1970s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 2)

[vivahawks]

Wanted to toot the horn a bit for King Hu's 70s films while there's still time, so here goes. Most of the attention these days goes to Hu's seminal sixties wuxia flicks (Come Drink with Me, Dragon Inn, and A Touch of Zen), and these are great, but people seem to forget or ignore how his craft developed past that. I haven't seen his contribution to the Four Moods anthology or his ghost story Legend of the Mountain, but The Fate of Lee Khan, The Valiant Ones, and Raining in the Mountain are all criminally undersung, entertaining, and innovative films. For those familiar with the Hong Kong kungfu movies of the period, Hu's works may come as a surprise; they're far more graceful, coherent, and cinematically adventurous than even the best of the former.

The Valiant Ones is one of my favorite action movies of the 70s, especially since Hu uses the story (a group of wuxia heroes fight Japanese-led border pirates) primarily as an excuse to explore stylistic, spatial, and tonal variations on the typical fight scene template. One of the movie's many pleasures is the affable serenity of Ying Bai and Feng Xu as Mr. & Mrs. Wu, the lethal warrior couple. As is Hu's wont (has any other commercial action director been more ruthless about their major characters' lives?), the hugely entertaining and often hilarious tone is sustained throughout before shifting for an abrupt, poignantly ironic coda. The ending here is perhaps Hu's most double-edged and tragic, Ford-like in its mixture of reverence for chivalric ideals with a bitter sense of political realities. The Fate of Lee Khan, a sort of companion piece to Valiant Ones, is similarly enjoyable with its tale of four female warriors masquerading as inn waitresses while fighting a Mongol tyrant; I remember it as a slightly lesser movie, but still very worthwhile.

Raining in the Mountain, however, is one of Hu's greatest films and one of the masterpieces of Asian cinema. Again the story and its Buddhist overtones are largely a pretext for Hu's formalist concerns: several rich and powerful sponsers compete to steal a priceless scroll from a monastery while the dying abbot tries to pick his successor. The largely silent theft sequences form the story's center and are some of the finest scenes in genre filmmaking: Hu carves up the temple's space with his camera, employing long shots, tracks, and multiple planes of action to turn its architecture into multidirectional mazes. The compositions are as rich and inventive as Antonioni or Anthony Mann, but they're never just decoration and always pushing forward the plot and its transcendental themes. Hu's editing, always precise and well-judged, is also in peak form here, and the end result is a model for using space and framing to communicate your story and ideas. If you don't believe me, someone nicely uploaded the first theft scene online, so judge for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkC89lP2p8Q. This will be very high on my 70s list.

[zedz]

Less than a fortnight to go!

Seven + Seven / 21Up: I've just caught up with the two 1970s entries in Michael Apted's "Up" series - the only two I hadn't previously seen. Of course, they're fascinating for followers of the series, and quite different in character to many of the later installments - 21Up is probably the most leisurely of them all, for example. I don't think either is going to make my top 50 list (which has swollen to 120 or so films!), as I still think 28Up and 35Up are the best of the bunch. They get the balance of past and present just about right, and the participants' lives are more eventful and surprising at those ages. The latest episode (49Up) tended to become overly self-reflexive (which is completely understandable), and I'm more interested in other aspects of the project.

Zabriskie Point: I just saw this under ideal conditions - front row centre for a lovely new (or recent) 35mm print - but I haven't really changed my opinion of it as one of the Great Bad Films. At times its greatness dominates to such an extent - Antonioni's vision of LA, those last 15 minutes - that you can nearly overlook the badness, but there are so many great films that aren't saddled with such terrible dialogue and performances that I'd rather give way to them on my list.

Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin are mediocre in isolation, but when they get together for those interminable scenes in the desert the screen just dies. Not even the Invasion of the Sex Mimes can bring it back to life. It looks like Antonioni was after Micky Dolenz and just signed up the first lookalike he found, regardless of acting ability, after Micky read the script and turned tail. The scene where Daria is buzzed by the aeroplane for the fifth time in a row and exclaims in surprise "What was that?" is a perfect storm of bad plotting, bad writing, bad acting and bad direction. At least she's tolerable when she doesn't have to deliver dialogue, as in the final sequence.

The worst thing about the film is how mind-numbingly, tragically hip it strives to be, stumbling and coming to rest at the most facile level imaginable in terms of its alleged 'political analysis'. So, free love is, like, cool, and capitalism is, like, uncool, maan. Oh, and the pigs are WAY uncool. It almost makes Easy Rider look meaningful.

However - and it's a big however - Antonioni's style and vision carries much of the film over its self-imposed morass of idiocy. There are enough great shots, great sequences, and great sound / image combinations to keep you aesthetically engaged even when your left brain has left the room for a drink (except maybe in the Zabriskie Point sequence, which not even Antonioni's eye + an incredible landscape can salvage). Sure, the zoom lens is employed too uncritically, but in the course of its overuse some amazing effects are unleashed.

[colinr0380]

Sure, the zoom lens is employed too uncritically, but in the course of its overuse some amazing effects are unleashed.

I'd agree, though I do feel that final sequence kind of justifies the rest of the film by itself - I've sat through worse films for less of a pay off! And I guess I'd be a bit more lenient about the use of zooms in the film after having seen more than a few Jess Franco films where I've been left thinking the zoom function should never have been invented (right, so you are panning over that wall, now another shot focusing on the asphalt tiling around a swimming pool, now another focusing jerkily on a boat in a harbour in the far distance - what can it all mean?? And why do I have this headache???)

[denti alligator]

I just watched Bresson's Lancelot du lac and The Devil, Probably for the first time. They both left me cold, though Lancelot less so than the other. Does anyone want to defend these films and get me to re-think whether I should re-watch them and maybe consider putting them on my list? I don't know if I could pinpoint what left me in so uninteresting in these films, especially since I generally love Bresson (with the exception of Mouchette), but that's also because it's hard for me to say why I think A Man Escaped and Pickpocket are masterpieces. The magic wasn't there.

After Bresson's Devil I watched Family Life, which blew me away, and will certainly rank on my list.

[zedz]

I just watched Bresson's Lancelot du lac and The Devil, Probably for the first time. They both left me cold, though Lancelot less so than the other. Does anyone want to defend these films and get me to re-think whether I should re-watch them and maybe consider putting them on my list? I don't know if I could pinpoint what left me in so uninteresting in these films, especially since I generally love Bresson (with the exception of Mouchette), but that's also because it's hard for me to say why I think A Man Escaped and Pickpocket are masterpieces. The magic wasn't there.

I'm not the one to defend the Devil, Probably (and I have yet to watch the Art Eye disc), but I am very fond of Lancelot. As you sasy, it's often hard to articulate what works for you with a Bresson film, but in this one I love the oppressive materiality of the mise-en-scene - all those shots of feet and earth (Bresson scrupulously quarantines head and feet in his compositions), the heavy clank of armour.

I'm also always amazed by the oblique, rigid presentation of the jousting match, blunt editing creating an abstraction and intensification of violence. Performance-wise, I think the film is a little uneven. Not everyone seems to 'get' Bresson's method (e.g. the guy who plays Arthur).

The amazingly bleak, energetic ending is one of my favourite sequences in Bresson, almost as overwhelming as the end of L'Argent, with the same retreat from an unbearable human world into the point of view of an animal.

After Bresson's Devil I watched Family Life, which blew me away, and will certainly rank on my list.

I'm glad you liked it. Now I'm wondering whether I've seriously underestimated Loach or whether this film really is head and shoulders above his other work.

[domino harvey]

I'd just like to give a shout out to what will likely be the number one film on my list, Wim Wenders' Wrong Move. A fascinating play against the "teaching" aspects of road films, it's really one of the most audacious films ever made and anyone with even a passing interest should move it up in their queue.

[denti alligator]

Thanks, zedz. Your comments on Lancelot touched on some aspects of the film I found intriguing, so I'll be sure to re-visit it, but not in time for it to be reassessed for this list.

I watched/re-watched four of the main Wenders films of the 70s: Alice in the Cities, Falsche Bewegung (Wrong Move), Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road), and The American Friend. If I have time later I'll write a little about each. For now I can say that only Alice will make my list. Im Lauf der Zeit seemed to me to be a grand, though fascinating (in some respects), failure. (I know it's generally considered to be his best work, so I realize I'm probably alone in this opinion.) Falsche Bewegung just didn't work for me (sorry domino), though as a re-working of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister it is certainly an interesting experiment. I can't decide if Handke's script dominates Wender's vision too much here, and if that's the film's drawback.

[zedz]

I love 70s Wenders. Im Lauf der Zeit, for me, is simply magnificent - big and sad and beautiful - and it's well up my list, but I've been parsimonious about other titles. Alice, my second favourite, has dropped down because I haven't seen it in about 15 years, but I may need to revisit that. Wrong Move would come in third - seeing it again recently it was much, much better than I remembered. I've never really loved The American Friend, however, for no good reason (hey, it's got Nick Ray and Sam Fuller, and Bruno Ganz singing the Kinks to himself!): I even prefer Goalkeeper's Anxiety and Summer in the City

[domino harvey]

Falsche Bewegung just didn't work for me (sorry domino), though as a re-working of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister it is certainly an interesting experiment. I can't decide if Handke's script dominates Wender's vision too much here, and if that's the film's drawback.

It's not a popular film among even fans of Wenders, so I'm not surprised or upset. I think your reservations about the authorship of the film are valid and I read an interesting dissertation last year that argued quite well that it in fact was the most uncharacteristic Wenders movie. I think that's going a little far myself but it's certainly unusually pessimistic for a Wenders film. I think of all of Wenders films that I've seen, it's the most dense and the closer a viewer looks at the film, the more it opens up and reveals how intricate it actually is behind the simple ("uneventful" I've heard) surface. It's a film I spent a good deal of time living with while writing extensively about it, so like a good-looking ex-girlfriend, I still remember her fondly.

As for the American Friend zedz, I like the film but I 'just' like it. It's certainly very well made and entertaining, but not among my favorites.

[denti alligator]

Zedz, tell us why you love Im Lauf der Zeit so much. The whole time I was watching it I thought to myself, this feels like a film in which no one knew what to do, exactly. It seemed like there was no script, and even though sometimes this can make for great acting and exciting filmmaking, it felt tedious to me. When I was done watching it (this was my first viewing) I turned on the Wenders commentary track and one of the first things he said was: except for the opening scene we had no script. My feeling is that if it was that obvious it wasn't done well.

However, it's true that the film was drenched in melancholia, and that's something I felt, even if I couldn't let myself fully go with it and explore it in the way that, maybe, Wenders wanted. A second viewing will be in order (I bought the DVD after all), but for now it's on the list of disappointments.

[domino harvey]

I guess we all have our own Wenders movie. That says a lot about him as a director I would say, that he's capable of producing so many different masterpieces depending on the viewer.

[Via_Chicago]

Some thoughts on Lancelot du Lac, per Denti's request:

Thematically, intellectually, and visually, I think that Lancelot is Bresson's richest and most complex picture. With Lancelot, Bresson creates a multi-faceted historiographical and theoretical text (perhaps the most important in cinema next to Ivan and, I presume, Rivette's Joan the Maid), re-imagining the French grail legend "Mort Artu" (the last portion of the prose Lancelot Vulgate Cycle - not currently available in English translation), while also establishing a stunningly powerful metaphor for the modern world (one that doesn't read as simply as that in Bergman's admirable, but flawed, Seventh Seal). In Lancelot, religion and violence, chivalry (in both the traditional and in the romantic [lower case "r"] sense) and Christianity, come together with ultimately tragic consequences. Bresson suggests (at least in my reading of the film) that this intermingling of contradictory elements leads to both a physical and a spiritual malaise (a decline that, significantly, we both see and hear, and thus, feel). In other words, because of their neglect of the truly spiritual (it's debatable whether this "spirituality" is equated with religion, since there's an almost uneasy sense that the disintegration of Lancelot and Guinevere's "unholy" liasion is in fact a part of this same decline), Arthur and his court fall (as Gawain tells he and Lancelot: "All will die").

What I find so endlessly fascinating about Lancelot is not only the immense detail of the picture's historicity, but the visual landscapes and aural soundscapes with which Bresson imbues the film. The opening scene alone, I think, aptly summarizes everything that follows, and provides the perfect bit of visual symmetry with the stunning stasis that ends the film (which zedz has already described above). Look and listen again to those pillaging scenes - the grunts of the knight as he slowly (almost agonizingly slow) draws up his sword to kill his foe; the horrifying image of stripped identity as we see knights, still in their armour, hanging from the trees (Bresson, I should note, dollies in on this shots for emphasis); the horse and sword knocking over the sacraments from the altar while at that exact moment we hear, somewhere in the distance, the cries of, presumably, a monk (is he being killed? is he crying out at the desecration of his church?). This scene masterfully captures the grander themes of the film: the failure of the grail quest, the loss of spiritual identity (look at how Bresson obscures the foregrounded cross while Lancelot prays), and the uneasy connection between violence and religion. All of this Bresson does with a few simple images and a spare, grave soundtrack. His filmmaking, as economical as it was, was perhaps never more so than here.

I could go on and on, but I'd rather not bore you. Instead, I recommend that somewhere down the line you give the film another shot and surrender to its strange rhythms and cadences; allow everything to wash over you and let Bresson's themes and ideas inform your viewing. I find it a magical film, but on first viewing, while I liked it, I wasn't exactly sure how to read it. I've done a lot of historiographical research on the period and texts that Bresson used and represents, so I don't know to what degree that has shaped by viewing experience. Nevertheless, I find it Bresson's most powerful work. It's tremendous.

[domino harvey]

I really hope this board's anti-Bogdanovich slant doesn't effect this list, he's tied with Pakula as the most represented director on my list.

[GringoTex]

I really hope this board's anti-Bogdanovich slant doesn't effect this list, he's tied with Pakula as the most represented director on my list.

I didn't realize there was an anti-Bogdanovich slant on the board. Last Picture Show made my 70s list. Texasville currently makes my 80s list and The Thing Called Love my 90s list.

[domino harvey]

His detractors have dubbed him "Captain Ascot," he's certainly not held in the same regard as masters like Michael Mann

Anyone want to make any last minute pitches for their presumtive number one choices? I'm rearranging my Netflix queue to fit in as many 70s films as I can before the deadline and I'd like to be able to give a chance to what I can.

[souvenir]

Anyone want to make any last minute pitches for their presumtive number one choices? I'm rearranging my Netflix queue to fit in as many 70s films as I can before the deadline and I'd like to be able to give a chance to what I can.

Not my number one, but I hope The Long Goodbye ranks higher this time. Nashville was a whisker from number one and McCabe was up there while this, the better film in my opinion, was quite a bit further down. I'd also like to see someone else vote for Billy Wilder's Avanti! because I stood alone on it the last go 'round (and probably will again).

[denti alligator]

Domino, I've never seen a Bogdanovich film (gasp!): where do I begin?

Souvenir: Avanti! will probably make my list.

[domino harvey]

Domino, I've never seen a Bogdanovich film (gasp!): where do I begin?

They All Laughed and Paper Moon are my two favorites, so especially for the purposes of this thread, Paper Moon. I've placed Paper Moon, Nickelodeon, and The Last Picture Show on my 70s list, and They All Laughed is all but assured to be my number one for the 80s list.

I have the Wilder set but haven't watched Avanti! yet, I'll have to fit a viewing in.

[denti alligator]

Alright, Paper Moon and The Last Picture Show have been placed on my netflix queue (actually, the latter was already there--I've been meaning to see it for ages). Nickelodeon isn't available from Netflix, but I did learn that PB directed Daisy Miller, which I have seen, so I guess I was wrong about not having seen any of his films.

[domino harvey]

Yeah, I got Nickelodeon via R2 (I don't think it even came out on VHS here, much less DVD). It's a pretty contentious film-- even Bogdanovich apologists are split on it-- but I love it. The more the viewer knows about the MPPC and how films were made, presented, and received by the public in the early teens, the better the film will likely be-- this is probably why it bombed haha

[denti alligator]

Two more that will definitely be on my list:

Petri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

and

Hitchcock's Frenzy

[domino harvey]

Apparently you can't delete posts in this forum.

[GringoTex]

Anyone want to make any last minute pitches for their presumtive number one choices?

Oh goody- an excuse to speak again about my number #1 pick, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Last week, my father-in-law from El Salvador was visiting and I made him watch it with me. Between us we drank two bottles of wine and a six-pack during the two-hour running time. He laughed the whole way through it, making him and the screenwriter the only two people I know of who think it's a comedy.

Anyway, this was probably the first time I watched it where I didn't focus on Warren Oates' brilliant performance in every scene. And I realized the two gay baddies really really love each other! When one coldcocks the mexican whore for grabbing his pecker, it's not an act of cruelty but an act of fealty to his partner. Peckinpah shows the extreme discomfort of each during the whore's advances, and I never noticed this before. These two guys are completely in tune with each other every step of the way- in complete contrast to Oates and Vega.

So there are four great love stories in this film: the obvious textual one, Peckinpah's love for Mexico, Oates' love for Peckinpah (when Peckinpah realized halfway through filming that Oates was imitating him, Oates told him the imitation was his gift to him), and the almost subsurface love of the two bad guys.

[Dylan]

For the record, Last Picture Show makes my top five of the seventies.

[DeVaca]

This is my first post on the forum and if Network gets cut again, it may very well be my last. Truly one of the best of the seventies.