Nine films marked the summer of 1982, but also the history of the seventh art. A documentary, "Hollywood 1982", available on YouTube and the platform Arte + 7 until Friday, offers a nostalgic dive in a pivotal time.

To grab everything, just have the subtitle. The documentary "Hollywood 1982", available for free on YouTube and the platform of replay of Arte until Friday, already mentions the object of his attention: "a magic summer at the cinema". For a little over fifty minutes, the two directors, Jacinto Carvalho and Johan Chiaramonte, themselves children of the 80s, offer a nostalgic and delicate dive in a summer season that has changed everything in the dark rooms. Whether in terms of genre or technique, nine blockbusters released that year have marked the history of the seventh art of their imprint. Moreover, they have influenced all the recent pop-culture.

The redefinition of the action movie hero

1982, what was it? Muscles, first. Those of Sylvester Stallone in Rocky III , true love film disguised as boxing film, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian . Why is it important? Because the two feature films bear witness to the redefinition of the action movie hero. He was tormented in the 70s. He will be bodybuilded and almost invincible the following decade. The Predator, Terminator or Commando are all heirs of these two films. It is also interesting to note that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the common denominator, he who got his first real role with Conan after years of scarcity, his physique being considered too strange to be on film.

Conan the Barbarian also has another merit: that of bringing up to date a genre hitherto despised, that of fantasy. Fantasy who will know his glory days almost twenty years later with the saga of Lord of the Rings . Or, even more recently, with the Game of Thrones series.

Rehabilitation of science fiction

In 1982 there were muscles, so, but also replicants and flying cars. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner , a commercial failure on its way out, is now a science fiction monument. And a jewel of technology: its futuristic sets, incredible for the time, have not aged much. Two other films also rehabilitate a genre hitherto confined to low-budget films: Star Trek 2 and Tron .

Again, the cinema proves that the seventh art is also technological. These are the first computer-generated images, the computer special effects in their infancy. The Academy of Oscars was not ready: it will not select Tron for the price of the best special effects, on the grounds that using computers is cheating.

Those who made the cinema, those who liked it

The documentary offers many anecdotes of the genre, by questioning those who made the film (writers, directors, chief operators) and those who loved it with passion and distributed (room programmers). It stops on the side of horror ( Poltergeist, The Thing ), futuristic dystopia ( Mad Max II ) and finishes in style with the ultimate blockbuster, the one that everyone saw at the time and still looks today And the extraterrestrial Steven Spielberg. The advent of mass entertainment and family, which will then be confirmed with all feature films that children and teenagers of the 80s know by heart ( Back to the future, The Goonies ).

Just regret that the analysis is not even further. We would have stayed an hour more before this beautiful journey, which is the luxury, between archival footage, excerpts and interviews, to recreate the aesthetics of a lofty attic as found only in the films of the 80s. There was something magical about that time.