The 1975 Mini-List

[swo17]

ELIGIBLE TITLES FOR 1975

VOTE THROUGH JULY 31

Please post in this thread if you think anything needs to change about the list of eligible titles.

[ballmouse]

Can Adieu poulet and Le chat et la souris be added?

[swo17]

Added, thanks!

[therewillbeblus]

Can you please add two Mondo Macabro blu-ray titles: The Killer of Dolls and A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse?

[swo17]

Done

[therewillbeblus]

There are a few films from this year I'll definitely be voting for that don't seem to be as well-known:

Benilde or the Virgin Mother (Manoel de Oliveira) - One of the most stirring artistic demonstrations of the struggles of corporeal sacrifice towards faith that I've ever seen. MO unflinchingly documents how unsafe it feels for us to surrender our limp tools of logic in the face of a spiritual enigma. The most 'realistic' spiritual film provokes surreal existential horror when shown through a reflexively objective lens, rendering us powerless right with the rest of this group. I realize this sounds highly analytical, but it's a very fun experience - like a deadpan anti-social comedy where nobody's in on the joke except the audience if they choose to be (read: 'surrender' to what's happening). It's just characters talking past each other with no hope at harmony because faith is too tall an order for some, and impossible not to embody for the other.

Euridice BA 2037 (Nikos Nikolaidis): I just watched this and wrote it up in the larger 70s thread

a surreal reworking of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice as reimagined by the brothers Quay (although their careers started around the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if their approach to adapting Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life in particular was partly-inspired by this film's vibe). The crackling fragmentation of reality as we experience the isolated heroine's removal from significant elisions regarding her past and fate are remarkably conveyed with audio-visual wit. The experimental project's enigmatic persistence may frustrate some viewers, but I can't imagine anyone being bored by its continually-surprising and aesthetically-arousing essence, with Nikolaidis applying his keen perceptive skills at locating and leaning hard into new angles in order to cultivate beguiling perspectives all-but-ensuring a reliably stimulating endeavor.

Inserts(John Byrum) - Zestful chamber piece condensing Babylon's stimulating perversity into a single space, this is a riot that expertly uses temporally-fluid camerawork to adapt the audience to the mindless existences displayed here; bringing us into the psyche of the atmosphere rather than a single person.

Thundercrack! (Curt McDowell) - What would happen if John Waters, Curtis Harrington, and Michael J Murphy decided to meld their approaches together to film an epic pornographic horror-comedy? If you want to know the answer, check this out. Warning: this does have some extremely pornographic content. The film primarily thrives outside of these scenes (the opening act especially), but there are bits that work at provoking laughs like the intercutting Crucifix sex/Jesus narration in Multiple Maniacs only with explicit sex, so it's not like you need to or should fast-forward all these sections, though I definitely felt my limits tested towards the end. I purchased the Synapse blu, and look forward to revisiting this soon with subs - I wasn't always able to make out every line, but when I rewound my digital copy and paid closer attention, I almost always got an extra laugh in. I bet there's a lot more gold to find if I choose to mine for it

[Rayon Vert]

Is it a thing with IMDB where when you put in a porn film title in the search engine (e.g. Thundercrack!), nothing comes up? (But when you put the director's name, then you can access it through the filmography.) I see it's available to watch on ok.ru (like pretty much everything is!).

[swo17]

Yes, they suppress adult titles by default, but you can bypass that with their advanced search function

[therewillbeblus]

Same with Letterboxd, though I still haven't figured out how to search for it directly through the site/app. I just revert to the noob route of typing "[Title] Letterboxd" into google and getting in that way, which I imagine you could do with IMDb too

I suspect that anyone who thinks the above description sounds interesting will enjoy the film for at least its first thirty minutes-one hour, and then start dropping off from there, so there's really no harm in at least watching that far. It's a spectacularly bizarre first act

[yoshimori]

I'm assuming the second-ranked film (after Nashville) on my current 1975 list is going to be treated here as a 1981 release, though it was obviously finished by 1975 then shelved by the Soviet authorities. A tough problem, huh? Glad I'm not having to assign dates!

Elem Klimov's Agonia.

[knives]

Whatever year Agony gets assigned to it will definitely be my number one for that year.

[swo17]

I've made it eligible for 1975

[knives]

Just a few thoughts.

Bilans kwartainy, which seems to have a million English titles, was my first real watch for the project and what a great start. Zanussi is one of those directors I always enjoy, but forget why unless I’m watching one of his movies. Here is a movie in its quiet observation and focus on individual experience in a collectivist situation seems in tune with what else I’ve seen. This is transformed by the details though as it focuses on a woman who keeps her interior within lacking the skills of the other erudite protagonists I’ve seen. Additionally, the collective she is a part of is marriage. In particular a marriage she is suffocated by. Love and it’s modes of residence have appeared before, but never for me so directly.

Also from the East of Europe Seven Little Flames is a fun little adaption of the Calypso story that feels like something you’d accidentally stumble across as a small child.

It’s always fun to see a Kurosawa riff and especially one that moves things around to fit a new cultural setting so di Leo’s Kidnap Syndicate was a total joy. In High and Low the question was really between the Japanese honor system and capitalism whereas this goes even further drawing parallels to Getty by just attacking capitalism as a hungry monster that destroys one’s ability to look at things from different angles. Too bad the voice they gave James Mason just doesn’t work for me.

[the preacher]

Could you please add the following 4 titles?

Al karnak (Ali Badr Khan) EGY
Adaptation of Najeeb Mahfouz's political novel

Cursa / The Long Drive (Mircea Daneliuc) ROU
Road movie with love triangle

Le vieux fusil / The Old Gun (Robert Enrico) FRA
War revenge, man's tragedy

The Wilby Conspiracy (Ralph Nelson) GBR
Political chase thriller

[swo17]

Added, thanks!

[brundlefly]

Don’t know if anyone wants them, but Joseph Losey’s The Romantic Englishwoman and Galileo look to be from 1975 as well and are not on the list.

These Wiszniewski and Rybczyński shorts are pretty great:

Wanda Gosciminska - Weaver depicts another socialist labour hero, but the mode here is phantasmagoric, one of the most astonishing visualisations of a first-person narrative I've ever seen. The succession of Andersson-esque and Paradzhanovian (in both the ultra-formal Pomegranates and hyper-kinetic Shadows senses) set-pieces is dizzying. If this film is a documentary, it's a documentary only in the sense that I'm Not There and Amarcord are.

...

The film features a host of sui generis camera movements, including a wonderful sequence where a ground level camera swirls among bizarre weaving machines (they look like rejected Doctor Who villains circa 1976) as Wanda and her friends roam through the factory, but my favourite is a vertical downward track from several stories up, hugging a wall and descending on some graffiti sprayers, then miraculously leaving the wall to trace a quarter-circle arc in mid-air (a half-sensoria, for those in the know) and end up looking straight at the sprayed wall. It's an incredible shot that belongs in our "amazing camera movements" thread, but it has plenty of company in this film and other Wiszniewski works.

There’s a moment in “Wanda Gosciminska” where a member of a student assembly asks her, “Was work really the most important thing in your life?” I wouldn’t be shocked if it were a scripted line as it’s a consideration both seriously and snarkily pondered through several of Wiszniewski’s worker portraits. As zedz notes, his last five documentary shorts are fantastic as a whole; “Wanda,” the second of those, is the audacious declaration that he’s going to mess with the form.

There are striking visual ideas, and the execution can be amazing -- Zbigniew Rybczyński was the DP – but the ideas are more than eye candy. There’s a striking then v. now comparison of digits and dinner tables. A sea of uniforms are re-examined to show they’re anything but. The symbolic socialist worker heroes given presence at the family table are echoed by a roll call of award-winning workers, now posed as statues in a museum. This includes Gosciminska, who always appears stone-faced, stern, and certain. “We had no time for doubts,” she says, and to her and the film’s credit this is not a one-sided scoff at dusty values; it’s a consideration of changing conditions and mores and a wonder at work and progress.

Both of his films on the experimental set are masterpieces. New Book is a far more elaborate version of Figgis’ Timecode, with nine continuous ten minute takes (arranged Hollywood Squares fashion) that don’t just narratively interlock, but visually interlock as well (so that, as figures or objects leave the left side of one frame they enter the right side of the adjacent one, even though the physical spaces presented in each frame are not contiguous): an overwhelming technical feat that has to be watched multiple times.

Of the three shorts Rybczyński directed in 1975, “New Book” is the biggest win, a ninety-minute ten-minute short built to engage logistical awe (though Zbig does tinker with the footage to make it all line up) and small personal concerns. (Will she show up? Where has the doctor gone? Will he ever get his ball back?) How frustrating would it be to see this projected at a festival and only figure out two minutes in what was going on!

RIYL Gondry (esp. "Sugar Water") and working as a security guard.

[knives]

Managed a few films, but none are particularly impressive.

The Secret Night Caller is the most interesting one as it gave me some new things to ponder. These made for tv movies while rarely good are always so fascinating for how they work within their limitations. At first I assumed this was a proto slasher and in a way it is, but instead of kills this revolves around dirty phone calls. It also is closer to the Maniac model breaking down the psychological descent of its Brady patriarch. The film gets quite nasty thanks to its central villainy being so easy to tell rather than show. The movie is uncomfortable and while sometimes trite in how it deals with psychosis the whole is full of intelligently conveyed surprises.

Shivers is interesting simply by virtue of being so Cronenberg although I also took delight in its proudly Canadian script (Reitman really liked announcing that at the time it seems). It’s kind of amazing the consistency of interest Cronenberg has had. The movement from this to Crimes of the Future isn’t even as far as a hop. Now, he’s definitely developed since Shivers in quality. The storytelling here is rough with a few moments feeling like they were written on the principle of show some boobs when you don’t know what else to do. The overall characterization is rough with the women in particular being fairly indistinguishable. Yet coming into this knowing where these ideas will go makes the film exciting and special.

Finally, and least successfully, I rewatched The Return of the Pink Panther . This was the first Pink Panther movie I saw a million years ago and my initial reaction seems to hold true that this is an overextended slog with a confused plot and minimal laughs. I do have a greater appreciation though for Sellers’ ability to sleepwalk through a scene and still make me crack a smile. Some of these jokes are so poorly constructed that it’s hard to believe they were written by professionals, yet each time I giggled a little thanks to how they’re sold.

[therewillbeblus]

Revisited Benilde again, and while I already plugged it a bit upthread, it's remarkable this isn't one of MO's most lauded works.

For the first act, this film feels a lot like a Bunuel played straight, as surrealism becomes real in a dense chamber piece that incites contradictory (and perceptively antithetical, to the characters) social and spiritual dynamics of fear and confidence around a corporeal ‘miracle’. The film stresses human and celestial mistrust, and the psychological inhibitions barring spiritual access, as well as perversely supplying us with the conditions that do allow for grace - using the ‘enigmatic woman’ in her purest and cheekiest form (without dismissing Benilde's value or prospective truth), as a device that proves a point either way. If she’s lying or wrong, delusion and ignorance of willful ego still reigns as the gateway to subjective spiritual harmony; if she’s honest or right, the mirror held up to others diagnoses even the most religious of us as solipsistic heretics. Reason and faith battle as human suspicions trump consideration of the mystery we aren't invited to - which is especially triggered by the proclamation that one person might be included in God's plan, or have a closer relationship to God than us - and nobody can win or get any closer to a spiritual ideal when they demand the impossible: personal access to another’s experience. ‘The resistance of humility’ could be an extended title..

The theatrical design of a stage play emulates the restrictive and fatalistic movement towards powerless unraveling, and the ominous score haunts the interpersonal interactions throughout, emphasized when characters engage with Benilde and primarily silent when two likeminded principals talk amongst themselves in an echo-chamber of co-regulation when she's offstage. The middle grounds of percolating foreboding music occur when more characters are co-existing with her and attempting to impress their perspective onto the situation with some conviction, which doesn't typically last very long as she does not react or budge, and almost always leads into thundering musical chaos. And of course, the final moments bring it back around a new character, brazenly suggesting a kind of Twin Peaks cliffhanger only where the substitution of evil is God! What starts out as a darkly comedic set-up eventually descends into horror, only you'd hardly notice it, since MO is so controlled and consistent that he barely wavers from the resolved tone. This mood reflexively mirrors Benilde herself: enigmatic and steady, and all the scarier for that lack of reactivity to our own attempts to seek answers through fallible bends in the tide. In this respect, Benilde's presence reminds me of that chapter in Moby Dick where Melville analyzes how the whiteness of the whale is so overwhelmingly fear-inducing because it resembles God, because that chapter, among many things, finds a novel way to engage in the reader in how and why we fear disruptions from the corporeal familiar. So does this film.

[Black Hat]

Can we add Libera, My Love please?

[swo17]

Added

[swo17]

These Wiszniewski and Rybczyński shorts are pretty great:

Wanda Gosciminska - Weaver depicts another socialist labour hero, but the mode here is phantasmagoric, one of the most astonishing visualisations of a first-person narrative I've ever seen. The succession of Andersson-esque and Paradzhanovian (in both the ultra-formal Pomegranates and hyper-kinetic Shadows senses) set-pieces is dizzying. If this film is a documentary, it's a documentary only in the sense that I'm Not There and Amarcord are.

...

The film features a host of sui generis camera movements, including a wonderful sequence where a ground level camera swirls among bizarre weaving machines (they look like rejected Doctor Who villains circa 1976) as Wanda and her friends roam through the factory, but my favourite is a vertical downward track from several stories up, hugging a wall and descending on some graffiti sprayers, then miraculously leaving the wall to trace a quarter-circle arc in mid-air (a half-sensoria, for those in the know) and end up looking straight at the sprayed wall. It's an incredible shot that belongs in our "amazing camera movements" thread, but it has plenty of company in this film and other Wiszniewski works.

There’s a moment in “Wanda Gosciminska” where a member of a student assembly asks her, “Was work really the most important thing in your life?” I wouldn’t be shocked if it were a scripted line as it’s a consideration both seriously and snarkily pondered through several of Wiszniewski’s worker portraits. As zedz notes, his last five documentary shorts are fantastic as a whole; “Wanda,” the second of those, is the audacious declaration that he’s going to mess with the form.

There are striking visual ideas, and the execution can be amazing -- Zbigniew Rybczyński was the DP – but the ideas are more than eye candy. There’s a striking then v. now comparison of digits and dinner tables. A sea of uniforms are re-examined to show they’re anything but. The symbolic socialist worker heroes given presence at the family table are echoed by a roll call of award-winning workers, now posed as statues in a museum. This includes Gosciminska, who always appears stone-faced, stern, and certain. “We had no time for doubts,” she says, and to her and the film’s credit this is not a one-sided scoff at dusty values; it’s a consideration of changing conditions and mores and a wonder at work and progress.

Both of his films on the experimental set are masterpieces. New Book is a far more elaborate version of Figgis' Timecode, with nine continuous ten minute takes (arranged Hollywood Squares fashion) that don't just narratively interlock, but visually interlock as well (so that, as figures or objects leave the left side of one frame they enter the right side of the adjacent one, even though the physical spaces presented in each frame are not contiguous): an overwhelming technical feat that has to be watched multiple times.

Of the three shorts Rybczyński directed in 1975, “New Book” is the biggest win, a ninety-minute ten-minute short built to engage logistical awe (though Zbig does tinker with the footage to make it all line up) and small personal concerns. (Will she show up? Where has the doctor gone? Will he ever get his ball back?) How frustrating would it be to see this projected at a festival and only figure out two minutes in what was going on!

RIYL Gondry (esp. "Sugar Water") and working as a security guard.

Yes to both but I also hope people "can't stop" watching Rybczyński long enough to make time for Oh, I Can't Stop!, which is perhaps the purest monster movie ever made.

Also worth seeing from this year:

L'Empreinte (Jacques Cardon)
I believe YouTube is the only way to see this 7-minute short. And everyone should see it, so we can all be the same.

Towers of Silence (Jamil Dehlavi)
This is a bonus film on BFI's The Blood of Hussain release, and like Qâf on Indicator's Born of Fire, I prefer the extra to the main feature for its often stunning cinematography. RIYL birds flying all over the place. Trailer

Associations (John Smith)
A brief Zorns Lemma-esque exercise in replacing language with images, with a nice sense of humor about it.

31/75 Asyl (Kurt Kren)
Kren shoots the same landscape over the course of a few weeks on the same rolls of film, but with a different part of the frame masked each day and variations in the filming conditions contributing to a surreal composite image, e.g.



The Traveling Players (Theo Angelopoulos)
An epic film, with an epic write-up by zedz.

Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (Thom Andersen et al.)
An insightful documentary about a subject that should be of interest to any cinephile, but there's also something about its construction and tone that makes it both calming and unsettling at the same time. Or is that just how Dean Stockwell sounds?

Ātman (Toshio Matsumoto)
An extra on both the Cinelicious and BFI Funeral Parade of Roses releases. The camera swirls around and around a man in a demon mask. Honestly, they could've stopped making movies after this one. Peak cinema here.

Die große Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner (Werner Herzog)
Or wait, here's something even better--slow-mo footage of skiers flying through the air to the strains of Popol Vuh, as reported by our sports correspondent Werner Herzog:



Hedgehog in the Fog (Yuri Norstein)
An insanely intricate animated short that looks like it took a decade to create, which I guess is Norstein's thing as he has supposedly spent the last four of them perfecting his feature-length adaptation of The Overcoat.

[knives]

Got a few more films seen. All real pleasures.

Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf has to be far and away the best werewolf movie ever, right? With a few touches that reminded me of Ruiz and Parajanov Favio crafts an alluring fairytale about lost love that feels like something being retold a hundred generations later.

Alternatively, WW and the Dixie Dancekings proved to be just a good old time with people playing around with their images. This was an unexpected hoot with Alvidsen and Reynolds stretching just enough to build some surprises. Reynolds isn’t quite malevolent, but he applies his charm and well established character for someone we can’t and never do ever truly trust. Having him butt heads with Art Carney as the Judge from Blood Meridian allows the second half to maintain the excitement and won’t allow it to be predictable.

Alvidsen does far better here than the last time I saw him try it it comedy. The film is really sly doing some of the dirty jokes Alvidsen seems to enjoy while mixing in the Reynolds playfulness well. This project has really helped me see him in a more full light which makes him seem so interesting.

I’m fairly lukewarm on Truffaut, but with Adele H he gathers all of his talents to make a pretty great movie. I’m so used to his color films being so drab and unrefined that the successfully noirish attempt at showy a depressed past surprised me in the best of ways with the shadows encroaching and inducing claustrophobia just as it should. Though I should say Truffaut for all he puts into the film isn’t the masterpiece maker here. Rather, Adjani’s rightfully star making performance steals the show sympathetically allowing us to ride alongside a character who is otherwise difficult to follow. She works so hard to make Adele madness perfectly logical even as the exterior film surrounding her shows the truth. It’s a tough balancing act that shows restraint in a role others might have reached too far on.

[TMDaines]

Can we add Libera, My Love please?

Might just have to dig this out of my keyvip.

[knives]

Got the year’s cheat sheet done. With that I also want to give a shout-out to Lies My Father Told Me which isn’t even on the list despite being made by The Shop on Main Street’s Jan Kadar. It’s a fairly straightforward tale of a Canadian child trying to understand the right way to be as he’s torn between his brutish, modern father and old world, kindly grandfather. The extremes of that dichotomy causes the boy to be at once imaginative and frustrated not knowing what is right and what is real. It’s also a good reminder to myself how much I’ve been sleeping on Soviet bloc expat works in general and Kadar in particular.

[swo17]

I've added the Kadár film. Also, it looks like you forgot to add the link to your cheat sheet