A Cinema of Loneliness : Penn, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman Book

The "New Wave" style of American film of the 1960s and 70s—characterized by exciting, narrative innovation and sometimes adventurous reworkings of older film genres, as well as images of solitude and explosive violence—has come to an end. Erasing virtually all traces of 60s and 70s experimentation, American film in the 1980s has returned with a vengeance to a more linear, conventional style.
In this newly revised edition of The Cinema of Loneliness, Robert Phillip Kolker continues and expands his inquiry into the phenomenon of cinematic representations of culture by updating the chapters on the directors discussed in the first edition—Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Robert Altman—to include their latest work, and by substituting for the chapter on Francis Ford Coppola a chapter on the cultural, political, and ideological formations of eighties films and the work of Steven Spielberg. He incorporates new discussions to include the more recent films, such as Arthur Penn's Four Friends (1983) and Target (1985); Stanley Kubrick's direction of The Shining (1980) and Full Metal Jacket (1987); Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983), After Hours (1985), and The Color of Money (1986); and Robert Altman's A Perfect Couple (1979), Popeye (1980), Streamers (1983), A Fool for Love (1985), and Beyond Therapy (1987).
Placing the films of Penn, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, and Altman in an ideological perspective, Kolker both illuminates their relationship to one another and to larger currents in our culture, and emphasizes the statements their films make about American society.

"The best book on contemporary American film that we have or are likely to have for some time."--The Washington Post Book World.