Aegis 2012
Book Review >>> Lacy O’Lalde
Hollywood Incoherent Todd Berliner. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2011. 288 pp.
The 1970s were a revolutionary time that saw many changes within the film industry and the types of movies that were being produced by Hollywood corporations. With his new book Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema, Todd Berliner attempts to define the incongruities and complexities that “[are] pure seventies filmmaking” (39). The book is organized into three major parts that highlight the narration and narrative incongruity of films from this era. The three parts, “I. An Introduction to Narrative Incongruity,” “II. Modes of Narration in Seventies Films,” and “III. Incongruity’s Endpoints,” have sub-chapters that Berliner dedicates to specific films that support his theories and hypotheses. To break down and analyze an entire decade of films is a daunting task, but with the first page Berliner performs proficiently. The first section of Hollywood Incoherent offers a clear introduction into the world of film and the world of the seventies. In this section, Berliner sets up the foundation and background for his endeavor into the modes of narration of seventies cinema. He does not refer to all of the films in the decade with his use of the phrase ‘seventies cinema’ but to a subset of films from the specific seven year period of 1970 to 1977. It is within this exclusive timeframe of films that Berliner centers his study around and considers a period of deviation from classical the narrative styles of prior films in the past. The films he mentions from 1970 to 1977 were a departure from the films of The Golden Age in Hollywood in the 1930s, 1940s, and classical Hollywood of the 1950s and 1960s. The Golden Age of Hollywood lasted from the onset of the Great Depression to the end of World War II and saw many big budget films made such as King Kong (1933) and Gone with the Wind (1939). The narrative forms of movies from the Golden Age and Classic Hollywood were often very linear and frequently closed with a resolved ending and hardly deviated from accepted social norms. Due to the financial crisis in the late 1960s that the Hollywood corporations and studios faced, young directors like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese were hired and brought in. They were given the artistic freedom that allowed them to create and direct however they wanted, and “that’s how, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, it became a director’s medium” (14). Berliner uses the term ‘incoherent,’ in the literal sense that there is a lack of “connectedness or integration among different elements,” to describe films of the early 1970s (25). For Berliner, seventies films have perverse narratives that disrupt and turn away from a traditional linear course and prevent whole resolutions from happening. In Part II of Hollywood Incoherent Berliner highlights the three modes of perverse narration in seventies cinema with the use of three exemplary films from the decade. The first mode, narrative frustration, is depicted through The Godfather (1972) and its sequel The
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