The 1978 Mini-List

[swo17]

Conversely, I will now put that in my queue

[knives]

I’m really curious if Page is a Fielder Cook type major director hidden from the crowd because he’s primarily a television director. He also directed one of the best episodes of The Adams Chronicles.

[knives]

The director of Overture: One Two-Five is mislisted in the data base.

[swo17]

Is that correct now?

[the preacher]

A few requests, swo:
Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (Ted Kotcheff)
House Calls (Howard Zieff)
Raíces de sangre (Jesús Salvador Treviño)
Las palabras de Max (Emilio Martínez Lázaro)
Soldados (Alfonso Ungría)
Eskimo Limon (Boaz Davidson)
Così come sei (Alberto Lattuada)
Schwitzkasten (John Cook)

[domino harvey]

I really like House Calls too, here’s my write up

House Calls (Howard Zieff 1978) If Glenda Jackson's earlier romantic comedy for Melvin Frank, A Touch of Class, briefly flirted with late-period screwball romances from the 40s, here she's on board for a flick bringing back the gentle sex comedies of the sixties within an era when anything goes. House Calls is a pleasant surprise: A good-hearted and likable embodiment of a subgenre rendered superfluous by the death of the Code. Jackson's divorcee and Walter Matthau's widower make a winning couple with their tinged barbs and adult expectations and the characters get into plenty of zany situations that could stand with the best of their antecedents-- the Code-mocking "One foot on the floor" scene is as good as anything in any sixties sex comedy, though it could never have existed in one! Art Carney also gives a fine comedic supporting performance as a senile Chief of Staff overseeing Matthau and company-- it's a solid comic role that somehow avoids all opportunities for maudlin emotion by never succumbing to emotion in the first place! Though I'd never heard of it before, apparently the film was a huge hit when it first came out (and even inspired a long-running TV series), and it's easy to see why, as it's all quite charming

[therewillbeblus]

Same here, a strange omission from my provisional list. Thanks for catching that, preacher

[swo17]

A few requests, swo:
Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (Ted Kotcheff)
House Calls (Howard Zieff)
Raíces de sangre (Jesús Salvador Treviño)
Las palabras de Max (Emilio Martínez Lázaro)
Soldados (Alfonso Ungría)
Eskimo Limon (Boaz Davidson)
Così come sei (Alberto Lattuada)
Schwitzkasten (John Cook)

I've added all of these, thanks!

[swo17]

Préparez vos mouchoirs [Get Out Your Handkerchiefs] (Bertrand Blier)

This won the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture this year. The Cohen Blu-ray features a helpful introduction in which Richard Peña explains that there are two things about this movie that modern audiences might take issue with:

1. There is a lot of talking.
2. The movie starts off with a man offering his wife to a stranger because she is bored of him. You shouldn't do that with your wife.

But if you can get past those two things, you're in for a wholesome, old-fashioned romp!

[knives]

So, Absolution is really amazing. I watched the theatrical cut which was what was available to me, but even in this version it’s a tight noose of a film that ranks as well as one of the best scripts I’ve encountered from Anthony Shaffer. Burton also does some of his best work quietly melting down to nothing.


On a very different track I’ve been following the Al Jarnow recommendations from the list throughout the year. I’ve liked them all well enough, but only just found one I truly loved in Cubits. This very short short does two genius things. First, it provides a nice primer for small kids on what is a cube and secondly it’s a telling of its own making. Got to get kids started on reflexive structural cinema early.

[swo17]

On a very different track I’ve been following the Al Jarnow recommendations from the list throughout the year. I’ve liked them all well enough, but only just found one I truly loved in Cubits. This very short short does two genius things. First, it provides a nice primer for small kids on what is a cube and secondly it’s a telling of its own making. Got to get kids started on reflexive structural cinema early.

A lot of this plays well in 3D if you cross your eyes just right!

[swo17]

My picks for the best/most iconic music videos of the year:

Kraftwerk: The Robots (Günter Fröhling)
Kate Bush: Hammer Horror (Keef)
The Residents: Hello Skinny (Graeme Whifler)
Elvis Costello & the Attractions: Pump It Up (Paul Flattery)
Village People: YMCA
Devo: (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (Chuck Statler)

[Rayon Vert]

First album I bought was Macho Man. Not half bad actually! It included the Just a Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody medley before David Lee Roth turned it into a hit! (Hey, I was 9.) What an odd thing they had a song called Sodom and Gomorrah.

Our babysitter took us one day to go see Grease - more her choice, it wasn't what me and my brother's idea of what seemed like a cool movie. But I had a completely transcendent experience during the screening - I was literally walking on clouds coming out of the theater (and in love with "Sandy" of course), and was desperately trying to figure out how I could earn enough money to buy the (double) album. (Luckily it was on the radio all the time.) I eventually won it in a record store contest! There is a God.

[swo17]

Yvonne Rainer's work (whose film this year, Trio A is a mere ten-minutes and can be watched on YT - FYI)

This might pair well with Shirley Clarke's Trans (also from this year), on Disc 2 of Milestone's Magic Box set and also streaming on Criterion Channel. Where Rainer's dance film is elegant and spare, Clarke's is boisterous and otherworldly

[therewillbeblus]

Préparez vos mouchoirs [Get Out Your Handkerchiefs] (Bertrand Blier)
This won the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture this year. The Cohen Blu-ray features a helpful introduction in which Richard Peña explains that there are two things about this movie that modern audiences might take issue with:

1. There is a lot of talking.
2. The movie starts off with a man offering his wife to a stranger because she is bored of him. You shouldn't do that with your wife.

But if you can get past those two things, you're in for a wholesome, old-fashioned romp!

I just revisited this yesterday - it was my first Blier a long time ago, and wanted to see how it played now that I've finished his filmography. I didn't like it nearly as much as the first time around, almost entirely for its structural failures - always a risk with Blier, who more or less adopts the same mysterious yarn-ball-unraveling narrative approach to the bitter end. This time around, Blier doesn't keep up the momentum during his later-act shift to the summer camp, and while the thematic perversity of where this goes is pretty brilliant (Pauline Kael's full review adds a lot of appreciation to exactly why the child-bearing-child vehicle makes sense), the last hour is mostly a slog, at least if you've seen it and know where it's going. The first section still works well though, and the film is well-worth checking out for that aspect alone - as well as how Blier fine-tunes and tones-down his similar ideas from Going Places to here! (And of course for the bewilderment that this won the Foreign Language Oscar stateside)

And maybe I should re-appraise Perceval too, but it was just such a stylistic departure from what I've expected and loved from Rohmer, and not one that I thought was very successful. I'll have to check out the others, but I guess I just hadn't found myself too compelled to watch Watership Down or The Driver.

Hopefully you do. On Perceval, it’s actually my favorite Rohmer! I think the stylistic daring is very successful and in general find Rohmer at his best when doing formal experiments such as his Zack Snyder preceding George Eliot biopic. That’s not to say Perceval exists in a vacuum. It shares a lot of traits with a few other European experimentations from the period. I find it especially reminiscent of some of de Oliveira’s work. Rohmer seems to be taking several cues from early medieval British paintings offer no perspective and in general losing all sense of three dimensions. This isn’t just a topic appropriate aesthetic either. It seems to be connecting to the film’s concern with early Christianity tying itself to myth as a way establishing its borders.

I thought Perceval was just okay the first time too, but upon a rewatch I agree with knives - this is among his very best films. It's difficult for me to describe exactly why this film works so well, but it has something to do with Rohmer's sincere adoration for the text coupled with the playful irony with which he approaches dismantling the myth of human constructs of institutional ideology in valor, love, religion, morality, faith, and egocentric existential purpose. The film is wildly entertaining, and somehow both lucid in its gentle farcical portrayals while remaining ambiguous on the intention of the feeling behind them, which can read as cheeky or genuinely solemn, sometimes in the same shot.

In its own way, it’s subtly moving, commenting on the sensitivity of man by holding empathy hand in hand with the derision of how naive we are for myopic sheeplike behavior. It’s significantly not a criticism because the film doesn’t propose a fictitious social structure where we don’t need direction and containment; instead it dispenses artifice and satire almost everywhere but in that subtext of affirmation for emotional equilibrium. If the social context demands a silly, constructed action to stabilize, that’s worth exposing separate from the drive that’s valid in a vacuum. There’s also something to be said for the deft, practically textually-elided examination of the nebulous ambiguity of 'grace'. This is done with a conscientious neutrality of judging its validity- seemingly in subjective and objective lenses at once: since a selfish 'need' is being fulfilled for each man, only it’s muddled unconsciously with the 'wants', compromised and consequential to one's peers from this inherently yet man-made ignorance. The force that intends to connect just drives us further apart.

This one moved up considerably to my number-one slot for the year, and I'm expecting it to stay there.

[swo17]

Olimpiada (Bogdan Dziworski)
This is unfortunately kind of difficult to find. It's not included in NInA's Dziworski set but someone has made a custom DVD online that has it if you know where to find such things. Here also is a 3-minute excerpt (of the film's 17). Great camera angles, sound design, and temporal manipulation as usual to immerse you in a distinct winter setting. The film's title might have you anticipating something professional and awe-inspiring, but it actually mostly focuses on children who aren't very good at skiing!

[swo17]

The Lonely Voice of a Man (Aleksandr Sokurov)

Sokurov's first feature was completed in 1978 but banned and ordered destroyed, only surviving through some combination of Andrei Tarkovsky fighting for Sokurov and the film being hidden from authorities. Watching the film you can really see why they hated it... if hazy visual poetry makes you question your allegiance to the motherland. The film was eventually released in 1987 but this is the year you can vote for it

[knives]

Missing from the master list is George Kuchar’s hilarious and backwards poignant The Mongreloid. It takes a silly situation, melodramatically narrating the travels of a dog relating to his anus, and turns it into this pained loneliness of gay immigration.

[swo17]

Added.

And here's a somewhat crude but still lovely animated short by Frédéric Back, who would go on to make The Man Who Planted Trees: Tout rien

[therewillbeblus]

A few short thoughts on other recently-logged revisits:

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin - I don't really care for this as an action movie, but its scenes of teaching and learning during the middle section are entertaining and thorough, more than most of these sequences in HK martial arts flicks from this period. Otherwise I don't really get why this one gets hailed as cult-worthy above others, but I guess I just get something different from these films than others. Still, it's a fun, breezy way to spend two hours.

Autumn Sonata - While certainly theatrically-conceived, I'm always impressed by how much honesty bursts through this portrait of layered family dynamics, especially the boiled-over combative perspectives in the meaty second half. Bergman gets a lot right in his tender portrayal of how subjective traumas are unconsciously bred by our parents, but his attention to the intolerable anxiety of being accused by a loved one -and having the narrative of your life rewritten before your eyes, unprompted by one's conscious schematic expectations of what is socially 'possible'- is just as empathically studied by the camera and script. It's through the chances afforded by this generous angle that Ingrid Bergman can flex her powers and walk away with a movie that should be Ullmann's on paper.

The Fury - I can't think of a film offhand that is this sincerely committed to such slapdash, absurd, nonsensically vapid material. I have no idea why this movie exists (and I'm not convinced that anybody - including the characters - have any idea what's going on or what their motivations are), but it exists in a form that's... palatable(?), resting in a space between detached camp and accessible emotion. I kinda feel like I'm exploding into pieces repeatedly while trying to figure out what to make of this one, but I guess that's in step with how the film feels about itself too, especially given its abrupt ending-to-credits that takes characters to places that make no sense for them and offers no follow-up of our principals. It's basically the cinematic equivalent of someone trying to throw a balled up piece of paper into a trash barrel, missing ten times, and then just giving up.

Hotel Fear - Interesting wartime social drama-horror/giallo hybrid (at about 90/10), that milks every opportunity to make the audience uncomfortable in order to align us with our surrogate - a young girl whose mother dies leaving her at the mercy of the hauntingly-cartoonish sexually-aggressive patrons at the hotel she runs. The content borders on surreal on a number of occasions, and its elisions of surrogacy help cross us up for the denouement, but the actualized threats are palpable, brutal, and frightening on a very real, immediate level. The film's tone manages to succeed as a low-(okay, middle-) key digestible horror, due to its fantastical mythic elements working to offset the moments of raw, alienating assaults.

Interiors - Woody Allen makes his first Bergman-inspired drama, and it's more than fine, but slightly left from strong. There are moments of greatness in its depiction of messy family dynamics, complete with admirably-drawn divergent shades of the caretaker role - particularly between the father and favorite daughter. And then there are pieces that seem out of place as superfluous or overwritten, such as much of the husbands' interactions and overall thin personalities, or Keaton's therapy sessions.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers - An inspired, eclectic cast of interesting characters with conflicting personas take on a social apocalypse (via an appropriately-nasty version of the body-snatchers subgenre) across a series of diverse set pieces. Yeah, the ending is one for the books, but Kaufman's controlled vision has the whole film flowing at creatively-varied rhythms, stalling and propelling forward with agility exactly when it needs to go 'there'.

Remember My Name - A familiar aesthetic might send viewers to hone in on Altman's producer cred, but Rudolph trades in Altman's more giddily-curious, and consequentially detailed engagement for aloof but still urgent examinations of personality through a behaviorist psychological approach. The ferocity and restraint in Chaplin's perf has earned the uniform praise, but Anthony Perkins quietly has the more interesting role, performing a broad character in a manner that's more cryptic and nebulous than it likely would've been in a different actor's hands. I don't love this like the rest of the world, but it's a small, appreciated exercise in disciplined filmmaking.

Terror - Not one of Norman J Warren's best, but his quasi-Suspiria homage is super impressive given his budget. Even obvious effects like reversed video during supernatural setpieces spark more awe than cheese, though the economy of the narrative doesn't glide quite as well as his other works, fumbling a lot over plot filler in the middle that's rare to see in a Warren pic. I do love his ending, specifically how Warren subverts expectations as he essentially gives us the beginning of its inspiration perversely as a climax with established characters!

Trio A - Far be it from me to advise anyone not to see a Yvonne Rainer film after failing to garner support for all my/her orphans this decade, but I doubt this short will land for anyone who isn't familiar with her dance ethos (which has been adapted into her cinematic art with Godardian influence), so you may want to do some complementary reading - available in her dedicated thread - before watching. Hopefully Kino gets to these commercial physical releases soon, so people finally feel inclined, and have the resources to give her the attention she deserves.

[swo17]

Cycle
Clock & Train (Guy Sherwin)

Two of my favorite installments from Sherwin's Short Film Series are from this year. The first shows a close-up of a bicycle tire slowly driving in circles as the shadows adjust around it. Interesting from a geometrical perspective and also just cool to watch on a loop. The second (pictured) superimposes the view of two train rides moving in opposite directions, with one trip's clock moving in reverse, which I guess means the two trips must have been in the same direction but one of them is being played backwards. So to use knives' phrasing from earlier, this film is also partly a tale of its own making. Like all films in the series, these are each just 3 minutes long

[knives]

I’ve been interested in the Sherwin films, only seen Metronome, do you know where they are available? All I’ve been able to find out is that they used to be streaming on Kanopy.

[swo17]

I probably should have thought to mention that! Fortunately this is still in print. The packaging is also very creative.

If placing an order from Lux, I also recommend this John Woodman set. His Beach Fragments is also eligible for this year, which is a frantically cut piece about a serene environment.

There are probably several other things I'd recommend if looking outside of just this year

[knives]

Got a fully up to date cheat sheet and am already scheming titles that hopefully will be worth mentioning in the thread to add to the list.

[knives]

Shirley Clarke’s four dance shorts from the year are all excellent and very different. Trans and One-2-3 are both early video experiments really focused on the way dance can be changed by medium. I found the later to be especially well thought out in this regard resulting in a rather haunting experience.

Mysterium is the most traditional one, but tradition survives for a reason. This is mesmerizing and beautiful. Those shadows in Initiation though. In tune with some of Saura’s later experiments, but whereas he seems to see dance and music as always living there’s something of the unconscious here.