The highpoint of classic Hollywood cinema is from 1930 to 1945. The conglomeration of Hollywood and advertising and marketing, people do not care about which movie they need to get financed but which movies they are going to sell (Godard and Kael, 1982, pp.174-5).

New Hollywood was from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. It was whole new cinema adventure linked to traditional classic Hollywood genre filmmaking with the stylistic innovations of European art cinema. No one was sure about the directions that should be taken because it is a new idea. The success of the musical film, The Sound of Music touched off the ‘youth audience’ and ‘youth’ and ‘alternative’ films in late 1960s and early 1970s, all relate to ‘anti-heroes’. It was descried as a cinema of ‘alienation, anomie, anarchy and absurdism by Sarris.

Then the ‘movie brats’ arrived, it is a film-school-educated and/or film-critical generation who began making commercial American cinema with an elan. It was considered to be the moment of symbol of critical practice of auteurism within American filmmaking, resulting in a self-consciously auteurist cinema. This moment is dubbed by Noel Carroll to be a ‘cinema of allusion’, according to classic Hollywood cinema and European art cinema. Based on Bordwell and Staiger’s claim, the new Hollywood directors are not youthful and technologically competent than their predecessors. They grafted art cinema conventions on classical traditions in a genuinely new aesthetic. ‘In keeping with the definition of a non-Hollywood Hollywood, American films are imitating the look of European art films; classical film style and codified genres swallow up art-film borrowings, taming the disruptiveness of the art cinema’ (Bordwell and Staiger. 1985, p.375). ‘Most American commercial cinema has continued the classical tradition and observing that the New Hollywood can explore ambiguous narrational possibilities but those explorations remain within classical boundaries’ (p.377)

Reference: “New Hollywood” in Pam Cook (ed) The Cinema Book. 3rd Edition. BFI. London. 2007. pp. 60-67