1970s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

[zedz]

I will be very surprised if anything knocks Du côté d'Orouët from my top spot. For years I put Zerkalo as the cream of the 70s crop, but after watching the Rozier film I was far too overcome with joy at its beachfront nouvelle vague Rohmerisms to give it anything but number one. A brilliant display of the ups and downs of vacationing with friends and despite being nearly three hours it feels like 30 minutes.

I would say your vote of confidence guarantees this film a place on the final list, since domino and I have already confirmed that we'll both be rating it highly.

Everybody else: go see it. If you like Rohmer or Rivette, this film is like the two of them on a beach holiday together.

[colinr0380]

And in the commercial field, don't forget Nic Roeg, who had what might be the most amazing run of any director this decade. I don't love Performance, Walkabout, Don't Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth equally, but there are no duds there, and I can't think of any other English language feature filmmaker of the seventies working with that range and ambition...

...I'm not a fan of Ken Russell's bombastic 70s work, but knock yourselves out.

One of the great moments from the commentary to The Man Who Fell To Earth comes just before the moment where Bowie appears to Candy Clark in his alien form. She knocks at the bathroom door and Roeg points out that her "Tommy...can you hear me?" line was a sly homage to the Russell film!

Speaking of Tommy, this reminds me that this is kind of Ann-Margret's decade, swimming in soap suds, chocolate and baked beans as the advert-addled mother (there was obviously some consumer backlash thing in the air at the time as Aldrich's Legend of Lylah Claire ends with a dog food advert taking a turn for the disturbing), but also turning up in Tony Richardson's Joseph Andrews in '76 and Magic in '78 (aka the horror film where Anthony Hopkins gets overcome by his ventriloquist's dummy) and most powerfully at the start of the decade holding her own in her scenes playing against Jack Nicholson in Carnal Knowledge.

Carnal Knowledge has to be essential viewing for this project and along with Straw Dogs, Woody Allen and Cassavetes is a supreme example of intricate adult and frank relationship drama (with an edge of humour and irony) that seems all too rare outside of this decade. Most of the cast have never been better (Though Nicholson arguably surpasses this performance with Chinatown, The Last Detail, Cukoo's Nest, The Passenger etc, this is his meatiest role. Art Garfunkle's later role in Bad Timing gets even creepier if seen as a follow up to the role here! And Rita Moreno's cameo in the final scene is kind of gobsmacking and something that could only take place in a 70s film!)

[Wu.Qinghua]

- The Bill Douglas Trilogy is a phenomenal piece of work (I'll be singling out the second part, My Ain Folk).

Just for the record: Can I vote for the whole trilogy, so that my votes would be added to your votes for the second part? Or would voting for the trilogy mean that I'd actually vote for a different film?

- Brownlow and Mollo's Winstanley - if you can get past the really very bad lead performance, this is an utter masterpiece.

Yes, indeed. I forgot about Winstanley when I drew a first draft today. I'll add it immediately.

Talking about British 70s cinema: I'll very, very strongly recommend Horace Ove's seminal British 'Black Power' film Pressure, which without doubt will get a lot of my points (Bruce Lee fans might want to have a look at the first 10 seconds of this youtube clip). And I also strongly recommend having a look at Platts-Mills Bronco Bullfrog. That's a really marvellous working class youth movie with non-professional actors, a believeable storyline and everything else necessary for making a beautiful little movie. (And if you could get hold of the BFI edition, you'd have subs for BB itself at least). Btw, it's nice to see, that the BFI's releasing 'Riddle of the Sphinx' this summer, too.

[swo17]

The typical rule is that trilogies cannot be considered as a single entity for voting purposes. However, if you all backed me into a corner with pitchforks and demanded that I make an exception for just the Bill Douglas trilogy, I might consider it. (I personally haven't seen it yet, but I have the Blu-ray just sitting here, beckoning to me.)

[MichaelB]

I was about to point out that Bronco Bullfrog is a Sixties film, but I see that the IMDB disagrees.

It's wrong, for the record (I know for a fact that the finished film was screened in 1969), but I suppose rules is rules.

[Wu.Qinghua]

I can't attack you with a pitchfork, can I? I was just wondering how to interpret the rules about multi-part films, trilogies etc. Maybe I haven't read them thoroughly enough.
Singling out a part of Bill Douglas' trilogy, which I always considered to be one big autobiographical film, ain't easy. But I don't want to start no discussion about the basic rules here, so I'll just have a another look at the second part again.

[Wu.Qinghua]

I was about to point out that Bronco Bullfrog is a Sixties film, but I see that the IMDB disagrees.

It's wrong, for the record (I know for a fact that the finished film was screened in 1969), but I suppose rules is rules.

I think so, too. I actually wanted to vote for it last time round, but accidentally found out that imdb categorizes it as a 70s film.

[knives]

The typical rule is that trilogies cannot be considered as a single entity for voting purposes. However, if you all backed me into a corner with pitchforks and demanded that I make an exception for just the Bill Douglas trilogy, I might consider it. (I personally haven't seen it yet, but I have the Blu-ray just sitting here, beckoning to me.)

This and the Davies trilogy are one film for me in a lot of ways, but considering the space between the films makings treating them as multiples is probably the best (though Douglas is significantly more consistent in style than Davies). Also don't forget Deep End which seriously has a chance to take my number one spot. Easily the best coming of age film if you ask me. The Jane Arden films BFI has released are also great with The Other Side of Underneath being my personal favorite.

[zedz]

Speaking of Tommy, this reminds me that this is kind of Ann-Margret's decade, swimming in soap suds, chocolate and baked beans as the advert-addled mother (there was obviously some consumer backlash thing in the air at the time as Aldrich's Legend of Lylah Claire ends with a dog food advert taking a turn for the disturbing)

That scene is actually a reference to the cover of The Who Sell Out, so the time in question would be 1967. I think the 'consumer backlash' thing is actually pretty much constant: you could come up with lots of pop culture examples from any decade of the twentieth century of people taking the piss out of the advertising of the day.

[zedz]

I can't attack you with a pitchfork, can I? I was just wondering how to interpret the rules about multi-part films, trilogies etc. Maybe I haven't read them thoroughly enough.
Singling out a part of Bill Douglas' trilogy, which I always considered to be one big autobiographical film, ain't easy. But I don't want to start no discussion about the basic rules here, so I'll just have a another look at the second part again.

I agree that it's a great entire work, but it's also great in its parts. I feel like Douglas' technique leaps ahead in the second film - it's as visually eloquent as the greatest of silent films - and it has an emotional intensity that outdoes that of My Way Home (which is how it should be, since the final film is serving a different purpose). That's why I'm giving it my trilogy vote, though if I were being scrupulously objectively subjective, the other two parts should probably have their own places in my top fifty.

And swo, get onto watching this immediately!

EDIT: In terms of the pros and cons of agglomeration, I don't believe either this or the Terence Davies Trilogy were intended from the outset to be trilogies. They were instead individual semi-autobiographical short films that were successful enough to lead to the commission of further semi-autobiographical short films. Which makes them the very antithesis of "one big work broken up into more than one release" which is the underlying rationale for agglomerating two-part films (and the occasional trilogy like The Human Condition.) In both cases (but especially Davies), you can see the filmmaker develop a lot over the course of the three films, so I'd argue that they don't even have a huge degree of artistic unity in their favour.

[Tommaso]

All right, the 70s is where my cinema knowledge really starts to get thin, so I'll probably follow this thread more closely than I did with the 60s one (where I had a far too long list from the beginning). So keep those recommendations coming on; my bookmarks at a certain backchannel place have already expanded considerably.... At the moment I only have 32 films which I think would deserve to be on any of my lists, and I certainly don't want to fill up the rest with the likes of "Barry Lyndon" or "Days of Heaven" (okay, already hiding from the big clubs falling on my head, but I really think they're terribly overrated...)

So, my first film watched for this list was where I left off the last round:

Heroic Purgatory (Yoshida 1970): as "Eros + Massacre" was a demanding, but ultimately smooth ride for me, I thought I could get through the next Yoshida relatively easily, but I have to admit that this one was beyond me, even though I found the visuals as stunning as always. But the whole story about a husband and wife picking up a girl who pretends that they are her parents (while they're not) which after about 20 minutes transforms into a free-wheeling and decidedly surreal account of flashbacks and flash forwards (to the year 1980) having something to do with the man's past in a communist revolutionary group left me increasingly uncomprehending. And I'm only happy that both the fan reviewers at imdb and the professional critics cited there don't seem to make much more sense of it than I was able to. The girl has fantasies about getting rid of the 'daddies', and there's a bit of a story about a spy threatening the revolutionary activities (who may or may not be the male protagonist, who seems to have given up his leftist activities in order to work on some governmental project involving laser beams and/or nuclear warfare), and surely this has some political intention, but I'm not sure at all what the whole thing is supposed to mean. Is the girl a reminder of 'lost possibilities' or 'lost dreams'? What's the significance of some 'film within the film'-moments in which we suddenly see the film's action projected on screen? Frankly, I'm baffled. But all this didn't keep me from enjoying the outstanding cinematography and the visual set-up of the whole film. Rigorously composed unusual camera positions and wonderful mise en scene which makes a lot of the many empty spaces depicted. A very beautiful film, definitely. But can somebody please explain the whole thing?

[swo17]

EDIT: In terms of the pros and cons of agglomeration, I don't believe either this or the Terence Davies Trilogy were intended from the outset to be trilogies. They were instead individual semi-autobiographical short films that were successful enough to lead to the commission of further semi-autobiographical short films. Which makes them the very antithesis of "one big work broken up into more than one release" which is the underlying rationale for agglomerating two-part films (and the occasional trilogy like The Human Condition.) In both cases (but especially Davies), you can see the filmmaker develop a lot over the course of the three films, so I'd argue that they don't even have a huge degree of artistic unity in their favour.

Yeah, what you are describing sounds like a clear-cut sequel situation, so they should only be eligible individually. My suggestion was partly operating on this comment that you made in a previous iteration of the '70s project.

[TMDaines]

All right, the 70s is where my cinema knowledge really starts to get thin, so I'll probably follow this thread more closely than I did with the 60s one (where I had a far too long list from the beginning). So keep those recommendations coming on; my bookmarks at a certain backchannel place have already expanded considerably.... At the moment I only have 32 films which I think would deserve to be on any of my lists, and I certainly don't want to fill up the rest with the likes of "Barry Lyndon" or "Days of Heaven" (okay, already hiding from the big clubs falling on my head, but I really think they're terribly overrated...)

I might not even have 32 total right now! But it was the same for me with the sixties, so I watched a good amount and came up with more than fifty films that I'd call great. I told myself I wouldn't submit a list unless I would seriously go to bat for the merits of the films that were #45-50 and I would have had no trouble doing that. It's nice to have the wide world of cinema narrowed down to one decade for the most part for a few months. I get much more watched that way, otherwise I'm just telling myself I have my whole life to watch everything.

[zedz]

EDIT: In terms of the pros and cons of agglomeration, I don't believe either this or the Terence Davies Trilogy were intended from the outset to be trilogies. They were instead individual semi-autobiographical short films that were successful enough to lead to the commission of further semi-autobiographical short films. Which makes them the very antithesis of "one big work broken up into more than one release" which is the underlying rationale for agglomerating two-part films (and the occasional trilogy like The Human Condition.) In both cases (but especially Davies), you can see the filmmaker develop a lot over the course of the three films, so I'd argue that they don't even have a huge degree of artistic unity in their favour.

Yeah, what you are describing sounds like a clear-cut sequel situation, so they should only be eligible individually. My suggestion was partly operating on this comment that you made in a previous iteration of the '70s project.

At that point, I hadn't seen the films in more than ten years (more like fifteen), so I really couldn't differentiate between them.

[Wu.Qinghua]

Spotlight #1:

Maynila: Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag / Manila in the Claws of Neon aka Claws of Light aka Nails of Brightness etc. (Lino Brocka, Philippines 1975)

I'd like to put this film in the spotlight - and I surely know about Khavn de la Cruz' commentary on it. Let's say that in my eyes, this is not only one of the greatest 'Third Cinema' films ever made, but it's also often and, in my eyes, rightly considered to be the one filipino film you should have seen (It's recently been restored with the help of the WCF and has just been shown at Cannes, btw.) . It's a realist film dealing with migration, poverty, gender and LGBT issues, 70s style authoritarian modernization policies and the dreams as well as living conditions of slum dwellers etc. in the Marcos era, which had a huge influence on filmmakers like Ruy Guerra (A Queda) or Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver) back in the days. That is if you should consider to vote for Taxi Driver, then you should have a look at this film, because, as far as I can see, it's obviously one of its subtexts (Please speak up, if you disagree). Watching it, you shouldn't forget that it's been made during the first years of the Marcos dictatorship, so it had to pass censorship and stuff which lead to Brocka using linguistic as well visual metaphors. By the way, it's also been prophetic in some way, if you think about the collapse of the framing of the Manila Film Centre in 1981 (Wikipedia) which has been one of prestigious objects of Imelda Marcos' cultural policy.

As for availability: I do not know, if there's a legit release of Maynila. I've heard someone might have released it in the Philippines in form of a limited edition recently and I'd be glad if someone would know about that and could steer me to a place where I could get it. But there are fansubs floating around, as far as I know, and it's been popping up on Youtube with subs again and again over the last years. Btw, I'll also vote for Brocka's Insiang, which is a wonderful melodramatic take on slum-dwelling with Hilda Koronel in the lead.

[zedz]

All right, the 70s is where my cinema knowledge really starts to get thin, so I'll probably follow this thread more closely than I did with the 60s one (where I had a far too long list from the beginning). So keep those recommendations coming on; my bookmarks at a certain backchannel place have already expanded considerably.... At the moment I only have 32 films which I think would deserve to be on any of my lists, and I certainly don't want to fill up the rest with the likes of "Barry Lyndon" or "Days of Heaven" (okay, already hiding from the big clubs falling on my head, but I really think they're terribly overrated...)

I might not even have 32 total right now! But it was the same for me with the sixties, so I watched a good amount and came up with more than fifty films that I'd call great. I told myself I wouldn't submit a list unless I would seriously go to bat for the merits of the films that were #45-50 and I would have had no trouble doing that. It's nice to have the wide world of cinema narrowed down to one decade for the most part for a few months. I get much more watched that way, otherwise I'm just telling myself I have my whole life to watch everything.

In terms of bulking up lists, there are a number of major bodies of work that are consistently interesting and reasonably easy to access.

First stop (and I'm sure TMDaines doesn't need this particular roadmap) is the New German Cinema, with most stuff by Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders and Kluge readily available and relatively dud-free. There's lots of other great stuff as well (e.g. the elusive Matthias Kneissl) that the highly motivated can try to locate.

Second: Robert Altman. Amazingly consistent this decade, considering how all-over-the-place his career was, and there's not a great deal of consensus on what's best, but it's all interesting, and all thirteen films have been released on DVD. My personal top five for the decade: McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Long Goodbye, Nashville, 3 Women, A Wedding.

Third: Three major auteurs of the period whose complete features are readily available: Akerman, Angelopoulos and Pialat. Akerman's 70s work is tidily available in the two Criterion releases. All four of Angelopoulos' 70s features are in the first Artificial Eye box, and they're all magnificent, with The Travelling Players at the top - and at the top of 70s cinema in general. Pialat's three 70s features are out on MoC (and there's also a handsome, subbed French BluRay of Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble), and they're all brilliant in different ways, and his exquisite TV series Le maison du bois is available on French DVD, unsubbed, alas. Also, about half of Chabrol's 70s output (and arguably the best half) is available cheap in two UK box sets.

So there's about eighty or so great films to get your teeth into!

[knives]

Funnily enough I find Altman to be highly inconsistent this decade with MASH and McCabe and Mrs. Miller completely flopping for me. That does remind though that Paul Newman has two great films this decade, one of which is on Blu, with the largely unavailable film definitely making my list. Also has one of the best titles ever.

[zedz]

Are you talking about The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds? I saw that when I was about six, and it affected me deeply, though I remember nothing about it now except that it was really memorable.

[knives]

Yes, it's an amazing film that would make a stunning double feature with The Insect Woman. It manages to be ever devastating with its subject while never falling into empty hysterics.

[matrixschmatrix]

Second: Robert Altman. Amazingly consistent this decade, considering how all-over-the-place his career was, and there's not a great deal of consensus on what's best, but it's all interesting, and all thirteen films have been released on DVD. My personal top five for the decade: McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Long Goodbye, Nashville, 3 Women, A Wedding.

I'm worried a bit into falling into cliche with this one, as any list I made of 70s films right now would be dominated by the New Hollywood auteurs- Altman high among them, but also Scorsese, Coppola, Peckinpah, Ashby, De Palma, on and on- even Spielberg and Lucas have a couple of potentially listworthy entries each in the 70s. It's going to be a trick to make room for new discoveries here, since I could easily make a list of 50 films from the 70s that I've been in love with since I was a teenager.

[knives]

I was a bit afraid that Ashby would dominate my list even with only seven films as to me he defines the decade the way Nick Ray does the '50s, but surprisingly only three of his films made my list. There's a lot of great films of the decade and surprisingly most of them are experimentals (I'll do a short write up on a Baille I saw earlier today in an hour). Just on my pre-list there's Pink Narcissus, The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, The Other Side of Underneath, Kostnice, and Zorns Lemma for instance.

[zedz]

I find that whole gang incredibly overrated. I'll try to find room for Peckinpah (though I really don't think of him as part of that whole thing), and I have a real soft spot for Scorsese's American Boy, but otherwise only The Hired Hand and Hellman for me. Basically, it seems like I need the Warren Oates seal of approval.

[domino harvey]

I will be very surprised if anything knocks Du côté d'Orouët from my top spot. For years I put Zerkalo as the cream of the 70s crop, but after watching the Rozier film I was far too overcome with joy at its beachfront nouvelle vague Rohmerisms to give it anything but number one. A brilliant display of the ups and downs of vacationing with friends and despite being nearly three hours it feels like 30 minutes.

I would say your vote of confidence guarantees this film a place on the final list, since domino and I have already confirmed that we'll both be rating it highly.

Everybody else: go see it. If you like Rohmer or Rivette, this film is like the two of them on a beach holiday together.

Du côté d'Orouët will be my Number One as well. My earlier guess after first seeing it that it might be one of the best films I've ever seen proved true. No need to make it a spotlight title after all this attention, but you'd be a damn fool to miss this for any reason

My spotlights are Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love, which I wrote at-length about here, and Wenders' Wrong Move, which was my Number One last time and will be close by at Number Two this round, barring any unforeseen masterpieces

[matrixschmatrix]

I was a bit afraid that Ashby would dominate my list even with only seven films as to me he defines the decade the way Nick Ray does the '50s, but surprisingly only three of his films made my list.

Being There and Harold and Maude are both locks for me, and The Last Detail and The Landlord are both ones I have to rewatch but certainly live fondly in my memory. Ray seems an apt comparison, as Ashby has this absolutely murderous decade, with only glimmers outside it to compare- actually, significantly moreso than Ray did.

I'm pretty likely to have a disproportionate showing for Bob Fosse, too- I've never warmed much to Lenny, but Cabaret and All That Jazz both seem like gimmes at the moment, and it's possible to imagine a list that would have room for the pretty-phenomenal-for-TV (and music I only kind of like) Liza With a Z.

[knives]

Oddly Harold and Maude most definitely won't make my list, but more on him on Friday. The Rozier only seems available through the French Coffret set, does that have english subs?