1970s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

[swo17]

Sorry, you're right, I was thinking of WarGames.

[bamwc2]

It's been a long time since I saw it too, but I can say that beyond a shadow of a doubt James Caan was not in WarGames unless it was some uncredited cameo that I've forgotten about since watching it last in the late 80s. So, who are you guys thinking about? I don't see any obvious Caan analogues in the film's cast listing.

[domino harvey]

Spoiler

A bad joke exchange based on "The only way to win is not to play" and swo's comment

[swo17]

Yuri Ilyenko's The White Bird with a Black Mark--a 5,000 word review:

[TMDaines]

Very good. I need to watch this and haven't made the progress through the Ukrainian boxsets that I'd like. Stunning imagery is a given for these films though, it seems.

[domino harvey]

the Blood Spattered Bride (Vicente Aranda 1972) A lot of you probably own this and don't even realize, as Blue Underground buried it on the second menu page of extras for their Blu-ray of Daughters of Darkness. And while this fuzzy business is ultimately your basic lesbo vamp stuff, it has enough weird touches to keep it worthwhile. I actually thought the first act was the strongest, when the blushing virgin bride gradually realizes not only what sex is but that her once-patient husband now wants her at all times and literally never stops trying to put something inside her for at least the first half hour of the film. Once we get into the vampire who haunts the joint communicating via dreams and so on it gets a little more rote, though there is a peculiar scene where the vamp is discovered buried under the sand at the beach and when the asshole husband digs her out, the first thing he frees are her bare breasts! Honestly, the amazing trailer for this and I Dismember Mama that appeared on the first 42nd Street Forever comp set highly unrealistic expectations!

Daughters of Darkness (Harry Kumel 1971) Stylish and well-paced slow burner about Delphine Seyrig doing her thing while the rest of the vampire movie happens around her. A great example of a movie that sounds far more ludicrous once one tries to actually write out what transpires, but it all has a weird, wonderful logic of its own. Also, apparently I've been saying "Bathory" wrong!

the Day of the Jackal (Fred Zinnemann 1973) If you have been reading my posts here long enough then you know there's little love lost between me and Fred Zinnemann, but as with the Nun's Story and Oklahoma!, when he's presented with a specific adaptive work and afraid to deviate from it too much, the end result can actually be quite good, and this thankfully falls under the thumbs-up category. Tracing the incremental steps undertaken by both a hired assassin and the police force trying to catch and/or stop his attempt on de Gaulle's life in 1963, it's easy to see the effect the film has had on other works that owe much of their now-lauded structure to this (Zodiac and Munich spring immediately to mind). The drama-free approach does sometimes teeter close to just being inert, but I did find myself enjoying the picture, even if I kept questioning some of the more circuitous methods employed by the assassin.

Myra Breckinridge (Michael Sarne 1970) I don't know why I was surprised to discover after-the-fact that the commonly held critical consensus on this film is that it's awful, but chalk up another one for not listening to the opinions of others before forming your own. I think the film is doing a lot of interesting things that got glossed at the time of release and are possibly still ignored. Namely, this is a movie made at the dawn of the 70s cinematic freedom era and yet despite all of its newfound abilities to break-free of the classical studio methods, the film is obsessed with and attempting to engage with how the studio system imparted shared cultural knowledge to audiences. That the film stars several aging Hollywood players in both lead and cameo appearances (including Mae West, John Huston, Andy Devine, and John Carradine) is only helping to bleed the lines. The film is of course ultimately suspect of the studio era (Raquel Welch has a hilarious line about how "Between 1935 and 1945, no unimportant American films were made"), and yet it populates the screen not only with vintage posters but clips from (obviously Fox-owned) studio pics. At first these interruptions as ironic commentary-- the great underscoring of the opening dance number between Rex Reed and Raquel Welch is set to a singing Shirley Temple imploring us to S-M-I-L-E-- but eventually these interjections become noise and static, unable to even serve as criticism or counterpoint. And this is a film that ultimately assaults the viewer on all fronts-- it pushes outrageous then-new moral and sexual freedoms while undermining every myth of Hollywood and making fun of method acting, organized education, and traditional gender roles in the process. By the time Raquel Welch strips down to a star-spangled swimsuit, dons a strap-on, and proceeds to rape an aspiring actor, the point couldn't be clearer. And yet it seems this Gore Vidal adaptation is either lampooned as a mess or revived as some sort of camp trash, when instead I think it's one of the first honest and biting critical approaches to the institutional myths of the Hollywood machine. Highly recommended to adventurous types.

Next Stop, Greenwich Village (Paul Mazursky 1976) Another wonderful Mazursky pic, filled with small-scale adventures in 1953 Greenwich Village, which is convincingly sold with little prodding as one of the greatest places to make your way as a young intelligent person trying to find footing in the creative world (Again, I must ask, where's that time machine?). Christopher Walken steals the movie in an early supporting role as that one guy we all know, smart and smooth but essentially hollow inside like a chocolate Easter bunny. Jeff Goldblum also has a memorable if brief turn as an aspiring actor who learns the hard way not to be so full of himself. I'm starting to be convinced that Mazursky is the master of episodic filmmaking, as the film's best moments are found in its small, well-observed details, such as when three of the friends make their way home from an illegal abortion doctor and proceed to prance along with a hopscotch board in the middle of their conversation.

[knives]

I haven't had the time to write about the (or any) Mazursky, but that's easily my favorite of his and will have to make my list. Even as it focuses so hard on the time and location of its setting I feel it beautifully and honestly touches on what it is like to start off as a failure and fall to success. The stuff with the parents is particularly great, the darker grumblings might have well have been documentary footage of when I first left home, but every beat seems so utterly true that if there is a made moment it is completely hidden away.

[FerdinandGriffon]

Yuri Ilyenko's The White Bird with a Black Mark--a 5,000 word review:

What DVD was the source for these screenshots?

[swo17]

It's in both the Ilyenko and Mykolaichuk sets pictured here, very difficult to obtain. You basically either need to be affiliated with an institution, visit the Ukraine in person, or luck into a copy.

[FerdinandGriffon]

It's in both the Ilyenko and Mykolaichuk sets pictured here, very difficult to obtain. You basically either need to be affiliated with an institution, visit the Ukraine in person, or luck into a copy.

I am burning with envy.

[swo17]

Spotlight: The Stone Wedding (Mircea Veroiu & Dan Pița)

This was named one of the best Romanian films of all time in a 2008 national poll, by people who evidently know exactly what they are talking about. It's really a split film, with each of the named directors helming a piece. Both are adaptations of the writings of one author, which supposedly was a way to get away with subliminally criticizing Ceaușescu in a public forum.

The first part of the film tells of an old woman who must slave away to care for her sickly daughter, the only still surviving member of her family. The film focuses on the exquisite drudgery of her existence, unfolding in stunningly framed B&W scenes which for all I know inspired Béla Tarr to become a filmmaker. In contrast to a film like The White Bird Marked with Black, which tries hard to look beautiful and succeeds admirably, this is that rare beast that manages to bring out great beauty in the mundane, seemingly without trying. And then there's the distinctive soundtrack, consisting largely of archaic Romanian folk songs, but occasionally swelling with the score into a sublime cacophony.

The second part of the film is not quite the revelation that the first part is, but still rounds the film out quite nicely, exploring a similar theme in a very different way. Here we have a wedding dinner disrupted by the fact that the bride can't take her eyes off one of the performers in the wedding band. These scenes feel a bit like Pasolini in comedy mode, though fear not, lovers of tragedy--this story does not end well. The film can probably be read allegorically as a criticism of the empty pageantry of Ceaușescu's regime and of his preferred method for dealing with dissidents. The soundtrack is also similar to that for the first part, only with more wedding songs obviously.

I wouldn't normally recommend that you watch a film on YouTube, but the version available there is no worse than any other copy that I'm aware of, even if you have access to back channels. If anyone here happens to be dining soon with Martin Scorsese, you might drop a hint that this would be a prime candidate for the WCF to tackle.

[swo17]

Some more strong recommendations:

Wrong Move (Wim Wenders)
What can I tell you? When domino's right, he's right. And he's right here. Wenders' other road films may boast more aesthetic pleasures, but this one gets under my skin in all the right ways. It has a bit of a rough-around-the-edges quality to its construction--exemplified by that haunting, repetitive score (shades of Howard Shore's for Naked Lunch)--which is completely in keeping with its über-bleak world view.

The Hunters (Theo Angelopoulos)
Basically the exact same movie as The Traveling Players, except that the narrative device of a theater troupe trying to perform a play has been replaced with the slightly more sci-fi concept of a group of hunters struggling to explain the discovery of a freshly deceased corpse from an old war. This launches a metaphysical journey into various epochs of Greece's recent past, drifting in and out of each other as if in a dream.

There has been some controversy about how Artificial Eye released this DVD in a form missing about 20 minutes (out of an almost 3-hour runtime). Two points about this: 1) This is somewhat understandable in the same way that it made sense for Second Sight to release a shorter cut of The Color of Pomegranates--the AE DVD looks very good, and the missing scenes aren't available in anything approaching the same quality. 2) Given the film's abstract narrative structure, you won't know you're missing anything unless you happen to already be familiar with the longer version. In other words, don't let this issue keep you from watching the film!

I, Pierre Rivière… (René Allio)
Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins)
Both of these films make the commercially difficult but artistically satisfying decision to tell their stories of people from the 19th Century by traveling to the lands where they lived and casting spot-on local non-actors in all of the parts. (In the case of the latter, this even results in the film being acted and narrated in different languages.) And both of these films do a remarkable job of capturing the social and political climates of the times in which they are set and which shaped each of these characters' particular madness--one a painter, the other a murderer.

Side note: Rather confusingly, the Allio film is not the only film from 1976 released under that title on DVD in the UK. This is the version I'm recommending.

Blaise Pascal (Roberto Rossellini)
It should go without saying that a film about a mathematician is going to be fascinating, but the thing here that really sets me into fits of hysteria is the sickly orchestral score (somewhat reminiscent of Gavin Bryars' "Sinking of the Titanic") which perfectly captures the feeling of a world drowning in a void of knowledge.

The Ossuary (Jan Švankmajer)
Astounding short documentary on a house of bones so outrageous in design that if it didn't exist, Švankmajer probably would have built it himself. What are the three most important things to consider when making a film like this? Location, location, location. And editing. And a Zdeněk Liška score. Sorry, I probably should have only said "location" once.

Taking Off (Miloš Forman)
Impeccably cast culture-clash comedy that loves its characters too much to resort to potshots against either side. Instead, the film mines laughs from somewhat surreal situations that bear the mark of screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. In addition, this is unmistakably the work of Miloš Forman, despite having little in common with the work of Milos Forman. The film's title is perfect too--I can think of at least six different meanings for the titular phrase that the film goes into (a child running away from home, an adult shirking responsibility, seeking stardom, disrobing, drug use, and whatever form of therapy that is that the dad tries throughout the film).

[knives]

I've been thinking a lot about Blaise Pascal lately with regards to the conversation on Europe '51 and in a lot of ways I think it is the most cynical continuation of that Francis obsession. Again we have someone trying to make sense out of the world and free it from contradiction only for the state apparatuses to run him to ruin (this time to the point of absolute destruction). It's not even a socially motivated destruction this time, but for the basic need to understand, like you said knowledge. Scenes like the one where his body has completely given up on him and yet he continues to explain air pressure to an angry mass is just tragic in a way only Rossellini seems able to convey. I hope you (and everyone else) checks out the other films in the set especially Cartesius which is probably my favorite film ever.

[swo17]

Yes, there's a lot going on there, and I've only touched on the surface pleasures. And of course, you have to watch Cartesius to better appreciate the Descartes cameo in Blaise Pascal.

[Tommaso]

Rheingold (Niklaus Schilling, 1978): A diplomat's wife has a love affair with a man who sells snacks on the 'Rheingold' train going from Holland to Switzerland. One day, her husband finds out and in a rage stabs her with a paper knife. The husband leaves the train in a panic, but feels remorse so he tries to catch the train again by following it in a taxi. Meanwhile, the woman tries to hide her wound from the other passengers on the train and slowly bleeds to death.

This is basically all that happens in this extraordinary film by one of the unsung heroes of the new German cinema, Niklaus Schilling, but describing the plot doesn't do the film any justice at all. Almost exclusively set inside the Rheingold train, the film's train ride through Germany becomes a reflection on history and myth, and also on film history. Thus the title doesn't only reference the train's name, but of course also Wagner and the Nibelungen saga. There's an old man who tells his granddaughter about the Lorelei myth, with said blonde child looking as if she came directly out of some Third Reich film. Actress Elke Haltaufderheide (who also produced the film), a woman dressed in white and of ethereal blonde beauty, sports an alluring Weimar hairstyle and is the closest lookalike of 30s superstar Lilian Harvey I've ever seen on film. It's never made clear why she decides not to simply call a doctor after she's been stabbed, but the film isn't about 'logic'. Instead it probes the whole idea of suffering to death so pertinent to German myth and cinema of a certain period, and it's probably no coincidence that Schilling mentions directors like Wysbar and Harlan as influences (which certainly didn't go down well with German audiences at the time). Harlan's "Opfergang" might indeed be a good reference point or even comparison. Much of the film's effect is created by the mystical, but also threatening electronic soundtrack by Eberhard Schöner, and with its painterly and often artificial images and glorious use of colour the film feels much more modern than most other German films from the 70s I can think of. If you liked Kraftwerk's "Trans Europa Express" video, this one should go down very well, too.

While the film was booed at its German premiere, it was rather successful when it was shown at a festival in LA in 1978, with one critic calling the hallucinatory images that the dying woman sees "some of the most unusual in film history. I cannot describe the majesty and romanticism of those scenes" [translated back from a German translation]. I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately the film is difficult to see, although there is a German dvd release which is OOP but can still easily be had via amazon marketplace. So, if you can get it, get it. It's certainly one of the most unusual films from this period.

[swo17]

Unfortunately the film is difficult to see, although there is a German dvd release which is OOP but can still easily be had via amazon marketplace.

This one here? Does it have English subs?

[Tommaso]

Yes, that one. I only have a TV recording, so I can't say for sure whether it has subs, but most likely not.

I've also found out now that producer Elke Haltaufderheide has a webshop where she sells this film and eleven other Schilling films at very reasonable prices (the other films are otherwise commercially completely unavailable). Perhaps ask there directly?

[swo17]

I've sent an email, so we'll see. You sure do have a knack though for recommending films that 99% of the planet can't watch.

[Tommaso]

It's not my fault if all the good things from Germany (and Austria) are so constantly ignored, and not only by the rest of the world....

[the preacher]

One month left! I guess it's time to nominate a spotlight: The Green Wall (1970, Armando Robles Godoy).

A film that embeds the senses of the viewer from the first scene because of the strength of its narrative, the usage of juxtaposed time, and its dialectical display of images. It is a story of an urban heroic young couple and their little son who against all odds decide to move to the Peruvian jungle, embracing a nationalistic colonizing project encouraged by the government during the 70’s. The family’s idyllic life is disrupted by the many difficulties they have to face in order to fulfill their dreams. The story is a metaphor of the dilemma that Peruvian citizens were experiencing during that time in a country where social change, progress, and individual realization were difficult to achieve. The masterful final sequence will leave the spectator speechless for its unexpected development of the story. The Green Wall is considered “a bitter and beautiful movie” and a piece of art from the late Armando Robles Godoy, who is considered the only Peruvian filmmaker to have created an auteur cinema in Peru. (introduction by Mildred Lopez)

Roger Ebert review.

For Spanish speakers: Una clase de cine con Armando Robles Godoy.

[swo17]

Yes, there's one month left as of today. People can PM me their lists at any time. Please refrain from posting your lists here until the appointed time following the deadline. But please do talk up any of the films that you are planning on listing that you feel others should strongly consider for their own lists. To wit:

Spotlight #2: Duvidha (Mani Kaul)

Unless I'm missing something, it doesn't appear that this stunning film has ever been discussed even in passing on this forum. There is, however, a quite insightful thread about the film (including loads of great screenshots) over at Mubi. This is my first Kaul film, and perhaps many of them are like this, but it's unlike any Indian film I've seen before, made with a level of bold artistry that makes even Satyajit Ray look mainstream in comparison. (For example, note how the static shots from Charulata are used even more radically here.) It's not quite as bold as The Color of Pomegranates, though it does at least seem to have been filmed on the same planet.

The film is available in this DVD 3-pack from Shemaroo.

[swo17]

I've also found out now that producer Elke Haltaufderheide has a webshop where she sells this film and eleven other Schilling films at very reasonable prices (the other films are otherwise commercially completely unavailable). Perhaps ask there directly?

And the answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that these DVDs have no English subtitles.

[the preacher]

Just noticed that Carlos Hugo Christensen's A Intrusa, usually listed as a 1979 film is now a 1987 (!) film by the IMDb. It was shown at the Gramado Film Festival, March 1980, but I was not able to find an earlier release. Is it eligible or not?

Btw, Borges didn't like this adaptation but the film is great.

[swo17]

If you can find a source for 1979 and use that to get IMDb to add the earlier release date, then it will be eligible. Otherwise no.

[the preacher]

Just find this: 29 December 1979. I can't say anything about the reliability of the source, though.