ABSTRACT
The late 1960s and early 1970s has long been viewed as an unprecedented moment in the history of studio filmmaking in Hollywood. To counteract slumping revenues, studio executives turned to experimentation rather than formula. Youthful and first-time directors especially were allowed to assume more authorial control over the filmmaking process and they used this new freedom to explore unconventional visual techniques and narrative styles, choices that significantly blurred and transgressed existing hierarchical structures. In embarking on this new path, as film scholar David Cook points out, young Hollywood directors followed the lead of their European counterparts making films that were “visually arresting, thematically challenging, and stylistically individualized.”1 This emergence of a “New Hollywood” or “Hollywood Renaissance,” he and many other have suggested, also neatly coincided with an emerging critical movement in film scholarship that sought to identify and explain this experimentation, and the flourishing of individual and personal style in general, as evidence of a kind of authorship or auteurism. Filmmakers who were unconventional were not only acknowledged as such but were often additionally described as auteurs.
