The 1970s: that magical era betwixt the swinging ’60s and the decadent ’80s, the epoch of leisure suits and Afros, the age of disco music and platform shoes. As war raged on in Vietnam and the Cold War continued to escalate, Hollywood began to heat up, recovering from its commercial crisis with box-office successes such as
Star Wars, Jaws,
The Exorcist, and
The Godfather. Thanks to directors like
Spielberg and
Lucas, American cinema gave birth to a new phenomenon:
the blockbuster.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, while the Nouvelle Vague died out in France, its influence extended to Germany, where the
New German Cinema of
Fassbinder,
Wenders, and
Herzog had its heyday. The
sexual revolution made its way to the silver screen (cautiously in the U.S., more freely in Europe) most notably in
Bertolucci’s steamy, scandalous
Last Tango in Paris. Amid all this came a wave of
nostalgic films (
The Sting, The Last Picture Show) and
Vietnam pictures (
Apocalypse Now,
The Deer Hunter), the
rise of the antihero (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman), and the prestigious short-lived genre,
blaxploitation.
