Breaking frozen cinematic ground: Carnival and the new American cinema

This thesis is a study of the American Independent film of the late 1950's and early 1960's, a cinema often known as the New American Cinema.

Through the application of Russian cultural and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's notions of carnival, this thesis seeks to reveal how in many ways the New American Cinema is best understood as a cinema of the carnivalesque, one that incorporates many of the same themes and images found within the longstanding traditions of carnival culture.

The New American Cinema not only departed from the Hollywood production model of filmmaking, but also distinguished itself thematically, transgressing the set cultural and social boundaries of postwar America. By identifying these cinematic transgressions through the careful examination of two key New American Cinema films, Pull My Daisy (1959) and The Queen Of Sheba Meets The Atom Man (1963–1981), I hope to also reveal that the New American Cinema was a product of its social and political climate, continuing in film what the Beat Generation had previously initiated in literature.