Five movies from the 1960s that were years ahead of their time
The 1960s were a transformative time for cinema worldwide. In Hollywood, the demise of classic studio-bound productions with happy endings and rigid censorship led to the New Hollywood era, where nihilism, violence, and sexuality triumphed. Taking inspiration from pioneering movements happening in other countries, Hollywood progressed drastically, and the influence of this monumental shift can still be felt today.
Meanwhile, in France, the French New Wave was in full force, with directors like Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Agnès Varda making innovative films that blended realism and artificiality, experimenting with unique editing techniques and themes that dug deep into the heart of the human experience.
The civil rights movement and feminist protests were picking up speed, and cinema was becoming more accessible with the influx of indie filmmakers demonstrating the possibilities in making movies with handheld cameras and a small budget. Thus, raw and truthful films about race, sexuality, gender, and other topics previously considered taboo were emerging at a much faster pace, signalling that many people’s attitudes were changing.
It’s hard to narrow it down to just five movies that were truly ahead of their time during the 1960s, but these are films that did something that few had done before, subsequently going on to have a mammoth influence for decades to come.
Five 1960s years ahead of their time:
‘Black Girl’ (Ousmane Sembène, 1966)
Ousmane Sembène’s directorial debut, Black Girl, is just over an hour long, so there is really no excuse not to watch it. Released in 1966, the film is a stunning yet tragic look at postcolonialism, considering how individuals are affected by something often discussed more widely. Here, we see Diouana, a woman from Senegal, find a job working for a French couple as a domestic servant. She is routinely dehumanised and fetishised, her culture nothing more than some quirky wall art to emphasise the French couple’s ‘openness’ to the world around them.
Sembène’s film is a bleak but powerful watch, and its head-on approach to tackling themes of race and colonialism from a feminine perspective had hardly been explored before this point. With Black Girl, the director offered a vital story that many didn’t want to hear, but one that needed to be told. By using innovative verité-style storytelling, Sembène reminded viewers that the film was far from a work of fiction.
‘Cléo from 5 to 7’ (Agnès Varda, 1962)
There were very few female filmmakers operating during the 1960s, but Agnès Varda made her mark with a series of groundbreaking movies that made her one of the most influential figures of her generation. It’s her 1962 film Cléo From 5 to 7, which felt most ahead of its time, with its exploration of key feminist themes emerging before second-wave feminism had truly taken off. While her male French New Wave contemporaries, like Jean-Luc Godard, offered female-centric stories, Varda gave viewers an authentically female perspective that was revolutionary for the time.
The film follows Cléo, a spoiled pop singer, who is thrown into crisis as she awaits the results of a medical test. We follow her as she anxiously waits to discover her fate, watching her come face to face with her role as a woman, a performer, and an object. Varda challenges the male gaze and shatters the illusion of perfection, offering up a flawed yet admirable character who viewers have come to love decades later.
‘Blow-Up’ (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)
Michelangelo Antonioni’s first English film, Blow-Up, offered a unique perspective of Swinging London, injecting the vibrant atmosphere with a distinctive essence of nihilism. The Italian filmmaker couldn’t have picked a better setting for his film, which explored themes of perception, artificiality, and truth, with David Hemings playing a sleazy photographer who finds himself obsessed with uncovering what he believes to be a murder in one of his images. Ephemerality and imagery become central themes, making Blow-Up the kind of film that benefits from being watched multiple times to grasp Antonioni’s rich array of ideas.
Not only does the film feel incredibly ahead of its time stylistically, but it was also a turning point for the easing of censorship in American cinema. With its morally ambiguous themes, nudity, and frank depiction of sex, the film went against the Hays Code, but when it was eventually released in select cinemas via Premier Productions, managing to avoid censorship, the success of the film led to the decline and eventual demise of the Code.
‘Psycho’ (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
The horror genre truly kicked into gear when Alfred Hitchcock released Psycho in 1960. Until this point, horror was not particularly challenging or original – most scary movies were based on pre-existing stories like Dracula or Frankenstein. However, with Psycho, the filmmaker introduced an early conception of the slasher genre, with the shower stabbing scene going down in cinema history as one of the most unforgettable and era-defining. This was a story that felt hauntingly real. There were no ghosts, ghouls or monsters; rather, a mentally unstable motel owner.
Hitchcock tricked audiences by setting up Janet Leigh’s Marion as the main character, only for her to be brutally killed in one of the most graphic scenes cinema had ever seen. While it might seem very tame compared to today’s standards, the film rippled through the industry and encouraged a wave of horror movies that were considerably darker than ever before, paving the way for everything from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween to The Silence of the Lambs.
‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
Stanley Kubrick made many movies ahead of their time, but 2001: A Space Odyssey is undeniably the one that takes the cake. With its futuristic set design and strikingly realistic depictions of space, the film managed to convince many viewers that Kubrick had reused the set to ‘fake’ the moon landing. Indeed, the film looks surprisingly modern for something made in the late 1960s, and it blazed a trail for all sci-fi movies that came in its wake, like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, subsequently sparking a cosmic phenomenon.
Besides being visually striking, the film’s exploration of the threats of technology feel incredibly relevant today, especially with the dawn of AI taking over many jobs from real humans. The destructive villain HAL 9000, an artificially-intelligent computer which gains sentience, is a symbol of humanity losing its grip on what is truly important – community, creativity, and autonomy. HAL 9000 might be human-created, but it soon comes to learn how to destroy human life.
