American Outlaws: Scenes from the Dream Life, 1968-72

6/10/05 to 6/18/05

Dirty Little Billy, June 18

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Past Films

Wild in the Streets
Friday, June 10 19:00
Lecture & Booksigning by J. Hoberman. Hoberman discusses the renegade protagonists of the '60s before screening this insolent satire, released during the 1968 primary season, about a "Jim Morrison–like pop–star president who puts everyone over thirty in psychedelic concentration camps."-J. Hoberman
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Joe
Saturday, June 11 19:00
Introduced by J. Hoberman. "A middle–aged adman kills his daughter's hippie boyfriend, then joins forces with Peter Boyle...the bellicose embodiment of Silent Majority working–class resentment."-J. Hoberman
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Myra Breckinridge
Saturday, June 11 21:20
Introduced by J. Hoberman. A gay film critic gets a sex change and heads for Hollywood in this notoriously outré adaptation of Gore Vidal's novel. "We might as well slit our throats, if it's come to this."-Life
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Bloody Mama
Saturday, June 18 19:00
Introduced by J. Hoberman. Set during the Depression, but with echoes of the Manson Family, this is "a degenerate child of Bonnie and Clyde....Shelley Winters [plays] monstrous mother hen to a criminal brood of sexually anarchic, drug–addled hillbilly trash."-J. Hoberman
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Dirty Little Billy
Saturday, June 18 21:00
Introduced by J. Hoberman. Michael Pollard is Billy the Kid in an "unrelentingly miserablist Western-a terminal expression of a genre that self–destructed, inadvertently timed for the [Vietnam] war's bitter aftermath."-J. Hoberman
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American Outlaws: Scenes from the Dream Life, 1968-72

6/10/05 to 6/18/05

A Series with J. Hoberman

Throughout the delirious social spectacle known as the sixties, political events could be appreciated as movies and movies taken for political events. Fantasies contaminated and even supplanted reality in Indochina, Watts, Haight–Ashbury, and Washington, D.C. Openly hysterical low–budget movies featuring bikers and hardhats, not to mention hitherto taboo expressions of sex and violence, were imaginatively closer to what was actually going on than were expensive Hollywood productions-although, in their quest for relevance, the studios financed all manner of bizarre projects. Not since the early 1930s had the movie industry been so confused, a state of affairs that encouraged both exploitation and experimentation. And, as during the pre–Code Depression, criminal behavior was celebrated on the screen.

By the summer of 1969, Americans were living in a moment of antithetical, competing...

A Series with J. Hoberman

By the summer of 1969, Americans were living in a moment of antithetical, competing scenarios-a virtual civil war. Movies then typically remained in distribution long enough to accrue cultural baggage. The key ones were cult films writ large, their meanings determined by the reception and metaphoric use given them by their audience, whether counterculture or silent majority. Such movies provided readymade metaphors and showcased new protagonists-including the Righteous Outlaw and the Legal Vigilante-who continue to inform America's political mythology to the present day.

-J. Hoberman

J. Hoberman is a staff critic for the Village Voice and the author of The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (newly in paperback from The New Press), on which this series is based. His previous books include Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media, The Magic Hour: Film at Fin de Siecle, and Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds.

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American Outlaws: Scenes from the Dream Life, 1968-72

6/10/05 to 6/18/05

Past Films

Wild in the Streets

Joe

Myra Breckinridge

Bloody Mama

Dirty Little Billy