Page 18 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

2 Policy and Industry

experiment and thematic innovation are possible because the audience is
often small, better educated, and characterized by a more critical worldview
at odds with mainstream assumptions.
During the decades after World War II in the US, for example, fi lms
from Europe, Asia, and elsewhere were made on low budgets with, often,
untrained actors, yet they were very popular with educated audiences
because they explored issues that were left out of mainstream Hollywood

films of that era. While American films of the 1950s portrayed White

suburbia as a world of easily resolved emotional conflicts, where social
embarrassment might be the greatest harm that might befall someone,

films such as Satyajit Ray ’ s Apu Trilogy portrayed the difficulties of life in

situations of poverty. The problems depicted were tangible and material.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Hollywood film industry had adapted

and begun to make more realistic films such as Five Easy Pieces that dealt
seriously with human and social problems. The days of the facile plot reso-
lution were gone, apparently forever. The repeal of the Production Code
in 1968, a policy that limited the range of subject matter that Hollywood

films could cover and the ways controversial subject matter was treated,
also made possible a creative opening in mainstream fi lm production. A
change in government policy made possible a change in cultural content.
But the US economy sank during the 1970s, the fi lm industry suffered,
and to survive it began to make more “ blockbuster ” films, ones such as

The Godfather that were guaranteed to earn enormous profi ts. As a result,

US filmmaking changed and once again became more standardized and
more mainstream. The least common denominator returned in such fi lm
series as Star Wars and Indiana Jones that contained racial and cultural
stereotyping that would have been unacceptable in marginal fi lms made
for more educated audiences. As the dominant tone of the country became

more conservative in the 1980s, the film industry played to its concerns
and made fi lms such as Top Gun that celebrated US military power.
But the alternative, marginal, critical, avant - garde audience was still out
there, and the film industry rediscovered it in 1989, when a small company

named Miramax distributed sex, lies, and videotape , a modest film with no

stars to carry it in which fairly ordinary people with common moral fl aws
seek to work out a complex series of relations that involve friendship,
betrayal, and adultery. The existing mainstream culture industry could not
accommodate such a vision of life. It required a small marginal production
company willing to take the risk. The film was bought at the Sundance

Film Festival, and along with such films as Pulp Fiction , it established