VI

		Even though the films created by Fran ois Truffaut, Federico Fellini, Vera Chytilov , and many others slipped into the mainstream, gaining market share against their Hollywood opponent, it took some time for American independents to take advantage of the situation. Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider eventually pulled it off in 1969, aligning the film thematically and stylistically with the rest of the revolutionary culture enjoyed by the younger audience. Faced with this visual upheaval, it was easy at the time to believe that the modernist revolution that had seized music, painting, and literature at the turn of the century had finally reached film as well. In film in particular, for the very first time, what was perceived as the avant-garde dominated the cultural scene. 26 Surely no turning back was thinkable at this junction. Filmmakers here and in the rest of the world were going to keep probing the limits of the medium. A film Renaissance was finally at hand.

		VII

		This view of things turned out to be dead wrong after all. The support of high culture by what was after all mostly middle-class youth proved as lasting as its endorsement of the new left and black radicals. Most observers at the rime got it wrong because they interpreted mere experimentation for lasting conviction. More specifically, once American films were able to provide novelty without subtitles, outrageous homegrown characters rather than aloof foreign ones, boisterous sex encounters in lieu of refined erotics, and quick cutting as a substitute for genuine aesthetic experimentation, spicing it all with a newly charged but uniquely American violence, the passing endorsement of the foreign cinema came to an end. It had been but a misalliance from the beginning.

		In the other arts too, the current was flowing from stateliness toward confrontation, energy, and immediacy. Happenings were in vogue. The Living Theater in New York fostered performance art, breaking down the traditional boundaries between actors and spectators. "Action painting" and the quick, bright, colorful, iconoclastic pop art of Andy Warhol became the rage in many galleries. And, of course, the rock music of the Rolling Stones, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janet Joplin, and so many others attracted all those rebelling against the stifling rigidity and conformism of the previous generation's mores. Certainly, in the long run, rock had a lot more to offer to the kids than the rest of culture