How is affective experience produced in the cinema? And how can we write a history of this
experience? By asking these questions this study by Hauke Lehmann aims at rethinking our
conception of a critical period in US film history ¿ the New Hollywood: as a moment of crisis
that can neither be reduced to economic processes of adaption nor to a collection of
masterpieces. Rather the fine-grained analysis of core films reveals the power of cinematic
images to affect their audiences ¿ to confront them with the new. The films of the New
Hollywood redefine the divisions of the classical genre system in a radical way and thereby
transform the way spectators are addressed affectively in the cinema. The study describes a
complex interplay between three modes of affectivity: suspense paranoia and melancholy. All
three each in their own way implicate spectators in the deep-seated contradictions of their
own feelings and their ways of being in the world: their relations to history to society and
to cultural fantasy. On this basis Affect Poetics of the New Hollywood projects an original
conception of film history: as an affective history which can be re-written up to the present
day.
