How does the film resonate now, so many years after its making?

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Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) and Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967).

https://lumiere.berkeley.edu/students/items/48197-Bonnie and Clyde

https://lumiere.berkeley.edu/students/items/48198-Easy Rider

Questions to answer in essay (not necessarily in this order):
How is the film form (mise-en-scne) similar? Different? Be specific.
How is the narrative/story similar? Different?
Place each film in an historical context. What was going on historically/culturally/politically/technologically that may have influenced each film?

Background Info on Bonnie and Clyde

Technology:
The popularity of Television in American households prompted the film industry to create and release films that could not be seen on TV (due to ratings, nudity, sex, or extreme graphic violence). Desperate to attract the youth audience, the film industry releases Arthur Penns film, Bonnie and Clyde.

Why was a film like Bonnie and Clyde made in 1967?
The film helped usher in the era of the counterculture film.
Revolutionary characters played by two attractive young new actors, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway appealed to the baby boom /American youth viewer.
This demographic was part of the counter-cultural movement protesting the Vietnam War, and the US governments role in it.

Bonnie and Clyde exemplify the youth protests of the 60s and 70s often rebelling against authoritarianism, and rooting for the modern Robin Hood hero.

The story takes place in the depression era. The baby boom audience was too young to remember that time, but heard stories about it by their parents.

Why release a film about depression era gangsters in 1967?
Blending humor and horror, it draws the audience in sympathy toward its antiheroes. It is, at the same time, a commentary on the mindless daily violence of the American 60s and an esthetic evocation of the past.

The film challenges Genre conventions: We have sympathetic outlaws and outcasts in a setting that paints the 1930s with a Nostalgic stroke. The story of Bonnie and Clyde is at once sincere and satirical, serious and yet also comical.
It mixes the gangster film genre with the screwball comedy, buddy film, and road film.
American culture. Recall the odd cartoon style slapstick scenes reminiscent of the silent comedies of the past. Scenes were also often accompanied by banjo music (namely, Foggy Mountain Breakdown from Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs). Combined with the graphic violence and nihilistic tone of the film reflected the zeitgeist of late 1960s results in a post modern pastiche.

The style of Bonnie and Clyde was influenced by the French New wave movement that was popular with younger moviegoers at the time. See page 283 from our textbook for more.

Is the story of Arthur Penns film true?
The motives of the real Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were much more nefarious and self-serving, says Nate Hendley, author of Bonnie and Clyde: A Biography. In reality, they never robbed banks, he says. They hit up low-hanging fruit. They robbed small-town grocery stores and gas stations, where working people or poor people would [shop].

If you are interested in learning more about the real people, Bonnie and Clyde PBS made a documentary that reveals a couple who was not as sympathetic and beautiful as what we see in Penns fictionalized version.

How does the film resonate now, so many years after its making? As a social critique of our desire for fame and power more than money, Bonnie and Clyde resonates even today.

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