As a long-term fan of the ’70s sitcom M*A*S*H* I was pretty keen to see our text this week, the original 1970 Robert Altman film of the same name. I have to say, I wasn’t a huge fan of it: it’s grainy, hard to hear, and consists of a plot barely strung together by very thin causal links. For all of these reasons, it was a good film to use as the basis of our discussion of new Hollywood.

We’ve spent the last couple of weeks talking about the Hollywood studio system of the early 20th century, when just about all Hollywood films were produced, distributed and exhibited by the big five (and little three) production studios. This meant that most films (most, we noted in the seminar, is an important word here to avoid generalisations) adhered to a similar narrative style of having a psychologically well-defined protagonist with clear and apparent goals.

However, from the 1940s Hollywood began to change. The antitrust laws from the US government came into effect, forcing the break-up of the major studios in a bid to create more industry competition. Television was invented in the 1950s and became wildly popular, creating a cheap and convenient alternative to cinema. Furthermore, the increased importing of European and Asian films (as opposed to exporting of American films, limited due to WWII) opened American film-makers’ eyes to a new, authorial, creative style of cinema that, in the era of ’50s beatniks and ’60s hippies, answered a growing demand from a counter-cultural audience.

As a result, Hollywood saw the rise of ‘art house cinema’. In one of our readings for this week, Bordwell defines art house by its intention to subvert the classical Hollywood conventions of neatly constructed characters and linear causality in plots. Where classical cinema prefers the stereotypes of hard-boiled detective, pretty blonde, young rascal, or even more generally good and evil, art house muddles them up to create hybrids and characters whose motivations are ambiguous. Where traditionally Hollywood had liked easy-to-follow plots with a sense of resolution, art house suggested this didn’t have to be the case.

M*A*S*H* certainly exemplifies these attributes of the art house style, which became popular (and profitable) in Hollywood in the ’60s and ’70s. The protagonists (note the plural, as the film bucks against Hollywood’s desire for one or two starring roles) are by turns heroic and hateful, and the film aestheticallyis grainy and hard to hear. In fact, Altman specifically used multiple audio tracks to create overlapping sound that he thought was more true to real-world conversation.

This provides a good segue to mention the most valuable part of the discussion for me, which was the idea of realism in art house cinema. To me, Bordwell’s references to realism were somewhat confusing as he seemed to suggest a double meaning of the term. In class, we discussed the idea that art house’s often unsatisfying resolutions and ambiguous characters were realistic in their attempt to more closely mimic the real world; and yet, perhaps we could describe classic Hollywood as being the more realistic style as art house often employs a surreal aesthetic with the intention of confusing the viewer (for example, Antonioni’s hauntingly still and unrevealing shots in L’Avventura or the indistinguishable dark, alien sets of Under the Skin).