"Malaiseyness" wasn't my description, and I wasn't talking about attuned-to-zeitgeist people like Eustache and R Cardona Jr addressing the 'failure of 68'... but about stalwartly bourgeois filmmakers like Chabrol and Altman starting to load their scripts with reform-conscious thematics that no longer register as righteously as was intended because -- as I said -- the terms of public discourse have evolved. I'm very much indulging in the kind of ahistorical "nowism" that we talked about in that LB thread on The Sun Shines Bright ( I think it was Carlos V. that invented the word, so props to him...) but I'm not offering a coherent critique, just observing a tendency. From what I've watched for this poll, these movies are the ones that shared that quality of being on the threshold:
Cooley High: I found it impossible to tell if it was "authentic" representation for an underserved demographic, or if it was a minstrel-show performance of blackness.
Playing With Fire - Robbe Grillet: feminist content vitiated by ARG's inability to treat his material as anything more than jeux-d'esprit abstractions for him to play wittily with.
Mandingo - Fleischer: the very definition of 'problematic', from start to finish. The question of how an audience would have understood those transgressions in '75 can't easily be resolved.
The Moon Over The Alley: about gentrification,, which is ahead of the curve... but there's something smug and po-faced about their insistence on treating cultural diversity as a check-box list to go down. "Look! There's a gentleman from India! And a Jamaican woman with her baby! And a homeless couple sleeping behind the dustbin, aren't they adorable! And there's even exactly two homosexuals!"
Nashville: Haven't watched it yet, but the cultural appropriation was so! strong! during the credits, in that sequence where a dozen black performers are assigned the job of making the white lady look good while she playacts at their culture, that it made me worry and worry.
Winstanley: Diggers were admirable, but Ranters were taking the whole thing too far. Tsk tsk on them.
... ... ... and a couple more that were only vaguely disturbing in these ways. Seen all in a mulch together, it seems like a defining trend for the year.
but i'm sorry i stopped too. it's so hard to start again
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