Programmed May 2024

Hollywood Crack-Up: The Decade American Cinema Lost Its Mind

What happened to America in the 1960s? Amid the stream of social upheavals, a wave of films emerged depicting mental illness, madness, extreme emotional states, and chilling violence—jarring transmissions from a new generation of Hollywood iconoclasts that seemed to evoke the very breakdown of the studio system itself. With filmmakers like Samuel Fuller ( Shock Corridor ), John Frankenheimer ( The Manchurian Candidate , Seconds ), Robert Aldrich ( What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? ), and Mike Nichols ( Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ) deploying a profusion of wild and warped images, sounds, and themes, these startling portraits of social and psychological collapse capture the tenor of their times while pointing the way toward the explosive experimentation of the oncoming New Hollywood. Programmed by Nicolas Saada and Richard Peña