The 1970s List: Discussion and Suggestions

[swo17]

MINI-LISTS FOR EACH YEAR RAN THROUGH NOVEMBER 30. ROUND 1 VOTING RUNS THROUGH JANUARY 7 AND THE OPTIONAL ROUND 2 (ORPHAN RESCUE) RUNS THROUGH JANUARY 31

If you are reading this sentence, you are eligible to participate in our forum's latest decades list project exploring the films of the 1970s. If you know anyone adventurous enough--on or off the forum--that you think would also enjoy participating, feel free to invite them as well.

Please PM me your list of what you believe are the top 50 films from this decade toward the end of the project. I will send confirmation that I have received your list after I have tabulated it. If you haven't heard from me within a day, you should follow up with me to make sure that I received your list. You may feel that you could compile a list of 50 favorite films from this decade much earlier than the deadline, but it's still highly recommended that you engage in the discussions here. Don't keep your favorites a secret, and always be open to suggestions from others!


THE RULES

1) Each individual list is to comprise no more or less than 50 films, ranked in your order of preference (with no ties). If you haven't yet seen 50 films from this decade that you think are genuinely great (or even if you have), please take advantage of the resources listed below and participate in the ongoing discussions to find films that you can be proud to put on your list.

2) Anyone participating in this project should plan to submit a list by the Round 1 deadline. After this point, I will publish some preliminary results that will not reveal how each film has performed, but will at least make it apparent which films are orphans (i.e. those that have received only one vote, and so receive no points in the tabulation process). During the month that follows (Round 2) all those who are interested in participating further may seek out the orphaned films (or anything else they didn't fit in before the Round 1 deadline) and make revisions to their lists as they see fit, up until the Round 2 deadline. After this point, I will publish the results.

3) Any feature film, documentary, experimental film, short film, TV miniseries, TV movie, or TV special released in the 1970s (1970-1979) should be eligible. In addition, any multi-year release starting in the 1970s should also be eligible. Year of release is established in my database for SNAPSЖOT and also summarized by year as follows:

1970 / 1971 / 1972 / 1973 / 1974 / 1975 / 1976 / 1977 / 1978 / 1979

*Links for later years not yet populated but should be within a few months

If a film is not listed here, please bring it up so I can add it to the database.

4) In certain cases, it may be appropriate for films that are technically separate to be combined, or for films that are technically combined to be separated. In such cases, you may vote for either a part or the whole, but bear in mind that all votes will be competing against each other (e.g. a vote for only I Am Curious: Yellow will not count toward the vote for the two parts of I Am Curious combined). Generally, if multiple films are allowed to be combined for voting purposes, you should probably vote for them that way unless you are strongly opposed to doing so. The most common cases:

• Single-director multi-part films for which each segment was released separately (e.g. Feuillade's serials, Lang's two-part epics) may be considered as a single film. Films included in trilogies may not be combined.

• Variant edits: For films that exist in multiple versions (e.g. Welles' Mr. Arkadin, Rivette's Out 1), all votes that don't specify a "secondary" version will be counted toward the "primary" version.

• Portmanteau films: Each of the individual segments and the film as a whole are all separately eligible.

We may occasionally need to make a special case. If you are seriously considering including a film on your list that you have a question about in this regard, bring it up in this thread and we'll iron it out. However, I will not make any further exceptions during the last week of the project.

For more details about rules and procedures, please refer here.


RESOURCES

Past Forum Discussions
Discussion from the Forum's Prior 1970s Project
Discussion from the Forum's Genre List Projects
Discussion from the Forum's Shorts List Project

Guides Within This Thread
Do you feel you have an especially informed opinion about the work during this decade from a particular director, country, genre, etc.? Many people here would greatly appreciate your taking the time to prepare a guide for navigating through all that's available. (Though they do not necessarily need to be comprehensive.) Guides are especially welcome for extremely prolific directors/movements, or to summarize availability for films (such as shorts) that are often hidden away on releases for other films or only available on the web. Past examples: Director Guide, Country Guide, Genre Guide, DVD Availability Guide

therewillbeblus on Nikos Nikolaidis

External Resources

AWAITING SUGGESTIONS

Recommended Reading

AWAITING SUGGESTIONS


THE MATRIX R. SCHMATRIX HONORARY SPOTLIGHT SECTION

Remember that part in the movie Spotlight where all the reporters sat around and said "Hey, you hold your nose and watch this movie that you wouldn't otherwise want to watch and I guess I'll do the same for you"? Oh wait, that's not how it happened at all. No, those reporters went out and put all their heart into their work and gave long important speeches about it. In honor of their garrulousness, this section is now reserved for links to any and all posts on a particular film that are 500 words or longer. Why 500 words? Because when I used to be in the biz, I remember my editor throwing that number around a lot. Sorry folks, but we're living in a post-Spotlight world now, and the old ways just aren't going to cut it anymore.

Family Life (Ken Loach, 1971) (therewillbeblus)
El jardín de las delicias (Carlos Saura, 1970) (DarkImbecile)
Sitting Target (Douglas Hickox, 1972) (therewillbeblus)

***Please PM me if you have any suggestions for additions to/deletions from this first post.***

[senseabove]

Pennies From Heaven (Potter, 1978) Well let's get this started off right, then! I've accidentally developed a tradition of watching something extra long between Christmas and NYE that started with Out 1, then rewatching La Flor, and last year I was stuck to the couch with achilles tendonitis for Berlin Alexanderplatz. I didn't have that week off this year, so I opted for something slightly shorter, at only 7.5 hours, all crammed in on New Year's Day. Its being my next, apparently traditional annual long-watch wasn't the only reason I kept thinking of Fassbinder's epic during this hyper-stylized downwardly mobile love/death spiral of a pathologically small-time schemer between the two World Wars.

I'm most surprised by the brilliance with which Potter presents so broad a range of emotion and imagination, not that is represented in pop music, but that is present in our relationship to it: all these songs, as Arthur points out, are really about one thing—"and that's the main thing, innit?"—and yet here they're often twisted, flipped, mirrored, and perverted to show a much broader spectrum of human feeling, "love" becoming, by various contextualizations, a kind of anti-metonym, able to stand in for everything it's supposed to not represent, all predicated on the fact that a majority would like to pretend that that one thing is exactly as innocent as it sounds at first blush—a kind of perversion of human nature in its own way. Not all the songs are, or need to be, subverted—Hoskins curled up in the corner lamenting how "My Woman" treats him so poorly is as straightforward an interpretation as you can get—but the subversion becomes a motif that stands out over and above just the musical fantasy conceit.

Potter's "perversions" start amusingly small, like the gender-flipped opening song with Arther lipsyncing to a female vocalist; get larger, like when Arther and a bank manager who has just denied him a loan contest via dance whether "That Certain Thing" that makes life worth living is money or love; become more and more incongruous, which frequently happens as the story darkens (and boy does it) when a song interrupts with the polar opposite of the scene's mood, serving to express dreams of love, failed or clung to, or just as ironic counterpoint to what "love" actually is in the moment; and eventually reach such divergence between cultural and subjective meaning that lyrics about being unable to forget a song sung to an unrequited love are the fantastic manifestation of a man haunted by the face of the girl he murdered.

There's a similarly perversely complex relationship to another fundamental human drive: imagination. It's an easy push to say this story is about a man with his head in the clouds stumbling into an abyss, but it's a kind of get-it-past-the-censors faux innocent surface message akin to all those love songs about absolutely nothing more than pecks on the check. If there's a main weakness, it's that the path to the abyss gets shockingly broad toward the end, which makes it lose focus on what I think is interesting about its exploration: how forcing people to thoroughly stifle natural instinct leads them to that abyss. (Though I do kind of love how outrageous it gets, even if I don't think it quite works—boy did I not see the farmhouse coming.) Which is to say: at the end, however sad we feel for Arthur, who obviously gets a very raw deal, I felt pretty bad for Joan, too, who waffles between pathetic and vicious, but who suffers a different kind of misunderstanding; these days she might identify as asexual and so, being helped to understand her own inverted kind of sexual frustration, might feel less obliged to label anybody whose desires lay beyond her own as a "dirty animal"—an impulse not even Arthur and Eileen can escape when discussing people who willingly do something they've just been obliged to and discover that they may even have liked it a bit.

I think the highest, most succinct recommendation might be that it feels like a latter day surfacing of the pre-Code spirit, both in its willingness to play with form in a way that doesn't yet know the rules, and to explore "adult" topics frankly, seriously, and yet playfully. If it gets a little sensational in the back third, well, I guess that's kinda the pre-Code spirit, too.

If anybody has recs for other 70s Potter-penned work to prioritize, I'll happily take them!

[swo17]

I know zedz is a big Casanova booster

[zedz]

My modus operandi this time, to keep things interesting, is to compile my 70s list from scratch, with no reference to what I included in my previous list (at least not until the last minute), and the Dennis Potter that sprang to mind for a rewatch was Blue Remembered Hills (Brian Gibson, 1979).

[swo17]

Adults playing children is always a good time

[therewillbeblus]

There's no director thread, but I've been making my way through Nikos Nikolaidis' filmography after being wow'd by his commitment to an alien fever dream of perverse psychosexual behaviorism in Singapore Sling, and his first features were in the 70s, so I'll spill some thoughts here.

An easy list-maker is his first feature-length film, Euridice BA 2037, 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.

His sophomore effort, The Wretches Are Still Singing, is more of a mixed bag. Unfortunately Nikolaidis doesn't play to his strengths here, and after a riveting and narratively-disorienting start set to The Platters' "Ebb Tide," the yarn just spins into an exhausting and messy multicharacter set piece that's basically an irreverent The Big Chill where we don't care about any of the characters or goingons, and the narrative disorientation feels cheap and, perhaps, purposeless. I realize that aspects of the commentary are sourced in specific generational outcomes from recent Greek history, but Nikolaidis is also reflecting on the more universal residual effects of radical, star-eyed youths struggling with sad, amoral, and banal existences in middle age. Theoretically, I admired Nikolaidis' attempt to craft an unconventional and absurdist portrait of these pathetic individuals (never have casual rape and murder and deep-seated sexual dynamics all projected into 'games' been portrayed so monotonously), as well as gatekeeping any potential we have in empathizing with their fatalistic losses to broad peripheries, but stuff this weird and drawn out only works when it's in the service of something interesting, and this film sucks the life out of any opportunities to dive into the experience of aging, disconnect, and obsessively romanticizing the past. Honestly, that may be the point- forcing an ironic distancing from the very subjects we're ostensibly-meant to engage with, robbing them of their and their respective (but essentially-identical, where it counts) existential crises' worth through a fading interest from the artist telling their story, inserting narrative pivots that find more evocative merit in left-field sensual and spiritually-restoring manifestations of a tertiary "character" 'Vera' than a single detail from the central five. This certainly reveals itself in a final monologue where one character sincerely yet delusionally talks about sharing their crazy adventures from that weekend with her psych-hospital therapist as if it was actually exciting or adventurous or cathartic or memorable, when we know it was vapid and flavorless and numbed and forgettable. So, maybe it's a clever deconstruction of midlife crises as boring and trifling self-pity, but that doesn't make it a particularly worthwhile film as a whole.

I've been ragging on the film a bit too much. I still liked this enough for its unorthodox determination populating enough peculiar bits to keep things amusing. I just hope it's a failed experiment rather than a sign of things to come across the rest of his body of work.

[therewillbeblus]

Todo modo (Elio Petri, 1976*): Whatever the specific prods at cultural satire are come a distant second to the atmospheric bravado on display here. The high concept of how religious salvation curbs or feeds moral degradation is simultaneously simple and helplessly tangled, especially as the respective parties demonstrate both cunning and delusional shades that leave themselves naked and withhold their cores at once. But it can succeed at being an explosion of these two contradictions because the team of director, scorer, and actors assault our senses with a kind of idiosyncratic collective cohesion where its explosive aesthetic flooding informs a reflexive thematic resonance. What we get sustains an absolutely riveting heightened tone of dueling spirituopolitical and psychosexual insanity for two hours, anchored by captivating, eccentric (career-best, if not, near-so) perfs by Gian Maria Volonté and Marcello Mastroianni that ascend the ceilings of their already-impressive respective ranges. Morricone's score may not be 'catchy', but he matches the esoterically arrhythmic yet relentless chaos so perfectly that it may be his most ambitious score-job yet, or at least the most synced collaboration I've seen between him and a director. Jesus, what a ride.

*I believe this is the correct year, but the film is not yet on SNAPSЖOT, so I imagine a ruling will take place later

[Calvin]

Les maudits sauvages (Jean Pierre Lefebvre, 1971)

Apparently known as "the godfather of independent Canadian cinema," Lefebvre's 1967 feature Il ne faut pas mourir pour ça was the first Canadian film to be shown at Cannes and he's long been a figure that I've been curious about - but scant availability has prevented me from seeing much of his work. However, I discovered that a bunch of his films are now available on Apple TV thanks to the Éléphant: mémoire du cinéma québécois initiative and I have set about it.

Les maudits sauvages opens with the title card "1670-1970 - un film presqu'historique de Jean-Pierre Lefebvre" and I can't decide if 'almost historic' is apt or generous for what follows. A fur trapper abducts a young Native American woman (named Tekacouita, apparently a reference to Tekakwitha, who has since been canonised) away from her fiance in 1670 to be his personal slave/concubine and brings her to (then modern-day) 1970 where he forces her to work as a go-go dancer in a rather grotty Montreal nightclub. Tekacouita is sold to customers as "an authentic exotic beauty from right here" and, indeed, the most intriguing aspect of the film is how Lefebvre deconstructs the pop culture image of indigenous peoples, presenting a critique not just of colonialism but of the progressive ethnocide, fetishisation, and commodification of indigenous cultures.

It's an intriguing film, beautifully shot by Jean-Claude Labrecque who shot a whole bunch of the key films in Quebecois cinema including À tout prendre, Le chat dans le sac, and The Ernie Game. I'm not sure what I think of it overall - I feel that some of the ideas are less than fully formed and it won't be making my final list but I'm definitely going to seek out more of Lefebvre's work. He definitely worships at the altar of Godard, with some distinctly Godardian intertitles.

Lady Oscar (Jacques Demy, 1979) - An English-language French/Japanese co-produced adaptation of Riyoko Ikeda's classic manga The Rose of Versailles, Lady Oscar is a fascinating entry in Demy's oeuvre. Despite being an adaptation, it feels at times to be a deeply personal work: a piece of queer, revolutionary pop-art about a girl raised as a boy that is as much about sexuality and gender identity as it is about sticking two fingers up to the bourgeoise. The Japanese Blu-Ray release is gorgeous.

[dekadetia]

Soft Fiction (Chick Strand, 1979) - I've been watching a lot of essay cinema lately (Isaac Julien, Yvonne Rainer, Marlon Riggs, Mani Kaul), and I feel that beyond their common link to the essay format itself (which is pretty fluid anyway), these makers all work in a genre that could be called something like "warm experimental" (maybe you could even call it "soft fiction"); that is, cinema that is unafraid to demolish structure and linearity, set the rules of visual language free, unbind from the necessity of being a textual analogue, etc., but is also careful not to divorce itself from the humanist, confessional probing that makes cinema the medium of the empath. Strand is masterful at this, combining elements of seance and mesmerism and disjointed explorations of space and time with the viscerally real, direct-to-camera confessions of a variety of different women. I could have watched this unique combination go on and on beyond its brief runtime; Strand has a knack for getting at (and then kicking the tires of) what is truly involving. Available on the Criterion Channel.

[Calvin]

Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, 1975) - An epoch-making film in Indian cinema, Sholay is a near-3 1/2 hour western/musical adrenaline rush heavily influenced by the films of Sergio Leone and Once Upon a Time in the West in particular.

Dharmendra and a magnetic Amitabh Bachchan star as a couple of convicts who are hired by the policeman (Sanjeev Kumar) who once caught them in order to help him bring the villainous bandit leader Gabbar Singh to justice.

Sholay is a film that feels like it lurches from moment to moment, set piece to set piece, with its audience strapped into the seat of its rollercoster as it goes around its twists and turns, punctuating a relatively traditional Western landscape with bursts of colour and song.

I don't know enough about the social or political situation in India to be confident in attempting deeper analysis of the film but it seems to be largely in favour of post-colonial symbols of power, with its hero(es) finding purpose having been adopted into civil society to oppose a cyclonic, pitiless, agent of chaos. In any case, I found it to be thrilling entertainment - maximalist cinema that attempts to be something to everyone and quite possibly succeeds.

[zedz]

Genuine dating conundrum alert: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One.

Criterion and imdb date it as 1968, which is incorrect (and clear from the film itself, which uses music from In a Silent Way, which wasn't even recorded until 1969).

Here are the facts, from the interview with Greaves published in A Critical Cinema 3:
The basic footage (for Takes One through Five, four of which were never edited) was shot in 1968, but it wasn't edited and completed until 1971, when it was submitted to the Cannes Film Festival. Its only screening - with the reels in the wrong order - was for for the selection committee, who rejected it because it didn't make any sense. It was screened publicly for the first time in 1991.

I'm considering it for my 1970s list, but that would have to be based on a single closed, botched screening, or on date of completion but not release, which isn't how this generally works. Umpire?

[senseabove]

Some quick thoughts:

Sleuth (Mankiewicz, 1972) Delightfully, if a little too, up its own ass. Fun if for nothing else than watching Olivier and Caine have so much fun.

Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (Grosbard, 1971) Miserable and completely lost up its own ass. I watched this for Barbara Harris and Barbara Harris really is the only thing watchable in it.

Serpico (Lumet, 1973) A movie that can't quite figure out who its audience is, the choir or the complacent, unaided by its cipher of a lead character whose interiority is far too briefly sketched with a jerkily sprawling timeline (later revealed to be much more compressed than I'd expected!) to ever congeal into anything compelling. Any decent man would do the same, it seems to want to hope, while trying to avert its gaze from the plot's necessary premise that most men aren't. Pacino as hippie Ken doll has a certain amusement, and Lumet sure knows how to cut in to a close-up.

The Working Glass Goes to Heaven (Petri, 1971) If you want your lead to be a cipher, this is how you do it: Volonté is a man bewildered by a world suddenly disunified, and by the realization that none of its constituent elements—home, work, country—has time or space for him as anything but a symbol for their exploitation. Petri's overwhelming formal aggressiveness would feel propagandist if it didn't so consistently undercut itself until all that's left for us to hold onto is Volonté's skittering nerves. Watching this having recently been working my way through Pasolini was a fascinating contrast, as I often feel like Pasolini can't quite manage to balance his concrete, specific, contemporary political critiques and his fascination with a kind of suprahistorical creative impulse, where the latter is almost entirely what I find interesting about him and his work. (The video essay on the Radiance release covering contemporary political scene and Petri's career is stellar, btw, so packed with information you almost want to play it at half-speed.)

A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness (a.k.a A Story of...) (Suzuki, 1975) Shockingly coherent for Suzuki, at least to start, with just enough of his distinct flare for flouting the rules: the third or so shot, for example, begins a standard establishing sequence, jarringly sped up with fast cuts in place of lingering cross-fades: a skyscraper; the sign by the door; a large, posh, unpopulated office; the corner desk and a zoom in… Then cut to a man sitting on a couch—which, after we spot the aforementioned desk with its conspicuous two phones in the background, we realize was innocuously in the foreground of that shot—having a conversation with someone off screen, neither of whom were shown entering the scene. This being Suzuki, of course, things get progressively more stylistically incongruent. Later, for example, we see a long location shot of headlights descending camera-ward down a road disappearing into a valley and flanked by dense suburban neighborhoods, the other end of the road reappearing just at the bottom of the frame; the car descends, descends, descends, descends—a sudden scream and a flash cut to a perpendicular shot of the driver's side, car rollicking in place on a sound stage with a solid, dusk-purple background—back to the longshot as the car continues down the hill unabated, disappears, then rushes back up into the camera. The stylistic abruptness carries over into the story, as what begins as a fairly simple story of corporate exploitation—manager boyfriend signs unproven star and scores big—is traded for a bizarrely intimate one about celebrity stalking and loneliness. I'm not sure any of it hangs together in the end, lacking both the semblance of restraint in his studio work and the truly boundary-less explorations of what comes in the 80s, but definitely worthwhile for Suzukiites.

[swo17]

Genuine dating conundrum alert: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One.

Criterion and imdb date it as 1968, which is incorrect (and clear from the film itself, which uses music from In a Silent Way, which wasn't even recorded until 1969).

Here are the facts, from the interview with Greaves published in A Critical Cinema 3:
The basic footage (for Takes One through Five, four of which were never edited) was shot in 1968, but it wasn't edited and completed until 1971, when it was submitted to the Cannes Film Festival. Its only screening - with the reels in the wrong order - was for for the selection committee, who rejected it because it didn't make any sense. It was screened publicly for the first time in 1991.

I'm considering it for my 1970s list, but that would have to be based on a single closed, botched screening, or on date of completion but not release, which isn't how this generally works. Umpire?

Hmmm...well a couple things to consider:

1. This was explicitly eligible for the '60s list, with a note in the first post saying to ignore IMDb (which at some point put the film in the '90s). It received exactly one vote! It was, however, also eligible for the 1968 list, where it received four votes and tied for the #49 spot.

2. I see some corroboration for the film having been completed in 1971, which is certainly a data point worth considering. As a general comment though (and this may very well not be the case here) if a film gets edited later with a new soundtrack, I would still tend to list the film in the earlier year. For instance, I have Lucifer Rising as 1972, despite its soundtrack not being completed until 1980, and In the Shadow of the Sun as 1974 despite the soundtrack being completed in 1981. Are these controversial rulings? Please don't cancel me. Not tonight.

All else being equal I'd rather use the year of completion but given that this film was already eligible for the '60s list I'm inclined to leave it there for now

[therewillbeblus]

Thanks for the public ruling on the Jarman, I had it as '81 and never would've thought to look that far ahead to check in. Probably an annoying (and impossible to be fully thorough) task, but if you're able to list any other films that stand out to you as being bumped ahead multiple years from their LB/Wiki/IMDb date (maybe in the general 70s thread), that would be appreciated. I always check the following year (i.e. 1973 for 1972) in SNAPSЖOT just to make sure we're not using different sources, but nothing beyond that. If it's the reverse situation, where I have something listed as 1974 but it's 1981 for you, I'll catch that easily when checking through my list, but it doesn't really work that way inverted

[zedz]

Hmmm...well a couple things to consider:

1. This was explicitly eligible for the '60s list, with a note in the first post saying to ignore IMDb (which at some point put the film in the '90s). It received exactly one vote! It was, however, also eligible for the 1968 list, where it received four votes and tied for the #49 spot.

2. I see some corroboration for the film having been completed in 1971, which is certainly a data point worth considering. As a general comment though (and this may very well not be the case here) if a film gets edited later with a new soundtrack, I would still tend to list the film in the earlier year. For instance, I have Lucifer Rising as 1972, despite its soundtrack not being completed until 1980, and In the Shadow of the Sun as 1974 despite the soundtrack being completed in 1981. Are these controversial rulings? Please don't cancel me. Not tonight.

All else being equal I'd rather use the year of completion but given that this film was already eligible for the '60s list I'm inclined to leave it there for now

Now I remember why I tend to avoid these threads!

In the Shadow of the Sun didn't exist until 1981: it's a compilation of earlier short films (one of which I'll probably be voting for, and not all of which come from 1974) and home movie footage compiled specifically for the collaboration with Throbbing Gristle, just as his subsequent compilation of old material Glitterbug is a new 1994 film created with Brian Eno. Neither of these works are unfinished films from the 1970s just waiting for a score.

Personally, I'd go with 1980 for Lucifer Rising, since the film was always intended to have a musical soundtrack and that wasn't completed until 1980. I think we only have Anger's word that it was otherwise complete in 1972, and I wouldn't count on him as a source for anything.

I'm cool with your Greaves ruling: there are way too many unambiguous 70s films worthy of my attention! For the record, here's Greaves talking about it in August 1991:
We've only had a few public showings to date. The film was never released. We shot it in 1968 and then had difficulty getting anybody to finish it. We finally got the money for a blow-up in 1971, but then we had the problem of trying to get it launched. I thought I could get it into the Cannes Film Festival, and I flew over to France. The problem was that Louis Marcorelles, the influential critic, went to a pre-screening of the film and the projectionist got the reels all fouled up. Take One is already chaotic. It's so fragile that if you mix it up even a little, you lose the film. Marcorelles and I had dinner after the screening , and he said, "I couldn't understand what the film was about!" I was surprised at his reaction, and then later, too late, I discovered that his projectionist had screened the reels out of order.
I like to think of that incident as a divine intervention: it has kept this film buried for almost twenty-five years. I was so interested to show it tonight because almost no one here has seen it.

[swo17]

There's no one easy and fast rule that applies to every film, and as all of these examples illustrate, it's not even just an issue when assigning films to years--in these cases the decade is just as much in question. I try to take everything under consideration in my rulings, and that includes all of your feedback, which is precisely why you should not avoid these threads, zedz! Even if you're only voting by decade and not by year.

For In the Shadow of the Sun, I was most influenced by the BFI's own positioning of the film in their boxset as Jarman's "debut feature" which they dated 1972-1974. I can't remember if there's more context behind that in the booklet--I'll have to revisit that. When a range of dates like this is provided for a film, implying that it's being worked on throughout that time, I'll generally assign the film to just one year, the latest one in the range. You can contrast this treatment with, say, A Touch of Zen, with two parts released throughout the period 1970-1971. In that case I assigned the date range 1970-1971 and made the film eligible for the 1970 list. Basically, if each film can only be assigned to one year, my intent is to assign it to the year in which it was first publicly shared* even if changes were later made or additional parts were later released. Or consider Dog Star Man (1961-1964). We didn't know all that it would be in 1961, but that's the year in which "Dog Star Man" was first a thing, so there it goes.

For what it's worth, IMDb shows screenings for Lucifer Rising on Dec 8, 1972 and Apr 10, 1974. It puts the film in 1972. Letterboxd puts it in 1974. BFI puts it in 1981! Let me think on this some more.

If anyone is passionate about year assignments for these or any other films, please do speak up and/or provide evidence, and I'm open to changing my rulings. Obviously it's best if it gets sorted out before we do the list for a given year though.

*An exception: If a film was suppressed (perhaps by the government) or otherwise shelved for years/decades against the filmmakers' wishes, I tend to feel like it's righting a wrong to put it back as close as possible to when it would have been released if not for that obstacle. So the Greaves (or, say, Larks on a String or The Ear) definitely belong in the '60s or '70s and not the '80s or '90s. But I'm not just going to pick a year based on nothing; something should have happened that year--ideally there would be documentation somewhere like "the film was completed in ____ but..." By similar thinking, I ruled during the 2010s list that The Other Side of the Wind would be eligible as a 1970s film as opposed to a 2010s film. I have it as 1976, which I understand was the year when shooting ended and the project was abandoned. (Technically, I list the release year as "1976/2018" and it's eligible for the 1976 list.)

if you're able to list any other films that stand out to you as being bumped ahead multiple years from their LB/Wiki/IMDb date (maybe in the general 70s thread), that would be appreciated.

Off the top of my head, I can't really recall any that aren't mentioned in this post

[therewillbeblus]

Thanks for the thoughtful rundown, swo

[zedz]

Thanks swo. Even being consistent is a challenge when there's conflicting information out there and it gets amplified and repeated in the internet echo chamber.

In a brief google to see if I could find more background material on In the Shadow of the Sun, I found a bunch of mutually exclusive "facts", including:
- the drive to Avebury footage superimposed over much of the film was shot in 1980 (I'm pretty sure it's from A Journey to Avebury (1971)).
- In the Shadow of the Sun (which is nearly an hour long) was originally part of The Art of Mirrors - a film that survives and runs for five minutes.
- the original footage was shot in 1972 - no, sorry, 1972 through 1974 - nope, make that 1972 through 1975. except for the bits that were shot in 1971 (the trip to Avebury) and 1980 (also the trip to Avebury).

[swo17]

The BFI Jarman booklet describes early screenings in the '70s of "what is now known as In the Shadow of the Sun" with different vinyl records providing the score. (So it may not have had that name yet, but Jarman talked about the project as a whole--as opposed to any one of the component shorts--describing it as "an English apocalypse" or "alchemical thriller.") They go on to describe it has having been "revived for the 1980 Berlin Film Festival," with the new Throbbing Gristle score added. It is this version that played cinemas in 1981. Their write-up concludes: "There is a strong case for considering In the Shadow of the Sun his first feature, even if it was released in cinemas in 1981. Jarman considered it so, and to say otherwise, in fact, risks disavowing this extremely important, and brilliant, early work."

In contrast, they simply put Glitterbug in 1994, though one distinction there is that Jarman is noted as having been too ill at this point near the end of his life to fully control the project, and having given his blessing for others to exercise their own creative judgement with parts of it. If you simply looked at the last filming date and ignored everything else you might put both films in the 1970s, but I think they do a reasonable job of contextualizing why one might be considered his first feature and the other his last

[senseabove]

Regrouping (Borden, 1976) Borden's first film is a semi-collaborative documentary that proposed to follow a group of four women in the 70s whose friendship is loosely, but explicitly organized around their feminism. Its iterative, compounding style is reminiscent of Yvonne Rainer's first three films, exploring first the parameters of the women's consent to be documented, the nature and development of their friendship, and then their growing suspicion of the project and of Borden's intent. As the project itself disintegrates before us, Borden turns it into a meditation on the porous boundary between political identity and identity politics. It is hardly a treatise, though; like Rainer's early films, you might say its subject is how the ideological and the emotional are inseparable, and it deftly explores both sides of the stakes; its style takes on something of the Velvet Underground's story songs with a visual dimension: voices lapping each other as they fade in and out, forcing you to choose a focus for your attention, the association of sound and image drifting apart to imbricate suggestions without ever settling them into fact, new voices fading in or cuts to different imagery pulling attention from whatever continuing element you had fixated on for a moment. While it isn't quite the tour-de-force that Born in Flames and Working Girls are, it feels in some ways like the most prescient and contemporary of Borden's three films, an absolutely fascinating look at what it means to be both human and political, to disagree and still strive to accomplish something.

I'm going to be very upset with Criterion if they don't include this on the presumably forthcoming Born in Flames disc, excepting that I expect it would be at Borden's request; she apparently put it in her closet for decades by choice because of the fallout—it only had three screenings on its release, one of which, at Anthology Film Archives, was picketed by the original subjects of the film, who passed out flyers inviting attendees to a discussion of whether Borden was actually a feminist!

[ballmouse]

Had Mort d'un pourri (1977) been made 20-30 years earlier, it might've been a more stylish noir with a tighter plot. Had it been made a decade or two later, it might've screened less like a B action film. Alas, it was made in France in 1977 where every thriller looked like the last one and where the plot is as convoluted as the hair is long. The plot is typical 70s paranoia thriller. But it actually works a little bit better than most. Maybe it's the noir edge where there's a meeting between the protagonist and questionable character every third scene (the scenes that make up the other 2/3 of the film are chases and women) or maybe it was Alain Delon before he looked way over the hill or how every 70s European B film seems to have a bunch of interesting faces as supporting roles, but I found it watchable. But I don't know it was anything special. I suppose the premise has been done countless times since.

[therewillbeblus]

Given that Radiance is releasing a lot of films during this decade, I figured I'd make a list by year in case those subscribing/investing in the label want to prioritize viewings (I'm including years already covered, since some releases coming later this year are still eligible for the final, annual list):

'70
-Red Sun
-Scream and Scream Again

'71
-The Case is Closed: Forget it (Cosa Nostra box)
-The Working Class Goes to Heaven

'73
-Messiah of Evil

'74
-Thieves Like Us

'75
-How to Kill a Judge (Cosa Nostra box)
-The Sunday Woman

'76
-Fill 'er Up with Super
-Man on the Roof
-Yakuza Graveyard

'77
-The Iron Prefect

[therewillbeblus]

Short Memory (Eduardo de Gregorio, 1979): This French-Belgian political thriller is written and directed by South American storytellers, who attempt to craft the paranoid conspiracy template already made popular this decade into the labyrinthine narratives of their literary natives. It's a film that perversely demonstrates the superfluousness of surrogate vehicles for audience engagement by eschewing the development of its main principal for the bulk of the narrative. As Nathalie Baye resigns her role to that of a silent absorber, combing through files and listening to contacts spin a web of narrative without her active participation, the plot emerges as the central character, pronouncing the vitality of the story's power and justifying the film's existence. She inserts herself into the action towards the end, as pieces have come together, and once they do there's an inevitable disappointment as motives turn out to be familiar and the narrative turns contrived (kinda like what might happen if the audience actually jumped into the world of a movie to find the experience less exciting than unraveling the mystery through a cipher). However, during its earlier, strongest sections, the film reminded me of All the President's Men, only no where near as good (what is?) - but holding a similar style to Pakula’s restrained, careful, trusting approach. Even the ending is a bit of a whopper right in step with the downbeat American Pakula fare! Also, it's fun in-joke to see Jacques Rivette and Bulle Ogier show up in bit parts, considering the Rivettian anti-paranoia in the wake of revealing all the intel.

Swo, can you please add this to SNAPSЖOT for '79?

[swo17]

Done

[therewillbeblus]

I had high modestly hopes for Lemon Popsicle, Israel’s most ‘successful’ film, but it was much closer to Porky’s cheap, unfunny humor and tedious sex comedy scenarios than American Graffiti’s shrewd, entertaining, and vitalizing aimlessness - the film with which is seems to be often compared, inexplicably outside of the era and soundtrack. I kept waiting for something of value to occur, but it’s basically just three non-characters getting laid in the most pathetic possible ways for seventy minutes. And then the film has the gall to tack on a late-act ‘serious’ subplot, giving one of the boys an unearned opportunity to show some care and maturity, which essentially hijacks the narrative from the person deserving the pronounced experience. Of course that person is a girl, and this is a boy’s movie about the journey of becoming sensitive in all the right places - but don’t worry, we get some scenes with just her to exploit that trauma. He just gets the glorified self-actualization. Woof.