The 1970 Mini-List

[swo17]

ELIGIBLE TITLES FOR 1970

VOTE THROUGH FEBRUARY 28

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

[yoshimori]

Listmaster! I believe Shinoda's Buraikan, which I'd vote for, is 1970. Not sure what determination you made for Terayama's Emperor Tomato Ketchup. The long-version dates from 1970; the short version "premiered" on January 1, 1971.

What a year! Zabriskie Point and (the first half of) Performance are aesthetic high points in cinema history, iyam. I'm assuming most've seen the fabulously flamboyant Italian paranoia thriller, Il conformista. But I'd also recommend as just as good the more muted paranoia of Rosi's Uomini contro. From Japan, Yoshida's Heroic Purgatory and Jissoji's first feature, Mujo, are very impressive, and the two Wakamatsu movies - Sex Jack and Shinjuku Mad - are among his best.

[swo17]

Shinoda's Buraikan
Terayama's Emperor Tomato Ketchup

I've made these eligible for 1970

[therewillbeblus]

I haven't watched it yet, but I'm planning to catch up with Zulueta's Un, dos, tres... al escondite inglés for this year, if that could please be added

[swo17]

Added

[ballmouse]

Can The Cheyenne Social Club be added?

[swo17]

Done

[therewillbeblus]

There are many great films from this year, and obviously people who can access them should prioritize lovely rare stuff like Stop! and L’Ours et la poupée (and, thankfully some of you may have the bonkers In the Folds of the Flesh on deck from Mondo Macabro's latest sale), but I'd like to make a special plug for The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, which has slowly become one of my favorites of the decade. I'm going to repost my writeup here, and also offer to send anyone who PMs me and doesn't have back channel access a copy of the file, as long as you promise to watch it sometime during the month (no stipulations on writing thoughts, though they would be most welcome!) We can all blame Quentin Tarantino writing trashy books and starting a family and all that B-plot fluff for sauntering around his plan of starting a blu-ray label to prioritize giving this film a decent release.

Also, it has the all-time greatest joke of narrative subversion (segregated to the spoilerbox below obviously), that's both a middle finger to toxic masculinity and genre climaxes, but also, on a subtler level, a bleak representation of the turn of the decade: the experiential apathetic transition from an attitude that believed action meant something into one that knows nothing means anything

The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun
A 'wrong (wo)man' psychological thriller/road movie drenched in psychedelia, that is in dire need of image enhancement to digest its full effect (thank you Tarantino, from the future). Samantha Eggar carries the film as an empowered female individualist, who maintains a sense of self-actualized characterization even whilst she and we begin to doubt her sanity. It's not an easy grift to pull off, but this is a grindhouse gem fueled by pop-art incisions, potent personalities, and intrusive shocks to film grammar that trigger narrative ellipses, all in good fun. The film plays like a fusion of Gaslight, Le monte-charge and North by Northwest set on the tracks of Two-Lane Blacktop's raw, lyrical yet palpable manifestation of free yet lonely spirit, but erupting into its own tone of bewildering urgency.

I haven't seen the 2015 remake, but have to imagine that any intrigue it merits will inevitably be deprived of the pulsating 70s aesthetics and rugged rhythm of the original. This bleeding aura of sloppy edits, music, and lighting engages the audience with such a specific perverse tension that an otherworldly spell is cast, framing the most irrational projections as a sensible internal logic to the time. The subject matter fits so well in an era of psychosocial confusion in a cultural wasteland that the film's trajectory of becoming boiled down to the psychological defense mechanism of displacement is terrifyingly believable rather than exasperatingly disposable.

SpoilerShow

The need for a nearly 20-minute 'explanation' by Reed with deliberately-paced self-indulgent fervor, interrupting the climax in the most abrasive fashion, is a hilariously-executed, cheeky jab at narrative-hijacking. Yet the punchline that follows is even better- as Eggar's 20-second, cooly-delivered Last Words emasculate Reed's accumulated satiety, to end the movie with a stunned look, impotent lowering of the gun, and rapid edit past interpersonal catharsis. We see Eggar exit the police station, and are left to assume that Reed and his wife were convicted, I guess, but the subversive deflation of expected showdown theatrics or narrative follow-through is so bold and deliciously enunciated that I'm still elated from its anti-high. I'm a bit surprised Tarantino loves it so much (even though the rest of the film is so firmly up his alley) because the finish is the exact opposite approach he takes to his own endings, running counter to his ethos of what movies can and should accomplish!

[Rayon Vert]

It was an orphan in the sci fi list so I don't expect it to make this one (!), but I'll give this a plug, from my write-up for that project:

Colossus: The Forbin Project (Sargent 1970). (1st viewing) The insane premise is that the U.S. hands over all control of its nuclear defense system (data collection, analysis, decision-making!) to an autonomous, full-proof, self-learning supercomputer. Next thing you know Colossus starts communicating with the one the Soviets have revealed they’ve just built and then it’s basically HAL taking over the world - your worst AI takeover nightmare. It’s very intelligently scripted and directed and beyond its engrossing suspense - even though for much of its first half or so it’s mostly just people (White House, Kremlin) in tense conversation -, it ends up surprising you by going into some darkly witty routes in terms of what Dr. Forbin and a team member have to get up to to try and fool Colossus. There’s definitely a bit of satire here, and I’d say the computer even makes some compelling arguments at the end as to why humans should perhaps be enslaved for their own good! A terrific discovery for me that goes very high on my list - definitely recommended.

[knives]

For those who could use the help in searching through the list.

[the preacher]

Three for me, swo: Ralph Nelson's ...tick... tick... tick..., William Wyler's The Liberation of L.B. Jones and guilty pleasure Darker Than Amber.

[swo17]

Added, thanks

[Maltic]

Apparently, A Touch of Zen was released in two parts, 1970 and 1971, but I guess we go with 1971?

IMDB has Kozintsev's King Lear marked down for a limited release in the USSR in December 1970.

[knives]

Liberation is a great one. Definitely one of the best all time final features.

[swo17]

Apparently, A Touch of Zen was released in two parts, 1970 and 1971, but I guess we go with 1971?

IMDB has Kozintsev's King Lear marked down for a limited release in the USSR in December 1970.

I've seen conflicting information for both Kozintsev's and Peter Brook's contemporaneous Lears, both of which I've seen cited as either 1970 or 1971. The last time I looked at this I decided 1971 for both, but I don't remember specifically what that was based on. Now I'm leaning 1970 for those as well as Touch of Zen

[knives]

Aside from these lists one of my goals this year is to go through a bunch of Italian films including rewatching some favorites. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage isn’t exactly a favorite, but Argento is and his debut is fascinating in that context.

The movie finds the giallo still in transition. It’s fundamentally a detective story with shades of noir. Many points could easily have come from a particularly nasty Lang film. The hero being a cosmopolitan slice of white bread is the main thing defeating that comparison. The kill scenes, especially in the memorable opening is where the later madness would develop from. As usual though this is an insanely good score.

Less successful, but equally Italian is de Sica’s tepid The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. A fairly listless film which doesn’t really know what it wants to do. Seemingly the point is in how removed the family is from the world. A kind of Decameron situation, but the family drama it fills the time with isn’t drawn out enough to be compelling. It’s just bodies boringly moving through space. When reality does hit it feels so weakly executed, compare the last half hour here to the final shot of Austeria, that I had to ask myself why bother?

Where’s Poppa? had me sold from the opening credits. It’s a totally insane version of a million other films from the era with a sense of hunour that both is of its era and seems exceedingly modern. It takes very mild offenses and turns it into a stew of hatred and violence that is so hilarious. Admittedly it’s sense of humor isn’t for all, but as a lover of Skidoo and Richardson’s The Loved One this worked well for me.

[alacal2]

The Hallelujah Handshake

I'm grateful to Swo for including Alan Clarke in the late 60s and early 70s lists which has acted as a catalyst for a deep=dive into the 'Dissent and Disruption' boxset that has gathered dust on my shelves. Disruption indeed! A young man appears out of nowhere and brings his 'disorderly' lifestyle to a churchgoing community that struggles with the impossible task of both nurturing him and protecting its more vulnerable members.Institutions and individuals collide in unresolveable ways. I've put disorderly in inverted commas because one of Clarke's many strengths is his ability to upend our notions of what is normal.
I loved the way he also interweaves the hymn singing so that it becomes part of the narrative rather than mere filler and in doing so creates a kind of quasi-musical.

There is a recognised and respected category of paintings known as 'outsider art' and Clarke's work is to me the tele-visual equivalent. This is a fascinating portrait of an utterly memorable yet completely unknowable individual - a bit like Clarke himself. Will be on my list for sure in what is looking to be a dense and rich year for cinema.

[DarkImbecile]

I put my full writeup in the filmmaker thread, but I just want to put a plug here for this:

The Garden if Delights / El jardín de las delicias (1970) — "...and so the fruit is only as good as the tree which bears it..."

Carlos Saura's second darkly comic masterpiece begins with throbbing mechanical and electrical noises as the camera drifts through a broken down space cluttered with rusting machinery and random piles of detritus — a space that mirrors the disused shambles of its protagonist's mind and, perhaps, the filmmaker's view of the Spanish civic and political sphere in the twilight of Franco's dictatorship. My favorite of Saura's films thus far, The Garden of Delights is laugh-out-loud comedy layered atop masterful satire, his most technically accomplished and visually dynamic film while also the most openly political provocation of his first decade of features.

I'm sure at least some of my enjoyment is predicated on the close reading and chronological viewing of his films that I've been doing, but I feel confident in asserting that there's plenty to appreciate in this title in particular title for anyone regardless of familiarity with the director or the historical/political references.

[DarkImbecile]

A quick batch of first-time viewings:

Deep End (Skolimowski) — What starts off as a comedic bildungsroman about a young man's first exposure to the bizarre expressions and complexities of adult sexuality slowly reveals itself as a study of toxic obsession and petulant entitlement, and the fact that its very difficult to identify the point in this film where one bleeds into the other powerfully makes its point. John Moulder-Brown's baby-faced innocence as Mike makes even his uglier outbursts tempting to dismiss, while Jane Asher is tremendous as Susan, the seductive and volatile object of his (and others') obsessions.

There are so many amusingly sketched character moments here — the repeated trips to the hot dog stand, the interlude with the prostitute, the contemptuous back-and-forths between Susan and the bathhouse cashier — and Skolimowski adds just a touch of the sinister to several of them, like the least appealing "If you work hard, one day you may be sitting behind this desk" speech of all time.

Skolimowski's imagery dips only occasionally into the surreal and heavily stylized, but when it does the effect is indelible; that final shot is a perfect blend of Mike's earlier erotic reveries and horrific reality, an unforgettable bichromatic summation of the entire film.

Witchhammer (Vávra) — Not only a grimly relentless depiction of the corrupt exploitation of paranoid hysteria behind actual witch hunts, but a pointed — perhaps too pointed for some, as it’s notably even more blunt than Miller’s Crucible — attack on the police state culture of denunciation and arbitrary repression. The production design and director Otakar Vávra’s staging of the show trials, torture, and executions are riveting enough, but perhaps even more memorable are his depictions of the frivolous callousness of the persecutors and their noble patrons.

It’s understandable that Vávra devotes more time to the traditionally heroic naïveté of Elo Romančik’s Kryštof, an educated, cosmopolitan deacon who immediately resists Vladimir Šmeral’s Inquisitor Boblig. Still, I found myself wanting a closer examination of the priest who initially kicks off the investigation into witchcraft, a true believer who realizes his mistake at the most horrific moment.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Jireš) — No matter how disorienting or surreal the nightmare logic of Jaromil Jireš' horror fantasy becomes, the fast-paced parade of remarkable images thematically structured around a burgeoning female sexuality kept me fully engaged long after I'd given up on tracking the nuances of what plot there is. I still have no idea who Valerie's real father is or understand the true nature of her relationship with Orlík, but I'll remember shots of Helena Anýzová disappearing beneath a black cloak or Jaroslava Schallerová floating in a shimmering fountain.

Cinematographer Jan Curík pulls a nice magic trick in making even the most macabre and unsettling images in dark basements feel sun-dappled and shimmering, transitioning seamlessly from radiant exteriors to candle-lit interiors and making them feel as if they're occupying the same space.

Young Valerie's conflicted entry to womanhood — a sexuality alternately exalted and denounced by the church and similarly desired and feared by the men and women around her — is nicely contrasted with her grandmother's desperate attempts to return to the vitality of her youth. The resilience of Valerie's good-natured innocence in the face of sinister or inexplicable behavior by nearly everyone she interacts with makes her both an alluring character to follow and a bit of a blank slate, such that I found myself more interested in the scenes following her grandmother/Elsa's descent into hedonistic selfishness.

[knives]

Deep End was my first Skolimowski and still my favorite. It just captures for me so precisely a difficult kind of headspace.

[DarkImbecile]

Exactly — plus, as I forgot to mention, some really terrific needle drops

[swo17]

ELIGIBLE TITLES FOR 1970

VOTE THROUGH FEBRUARY 28

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

As a reminder, there are just a little under two weeks left to vote for this year

[knives]

I really fell in love with Patrick Carey’s 17 minute ode to nature Oisin. It’s just a beautiful film of quietude and singularity.

[swo17]

I really fell in love with Patrick Carey’s 17 minute ode to nature Oisin. It’s just a beautiful film of quietude and singularity.

Thank you for mentioning this. I've made the film eligible

[dustybooks]

Kicking off the '70s the biggest surprise for me was John G. Avildsen's Joe, kind of a proto-Taxi Driver which I found lean and surprisingly incisive; as unpleasant as the title character is (portrayed very brilliantly by Peter Boyle), it struck me as cogent that he's shown as voicing the secret whims of a more button-down conservative character whose dignified exterior lasts almost to the end of the film. Avildsen is an enigma to me; I dislike Rocky and remember hating Neighbors (which I haven't seen in decades) but have really admired both this and Save the Tiger.

It didn't surprise me at all that I loved Gimme Shelter but, as seemingly happens every time I watch another Maysles film, its intimacy really staggered me. I always walk away from their work thinking "how is it possible that this really exists?". It ended up being a neat double feature with Performance -- only peripherally Stones-related of course, but for me the best part of the film, which I found confused and messy in a way that didn't really work, was when it abruptly and briefly became an incredibly well-shot Mick Jagger music video.

The experience of watching Performance was matched pretty closely by Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion and Le Cercle Rouge -- I liked the latter more than the former, but I was left rather cold by both. I think I'm experiencing some sort of fatigue with backdoor-intrigue crime stories, especially instances like this that overcomplicate fairly simplistic narratives. The conceit of Elio Petri's film is fun and intriguing, but I have to admit I felt a lot of impatience with its stylistic flourishes and just came away fatigued. In Cercle Rouge I felt very immersed in the atmosphere but again, I became exhausted with keeping up with a whole slew of characters connected to the plot, none of whom were very interesting to me. This means I've seen every major Melville film without really connecting with any of them. Maybe someday.

Talking of directors I don't care for, apart from some distant appreciation of L'Avventura and La Notte I tend to get very little out of Antonioni. So in a way it makes sense that the film once regarded as his most embarrassing is the first one that I found completely enchanting. Zabriskie Point has a simple, even silly story and I can't really defend it on the basis of that or on the amateurish nature of the performances in it -- but it's so passionately rendered and I felt all of its oversized, juvenile emotions throughout, and to me its sense of motion and palpable freedom were as profound as any illustration of those concepts as I've seen. I think sometimes maybe it's OK to feel adolescent and very "us versus them" about things again, even if it's a very easy thing to criticize.

Two eccentric New Hollywood creations I liked but didn't love: Frank Perry's Diary of a Mad Housewife is plenty striking in its empathy but I got such a kick out of Richard Benjamin's villainously annoying performance it made the rest of the film seem pallid by comparison. And Little Big Man (Arthur Penn) came off as a huge jumble of half-formed stories and ideas but at its best (which, apart from Faye Dunaway's terrific performance, tended to be the more tragic scenes) it has a lot more weight to it than it first appears to.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and I Never Sang for My Father (Gene Hackman's favorite of his own performances) were pleasant enough but didn't go beyond what I expected, and the latter has moments of real strain to match any insight about emotionally neglectful parents and their semi-enablers.