The postwar struggles for racial equality in the United States achieved some success in the 1960s, during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Both administrations promoted liberal domestic policies (which Johnson termed the “Great Society”), including the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” instituted work-study programs in colleges and created the Job Corps. At the same time, these administrations carried on the policy of containing communism within the East-West conception of the cold war. The United States had begun to support the French fight against Ho Chi Minh’s Communist forces in Vietnam in the 1950s. In 1963, the year in which Kennedy was assassinated, America decisively entered the hostilities. Over the following nine years, the United States would send hundreds of thousands of soldiers into a war that became increasingly unpopular at home.
The early 1960s saw a new frankness about sexual behavior, accelerated by the invention of the birth-control pill and changing views of women’s roles. A freer social milieu encouraged the “counterculture,” that broad tendency among the young to drop out of the mainstream and experiment with sex and drugs. The counterculture also played a role in sustaining the New Left, a radical political stance that distanced itself from both traditional liberalism and 1930s-style socialism and communism. Soon, student movements were arguing for more domestic social change and U. S. withdrawal from Vietnam.
Between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, social activists clashed with authority to an extent not seen since the Great Depression. The liberal stance of the civil rights movement had given way to the more radical position of the Black Power movement. Opposition to U. S. involvement in the Vietnam War had intensified. Social cohesion seemed to vanish. Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, and Malcolm X were assassinated. Police attacked demonstrators during the 1968 Democratic
Convention in Chicago, and President Nixon widened the Vietnam War. Campuses exploded; 400 closed or held strikes during 1970.
The withdrawal of U. S. forces from Vietnam in 1973 could not heal the deep divisions in American society that the war had created. The New Left collapsed, partly due to internal disputes and partly because the shooting of students at Kent State University in 1970 seemed to prove the futility of organized action. Nixon’s successful bid for the presidency resulted from middle-class voters’ resentment of eastern liberals, the left, and the counterculture.
The upheavals of this period led to an international critical political cinema (see Chapter 23). In America, Emile De Antonio, the Newsreel group, and other filmmakers practiced an “engaged” filmmaking of social protest. At the same time, with diminishing profits from blockbusters, the Hollywood industry tried to woo the younger generation with countercultural films. The effort brought forth some experiments in creating an American art cinema.
Responding to the U. S. government’s turn to the right in the early 1970s, left and liberal activists embraced a micropolitics: they sought grassroots social change by organizing around concrete issues (abortion, race - and gender-based discrimination, welfare, and environmental policy). Many American documentary filmmakers participated in these movements (p. 584). At the same time, however, this activism was fiercely opposed by the rise of the New Right, conservative organizations that organized local support for school prayer, the abolition of newly won abortion rights, and other issues. The struggle between reform movements and New Right forces was to become the central political drama of the 1970s, and many films (Jaws, The Parallax View, Nashville) bear traces of it.
The drama was played against the backdrop of a waning U. S. economy, fallen prey to oil embargoes and brisk competition from Japan and Germany. The 1970s ended the postwar era of prosperity. This period coincided with Hollywood’s reinvention of the blockbuster and the rise to power of the movie brats, the most pragmatic and influential young filmmakers who became the new creative leaders of the industry.
World History
