1971 poll

[mesnalty]

criterion channel is US only? can't get it. even if it was there.

Oh yeah, forgot you weren't stateside US and Canada only, at least for now.

[rischka]

merchant of four seasons is '72 on imdb.

[St. Gloede]

1971 is undoubtedly one of the better cinematic years of all time. Seen 164 feature length films, but there is still a lot to discover. One thing that is fairly surprising is the extent to which English language cinema dominates the top spots

1. The Panic in Needle Park (1971, Jerry Schatzberg)
2. Walkabout (1971, Nicholas Roeg)
3. The Devils (1971, Ken Russell)
4. A Clockwork Orange (1971, Stanley Kubrick)
5. Reality's Invisible (1971, Robert E. Fulton)
6. The French Connection (1971, William Friedkin)
7. Family Life (1971, Ken Loach)
8. Agitátorok / The Agitators (1971, Dezso Magyar)
9. W.R. - Misterije organizma (1971, Dusan Makavejev)
10. Johnny Got His Gun (1971, Dalton Trumbo)

11. Les amis / The Friends (1971, Gérard Blain)
12. Voldtekt / Rape (1971, Anja Breien)
13. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971, Robert Altman)
14. Taking Off (1971, Milos Forman)
15. Two-Lane Blacktop (1971, Monte Hellman)
16. The Boy Friend (1971, Ken Russell)
17. Hangyaboly / Ant-Hill (1971, Zoltán Fábri)
18. Szindbád (1971, Zoltán Huszárik)
19. 10 Rillington Place (1971, Richard Fleischer)
20. Carnal Knowledge (1971, Mike Nichols)

Honorable mentions:

Shura (1971, Toshio Matsumoto)
Harold and Maude (1971, Hal Ashby)
Kokuhakuteki joyûron / Confessions Among Actresses (1971, Yoshishige Yoshida)
Giù la testa / Duck You Sucker / A Fistful of Dynamite (1971, Sergio Leone)
Straw Dogs (1971, Sam Peckinpah)
Gishiki / The Ceremony (1971, Nagisa Ôshima)
Punishment Park (1971, Peter Watkins)
Sho o suteyo machi e deyou / Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971, Shûji Terayama)
Dolgie provody / The Long Farewell (1971, Kira Muratova)
Bilyy ptakh z chornoyu vidznakoyu / The White Bird Marked with Black (1971, Yuri Ilyenko)
La salamandre (1971, Alain Tanner)
Reazione a catena / A Bay of Blood (1971)
Bang Bang (1971, Andrea Tonacci)
La folie des grandeurs / Delusions of Grandeur (1971, Gérard Oury)
Hachigatsu no nureta suna / Wet Sand in August (1971, Toshiya Fujita)
The Last Picture Show (1971, Peter Bogdanovich)
Dirty Harry (1971, Don Siegel)
Dauriya (1971, Viktor Tregubovich)
Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh / The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971, Sergio Martino)
Bakuto gaijin butai / Sympathy For the Underdog (1971, Kinji Fukasaku)
The Horsemen (1971, John Frankenheimer)
Max et les ferrailleurs (1971, Claude Sautet)
Addio zio Tom / Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971, Gualtiero Jacopetti & Franco Prosperi)
And Now for Something Completely Different (1971, Ian MacNaughton)
Lotte in Italia / Struggle in Italy (1971, Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin)
Duel (1971, Steven Spielberg)
Una lucertola con la pelle di donna / Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971, Lucio Fulci)
Il Decameron (1971,Pier Paolo Pasolini)
Le Souffle au Coeur / Murmur of the Heart (1971, Louis Malle)
Uz zase skácu pres kaluze / Jumping Over Puddles (1971, Karel Kachyna)
Quatre nuits d'un rêveur / Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971, Robert Bresson)
Inochi bô ni furô / Inn of Evil (1971, Masaki Kobayashi)
La tarantola dal ventre nero / Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971, Paolo Cavara)
Sikkim (1971, Satyajit Ray)
Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit / Land of Silence and Darkness (1971, Werner Herzog)
Le moindre geste (1971, Jean-Pierre Daniel & Fernand Deligny)
Quick Billy (1971, Bruce Baillie)
Out 1, noli me tangere (1971, Jacques Rivette & Suzanne Schiffman)
Behinderte Zukunft? /Handicapped Future (1971, Werner Herzog)

[Lencho of the Apes]

18. Pratidwandi / The Adversary (1971, Satyajit Ray)

1970 at IMDB.

[karl]

6. Proverka na dorogakh / Check-up on the Roads (1971, Aleksei German)

Was on my list too, but IMDb has it 1986, the year it was finally released in the USSR.

[St. Gloede]

Thanks, updated my list.

[sally]

appointment in bray - so gracq! i can't imagine any better adaptation. (doesn't look like many people have tried, there's a version of balcony in the forest that no one seems to have seen, but that's it?)

[...]

For anyone who hasn't seen it, and likes other Kobayashi movies, Inn of Evil is worth a view. It's not far off from the Samurai Rebellion kinda vibe in terms of how it works, longish build up of a moral tale played out to a given end in a pretty direct fashion, but this time about a different sort of group of characters, smugglers and thieves who live and work from an Inn ran by a father and his daughter. Most of the movie takes place in the inn or on the little island it sits on, save for a few scenes on or near the river in which the island is located. The story, like that of Samurai Rebellion and Hara Kiri, is pared down to a few characters and elements that give it all that strong sense of purpose or unity which works towards Kobayashi's strengths well. I'm surprised Inn of Evil doesn't seem to get mentioned with those other movies more often since it has a nifty cast and seems to fit well with them, other than perhaps the violence isn't quite as exciting in itself given how this story plays out.

Some youtube screengrabs from the movie

Spoiler!

[rischka]

thanks for the tip greg. nakadai and katsu playing lowlifes is right up my alley

[augusto]

the ceremony (oshima)

a touch of zen (king hu)
wake in fright (ted kotcheff)
calcutta 71 (mrinal sen)
ashad ka ek din (mani kaul)

blanche (borowczyk)
land of silence and darkness (herzog)
the decameron (pasolini)
mccabe & mrs. miller (altman)
cuadecuc, vampir (portabella)

the act of seeing with one's own eyes (brakhage)
two-lane blacktop (hellman)
throw away your books, rally in the streets (terayama)
the last picture show (bogdanovich)
mere apne (gulzar)

szindbád (huszárik)
four nights of a dreamer (bresson)
inn of evil (kobayashi)
silence (shinoda)
seemabaddha (ray)

[...]

You really have to stop for a moment and appreciate what a strange year 1971 was for film, at least in many markets. The US/Hollywood had no idea what they were doing, throwing all sorts of weird stuff against the wall to see what might stick, and taking their cues primarily from Italian movies. Westerns everywhere and of all types, revisionist, old school, head trip, existential, and whatever else might be draw a crowd. Horror movies too were everywhere, Giallo-esque or otherwise and even the more traditional genres were getting updates from changes around ethnicity or race and with new attitudes towards sex and violence that lunged both far to the right and to the left in turns. Like in Italy and Japan, sex movies themselves were plentiful, but new attitudes towards sex onscreen had filtered down into more mainstream fare as well as stories based around rape and sexual adventure were plentiful, with women, of course, getting the worst of it in terms of attitude and exploitation.

The turn against women was strong and direct and can even be seem in many of the titles of movies from the era, which also often tended towards kitschy self-awareness, signalling a desire to be hip and not take the wrong things too seriously, whatever wrong might mean, while also wanting to provide "new" "hip" takes on old genres. Drug references and nods to queer culture were treated as part of the same package, but often just used as nods to the audience being aware of such things rather than saying much progressive about them, sometimes saying more the opposite. Violent cops or authority figures were both lauded for their ability to thwart the counterculture and shown as obstacles that needed to be removed by the counterculture, sometimes maybe both or just left ambivalent allowing the audience to decide what they wanted to read into the stories.

The stars themselves were changing to something that wasn't fully settled, but was "grittier" than before, less "moviestar" good looking and more "real" for the men, while the women were more just dressed differently and given cruder parts, with some changes around the fringes and in older roles more matched to the changes with the actors. Settings too had/were shifting to city streets and like locales in current day films, while the old west and other more fantastic settings were likewise made "uglier" to match the trend.

This wasn't of course something that just happened in 1971, it was the culmination of some trends that started in the sixties and intensified as the older market demands faded, losing their grasp of the times, and "arthouse" and movie productions from outside the US and other old studio systems gained notice for their different takes. High and low moved in to take space from middle of the road films, to varying success, while the middle films that remained and drew audiences also weren't all that much like what was made just a few years before. The major movie industry was in something of a panic, while times were good for more independent or just new operations to step in and get noticed. A fascinating year that almost deserves a more specific accounting for the movies made, because of how odd so many of them are or were for the time.

[wba]

I'm gonna go and copy kanafani: Fantastic year!!!!

seen: 100+ films


probable no. 1 film

Le Mans (Lee H. Katzin)


Absolute Favorites

King Lear (Peter Brook)
Dollars (Richard Brooks)
Blanche (Walerian Borowczyk )
You Are a Widow, Sir! (Vaclav Vorlicek)
The Panic in Needle Park (Jerry Schatzberg)
Long Live Robin Hood (Giorgio Ferroni)
Mache alles mit (Kurt Nachmann)
Doc (Frank Perry)
Trotta (Johannes Schaaf)
Play Misty for Me (Clint Eastwood)
The New One-Armed Swordsman (Cheh Chang)
The Devils (Ken Russell)
Trinity is still my name (Enzo Barboni)
The Beguiled (Don Siegel)


Also Excellent

Shoot the Living and Pray for the Dead (Giuseppe Vari)
Die Spalte (Gustav Ehmck)
The Courage of the People (Jorge Sanjines)
The Third Part of the Night (Andrzej Zulawski)
Love (Karoly Makk)
A Touch of Zen (King Hu)
The Music Lovers (Ken Russell)
The Decameron (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman)

[---]

You really have to stop for a moment and appreciate what a strange year 1971 was for film, at least in many markets. The US/Hollywood had no idea what they were doing, throwing all sorts of weird stuff against the wall to see what might stick, and taking their cues primarily from Italian movies. Westerns everywhere and of all types, revisionist, old school, head trip, existential, and whatever else might be draw a crowd.

Precisely what Linklater thinks! It's short, but it's probably my favourite piece of writing on film:

Ten (sixteen, actually) Reasons I LoveTwo-Lane Blacktop

13 Because it’s both the last film of the sixties—even though it came out in ’71—and also the first film of the seventies. You know, that great era of “How the hell did they ever get that film made at a studio?/Hollywood would never do that today” type of films.

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

Agree with greg's assessment of this era.

On that note, it's always frustrating to me the way there tends to be a widely believed simplistic narrative that the New Hollywood and the fall of the Hays Code led to more progressive movies than what came in the decades prior. I'll see new movies with friends, complain about them morally and politically, and then they'll say "But then how can you possibly love old movies, which must be so much worse!" They are worse, sometimes and in some ways, but not always. And certainly if one's comparing 1940s American films and 1970s American films, the 1970s was an ambivalent mixed bag of changes at best. There absolutely are ways that the 1970s was a better moral and political time for American movies, especially in terms of independent filmmaking, but I think it's clear that the new climate of permissibility in representation and awareness of issues of race, gender, and sexuality most frequently led to more explicit violence and slurs against marginalized groups in the commercial US industry. The assumption is that the Code was simply a means for stifling progressive possibilities. It was used to do that, but it wasn't only that. It banned racist slurs, it banned rape jokes, it banned making criminal violence look cool (not always with success), etc. When the floodgates opened with the end of the Code, a lot of the immoral stuff the Code wouldn't let you do started to be done in spades, a pent-up energy of violence let loose and imbued with an air of cool rebellion. Don't mean to be denying the new positives that came and certainly don't mean to be defending the violent aspects of studio-era Hollywood, of course. Just accounting for why I tend to feel safer watching Code-era American movies than 1970s and 1980s American movies, which so often offend me with greater severity than their Code counterparts.

[arkheia]

appointment in bray - so gracq! i can't imagine any better adaptation. (doesn't look like many people have tried, there's a version of balcony in the forest that no one seems to have seen, but that's it?)

One more I can think of is the experimental film Chemins by Martine Rousset which features an unfinished text La Route spoken over 16mm footage of forests and old stone ruins. Not having read any Gracq, I can't speak to how it interprets its source material but the footage is quite nice.

[Angel]

You really have to stop for a moment and appreciate what a strange year 1971 was for film, at least in many markets. The US/Hollywood had no idea what they were doing, throwing all sorts of weird stuff against the wall to see what might stick, and taking their cues primarily from Italian movies. Westerns everywhere and of all types, revisionist, old school, head trip, existential, and whatever else might be draw a crowd. Horror movies too were everywhere, Giallo-esque or otherwise and even the more traditional genres were getting updates from changes around ethnicity or race and with new attitudes towards sex and violence that lunged both far to the right and to the left in turns. Like in Italy and Japan, sex movies themselves were plentiful, but new attitudes towards sex onscreen had filtered down into more mainstream fare as well as stories based around rape and sexual adventure were plentiful, with women, of course, getting the worst of it in terms of attitude and exploitation.

They killed the genres. And the health of the industry rests in its genres, not in its auteurs (there was, there are and there will always be auteurs). The average level of spaghetti westerns, giallos, poliziotteschis, erotic comedies, etc. was terrible and the same goes for American, Japanese or any other cinema industry.

[sally]

One more I can think of is the experimental film Chemins by Martine Rousset which features an unfinished text La Route spoken over 16mm footage of forests and old stone ruins. Not having read any Gracq, I can't speak to how it interprets its source material but the footage is quite nice.

sounds intriguing....i don't imagine it's something i can get hold of with eng subs though...

[thoxans]

emitai (ousmane sembene) i was kinda lukewarm on black girl tbh (never thought i'd say those words, but here we are). i'm more of a cisse or mambety kinda guy, but this was really well done. feels slightly bunuelian at times, with its absurdist colonialist critiques, and the political commentary seems like something straight out of an eastern european flick, and yet it all remains unmistakably african. also, the colours are gorgeous! rarely have plight and the downtrodden looked so good. added to my initial list

*trying to be a more active participant with these polls

[...]

And the health of the industry rests in its genres, not in its auteurs

Nice, hadn't thought of it that way before, but there's some truth to it that explains a lot when looking at how things trend over different film histories.

[brian d]

emitai (ousmane sembene) i was kinda lukewarm on black girl tbh (never thought i'd say those words, but here we are). i'm more of a cisse or mambety kinda guy, but this was really well done. feels slightly bunuelian at times, with its absurdist colonialist critiques, and the political commentary seems like something straight out of an eastern european flick, and yet it all remains unmistakably african. also, the colours are gorgeous! rarely has plight and the downtrodden looked so good. added to my initial list

i'd agree with just about all of this. sembène hasn't ever been my thing (based on xala mostly, though i'm ok with black girl). i've watched emitaï, ceddo, borom saret, and mandabi in the past year and really liked the first two, and didn't dislike any. i've got guelwaar lined up soon so we'll see how that goes.

[sally]

what was that sembene film with just farting in the first scene? i didn't like that one. but i think my problems with sembene in the past are ones that i would ignore now. looking forward to emitai

[Lencho of the Apes]

BLACK & WHITE 'SCOPE! BLACK & WHITE 'SCOPE! BLACK & WHITE 'SCOPE! SO PRETTY!

Ballad Of Bering And His Friends - dir. Yuri Shviryov, USSR.

Made for 6th-7th-8th year schoolchildren, but Soviet craftsmanship is in full effect. Also: nautical! Hubba.

3 beri 3.JPG (42.68 KiB) Viewed 4467 times

3 beri 2.JPG (47.78 KiB) Viewed 4467 times

3 beri 1.JPG (22.39 KiB) Viewed 4467 times

3 beri 4.JPG (29.52 KiB) Viewed 4467 times

[Silga]

I watched The Andromeda Strain ( Robert Wise). Lots to love - simple, yet very effective film with elaborate set design, chilling atmosphere and no unnecessary subplots. Definitely going to my final list.

Next up: THX 1138 (George Lucas)

[rischka]

one of the angriest films i've ever seen. it recalls 'investigation of a citizen above suspicion' but doesn't work nearly as well for me.

a sort of successor to monicelli's i compagni too, which i much preferred. volonte is gigantic though

[Lencho of the Apes]

At first glance, I thought that was David Reynoso from Viento Negro. Great title, I'm inspired to check it out just for that.

[rischka]

At first glance, I thought that was David Reynoso from Viento Negro. Great title, I'm inspired to check it out just for that.

yeah i was too lol. eat the rich starting to like it more as it settles into it's rhythm

[Lencho of the Apes]

Does anybody have an srt for Oshima's The Ceremony?

[rischka]

https://we.tl/t-piMJlQI0xN

try this

[Lencho of the Apes]

Beautiful, thanks!

[Lencho of the Apes]

How'bout, um, there's one more I'm missing. The S. Ray one, The Middleman/Company Limited. If anyone can hook me up with that, I think I'll have everything sorted.

For now.