Expressions of the Streets

Abstract Arthur Penn and Stanley Kubrick stand as the first generation of com mercial contemporary American cinema’s small avant-garde. Both of them began their filmmaking careers in the fifties, just before the French New Wave helped initiate a break in Hollywood’s classical style. Martin Scorsese is part of the next group of directors, which include Steven Spiel berg, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, John Milius, Brian DePalma, Paul Schrader, and, more recently, Oliver Stone, who came to filmmaking maturity after the French left their mark. That mark contains some complex tracings. Like Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, and Rivette, the American filmmakers studied film carefully, both formally and informally. Like the French, they spent a great deal of their youth watching film; but instead of turning to critical writing about their subject before actually making films, many of them attended film school, an extraordinary event in the history of American filmmaking.1