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

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#176 Post by **domino harvey** » Sat May 24, 2008 6:23 pm

Me over-reacting on the internet went here.

yoshimori · #177 Post by **yoshimori** » Sat May 24, 2008 6:30 pm

Rules are in the second post in this thread.

denti alligator · Sat May 24, 2008 6:47 pm

Master of lists, zedz, wrote this:

Actually, if you haven't seen 50 silent films, you're not really in any position to make a meaningful contribution to the list. (What if you'd only seen the 38 worst films made during the silent era? How would you know?)

It's not a question of being elitist; it's about making a contribution that is "meaningful," as zedz puts it.

Really, though, domino, I don't think this reasoning is at all "elitist." If you've onbly seen 50 films from the 70s, these aren't your top 50 favorite films of the decade; they're the only ones you seen. There's no process of selection involved.

#179 Post by **domino harvey** » Sat May 24, 2008 6:53 pm

Yeah I don't know, I see you and zedz's point but I also think that it's possible for someone to have seen three hundred films from the 70s and still only like 20 enough to list, and that person wouldn't be disqualified from making a list out of not being versed in the period, they would just have specific tastes that tell them not to list films that don't deserve to compete.

...though I don't know why I even care. I'm sure we'd all agree that this is just a fun little masturbatory exercise anyways and not worth me or anyone else really getting worked up about it. I think I'm just having a bad morning haha

HerrSchreck · #180 Post by **HerrSchreck** » Sat May 24, 2008 6:56 pm

domino harvey wrote:Okay, enjoy your lists guys.

Tho thenthitive..

Someone mentioned Sweet Sweetback Badasssss Song.

Muthufletchers better not forget one a my favorite all-location films of all time... the one... the ONLY,

ACROSS 110TH STREET.

Oh yeah. Top ten city. (can you tell I'm a Bronx boy?)

WHOOPS Edit: I saw dharvey came in and defused the seriousness just before me.

#181 Post by **domino harvey** » Sat May 24, 2008 7:12 pm

For anyone who needs a reminder and feels the need to give it up to the man upstairs (Mulvaney), you can browse the entire Criterion collection by decade on their site

Michael · #182 Post by **Michael** » Sat May 24, 2008 9:03 pm

Is anyone voting for Pink Narcissus? I'm curious. The BFI disc is astounding.

foggy eyes · #183 Post by **foggy eyes** » Sat May 24, 2008 10:56 pm

Michael wrote:Is anyone voting for Pink Narcissus? I'm curious. The BFI disc is astounding.

Not that it's much help, but I absolutely would if I could be bothered to submit a list. Never seen anything quite like it - lurid, explicit, otherworldly, and certainly as wild as anything Anger ever made. Would love to see it rank highly, but fear that you might be alone there, Michael!

A fairly representative cap:

Michael · #184 Post by **Michael** » Sun May 25, 2008 1:36 am

davidhare wrote:Mike I have very mixed feelings about Pink Narcissus. There are moments of absolute genius, but then it just drags on and on. And on. And the classical score is overused to death - what the hell is the piece???? Is it from Mussorgsky's Night on the Bare Mountain? (Brain has snapped.)

My feelings for Pink Narcissus are not mixed at all. I loooove it. Bobby Kendall is pure cinematic, I could watch him walking naked through technicolor haze for hours. Hard to imagine this luminously dream-like film being made inside a tiny Manhattan apartment.

#185 Post by **domino harvey** » Sun May 25, 2008 2:02 am

I'm sure (hopefully not wishful thinking) that Eric Rohmer's Claire's Knee will place comfortably within the list, but I would also recommend La Marquise d'O, a rather interesting Rohmer film from '76. It's a German-language (!) film featuring Ganz and Sander, who both played angels in Wings of Desire. It's quite stylistically similar to Rivette's later adaptations of Bronte and Balzac, I wonder how much of an influence his colleague's film had on him... Plus Rohmer himself pulls a Hitchcock and shows up as a soldier-- my God, he looked near death over thirty years ago when this was made, the man's unstoppable.

#186 Post by **zedz** » Sun May 25, 2008 4:12 am

You lot have been busy the last few days!

Yep, 50 or nothing in my book. If we were taking top 10s from all and sundry, I bet they'd mostly look the same and we could probably just refer you to Empire's Coolest Films of the 70s! list or whatever. We certainly wouldn't be seeing two films from Chantal Akerman in the top 10 (as is currently the state of play, six lists in).

I don't normally give stuff away like that, but this fluke will almost certainly evaporate with the next submissions, so let's enjoy it while it lasts. This is probably also the one and only guest appearance by Peter Watkins in any top ten, too.

Voting so far is very diverse. 203 films have been nominated, with 70 eligible. Current number 1 by a healthy margin wasn't even in the top 30 last time around; number 4 wasn't even top 50.

Still a week to go. I'll be rather disrupted over that time, so updates might be few and far between.

chaddoli · #187 Post by **chaddoli** » Sun May 25, 2008 6:24 am

I hope people aren't forgetting Killer of Sheep. It has just now been resurrected, but it is an essential film of the 1970s.

For the record, right now my top ten looks like this:

1. Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)
2. Claire’s Knee (Eric Rohmer, 1970)
3. Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)
4. Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
5. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976)
6. In a Year with 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978)
7. F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1974)
8. OUT 1 (Jacques Rivette, 1971)
9. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977)
10. The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975)

Michael · #188 Post by **Michael** » Sun May 25, 2008 2:43 pm

It seems like most of you are voting OUT 1 ahead of Celine and Julie Go Boating. The latter is definitely one of my top 3 but I have not seen OUT 1. Is there a DVD out there? How is that OUT 1 is superior to Celine and Julie?

chaddoli · #189 Post by **chaddoli** » Sun May 25, 2008 3:23 pm

Michael wrote:How is that OUT 1 is superior to Celine and Julie?

Because it's longer.

(I haven't actually seen Celine and Julie! I was about to open my BFI dvd but then I saw BAM is screening it in July. OUT 1 is not available on DVD anywhere in the world. I suspect the people who have listed it saw it last year during the Rivette retrospective at AMMI or in London.)

denti alligator · Mon May 26, 2008 4:17 am

Sembene's Xala will be on my list. Others'?

#191 Post by **zedz** » Tue May 27, 2008 12:28 am

Possible spanner in the works for some contributors: I believe imdb had historically misdated Gates of Heaven as an ineligible 1980 film. They have now corrected this to 1978, so it's eligible. If you'd excluded it in your submitted vote because of this, feel free to resubmit a revised list.

mikeohhh · #192 Post by **mikeohhh** » Tue May 27, 2008 1:31 am

zedz wrote:Possible spanner in the works for some contributors: I believe imdb had historically misdated Gates of Heaven as an ineligible 1980 film. They have now corrected this to 1978, so it's eligible. If you'd excluded it in your submitted vote because of this, feel free to resubmit a revised list.

that reminded me to check on another film that I could have sworn was 1979 but imdb had as 1980: Siberiade.

It's now listed as 1979 and now I need to make room on my list.

#193 Post by **zedz** » Tue May 27, 2008 3:00 am

mikeohhh wrote:
zedz wrote:Possible spanner in the works for some contributors: I believe imdb had historically misdated Gates of Heaven as an ineligible 1980 film. They have now corrected this to 1978, so it's eligible. If you'd excluded it in your submitted vote because of this, feel free to resubmit a revised list.
that reminded me to check on another film that I could have sworn was 1979 but imdb had as 1980: Siberiade.

It's now listed as 1979 and now I need to make room on my list.

That gave me a bad feeling, which I've now confirmed. They've finally corrected the misdating of Eros Plus Massacre, making it 1969 and thus ineligible. (And I'd just devoted the weekend to taking in the integral version!) So it's actually fallen between the cracks of two lists, like The Colour of Pomegranates did last time around. Several of us will thus have to revise our lists. For those who have already voted for the Yoshida, my default setting will be to remove it from your list and bump everything below it up a notch. If you want to add a new 50th film to the end of your list, or do a more radical reshuffle, PM me.

On the plus side, at least imdb is improving its accuracy!

Cold Bishop · #194 Post by **Cold Bishop** » Tue May 27, 2008 3:29 am

Or you could just make an exception for Eros, and retain the 70s date for this go around...

mikeohhh · #195 Post by **mikeohhh** » Tue May 27, 2008 4:05 am

Cold Bishop wrote:Or you could just make an exception for Eros, and retain the 70s date for this go around...

yeah, just let it slide. It's not like the movies on the '70s/'80s divide that we could just wait a few months to add to a new list. What if imdb had finally gotten Breathless right the week before our 60s list had gone to press and that movie had found itself without a place on this board's "canon"?

#196 Post by **zedz** » Tue May 27, 2008 5:07 am

Excepting Eros will make my life a bit easier. Is everybody happy with that?

Cold Bishop · #197 Post by **Cold Bishop** » Tue May 27, 2008 5:22 am

We all knew it was a sixties film to begin with, so backtracking now just because IMDB "officially" changed the date would be kind of silly.

Now a question/clarification: Terayama's Grass Labyrinth is listed as 1983, however, it was first released (incongruously) in the Private Collection omnibus in 1979. So it is definitely considered seventies, right?

#198 Post by **domino harvey** » Tue May 27, 2008 5:35 am

I didn't, I followed the rules and was shocked when Breathless appeared on the final 60s list.

miless · #199 Post by **miless** » Tue May 27, 2008 6:22 am

I realize I'm probably a bit late on this, but I used this as an excuse to see which films I love were made in the 70's.

most of them are pretty standard... and I couldn't really cut it down smaller than 12

Stalker
Spirit of the Beehive
Eraserhead
Mirror
Edvard Munch
A Woman Under the Influence
Stroszek
Solaris
That Obscure Object of Desire
Barry Lyndon
F For Fake
Days of Heaven

while compiling everything I realized just how little from every decade I've really loved (my whole 'favorite films' list could be boiled down to less than fifty films)

edit: is anyone else seeing an ebay advert for a '4 ton electric log splitter' on this page?

#200 Post by **zedz** » Wed May 28, 2008 5:45 am

Cold Bishop wrote:We all knew it was a sixties film to begin with, so backtracking now just because IMDB "officially" changed the date would be kind of silly.

Now a question/clarification: Terayama's Grass Labyrinth is listed as 1983, however, it was first released (incongruously) in the Private Collection omnibus in 1979. So it is definitely considered seventies, right?

I'd like to stick with the imdb rule simply because we need some consistent measure, so that would make it an 80s contender, unless you want to vote for the whole Private Collection omnibus.

For rare cases like Eros + we could formulate an exception like so:
"IMDB date determines eligibility, unless a change in that date means that a given film would be excluded from an entire cycle of voting"

Thus Grass Labyrinth is eligible for the 1980s list, even if imdb corrects the date to 1979 between now and its due date.

Does that make sense to anybody else? (And am I the only one feeling an urge to send miless a care package of DVDs?)

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