1969 - The Year Cinema Came Of Age
From Easy Rider to The Wild Bunch, mainstream movies were never the same after 1969, the year when counter-culture conquered the global box-office.
It's always hard to pinpoint the precise moment of change. In the case of cinema, as in music, the task is further complicated by the fact that, in seeking to declare a particular year of vital importance in altering an art form, one needs to consider when a certain film came out and in which particular territory.
See, for some, the year motion pictures grew up will always be 1968. Planet Of The Apes, 2001, Rosemary's Baby - there's no denying that it was an important 12 months for American film. However, there's no getting around the fact that one of the year's key pictures, Arthur Penn's Bonnie And Clyde, had actually been released in 1967 and only caught on in '68. And while there's few things I'd rather do than sing the praises of Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's Performance again, I'd only be deceiving myself were I to ignore the two years the film sat on a shelf, it being way too extreme for the pop kids of the late '60s.
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