Rewatching "American Cinema"

I've always liked documentaries about movies and television, and I feel like being a nerd about media was part of my fandom DNA from early on.  One of the earliest ones that stuck with me was the 1995 "American Cinema" series, an ambitious ten-part PBS program that was designed to be part of an educational course.  

The main part of the series consists of ten hour-long episodes on topics like "The Studio System," and "Film in the Television Age," each with an introduction by John Lithgow and narration from an array of different actors.  There were also a few shorter supplementary episodes intended for classroom use.  My local PBS stations ran marathons of the series a few times, but the two episodes I kept stumbling across were "The Film School Generation" and "The Edge of Hollywood."  The first is about the rise of Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and their cohort in the 1960s and 1970s.  The second is about independent American cinema in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including films from Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, and the Coen brothers.  

I recently got a chance to finally watch the whole "American Cinema" series from start to finish, and I found it well worth my time.  It was impossible to cover all of the history of American moviemaking in the allotted time, but I found "American Cinema" a worthy attempt.  There's some variance in quality from episode to episode, but all feature good interviews from historians, working directors, and other Hollywood players.  There are also lots and lots of classic film clips that it must have been a monumental effort to licence.  Five of the episodes are focused on the history of American cinema, looking at the development of the studios, movie stars, and some of the major changes affecting the industry.  The other five are about the movies themselves, specifically a handful of genres that had their genesis in Hollywood - the western, the film noir, and the romantic comedy.  The opening episode is entirely devoted to the "Hollywood style," where Martin Scorsese and Sydney Pollack, among others, try to define what made Hollywood films stand out from the crowd.  

With the benefit of hindsight thirty years later, it's fascinating to see the choices and delineations made by "American Cinema" that don't match up with modern expectations.  There are episodes that spotlight directors who came out of the early television ecosystem, and the "movie brats" who came up from films schools, but the term "New Hollywood" hadn't been popularized yet, and Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls wouldn't be published for a few more years.  "Combat films" get a whole episode, but there's barely any mention of musicals or horror or animation.  African-American cinema, LGBT cinema, and outsider cinema are all lumped together in the one episode on independent cinema.  

Clearly a lot of thought and care went into the series, however, and despite some of the dodgy calls on what was included and what wasn't, I still found the presentations valuable.  Information in episodes like "The Star" may no longer be relevant to 2020s Hollywood, as it compares the careers of Golden Age stars like Joan Crawford and the more modern Julia Roberts.  However, I found the discussion made for a fantastic time capsule for the brief era where movie stars were real players in the movie business, and had a major say in what got made.  Many of the interviews are very prescient, such as Robert Altman predicting the death of physical film in favor of "electronic" media.  

Because I am easily swayed by nostalgia, I was frequently delighted with the chance to see directors like Scorsese and Spielberg as they were at the height of their powers thirty years ago, departed old masters like Joseph Mankiewicz and Billy Wilder, and even appearances by an appallingly young-looking Whit Stillman and Gregg Araki.  There are a couple of problematic figures in the mix - James Toback participates in one of the supplementary discussions - but the series manages to avoid tripping over most of the serious cultural landmines that I was expecting.  

Modern viewers might find the early installments too laudatory and inoffensive, but the romantic comedy episode has a great time letting Amy Heckerling and Kathryn Bigelow point out the conservative gender politics inherent in the genre and provide a more critical viewpoint.  Other directors air plenty of grievances about their time in Hollywood, and the examinations of the business side of the movies are all pretty even-handed.  I find the historical episodes much more interesting than the ones on genre and style, maybe because this is where I feel the series' age the most acutely.

There have been many other documentaries made about American cinema since "American Cinema," some much better and more insightful about their specific subjects.   However, I haven't found anything as ambitious or comprehensive on the subject yet.  And I do think it's important to acknowledge that this is one of my foundational media experiences, especially as a film fan, and something that I'll continue to judge every other entertainment documentary against.      

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