On this course we will consider the celebrated decade-plus of American commercial filmmaking from c.1967 to c.1980 – a “Renaissance” in Hollywood cinema, Hollywood’s “second Golden Age,” according to many, or indeed its only Golden Age in the view of one of the most renowned and influential critics of the period, Pauline Kael (whose extended New Yorker review of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 did so much to put the “new American cinema” on the cultural map). We will view a wide-ranging selection of films from the period and discuss them in light of the industrial, cultural and socio-political contexts that shaped them and which they consistently addressed in innovative, imaginative and sometimes startling ways. We will look at the stylistic trends and technological practices associated with the emergence of an American art cinema, and also at the ways in which the films and filmmakers of these years engaged in a complex dialogue with their inheritance from the Hollywood films of the now-vanished studio era – a patrimony they both rebelled against and elegized. We will assess both the extent of the revolution in Hollywood and also its limits – not least in the continuing industry predominance of middle-class white males. We will also take account of the countervailing factors in Hollywood business practices and audience preferences across the period, which ultimately saw the “Renaissance” give way to a new, blockbuster-oriented Hollywood orthodoxy – while its legacy is still invoked by today’s independent and “Indiewood” filmmakers.