Bonnie and Clyde - cinematography of America's lost innocence

Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker

I'm halfway through preparing my first class presentation for my university courses this semester. Specifically I'm laying out my power point slides for FILM1002 - Introduction to Film Studies. I'm asked to talk on cinematography with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde as the reference movie.

So we dive straight in to the birth of the 'American New Wave' with the movie that got there a year before Bullitt, two years before Easy Rider or Midnight Cowboy, five years before Badlands. My line of argument will be that it's the first - at least one of the earliest - mainstream Hollywood films to tear down the icons of the 'golden era' of movie myth-making. It's an outlaw movie rather than a gangster film, owing much of its aesthetic interest to the classic Western tradition. Except this is a film premised on the death of the all-American Hero and the rejection of a national mythology of innocence. It is cynical - although perhaps I mean ironic - disrespectful of authority, comical, violent, deeply invested in the (hetero)sexual crisis of identity emerging in 1960's America and it cleverly exposes the hollowness of celebrity culture and the alienation of spectating or viewing.

Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow

All things considered it's a marvellous film. I hope my presentation does it justice.