time wrote.

Sunday, September 28 (Warren Beatty, Sixties Man)
2:00 p.m. THE PARALLAX VIEW
Paramount, 1974, 102 mins. Directed by Alan J. Pakula. With Warren Beatty.
Released during the House's Nixon impeachment hearings, Pakula's paranoid thriller is an updated Shock Corridor in which a reporter commits himself to the madhouse of American politics to solve the assassination of an RFK-like presidential candidate. Preceded by RFK campaign film directed by John Frankenheimer, 1968.

4:30 p.m. SHAMPOO
Columbia, 1975, 109 mins. Directed by Hal Ashby. With Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn.
The first movie to periodicize "1968" mores suggests that era's decline. His name echoing that of the candidate Beatty strenuously supported in 1972, the sexually hyperactive hairdresser George is a counterculture casualty.

Series Curated by J. Hoberman Moves from Camelot and the Cold War through Vietnam and Watergate

Image: Peter Fonda in Easy Rider

American Museum of the Moving Image
35 Avenue at 36 Street
Astoria, New York 11106
Telephone: (718) 784-0077

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