New wave cinema and how it effected the sixties specifically till present times

The historical development of Hollywood cinema, including the art and business of filmmaking along with the popular experience of film viewing, has influenced every aspect of social life in North America—and increasingly around the world—for more than a century. In continuous efforts to reach the widest possible audiences, the Hollywood film industry from the outset sought to create marketable products, to which end it moved to standardize all phases of the manufacturing and distribution of motion pictures (Schatz, 80).

By 1930, the industry, galvanized by the dominant seven studios (MGM, Columbia, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, RKO, Paramount, Universal), was able to achieve its goal of a commercially successful popular entertainment medium. In this context, filmmaking evolved through a merger of commercial and aesthetic impulses, with the former typically enjoying the upper hand (Ryan, 25).

The studio system, erected on a foundation of rapidly produced, formulaic pictures for mass audiences, was drawn toward a variety of easily identifiable genres: Westerns, thrillers, horror films, musicals, comedies, dramas, and so forth. This Hollywood synthesis lasted from the 1920s until well into the 1960s (Lewis, 89). Filmmakers employed narrative traditions taken from literature and drama wedded to technical and managerial techniques that were integral to American capitalism. By the 1930s, Hollywood cinema had become the largest popular entertainment form in the United States, spreading to the rest of the globe during the post-World War II years—a trend later heightened by the video revolution, computer technology, and other elements of economic globalization.

An identifiable working-class film movement begins after World War II, its devastation of working-class lives spurring filmmakers, first in Italy, to develop the anti-Hollywood neorealist style that foregrounds everyday life instead of plot and features nonprofessional actors (Jameson, 95).

Key films include Roberto Rossellini's Paisa (1946), about peasant resistance during the war, and Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1948), about working-class poverty in postwar Rome. Later, a more explicitly socialist form of Italian neorealism appeared in the films of Ermano Olmi's The Job (1961) and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Rosa (1962). In France, neorealist techniques, such as filming in the streets, influenced the New Wave, but its films focused mainly on the middle class, except for films such as Agnes Varda's La Pointe Comte (1955), about a marriage in a small fishing village, and Claude Chabrol's The Good Woman (1960), about Parisian shopgirls (Denzin, 15). In Britain, neorealism had a strong influence on the Free Cinema, which featured working-class London frustrations, as in Tony Richardson's Look Back in Anger (1959) and Karl Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), followed by the New Cinema, which focused on the working class of the northern industrial cities in films such as Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey (1961), eventually leading to the realist working-class films of Ken Loach, who has become a key figure in the working-class cinema of the present day (Debord, 59).

In Eastern Europe, neorealism, as well as the New ...