American Disaster Movies of the 1970s

<p><b><i>American Disaster Movies of the 1970</i>s is the first scholarly book dedicated to the disaster cycle that dominated American cinema and television in the 1970s.</b> <p/>Through examining films such as <i>Airport</i> (1970) <i>The Poseidon Adventure</i> (1972) <i>Two-Minute Warning</i> (1976) and <i>The Swarm</i> (1978) alongside their historical contexts and American contemporaneous trends the disaster cycle is treated as a time-bound phenomenon. This book further contextualises the cycle by drawing on the longer cultural history of modernist reactions to modern anxieties including the widespread dependence on technology and corporate power. <p/>Each chapter considers cinematic precursors such as the 'ark movie' and contemporaneous trends such as New Hollywood vigilante and blaxploitation films as well as the immediate American context: the end of the civil rights and countercultural era the Watergate crisis and the defeat in Vietnam.As Scott Freer argues the disaster movie is a modern demotic form of tragedy that satisfies a taste for the macabre. It is also an aesthetic means for processing painful truths and many of the dramatized themes anticipate present-day monstrosities of modernity.</p>