Rock and Roll Films
The rock and roll film came into being at the sa
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The rock and roll film came into being at the same time as the music began to make itself known. The use of "Rock Around the Clock" in The Blackboard Jungle was one of the first instances of this type of music serving as background to a film, though it was only used in the titles and was not embedded into the film itself in any significant degree. The music was popular, though, and within a short time films specifically about the music were being produced. The early films were primarily intended to assuage parental concerns, though they usually had an attitude of defiance as well. Over time, though, rock became more and more associated with the idea of the outlaw. Performers in the early films were clean-cut types trying to make a success with something new and innovative, but over time this image shifted to the musician as outlaw. This change is associated with the development of the anti-hero in the 1950s and with the growth of the counter-culture in the 1960s, a social movement based on challenging the establishment and thus more open to the idea of the outlaw as a social manifestation of protest.The outlaw as a manifestation of social ills, or the outlaw as anti-hero, predated the era of the rock film. One of the most important films showing this was The Wild One with Marlon Brando (1954), a film in which a motorcycle gang encounters prejudice in a small town and in which the establishment/anti-establishment pattern was created. When rock music moved into films,
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of vehicle or different types of legal challenge. These films also repeated the idea that these young people needed their own music to differentiate them from their parents, and the music happened to have a driving and orgiastic beat that made it more dangerous, which was in fact the reason young people liked it in the first place.
Ehrenstein and Reed (1982) note how rock and roll fit with the rebellious spirit of teenagers in the 1950s, specifically because that generation was experiencing a new sense of autonomy: "With its concerns of sex and speed, instead of the 'June, moon and spoon' of their parents' music, rock as a perfect music for the atomic era - its goading orgiastic sound made all the more poignant the possibility of oblivion's imminence" (p. 15). The 1960s brought about a major social change in the country, and the films about young people reflected this change, usually behind the curve, but reflecting it nonetheless. That change was in the direction of even greater and more overt rebellion, and the battle between the establishment and the counter-culture would spill over into outlaw-anti-hero depictions as well. The sixties as a whole was a period of rebellion and of a challenge to the accepted mores of the 1
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Approximate Word count = 1634
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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