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Yeah, Cohen pushed hard for Brown coming back, but AIP was very upset with Brown over a different project and so blackballed him.

knives wrote:Speaking of that sort of score Black Caesar deserves some applause. James Brown has rarely been better which says a lot for those sweet grooves. Too bad they wouldn't let him come back for the sequel.

I have a copy of Hell Up in Harlem that should make its way into my hands by the end of the weekend. After I watch it I'll do a write up on Cohen's work in the 70s. Though, you're right to single out the soundtrack for Black Caesar. It's simply marvelous!

Gregory wrote:Mentally disturbed? I'd say definitely not.

Ra'd been staying with the Panthers (sort of ...) and teaching at UC Berkeley back when the film was shot. Well, arts ...

At any rate, you certainly don't want to rule out music made by the mentally and emotionally unstable, or you'd be left with very limited listening options. However wacko Sun Ra might have been (and I've never really thought he was much more than 'colourful'), I'd imagine he had a long way to go to match Mingus, holed up in his studio with a shotgun, waiting for the police to arrive, babbling to a documentary film crew.

I'll preface this with the caveat that I'm no psychologist, but if Sun Ra truly believed the theology that he espoused, then I think that mental illness is a very likely explanation. And, yes, I think that the same is likely true of most individuals who found there own religions. Regardless, according to this wikipedia article on him, he was once diagnosed as having "a psychopathic personality".

Also, I never said that we should discount the work of the mentally ill. As I've said on here before, I live with OCD, but don't think that that's a good reason to ignore what I write. Even in my own profession there having been plenty of individuals who have struggled with mental illness. Kurt Gödel was a paranoiac who starved himself to death because he believed that others wanted to poison him. But that doesn't mean that I won;t teach his incompleteness theorem. There's actually a great graphic novel that touches on this theme. I highly recommend it.

knives wrote:That said for all the merits his Cohen and De Palma work has I've always felt Taxi Driver as his worst score thundering home each and every emotional point like he was Phillip Glass or something. The music isolated from the film is great, but as applied to the images it strikes me as overwrought and inappropriate.

knives, you've never been more wrong. I think Taxi Driver is one of the great film scores, a composer not simply finding the right music to fit the mood, but uncovering motifs and themes in the film which the writer and director probably never realized were there, beyond perhaps a latent and subconscious level. I am in agreement with the assessment often bandied about that Herrmann is as much an auteur on that film as Scorsese, Schrader or De Niro. His music is what adds the dimension of the unreal - the dreamlike and the nightmarish, the romantic and the infernal - to a work that otherwise may have consisted of strictly sordid realism. A lot of these "emotional points" simply wouldn't be there without Herrmann acknowledging them and imbuing them with power.

I will have to disagree with you on that. To give what I feel is the most blatant example of Hermann excessively underlining the emotions is in the television scene. The horror and alienation is there in the image very powerfully so the music trumpeting forth just seems to be him shouting that the scene is intended to be spooky. It strikes me as a condescending move.

A couple of viewings:
The Big Mess (Alexander Kluge, 1971)
A hyper-collage, hyper-conceptual satire on capitalistic expansion, Kluge’s film feels like a strange, d.a. levy poem about space travel written on a wall in a gas station bathroom. One’s ability to enjoy this film is directly related to one’s ability/willingness to follow the conceptual tangents Kluge is weaving throughout. Particularly of note are the themes of industrial monopoly and industrial scrap. Considering that the special effects in the movie are basically appropriated pieces of trash, Kluge is painting the great cosmic expansion as a pursuit where the largest companies are making insanely massive, state-of-the-art spaceships that are simply floating scrap ready to be bought and refurbished into new floating pieces of scrap not long after being launched. None of it seems to matter to the companies so long as they maintain control. There is a bullying of the private accumulators, who basically do the same thing the large companies do but without their permission (and since the companies own everything, the accumulators are de facto thieves). Despite the variety of faces that make an appearance in the movie, it is the Suez Canal Company that is the main throughline. As a viewing experience, it is heavily fractured, a bombarding of words and ideas loosely linked to more traditional narrative images and shockingly lo-fi effects. It is hard to see the connections sometimes but I think it is the force and speed with which it shifts between tones and storylines that is part of Kluge’s purpose. Technological advancement is seen as a hodge-podge of old, antiquated notions repurposed and new ideas barely cultivated all quickly cobbled together to serve the capitalistic interests of the ones controlling the galaxy. The irony for Kluge is that his movie is like the accumulators in the film: charming and imaginative but ultimately doomed because the galaxy is already owned by the big boys.

Thieves Like Us (Robert Altman, 1974)
It seems like every problem I had with Milius’ Dillinger is effortlessly overcome in Thieves Like Us, even though they are very different films with different intentions. The bank robbers in Altman’s film are not famous but they do gain recognition that eventually hinders their ability to operate. The seeds of envy are sown as Chicamaw begins to be frustrated with recognition the young Bowie receives in the papers. That aside, the movie isn’t really about fame. There is a workmanlike notion these characters have about being bank robbers (“This will be my 35th bank…”), a sense of pride in a job well-done, a sense of relief in having something to fill their time. Altman never treats their bank robbery as anything exceptional. He only goes inside the bank with them once toward the end. No one talks about the Depression but poverty is felt in little moments like the insistent mother making sure her kids eat all the food from their plates or the relish with which Lula shows off the outfit T-Dub bought her in New Orleans. The radio is omnipresent, adding a thick atmosphere where fantasy and reality are strangely on an equal plane, where the pursuit of the robbers seems nearly as detached as the adventures of The Shadow. It also works as a unifying device similar to the loudspeakers in M*A*S*H. (The radio also becomes a winking commentary in Bowie and Keechie’s love scene.) There is pathos and humor in Altman’s human universe, and those two are often inter-woven. I love the scene where Bowie misses his rendezvous because he couldn’t tell if the pickup at the crossroads was flashing his lights (as planned) or if they were simply shorting out. It is the sort of plain, uneventful human misunderstanding that most movies simply don't have the time for. Then there is that strange phrase that pops up from time to time: "people like us" or "thieves like us." It sets the robbers, in their minds, in a category by themselves, a group with a special purpose, personality and function that can only be properly understood by other people like them. Altman lets them talk that way, but spends his whole movie presenting them as sad and a bit lost. It's hard not to see this also as a fairly apt comment on the American South. For Altman, what makes them extraordinary is in just how ordinary they are.

All in all, it is the sort of film that only Altman could make and, it seems, only the sort of film he would/could make during his incredible 70’s run. I am really starting to fall in love with this movie. (Bonus points for being a movie made and shot in Mississippi that doesn’t fall prey to all the clichés that often befall those movies. As someone who has spent most of my life in the state, the proper sense of geography and pronunciation of places was nice to hear.)

I recently got back from Toronto to see part of their A Century of Chinese Cinema series, though I couldn't stay for the whole thing. Most of it doesn't apply to this list but Cecile Tang Shu Shuen was there for a Q&A after the screening of her films The Arch and China Behind. While The Arch is listed as a 1970 film by most sourced, IMDb has it as 1969, so I guess I'll do my write up of that in the old 1960s thread. Anyways...


China Behind (Cecile Tang Shu Shuen, 1974) - To my (very limited) knowledge, this is one of the first films to be made criticizing the cultural revolution. The narrative plays out mostly like a prison break movie, as it follows several mainlanders trying to escape to hong kong. Really tense and well made, and while it's quite critical of mainland china at the time, it's equally critical of the Hong Kong system the characters escape to. One character exploits his experience by telling his sob story in churches about how in the mainland they wouldn't even let him pray. The realism of this film is really unlike anything I've seen in HK cinema from this era, though this type of style would become the norm years later.

In the interview Cecile talked mostly about what she had to go through to get the film made. She had a very tiny budget, and the film was shot on short ends, with cameras borrowed by other film productions. It was filmed in Taiwan which is the only place they could film the material and make it look like mainland china. But they had to smuggle in the portraits of Mao and mainland military uniforms. They also had to teach Taiwanese students all the communist chants and songs. Then they had to smuggle the film back to Hong Kong to get it developed. She used a documentary camera crew for the filming, and much of her film crew were Taiwanese college students, some of whom went on to become big names in the Taiwanese New Wave (though some of the biggest names didn't work on it). Patrick Tam helped her film the stock market scene in HK in secret.

Really amazed by the amount of effort that went into getting this film made, and then of course it was banned in most Asian countries and only was shown in France. Cecile mentioned that she was originally a strong supporter of the cultural revolution and wanted to get involved. Then when she noticed so many people fleeing from the mainland she researched it and interviewed lots of people who had escaped. She said she made the film for herself to help her figure out what was happening.

Viewing Log:

Puzzle of a Downfall Child (Jerry Schatzberg, 1970): Faye Dunaway plays washed up fashion model Lou Andreas Sand in Schatzberg's directorial debut about a woman struggling with her own madness. I'm not sure why, but this film seems to have divided its audience into two extreme camps: those who love it and those who loathe it. Almost no one comes in between. I fall in the former category. I know that I'll get shit for saying this, but Dunaway gave the best performance of a woman who is losing her grip on reality in this decade (yes, even better than Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence) and Schatzberg displays an early brilliance behind the lens that would only grow throughout the decade. Yes, it is overly talky, but it is never boring. Carole Eastman's script keeps things moving at a brisk pace and always feels genuine. I really liked this one.

Remember My Name (Alan Rudolph, 1978): Neil and Barbara Curry (played by real life married couple Anthony Perkins and Berry Berenson) find themselves on the receiving end of a series of disturbing incidents at the hands of his ex-wife Emily (Geraldine Chaplin). As things escalate, Emily's behavior becomes more erratic and violent. While this film undoubtedly influenced innumerable thrillers that came after it, it actually takes a turn in the third act that makes is markedly different from any of those. The longer this one sits with me, the more I like it.

Something for Everyone (Harold Prince, 1970): Based on a play by Harry Kressing, Harold Prince's Something for Everyone tells the story of a young bisexual butler (played by the impossibly young Michael York) who uses his position to try and restore his countess's (Angela Lansbury) estate to its former glory. He does this by seducing both the countess's son and the daughter of a nouveau riche businessman, and then tries to get them to marry each other. There's little flashy here, but the story works well and there are great performances all around. Unfortunately, I caught a youtube rip of this otherwise unavailable gem that wasn't anywhere near what it deserves. Hopefully it'll be rescued from obscurity soon enough. It certainly deserves it.

Women in Cages (Gerardo de Leon, 1971): Another in the series of Roger Corman produced Philippines WIP films. Like the last two I mentioned, the film follows the exact same plot points. Judith Brown once again plays an innocent young American woman who gets railroaded through the justice system of an unidentified South Asian island. Once there she encounters a sadistic lesbian matron (another heavy role for Pam Grier) and an evil warden. She and her cell mates find any excuse to take their clothes off, and by the end of the movie partake in a bloody but futile escape. Although I gave mild recommendations to the other two films in the Corman set, there was something about them that bothered me even if I couldn't put my finger on it. I think that after seeing the same iteration for the third time in a row, I now might know what it is. Even though the women in here fight back and use violence when necessary, they are essentially treated like victims by the films in the genre. Even more egregious, like the conservative action films of the 80s, all of the characters must parish in the end aside from the innocent (though definitely not virginal in this case) woman. All others receive the punishment that the filmmakers feel they deserve. But why? What have they done to deserve it other than violate some unwritten patriarchal assumptions about womanhood? These ideas are still inchoate in my head, but seem to make sense.

The funny thing is until this project I thought Women in Cages was the first in this run of, well, women in cages films because it is such a blatant knock-off of Midnight Express but grindhouse. So I actually don't think it is being conservative so much as just setting itself apart from its source by being violent and grotesque.

bamwc2 wrote:I know that I'll get shit for saying this, but Dunaway gave the best performance of a woman who is losing her grip on reality in this decade (yes, even better than Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence) and Schatzberg displays an early brilliance behind the lens that would only grow throughout the decade.

I'll only give you shit for praising Gena Rowlands in the first place \:D/

Took a week's respite from the decade but came back swinging today:

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg 1977) I'd somehow gone this long without having seen this, but here it is, a Steven Spielberg film every bit as beautiful, awe-inspiring, and full of wonder as its reputation allowed. I sat captivated for the entire length of this slow-simmering tale, admiring the inherent simplicity of its construction and execution and basking in the gradual discoveries even though most had already been long ago spoiled for me in advance. Funny that this was released the same year as Star Wars, a space film that contains no wonder or beauty or awe-- at least audiences were given a choice! Given that 1977 was one of the worst years for Best Pic noms in history, it's beguiling that this film garnered eight (!) noms including Best Director but still couldn't edge out, oh, anything else nominated this year. Well, small consolation, but it's making my list.

Deep End (Jerzy Skolimowski 1970) Interesting film about a young man's seemingly innocuous infatuation with his flirty co-worker that takes several bizarre turns before she and we realize how touched the lad really is. Several weird set pieces help the film seem better than it probably is. Former model Jane Asher's great as the object of affection but despite the claims on the packaging, I found Diana Dors' cameo to be rather grotesque and a good sneak peak at what Marilyn Monroe's movie appearances would have been reduced to had she lived another couple decades.

Lipstick (Lamont Johnson 1976) Above average rape revenge melodrama that seems only to exist for a gloriously brazen two minutes of footage at the end. But man, it's a turned up to eleven scene well worth sitting through the whole catalog of blame the victim theatrics Margaux Hemingway is subjected to over the course of this cynical but all too accurately observed narrative. Chris Sarandon, coming off his Oscar nom for Dog Day Afternoon, gives a great performance as the seemingly mild-mannered music teacher who nonetheless explodes into taking debauched liberties once Hemingway Sr blows off his (awful) experimental music-- that he's charming and attractive and seemingly not a threat in advance makes him all the more effective as the heavy. Having unfortunately suffered through my fair share of rape scenes in films, it's worth pointing out that this one gets points for being deplorable and degrading without actually making those elements into subjective thrills for a prurient audience. This is a feminist film (often clumsily so)-- one that accurately anticipates the future programming of Lifetime-- and there's no question who the audience is. Hint: it ain't the raincoat brigade.

the Other (Robert Mulligan 1972) Tom Tryon from the Cardinal wrote this vaselined Depression-era mess about about a little boy and his murderous imaginary(?) dead(?) twin. Features all the hits you'd want: self-immolation, infanticide (drowned in a barrel of hooch no less), death by rat, &c while sparing anything of actual cinematic value. LOL @ Twilight Time releasing this out of all possible Fox back catalog titles though. It is certainly a good fit with the Fury, assuming their mission statement is to bring the worst horror films of the decade to Blu-ray.

YnEoS wrote:China Behind (Cecile Tang Shu Shuen, 1974) - To my (very limited) knowledge, this is one of the first films to be made criticizing the cultural revolution.

You scooped me! I plan on writing on this film and The Arch later, when I write up the beginnings of the Hong Kong New Wave, but both films are really worth a look, and you're right, look and feel completely different from anything else being made at the time. It's influence is definitely felt in many films of the 1980s, many of which concerned themselves with the problems faced (or for some, caused) by Mainland immigrants in HK.

domino harvey wrote:

bamwc2 wrote:I know that I'll get shit for saying this, but Dunaway gave the best performance of a woman who is losing her grip on reality in this decade (yes, even better than Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence) and Schatzberg displays an early brilliance behind the lens that would only grow throughout the decade.

I'll only give you shit for praising Gena Rowlands in the first place \:D/

Whew. I'm glad to find someone else here of the same opinion. I admire John Cassavetes ambition more than I like most of his finished products. A Woman Under the Influence has always struck me as his most overrated project. I do think that he's made some good films as a director. Off the top of my head, I really enjoyed Gloria, Husbands, and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, but there's always been something about the majority of his films that turn me off.

I do, however, take issue with your assessment of 1977s Oscar race. While I've never seen Julia or The Turning Point, any year that features Annie Hall is a banner year to me. To be fair though, I don't think that the dreadful Star Wars or the okay at best The Goodbye Girl deserved nominations for anything.

Edit: Oops. I just realized that I somehow forgot to write up Rolling Thunder which I watched almost a week ago. I'll leave this as a placeholder to remind me to include it next time.

Annie Hall might be a great film in isolation and an important film in Allen's career, but its place in the popular imagination versus its place in Allen's career are worlds apart which I assume is what Dom was getting at. Certainly a decade with Interiors and Love and Death makes Annie Hall slightly less special. This isn't even going into his amazing '80s and '90s which I feel blows his '70s work out of the water. A giant to a giant.

bamwc2 wrote:I do, however, take issue with your assessment of 1977s Oscar race. While I've never seen Julia or The Turning Point, any year that features Annie Hall is a banner year to me. To be fair though, I don't think that the dreadful Star Wars or the okay at best The Goodbye Girl deserved nominations for anything.

Julia and the Turning Point are why though. They are two of the worst films ever nominated. I go into greater depth in the Alt Oscars thread, but they are mind-meltingly, life-alteringly awful. The Goodbye Girl is middling but at least it has Dreyfuss' Dreyfussiest Dreyfuss performance going for it

Also bamwc2, this has gone on long enough, you need an avatar

domino harvey wrote:Also bamwc2, this has gone on long enough, you need an avatar

I used to have Wittgenstein looking his paranoid best in the previous incarnation of the forum (I went by some other name back then). Now, I simply don't know how to do it. Point me in the right direction and I'll do it.

If you save an image to the appropriate size (150X60 pixels) it's pretty easy. Just go to your user control panel (it is easiest to do this by clicking the new messages button). Under options click profile and then in there click edit avatar. It's self explanatory after that.

The Beguiled troubles me somewhat with its fear of women angle, with Eastwood's amputation as a metaphor for castration, but it achieves such a taut narrative and a steamy atmosphere of sexual repression and hysteria, that it overshadows whatever dubious elements it has. A certain inclusion for me.

Do you feel the same about the female stalker figure in Play Misty For Me, thirtyframesasecond?

It's been a while since I saw it and definitely a film I'll rewatch for this project. Eastwood certainly seemed keen on redefining his persona, making it more vulnerable, all the while still making Dirty Harry et al. It's an interesting decade for him for sure.

colinr0380 wrote:Do you feel the same about the female stalker figure in Play Misty For Me, thirtyframesasecond?

Director's Guide Part 3

Norman Jewison
...And Justice for All. (1979)----Image Blu RA
F.I.S.T (1978)-----------------MGM R1
Rollerball (1975)---------------MGM R1
Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)----Universal Blu RA
Fiddler on the Roof (1971)--------MGM Blu RA

Jewison in a lot of ways could be considered at partial fault for a lot of the genius of the decade in American cinema. Not only was he the mentor to Hal Ashby, but many of his tricks as applied to a traditional Hollywood form really was the entryway to some of the more subtle acts of Hollywood experimentalism throughout. He largely reaches his apex of this with his two Broadway musicals. Succeeding in a combination of the musical and realism where greater talents like Richard Lester failed is enough to make Fiddler on the Roof one of the major musicals of the decade let alone the fantastic weaving of story to song and theme. I remember somebody on the board having problems with the film's treatment of the younger daughter, but even with that in mind during rewatches I just don't see that. The film remains neutral to his ties to tradition and just because he is unwilling to move forward on a subject does not mean the film is endorsing that view. I figure I'll never be taken seriously again for calling Jesus Christ Superstar a great film and honestly sometimes I don't believe it either, but all the same I have to admit that the metaphor works really well and the music is killer. Add onto that a strong set of performances that accomplish everything they need to and more to a pretty amusing Pasolini lite style and frankly it becomes the rock musical of the decade. Sorry Russell fans. I can't really say the same for Jewison's entry into the Corman family. Impressive schlock premise aside Rollerball is simply a very average sports film with embarrassed performances from the leads and none of Jewison's visual chutzpah. He fares a lot better switching to the other Corman with F.I.S.T.; an unlikely starring vehicle for Stallone which he hits out of the park. Really this and Paradise Alley show more effectively than anything else what a miserable way we've got in Stallone's subsequent career as a right wing action god. ...And Justice for All. though is just a miserable way to end the decade for Jewison. It's a very stupid film completely ignorant of the system it is criticizing. It's too busy being proud of itself to realize that Pacino's lawyer is a total boob and constantly wrong. Thank god for Jack Warren and Jeffrey Tambor or this would be an entirely miserable slog.

Melvin Van Peebles
Don't Play Us Cheap (1973)------------------------Xenon R1
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)----Xenon R1
Watermelon Man (1970) ----------------------Sony R1

My pushing for Van Peebles masterpiece of last decade fell on deaf ears, but hopefully his output this decade is famous enough to where I don't have to work for nothing again. Watermelon Man is not only his best film, but easily his most accessible. Pretty much he rescues with the help of a few familiar faces rescues a fairly whitebread script to make one of the most brutal take downs of all forms of institutionalized racism that exists and the exhausted, existential place that would put any person. By its end the film is no longer much of a comedy, but more for an intense feeling of isolation it builds than for giving up on jokes. In many respects this is amongst the most essential films ever made. I suppose the same is true of Sweetback, but more it's place in film history than for the film itself which is so intensely personal I almost feel like no one has a right to view it beyond Van Peebles. The film is just plain incoherent and esoteric to the max, and yet those off putting qualities are just the same that draw one into understanding it as something to respect in awe. Finally is Don't Play Us Cheap which is more a filmed play than a film. The movie does a few things that really set it apart from the crowd and it is very fascinating as a good look into black American theater (it's very easy to understand what Tyler Perry was born into stylistically from this), but it is never really great cinema.

John Cassavetes
Opening Night (1977)-----Criterion R1/ BFI Blu RB
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)-----Criterion R1/ BFI Blu RB
A Woman Under the Influence (1974)-----Criterion R1/ BFI Blu RB
Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)------------Mr. Bongo R0
Husbands (1970) -------------Sony R1

This is definitely Cassavetes most solid decade as a director with even his weakest of the decade being a mostly great film in itself. fortunately enough he starts off with one of his best. Husbands perfects sloppy in a way that Robert Altman could only dream of. These characters just mosey along pouring out in increasingly nervous fashion until the film implodes rather than ends. Given Cassavetes' tendency to explode emotion in caged shouting matches the relative restraint on display here is extra admirable. That restraint is completely and totally missing in his next two films which are violent and unbalanced largely to their detriment. That said the moments of sweetness in Minnie and Moskowitz and the moments of clarity in A Woman Under the Influence more than make up for this leaving one with the impression of greatness even if the end results aren't near that. I should admit I've only seen the long cut of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, but that has enough merits as a great film for it to be real essential. It's also in a lot of ways the least Cassevetes film as all of its strengths such as a powerful and well structured script building the themes in a way not necessarily dependent upon there being a character are not really typical of the man's films strong or otherwise. Even Ben Gazzara's performance generates heat for more what goes unsaid than any obvious inflection. This is just a totally interior experience. Some how that gets topped in Opening Night which at its heart is a very simple film with a familiar story told in a familiar way, but as the acting lays on the acting and so on as an onion. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, gives their best performance ad really shows an art to performance that's typically lacking in cinema. If all acting showcases were this good than actors really would rule the screen. As an aside Cassevetes ineligible Columbo contribution, Etude in Black, is great and shows the possible versatility Cassavetes could have as a director if he so chose to. Just as a treat to yourself it is worth checking out.

Michelangelo Antonioni
The Passenger (1975)-----Sony R1
Chung Kuo - China (1972)-----Mr. Bongo R2
Zabriskie Point (1970)------Warners R1

I'm not the big fan of Antonioni here and this decade doesn't aid in that negativity at all. Zabriskie Point has to be the naidir of his career being a dull collection of boring images as a bunch of hippies fight the man through fucking or something. As a political film, a social film, a toying with surfaces, or any other excuse you have this is a bad movie. If you can past the unnecessary length China is a pretty interesting film in a way that is pretty damn revealing of Antonioni's goals across his career. My toying with surfaces thing wasn't just a joke, but actually what I think he's doing with the shallow people, including himself in this case, that appear in his films. For China that's a whole culture and the reality it represents. We're only given the shallow happy side of the country that the government approves with all hints of the complexity to reality hidden from view only escaping by accident. Though where this dismissing of the political for a love of the lies of the mis-en-scene comes to its highpoint in The Passenger which I feel is the best film of Antonioni's career or at least features the best final shot where his reputation is really sealed. In fact that whole final shot as it travels to find the imperfection of this idyllic space only to dismiss it as meaningless upon discovery is everything that ever needs to be known about the man and why his films retain their popularity.

IMHO, Zabriskie Point is neither dull nor boring, but its characters are, and the film is one great exposal of this. I never understood why anyone could think that this is a film that showed the students' movement or the political debates of the time in a positive light; the 'orgy scene' would be a complete misfire if the film intended such a stance. But if one assumes that Antonioni is actually skeptical about the agendas proposed, it all begins to make sense. Antonioni does show some sympathy for his characters, but that doesn't keep him from being very distanced and critical about them. If the film seems to go nowhere, and if the final 'explosion' is just imaginary, then this only reflects the illusory character of the revolutionary dream. Given that the film was made already in 1969/70, Antonioni's point of view seems astonishing (or perhaps not, given that he was essentially a conservative) and from today's perspective perhaps much more 'true' than films that cherished the movement.

Tommaso wrote:I never understood why anyone could think that this is a film that showed the students' movement or the political debates of the time in a positive light.

Similarly, I wonder if anybody here has strong opinions about Robert Kramer's Ice. Once touted as a "how-to-guide" for the arming of the radical left, when I last saw the film, I was struck by how utterly pessimistic it is about the chances of an American revolutionary struggle, the film being filled to the brim with intergroup feuding and outright failure, manifesting itself in the constantly recurring episodes of male impotency.