Architects of the New Hollywood: Analyzing and Confronting Revolution and its Absence in the New Hollywood Cinema of Mike Nichols and Arthur Penn

Abstract

The New Hollywood began in 1967 with Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Mike Nichols’ The Graduate. Characterized by formal innovation, moral complexity, and defiance of the Motion Picture Production Code that had governed the content of American cinema since the 1930s, the era is among the most studied periods in American film history, lauded as a space for artistic expression and studied as a period of cultural and industrial transformation. This research contributes to the scholarship by examining the period as a revolutionary space through comparative analysis of the New Hollywood films of Mike Nichols and Arthur Penn. These interventions are necessary corrections to existing gaps in New Hollywood scholarship. Though much of the literature has used the word ‘revolution’ to describe the New Hollywood, no text has adequately defined the era’s revolutionary qualities or qualified its successes and failures as a revolution. Through a combination of revolution studies theory, film theory, literature review, and close reading, this dissertation extends beyond the ill-defined uses of revolution that have marked New Hollywood scholarship and provides are more complex understanding of the era as a revolutionary space. Focus on Penn and Nichols is a means to correct the lack of scholarly attention the pair have received in New Hollywood literature outside of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, with chapters dedicated to Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant (1969), Little Big Man (1970), and Night Moves (1975), and Nichols’ Catch-22 (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971), and The Day of the Dolphin (1973). Expanding beyond the New Hollywood’s originary films provides a framework for understanding the historical trajectory of the New Hollywood by tracing the artistic evolution of its progenitors.