Star News Online :: Hollywood Incoherent

Hollywood Incoherent
By Todd Berliner
Buy It Now

Bookmarks - 'Seventies Cinema' explored in
UNCW professor's book
By Ben Steelman

There's something different about the great movies of the 1970s, from “The Godfather” to “Taxi Driver” to “M*A*S*H”, “Nashville” or even “Annie Hall.”

Exactly how they're different Todd Berliner tries to explain in his book, “Holly­wood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema,” which came out last year from the University of Texas Press.

Berliner, the new chairman of the film studies department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, will talk about his book, and '70s films, for the next Prologue, the StarNews/WHQR book club.

He'll answer questions beginning at 7 p.m. Monday in the WHQR gallery, upstairs at 254 N. Front St. Admission is free, and refreshments will be served.

Reading the book in advance isn't required. In fact, copies will be available for sale at a good-sized discount off the $55 list price.

What happened in the 1970s wasn't so much a revolution as a “tweak,” Berliner explained. A new generation of film-school educated directors, raised on the new European cinema, took the Hollywood storytelling tradition and tinkered with it.

The result, Berliner explained, was often “perverse” – not in the sense of X-rated or kinky, but in the sense of unexpected and not always rational.

Read More »