The genesis of the Hollywood Renaissance in the late 1960s was the by-product of a synthesis of factors related to social, cultural, institutional, and technological shifts that had been taking place in the United States since the late 1940s. Within this context, the role of post-war European cinema was crucial.

Through an extensive use of textual and contextual evidence, this book investigates the origins, nature, and extent of the formal impact that European new waves had on American filmmaking. Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) – the film that, according to critics at large, articulated an aesthetic ‘break’ with the classical tradition and signalled the beginning of the Hollywood Renaissance – is employed as a case study, as it epitomises the European influence in social, cultural, and institutional terms.