Hi Robert,
Whilst I can appreciate that the preoccupation with language and its
possibilities is central to the American imagination as it is to the British,
where does this leave the cinema generally, as central to the American
creative imagination as music is to the German, painting is to the Italian?
Surely, cinema has bred its own literacy, courtesy of the myriad American
directors who have refined it. Whilst the cinematic appropriation of
traditional, ie artistic visual literacy, is like as not going to seem fairly
superficial, being the legacy of European art cinema's impact upon the
American scene. As you point out, art referencing begins to appear in
American Antonioni, at a time when Americans are becoming aware that the
cinema might be ART, after all. Yet, art referencing appears more deeply
stitched into classical American cinema than we have been prepared to admit,
I suspect. There are Hitchcock's Dali experiments. But I suspect too that a
case could be made for tracing the legacy of late 19th/early 20th century
American painting in studio work, think of King, Vidor, Ford, Wyler, the
Welles of The Magnificent Ambersons. There's an interesting job for someone!
Anyhow, I digress. I liked what you had to say about Zabriskie Point and the
US art scene in the '60s. Continental and American directors also were
enamoured of the Brit art scene at the time. It seemed that, with the decline
of the old audience in the '60s, cinema was freed up to look around at
adjacent cultural practices, including music, of course.
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