i just saw california split and the conversation and i have decided that the 70s might be my favorite decade. i ask the members of this group: what are your ten favorite 70s films? and, if you feel inclined, what are the defining features of 70s cinema? (i suppose we can start with america, and maybe sprinkle in some france, but no italy please i don’t do italian cinema only italian soccer).
Hm. This is the sort of thing that could get me spinning my wheels for days, so to avoid that kind of obsession, a fast and dirty list I’m sure to regret (in no particular order, but confined to American, for now):
California Split
Nashville
Little Murders
The Conversation
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Dawn of the Dead
Taxi Driver
Apocalypse Now
Shampoo
Annie Hall
I’m tempted by Jaws and Alien and Animal House and Young Frankenstein… and I feel like Sweet Sweetback’s BadAsss Song ought to be on there but I appreciate more than enjoy it. And there’s a lot of smaller, astringent stuff that really seems ‘important’ or representative or just damn good–from Vanishing Point to Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore to Slap Shot to Rancho Deluxe–that I feel gets lost in the thrum of some of the heavy-hitters here. I have fond memories of some Frederick Wiseman stuff (Welfare, in particular) I got to see in college, but … too long ago to really say that any one film stands out.
Can’t stop at ten but I’ll reply anyway:
The Godfather II
Nashville
The Last Picture Show
Manhattan
Being There
Network
The Conversation
Barry Lyndon
American Graffiti
Murmur of the Heart
The Tin Drum
My Dinner With Andre
Walkabout
The Devil’s Playground
Amarcord
The Conformist
Scenes from a Marriage
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Dog Day Afternoon
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More
The Black Stallion
What’s Up Doc?
Young Frankenstein
Animal House
All That Jazz
The Deer Hunter
One Flew Over the Cockoo’s Nest
All the President’s Men
Harlan County USA
Days of Heaven
The Candidate
Smile
The Bad News Bears
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
a few to start with, maybe more later.
Mean Streets
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
Veronika Voss (German–Fassbinder)
Dirty Harry
The Long Goodbye
The Last Detail
Le Cercle Rouge (French-Melville)
Last Tango in Paris (hah! Italian!)
The Passenger (another one!)
Frenzy
Five Easy Pieces
The King of Marvin Gardens
sholay
deewaar
ankur
bhumika
nishant
seemabadha
ashani sanket
golmaal
amar, akbar, anthony
oh, god!
Forgot Chinatown. And Real Life.
Now–the underlying questions: is there something ‘special’ about this period in film history? what is it that you dig so much about the ‘seventies, Gio, and others?
For all the love of that era, my own film consciousness really got fired in the ‘eighties, with: Paris, Texas; Wings of Desire; Diva; Betty Blue; Raising Arizona; Big Trouble in Little China; Blue Velvet; The Shining; E.T.; Raging Bull; After Hours; Blood Simple; Goodfellas; Local Hero; The Hit; Matewan; Fitzcarraldo; Ran; Sex, Lies, and Videotape; Stop Making Sense; The Thin Blue Line. And so on. Is that decade less pivotal, less influential, less crucial? (For me, certainly not: if I was pushed to name my 10 favorite films of all time, to reduce my input to only 10 films, I think 3 or 4 would come from that fast/quick ‘eighties list I just made. And these are the films I first saw as films–I returned to the ‘seventies later, came at that body of work having been weaned on a love of sleazy crap on VHS intercut with the above films, first experienced at one of the first non-chain cinemas in my region.)
I think the differences between the excellent films you mention from the eighties and most of the films from the seventies is that the seventies films, by and large, were studio pictures, “tent pole” productions; they somehow stand for mainstream filmmaking while the eighties titles are more independent, below the radar upstarts. And maybe it has to do with the moment when you/we start to take films seriously. For me it was the seventies–those years from eight to eighteen when my tastes and my aesthetic interests were, for the most part, shaped and formed. Sure, I loved the Irwin Allen disaster flicks and everybody saw Jaws the weekend it was released, but I also remember making my parents take me to Louisville on my fourteenth birthday to see Sidney Lumet’s Network, and a year earlier my mom took me to see Nashville on a school night cause I wanted to see it so badly. I even remember sitting through Barry Lyndon twice in a row on a Saturday afternoon that same year. The seventies were integral to me for so many reasons: the Watergate hearings, Nixon’s resignation, suburban ennui and country club scandals, sexdrugs&rocknroll with no guilt (well, that’s not entirely true; Jimmy Smith where are you now) or fear of disease, “Saturday Night Live,” David Letterman (before he even had a late night show), reruns of Monty Python on PBS, sitcoms from Norman Lear and James Brooks, “Fernwood 2 Night” & “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” David Bowie and Lou Read, disco and the Eagles, The World According to Garp and Roots on the bedside table, Elton John and Pink Floyd and Grandmaster Flash and Supertramp and Fleetwood Mac and Styx and Elvis Costello and Boston and The Clash and Rickie Lee Jones and Tom Waits and The Talking Heads and Bruce Springsteen and Joni Mitchell and Abba and . . . Woody Allen and National Lampoon (the magazine but not yet the brand) and People and TV Guide. I’ll stop. It was a fun, confusing, polymorphous ride until Ron and Nancy danced into my television and things started to get serious and Mike Stipe made me stand up for something and MTV and cable television homogenized us all while the wall came tumbling down.
Those two movies could do it almost as well as any. Two of my favorites. Not mentioned yet:
Rosemary’s Baby.
You can never fully understand the layout of the apartment. So many scenes shot through doorways and down hallways…
Have been re-watching chunk of The Long Goodbye. I finally broke down and bought California Split a few months ago and managed to lose it. Most likely someone was over at my apt drinking, and I forced them to take it with ’em and watch it. Now I don’t remember who it was, and I no longer have the DVD which is out of print.
I’ve also been watching the 2 DVD set of Mary Hartman. Rather excellent though the hostage crisis goes on a little long (just like it did in the 70s).
Oh yeah – and for Gio – Fellini’s Roma is one of my favorite 70s movies. Saw it where all 70s movies should be seen. The NuBeverly Theater on a double feature. In this case with Satyricon.
And geez- Fassbinder… There’s another dozen or so right there.
And Jeff: that is one hell of a paragraph.
thanks everyone. i should say more, i want to say more, but now i just want to second mark: great writing, jeff.
Yeah–energetic, snazzy, engaging para.
Without snarking, I do want to push on a couple points, though. First, I don’t really buy the category distinction you’re making, that the ‘seventies pics were “tent-pole” studio pics and the ‘eighties ones I list were more indie. I think both lists — just yours and mine, ‘though I think we could include the others’ — are peppered with different kinds of flicks. (Isn’t tent-pole thinking a more recent phenomenon, even a post-Jaws phenom?) Scorsese’s experiences getting pictures made in both decades may exemplify the similarity of the production context.
I’m not saying differences can’t be drawn, but I think we (film critics, film fans, filmmakers, everyone?) romanticize the ‘seventies. I’m not sure I’d say that cable homogenized us all, or rather I’m not sure I buy your sense of the ‘seventies being so perversely, lovably diverse — I buy that such was your experience, but … hmm.
I’ll push a point, too–how about the category of “the 70s.” Does this era in filmmaking begin in 1970 (not if Mauer has his way, since Rosemary’s Baby is 1968) and end in 1979? Or is it a style, an attitude of filmmaking that begins with The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde and ends with Shampoo
The two films that prompted Gio to write this list fall squarely in this period, roughly 1967-1975, as do the bulk of the films mentioned (save for the ones in Jeff’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink list).
Rosemary’s Baby: Huh. Didn’t realize that. Thinking back now I’m not sure why I thought for sure it was the 70s.
OK – I’ll take that back and insert Basket Case and It’s Alive (without bothering to look up the dates of those either.)
I was on an honors defense in history last semester where the student made the case that the era defined around ‘seventies cinema actually begins with Lawrence of Arabia — that the formal and aesthetic qualities (& attitudes, issues represented, etc.) attached to that cinema can be traced to earlier films (and he agreed that they ended ’round ’75). Now, I’m not sure I buy that… but the issue raised intrigues me. Is there something “in” ‘seventies cinema that makes these films qualitatively different?
If not, if it’s a production context, I still need some convincing there, too. But the way most people talk, whatever the production changes defined, there’s a sense of a “seventies cinema” which seems to me elusive… and hence my challenge about nostalgia.
Ah, Basket Case. 1982. Of course, Henenlotter’s *best* work came with 1990’s brilliant Frankenhooker.
reynolds, that student must have been thinking of “The Steve Lawrence Show” which ran in 1965. It bristles with creative energy and intelligence. Its use of natural light, salvaged film stock, and raw, New York acting school talent such as George Gobel and Charles Nelson Reilly, make it a harbinger of heady things to come.
Ah, John–must you always use George Gobel to belittle others? That besmirches the memory of Gobel, my friend.
So, let’s take the periodization question seriously. Is it a matter of naming the films that start or end the “decade” (as distinguished from the decade), and bickering over which is the right start or right conclusion? Why, for instance, Shampoo? I ask because I know you’ll have an answer. Answer away, oh sage.
And your answer will get us to the underlying premises: if the “decade” isn’t coincident with the decade, what exactly is it that makes something a ‘seventies film? Eh? Eh? Eh?
[I picture you pulling on your mock turtleneck and murmuring anxiously, a la the late C. N. Reilly.)
I do take the question seriously. I just couldn’t pass up the Lawrence thingy. Anyway…
I can’t be persuaded that Lawrence has the formal and aesthetic attitudes of the films of the 1970s. To me, it’s a a bit of a relic, much closer the failed epics (like Cleopatra) of the last-gasp studio era. The only difference is that Lawrence has some of the key elements of the blockbuster working for it–and this is the only thing I can think of that ties it to 1970s cinema.
I wonder if the student had in mind Thomas Schatz’s argument that Lawrence of Arabia was a precursor to the New Hollywood (the name he gives the period or group of films and filmmakers we’re presently discussing). Though not exactly a blockbuster, it had the kind of tie-ins that would characterize the multi-media marketing of big pictures to come (it has a popular soundtrack, it wins something like 7 Academy Awards). It’s the Titanic of its time.
I like Shampoo because it has an end-of-an-era feel about it. You can see around the corner what’s coming: the “me” decade, Reagan, etc. But perhaps someone who appreciates the film more than I do can chime in.
I also think it’s fitting that it came out the same year as Jaws. Ashby (and Peckinpah, whose Cross of Iron went up against Lucas’s Star Wars a year later) for me is the last maverick of the New Hollywood. So I’m sticking with 1967-1975. But I promise I think through this some more. Seriously.
Doesn’t Peter Biskind echo John’s comment on seventies cinema as something not necessarily bound to a single decade. I think 1968 is as good as any other year but Biskind, who starts his study with Arthur Penn/Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde, does set the demise with Raging Bull as I recall (and that is long after Spielberg and Lucas have stirred up the pot, though I do remember Spielberg being somewhat questionable until the hat trick which was ET, Raiders and Poltergeist in 1981-2). Biskind’s book is a fun, gossipy read. And what role does Pauline Kael play in all this (if any at all).
Pauline Kael plays the role of an ambitious young newspaper reporter who gets in way over her head as she tries to unravel the vast conspiracy behind the assassination of a U.S. senator. George Gobel plays a pair of brown shoes.
oops! sorry, reynolds.
If you stop at 1975, you miss out on Network, Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, Being There, Apocalypse Now, All That Jazz, and Manhattan–not to mention Reds and Raging Bull. Still, one could argue these films didn’t do anything new that hadn’t already been done from ’67 to ’75. Why 1975 John? Shampoo? It is a great film but an era defining one? In 1973 Last Tango in Paris was the eighth highest grossing film in North America!
Well, Tango had Brando cock. Put Brando cock in almost anything, you’ve got a hit. Ishtar would have killed with Brando cock. Pauline Kael said that.
John, that student *did* explicitly reference–and react against–Schatz, trying to find some notion (esp. via the kind-of postcolonial critique and the ambiguous sexuality) of that New Hollywood smell in the film. I pushed on that notion of content (why Lawrence but not Spartacus) and, with the film historian from the U also on the committee, we tried to push him on whether–or how–the great live television of the ’50s might have set a precedent (as well as providing a slew of talent) for the subsequent shifts in ‘studio’ entertainment on film.
I wasn’t sold by his argument, nor was I inclined to Gobel it (or at least I didn’t act on that inclination). Mostly I thought his project opened up on a variety of interesting issues like the ones we’re raising here–what, if anything, is “era-defining” about the ‘seventies?
I’m intrigued by definition of production shifts–and Biskind does hint at such, but his evidence ain’t all that persuasive. It may be fun to read, but it reads like a film history analogue to Friedman on globalization, more hat than cattle.
I kind of buy your argument on Shampoo, in terms of content. Any corollary era-ending ways to read its production context, or its formal style? (I *do* tend to buy Biskind’s point about how Jaws and the notion of the blockbuster changed funding and production. So maybe that’s a better way to ‘end’ the era?)
Brando cock! I gotta get a panel together for the MLA on that subject.
For what it’s worth, I think of the “70s film” as encompassing the era from the late 1960s (with films like Bonnie and Clyde , Point Blank , etc.) and ending in the late 1970s/early 1980s. For me that era is defined by the rise of the American auteur–an older generation like Penn–and the new generation of Scorsese, Altman, Peckinpah, etc. (“older” being a relative term, as many of these people got their start making television in the 1950s). The system sufficiently opened up to recognize individual “authors” (with all the complications that brings up) in a way qualitatively different than earlier film, more closely identified with style, genre or production characteristics (the MGM musical, the Universal horror film, the RKO fast and dirty noir, etc.). I also associate the term with a loosening of conventions and restrictions–more overt sex and violence, ambiguous attitudes toward authority, a questioning of moral certainties, etc. American film also made greater use of techniques associated with European cinema–a style more obscure than the old clean continuity (say, in films like Klute and Three Women ). Certainly many of these qualities persisted past the 1970s but I think the combination of new ideas of authorship (with the rise of several major filmmakers), a loosening of narrative restrictions and new stylistics makes the “1970s film” a definable category, though, of course, a loose one. It’s worth noting that Mike’s list of major films from the 1980s include many from auteurs who started in the 1970s–I suspect, without providing any immediate evidence however, that the major films of the 1970s may be a more ambiguous lot than those of the 1980s. Pace Robin Wood, consider the taming of the horror film under Reagan.
sometimes my remarks are rather mealy-mouthed, as befits an aspirant to the Academy. However, what I should say outright is that I think films of the “1970s” (1967-1980) represent a period of questioning that was effectively squelched by the advent of the Blockbuster. My viewpoint, as a child Who Grew to Awareness in the 1970s, is that we had a chance to examine ourselves as Americans and then we blew it. Now we reap the rewards. Every moment is lived as if the past never happened. Widespread schizophrenia?
Actually, I thought your comment (21) was so clear and good that it almost made the whole debate less fun, as it was hard to come up with any kind of rejoinder. Your next comment (22) I enjoyed a lot more–because of its passion and intellectual engagement, and because I can challenge it more readily.
There’s much of what you say that strikes a chord with me, and I usually think you’re pretty dead-on, Michael (when you’re not foolishly dismissing Reservoir Dogs while I foolishly acclaim it). So take the following as an acolyte’s challenge to the master: I have trouble prizing ‘seventies cinema as a flowering of a self-reflexive cultural/political aesthetics when the decade begins (sort of) with Nixon’s landslide and ends with Reagan’s fairly easy defeat of Carter. If these films were so challenging, what consequences did they wreak? Why was everyone–those many thousands who made Last Tango number eight on the gross list–willing to see but not to comprehend the critiques such art was making?
I’m not dismissing these films or these filmmakers as critical voices, but I’m interested in seeing how our (nostalgic?) valuation of them as “critical voices” reinforces certain conservative assumptions — like “outsider” artists (and the “outsider” critic who loves them), the neat boundary between an authentic filmmaking somehow made amid a commercial system… etc. The seventies as a cultural moment were an astonishing retrenchment of bourgeois individualism, rife with anti-activist & anti-intellectual backlash, and a wholesale retreat from whatever political/social change seemed possible in the ‘sixties (another era oft-nostalgically idealized). Reagan didn’t cause that backlash; he was its most symbolic and resonant culmination.
I guess I’m less interested in privileging this era as a moment mythically evading our own current schizophrenia; I’m more interested in seeing how the contradictions of systems of politics and commerce result in an aesthetics both deeply embedded and yet also able to critique (and provoke critique). In search of same, I tend to avoid fond memories of a moment better than now (‘though such memories may have some historical truth-value), instead seeking to see–in the ‘seventies, ‘eighties, whenever–models which suggest neither our rosy evolution from nor our dispiriting fall into the dark ages.
michael, i realize that pat garrett and billy the kid is a great masterpiece, but could you please tell me why?
and: why can’t the 70s start in 1970 and end in 1979? wouldn’t that solve all these classification questions?
Gio, I think what a few of us are suggesting is that what we call “seventies cinema” 1) does not seem to apply to films made late in the decade, and 2) does seem to apply to films made a few years prior to 1970.
I don’t know if I can justify Pat Garrett as a masterpiece, but I can tell you what I love: the opening montage of Garret’s own assasination/Billy’s pointlessly cruel sharpshooting; the tone, which is not only sustained, but reaches incredible peaks, such as when Slim Pickens makes his way to the riverbed to die, as his wife looks on; like many films of this era (the one I’m claiming, 1967-1975), it refrains from adhering slavishly to plot thereby allowing for moments of gorgeous abstraction, such as the encounter between Garrett and the father on the raft. It has, I don’t know, that 70s mood of things coming to a close, of coming to terms, of reconiling oneself with failure (one’s own, the world’s). I don’t know, that sounds vague.
1975 — “Fall” of Saigon.
That ties in perhaps with John’s point about capturing something that is tied to the ‘dates’ but is reflective of a cultural mood, an era.
I’d worried that my last comment had seemed too surly or dismissive, which it was not at all intended to be. So, following John, we might zero in on a willingness to explore failure in this era — and, following Michael, note how this era’s films were willing to explore it ambiguously, without a sense of clear didactic or moral assessment of that failure.
I buy that sort of–‘though with that focus my sense of the ‘era’ opens up perhaps through to DePalma’s Blow Out, and may in fact be set up by earlier films like Lawrence of A (maybe that student was on to something). And, still, I wonder about this version of an era, ‘though I think these notions make sense to me. Is this really a new ‘era’ or a return? Film noir seems to serve as a strong aesthetic and thematic predecessor to ‘seventies-era films (if we define them this way), maybe even more than European films (although, hell, how many noir were directed by Europeans…). In other words, I might wonder if noir was not mere ancestor with some family resemblances but an ‘era’ and attitude in films and in filmmaking that are quite similar.
1967: Reynolds born. Everyone begins focusing on failure.
Noir as a genre, yes, but not necessarily as a style (another debate worth revisiting: is noir a genre of film or style of filmmaking?). With some exceptions, Chinatown springs to mind, films from this era don’t look noirish. The films look like European films of the previous decade. Nevertheless, they take on some of the narrative themes of 1940s noir films: despair, morbidity, the decline and fall of the American character, etc.
1970: john born.
1980: john turns ten.
1990: john turns twenty.
2000: john turns thirty.
Hope this solves all classification questions.
Mike–very provocative response, but I don’t think we should conflate the American film of the 1970s with the electoral politics then–they seem to operate in two different registers, and I would concede certainly that someone could watch Mean Streets , Chinatown and the like and still go ahead and vote Nixon. The new qualities that mark the films of the late 1960’s through to the 1970s are specific to film–and the fact that the decade started with Nixon and ended with Reagan doesn’t indicate at all that something new wasn’t going on in American narrative film. That said, I’d speculate that perhaps the most enthusiastic audiences for new auteurs like Scorsese and Altman were not necessarily those voting for Nixon etc. I did not posit a mythical release from the commercial system in noting that perhaps “critical voices†operated more overtly in that earlier era than they do now. Mainly I was interested in identifying the characteristics which would make “1970s cinema” a coherent category for discussion. We’re talking about narrative American film so that, of course, means that there is some kind of tension between the commercial and the cultural/political—but it’s odd to deny the possibility of “critical voices†because they don’t represent a complete break with all forces (I mean, isn’t that a rather utopian viewpoint, its extreme demands almost guaranteeing that there will be nothing new?) The “blew it†remark was a calculated provocation—of course, things never started so well or ended so badly. But I think it’s still nevertheless possible to make useful distinctions and to recognize that American film changed significantly in the late 60s—I’m hard pressed to identify an equally important period since then….what am I missing?
Gio—as for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid I think it is a remarkable self-conscious elegiac western—I would second John’s remarks. What I find particularly impressive is the way it works as both a meditation on storytelling—a quiet, slow, even painful taking apart of mythic elements—and as a sustained discourse on the conflict between abstraction (John’s word) and personality/situation. Pat and Billy are (mythic) role-players who can never shed those roles entirely, despite their strong impulses to do so. With reference to our other discussion, the film feels just right as a kind of “last Western,†as attentive to deepening its genre components as to delineating a very contemporary tone of searching, disillusionment, idealism, failure (as Mike and John noted), etc.
As often happens when we get riled up, I’m pushing harder than I might if forced to define my own assumptions (which so often hew to those of my betters, posting here), and some of our comments are being read out of the more complicated context of every comment we’ve ever made (here and in other, less virtual, more virtuous venues). Nothing wrong with heightening the ‘provocation’ to tease out some of the premises underlying our probably more-minimal disagreements. (Not if it produces more impassioned, smart rejoinders from Michael and Jeff and John.)
I’m still honestly trying to nail down what it is that makes this something called ‘seventies cinema, against my own skeptical reactions to many of the definitions I, you, we seem to use. I’m provoking not out of sheer cussedness, nor from any pure disagreement. Rather, I think there’s something in the conception of ‘seventies cinema worth maintaining. I just don’t know exactly what that might be, and. . .
For instance, I wasn’t trying to conflate politics in the electoral, social, and cinematic register–but I do think it seems crucial to see them in relation to one another, as I know you do, too; I think I was pushing back on the notion that ’80s Reagan America was different in kind across these registers–or that ’70s (Nixon? Ford? Carter?) America was a time of self-reflexive cultural ambiguity. We may argue that the mainstream cinema did pursue such ambivalence . . . but I might wonder how films as (for this viewer) viscerally thrilling in their complicated politics as The Parallax View, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and The Candidate served to reinforce the kind of cultural detachment from politics (electoral and social) which seems a recurrent plague in American history. For me, then, to name the ‘greatness’ of ‘seventies cinema is perhaps to privilege the way a mainstream American cinema took the aesthetic and political hallmarks of European filmmaking and turned them into primarily aesthetic exercises. (Culminating in the bleak pop nihilism of DePalma’s Blow Out or Body Double?)
Or that what we see in ‘seventies cinema, with its emphasis on narratives of failure, is the death knell of the long-privileged individual (white male) working against the system. We see this represented with a whiff of the romantic found in the bleakest pessimism inside the films, all these men struggling to find their way against corrupt and corrupting systems (of values, economics, politics, etc.). And we see these filmmakers (all white men) struggling to produce art against the bad old studio system which will (circa Jaws) find a way to disempower them, so many McMurphys and McCabes and McKays giving in and/or getting destroyed. This is a conventional romantic vision of the (American?) self, even if it’s produced within a complex aesthetic form, and it complements our desire to see the romance in these great auteurs seeing their way through the bullshit despite the system.
Maybe our appreciation for ‘seventies cinema depends upon its death–what makes it great is that it failed. Our narrative of the greatness of the decade is generically bound to end in our disappointment; maybe we’re not just defining an historical moment but emplotting a vision of film history which (again) is fairly conventional.
And maybe there are other narratives to tell about film history. While I buy that American film changed, I’m not sure I’d agree that the ‘seventies reached an unparalleled register of quality. For instance, all those films I named from the ‘eighties — I do believe that that decade (the temporal decade) produced an equal, if not greater, number of great films. If I sat down, I could probably say the same about the ‘nineties. What’s different seems maybe to speak to Jeff’s point about these films being ‘tent-pole’ pictures, made in studio system, whereas the range of films I named from the next decade have a far more diverse set of production contexts. Maybe. Charles Burnett, John Sayles, David Lynch, Wayne Wang, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Joel & Ethan Coen, Steven Soderbergh — they all really get their start in the ‘eighties. And some of the guys still hanging around (Altman, Scorsese, Gilliam) find new form and value. (And, yeah: these are still all guys. We might turn in another direction and examine how the last two decades have been marked by unprecedented access to filmmaking for women, for black, latino, asian-american artists in an American film production and distribution network.) There’s certainly not a shared aesthetic sensibility, which we *might* argue (and I’d probably agree about) for ‘seventies cinema. But that is not the same as saying we’ve since then lost a strong aesthetic sensibility.
watched a few 70s films now, and i thought i’ll leave to you boys the task of defining what constitutes a 70s film and say instead what i like about the ones i saw (mostly films from the lists you helpfully and sweetly provide).
first, i grew up with 70s movies. these are the movies i saw at the cheap neighborhood cinema with the whole family on otherwise miserable sunday afternoons. it is a wonder to me now that we actually did go to the movies! what happened in those two-three years that totally disappeared afterwards and made movie-watching a thing of the past? i think what probably happened is that the neighborhood cinema, like all other neighborhood cinemas, closed. i remember a great paucity of movie theaters in verona afterwards. italians don’t watch movies. italians don’t go to the movies. oh why why why doesn’t anyone believe me?
my memories of that time (the time we went, along with the whole neighborhood, a la cinema paradiso — and yes, the reels burned, the movies broke, children ran up and down the alleys, definitely no popcorn, everyone smoked, etc. etc.) is associated with spaghetti westerns, so it must have been a time when italians went to the movies to watch spaghetti westerns. i’m sure all of this stuff is findable somewhere and that someone’s written about it.
anyway, that was, in my kiddie memory, the ultimate time of movie cool. long-limbed men, solitary men, unsmiling men, tough men. but also, and i’m noticing this as i go through these movies, there is some radical shit going on in the relation between the sexes, some genuine SEARCHING, that is vastly and conspicuously absent from today’s flicks. think of klute, alice doesn’t live here anymore, network, what else? tough women, respectful men, a serious investigation of their respective roles. the last 70s film i saw is night moves and i was rather touched and impressed by the love scene between gene hackman and the masculine jennifer warren. she initiates the sex, she seduces him, and ultimately she swindles him. and gene hackman: so cool, so masculine. being taken for a ride by a woman does wonders for the masculinity of these characters. what happened between then and now?
and like many of you, i see the european — slow, brooding, existential — style everywhere. and the soundtracks use serious contemporary jazz. whatever happened to that?
Gio doesn’t know her own national cinema, so this won’t help her. But on behalf of the boys, I’d like to take one last stab at it: in the American cinema of the 70’s, actually from 1967 to about 1975 or so, there was a sort of neorealist tendency. I know a lot of scholars and critics say that the 70s directors were heavily influenced by the New Wave, and I don’t disagree, but I’d suggest that the films listed above were very much influenced by Italian neorealism. They had on location shooting, some had low budgets, most had rambling narratives (or, deemphasized movement in favor of time) and addressed present social conditions. In this way, there are more similarities between Five Easy Pieces and Bicycle Thieves than there are differences. Does that make sense? American neorealism: 1967-1975. It lasted as long as Italian noerealism, too. I will now prepare a short lecture on the similarities between the Hollywood melodrama and kabuki.
is that one you mention an italian movie, john? cuz i don’t watch italian movies. in solidarity with my oppressed people.
back to cool: italian cinema: definitely not cool. couldn’t do cool if cool did it. end of my argument.
Good news: Entering the words Brando cock into Google brings up this blog as the first entry. Next stop: Keitel’s ballsack.
Johnny To. Screw you, Arnab!