Ok, sorted into streaming services. Gosh, if I didn’t know any better I’d think that I created this thread as a deep advert for Filmstruck or Starz.
The security convention scene in The Conversation is a marvel, just one of the realest things I’ve seen in a movie.
Late to the party, but I’d add Two Mules for Sister Sara. Not the best western from any kind of plot perspective, but the performances are great, and the desert landscapes are beautiful.
Two mules: Added (Starz).
I’m already getting started on the list. I had a couple of coupons for renting any two movies on Google Play for $.99 each in the month of june, so I took them up on that: Duel and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest. Now I have only a month left to watch them, and once I start watching one, I only have 48 hours to finish it. So I’m going to have to time those just right.
Edit: Black Moon (Film Struck, Kanopy) and Holy Mountain (Amazon rental) added.
Black Moon
Holy Mountain
Jeeze dude maybe you should blog this. You could become the internet expert on 70s cinema!
WTF is wrong with you people?
Animal House
Smokey and the Bandit
Someone must have mentioned Animal House, since I put it in my “already seen” category. (Edit: It was Tin_Wisdom). Looks like Smokey and the Bandit is only available as a rental, so I put it in there.
Frenzy (72) and Family Plot (76) both from Hitchcock … still great, I especially like Family Plot after several viewings, it is really funny and Bruce Dern was great …
That might seem like a good idea, if I was more optimistic about 70s cinema. However, I have a gut feeling that I will not enjoy most of these recommendations. This was really driven home this weekend when I started watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And the movie starts off in a mostly silent scene with men playing cards. And I don’t know what kind of experimental cinema this is, but doing a closeup of someone’s hands for over a minute as they play cards seems like such poor movie-making to me. You’re showing their hands mostly, the face is obscured, you can’t really tell what they’re playing, they’re not talking so you’re not really building up their characters either, so it just seems like a complete waste of time to me, from the viewpoint of a movie-goer with more modern sensibilities. I suspect I’ll be seeing a lot of this “time wastage” in 70s cinema that some will say builds atmosphere or builds tension, or helps build up the characters.
Watched Little Dieter Needs To Fly over the weekend. Woah. So many “classic Herzog” aspects, not least the whole concept of making the poor dude relive the experience, to the extent of binding his hands and having armed men frogmarch him through the jungle. That must have been fun for him. Though he seemed remarkably chipper talking about it (even in the footage from relatively shortly after his capture).
Oh yeah, the Herzog recommendation was “All of them”, so I really need to look up all those titles and add them to the list. Thanks for the reminder.
Edit:
Woyzeck 1979
Nosferatu the Vampyre 1977
Stroszek 1976
Heart of Glass 1976
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser 1974
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (a film by) 1971
Land of Silence and Darkness (Documentary) 1971
Fata Morgana (Documentary) 1970
Even Dwarfs Started Small 1970
Signs of Life 1968
I’ve got them all on a box set, as I mentioned, so I’m planning to go through the ones I haven’t seen in alternation with my usual stuff from Cinema Paradiso, as my queue is getting short (recommendations wanted!). I was going to watch Stroszek but it turns out I ripped the commentary track only by mistake.
Well, I would humbly recommend you try to engage with artworks on their own terms to some extent. By 1969, the year of Butch Cassidy, film was a 70 year old art form with a huge vocabulary of techniques and accepted practices that had been built up, and George Roy Hill was a seasoned pro who knew what he was doing. There is some flailing around in the early 70s as directors and editors try to unshackle themselves from the more straitened Golden Age style, but it’s not like these guys were a bunch of freshman film students with super 8 cameras. You’re talking about Coppola, Altman, Spielberg, Malick, Friedkin, Arthur Penn, Nichols, et al. But it is true that they may not all have the perspective that every frame of the film needs to be ‘moving the story forward’ or ‘developing the characters.’
But yeah, if you just end up disliking '70s movies even more, maybe not much to blog about there. :( You could do it in the ‘angry rants’ style, I suppose.
I will certainly try. A part of the viewing experience is always the mindspace the viewer is in, as much as you try to minimize it. But that can be a good thing too. When you’re in a certain mindspace, certain movies really connect with you on an emotional level that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
Also, frankly, 70s movies are mostly far better paced than your average modern blockbuster. Back in those days, a movie like the Godfather was noted for being really long.It would only be a little longer than a typical popcorn movie these days.
That sounds like game title.
If you haven’t watched a lot of world cinema from the period, the pace can seem a bit slow. But given the moribundity of Hollywood movies at the time, you can’t blame young American filmmakers in the late '60s and '70s for wanting to take on some of the new storytelling techniques coming from the various European new wave movements. That’s where all the excitement and vigor in cinema was at the time.
Yup, the Easy Riders/Raging Bulls period needs to be seen in large part as a response to the French New Wave (and to a perhaps lesser degree, other world cinemas, e.g. Italy, Japan, etc.).
Jeremiah Johnson (1972).
Directed by Sydney Pollack.
Saw it when I was 15, then one of the first VHS and DVDs I rented/bought.