The 1974 Mini-List

[swo17]

ELIGIBLE TITLES FOR 1974

VOTE THROUGH JUNE 30

Please post in this thread if you think anything needs to change about the list of eligible titles.

[therewillbeblus]

I don't have a whole lot of rarities for this year, but if you're going to jump on the Yvonne Rainer bandwagon, you could hardly do better than Film About a Woman Who… - arguably her masterpiece. I'd also like to put in a good word for the hilariously dry 11 Harrowhouse for fans of Charles Grodin; the wild cult action-comedy The Gravy Train (aka The Dion Brothers) co-written by Terrence Malick and starring Stacy Keach and Frederic Forrest as the titular duo; Harry and Tonto, one of the most wonderful, eccentric and honest road movies of the decade, led by the best male performance of the year (and awarded for it!); and Cockfighter, Warren Oates' and Monte Hellman's rawest, most quietly inspiring work of both respective careers.

Of course if you've never seen California Split, well, it's my favorite movie, so go do that. The uncut version is also streaming free on Amazon Prime right now, at least in the U.S. (and they seem to take it down sporadically - you had to pay a rental fee on Prime just last month - so get yourself a dose of Elliot Gould's energy and go roll some dice)

[yoshimori]

Could you please add Shinoda's Himiko? It's something of a visual delight. And my favorite of the Straits of Magellan films, "Pan 700", is missing from the list.

Let me also recommend my current favorite of 1974, Jissoji's Asaki yumemishi [It was a faint dream]. I often have no idea what's going on in this movie, and there are lots of shots in which I'm not even sure which one, if any, of the visible figures is the one whose voice I'm hearing, but it's completely mesmerizing.

[swo17]

I've added the Shinoda but I actually have Pan 700 as 1969. There are a lot of places that seem to simply dump all the "pans" into 1974, which (per the CC booklet) was when 49 of them were included in Straits of Magellan: Drafts & Fragments (which you can vote for this year) but my understanding is that some of them predate this. For instance, you can see on Criterion Channel that they've assigned these pans to earlier years:

Pan 700 (1969)
Pan 2 (1970)
Pan 3 (1972)

And that's just out of the handful of pans that are available on the channel/Blu-ray release.

These three pans were eligible for the years listed above before each respective list started, but that would of course have been an easy thing to miss. Two questions:

1. How disappointed would you be not to be able to vote for this?
2. Is anyone else in the same boat?

[yoshimori]

Thanks so much for the response. Very happy to have you point me to the history of works I've seen but have no knowledge of otherwise. No disappointment at all.

[Rayon Vert]

Is it possible to add Chantal Akerman's Je tu il elle?

[swo17]

I have it as 1975, as per Criterion. Do you know of an actual release date in 1974?

[Rayon Vert]

Oh. I was just going by my own document, and I see I must have used the IMDB rating (it says Belgium 1974 as the first release date). I see Wiki also has it as a 1974 film (also Senses of Cinema and a few other places). I don't care either way, as long as you give a ruling and then if the ruling is 1975 I can change it in my document and not miss it for that year's list! Thanks!

[swo17]

Actually, on top of all the sources that suggest the earlier year, it looks like it won an award at the 1974 Faro Island Film Festival. I'll move it here

[Rayon Vert]

Thanks swo. Nice sleuthing.

[knives]

Just a few stray thoughts on a few stray films.

Swept Away: a film so great it created one of the more specific genres ever.

The Little Prince is actually my favorite Donnen. It reminds me a lot of The Band Wagon in the sense that it tries and largely succeeds in being a little bit of everything using the episodic structure to allow each star to really shine. Fosse and Wilder’s segments being the highlights for me.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is shockingly laid back and beautiful with a funny bone that let's Shaw suffocate the room. I see gritty thrown around a lot at the film, but I don't think that bears out too well. There is grit, but not anymore than any other film of the era. Instead I'd describe it as almost classically fluid and relieved. Gesundheit.

Blood for Dracula see a vile, American proletariat rapes his way through Europe killing off morality and nobility in the process in the tragedy of our times. Sure as a little film this wouldn't work but that is true of every metaphor. This needs to be seen like Grand Illusion examining the role of WWI in the end of aristocracy and dignity. With this in mind everything from performance style to setting makes sense. Additionally it seems to have become only the more effective of a commentary since given how the modern Wallace Simpson affairs result in a shrug. Europa was sick; now it's dead.

I'm not saying I agree with the film, obviously, but it's easily the most logical way to render Dracula a hero. It's also just a fun movie that shows that Morrissey's aristocratic fascism is what film were made for (see also his accidentally empathetic hate letter Trash).

[knives]

Part two starts with my favorite hidden gem of the year. Color my surprise on finding The Wild and the Brave hidden away on Amazon Prime. It's an Oscar nominated documentary shot in one of Uganda's largest national park.

This is a very great film that works as a powerful microcosm for the transition of Africa from a colonial continent into an ostensibly free one. Early this year I saw a documentary about Ralph Bunche, by the great William Greaves, and a significant part of it dealt with the complications on a global scale of this transition. Eugene Jones' film offers an intimate version of events allowing for a nuance in topics that I could not have considered before hand.

The film is about a white chief ranger training his black replacement. Both men are well characterized so that they can represent themselves as well as the figures they represent. A classic example of this happens about half way through when a conversation over darts takes subtext and turns it into text. Our white man is worried that the new recruits being so well educated means they will be harder to train. The replacement argues that education is a good thing as it means they will be more competent and trustworthy. The conversation serves as the crux of the film.

There are many wrinkles to this understanding throughout though. The most curious to me is the white man's view of himself. He is a Ugandan and claims as much many times. His personal and professional frustration comes from being born in Uganda and having it being the only home he knows. England is just foreign to him as to Paul, the replacement. It is beyond his capabilities to understand why this newly freed state would not want a white man in this very important position.

The transitions of the film are not limited to the colonial one though. The film also deals with the native Ugandans and how they have to deal with self governance. The ethnic fighting between tribes is the major background story showing all the rangers not merely responsible for the animals, but also the people. There are a few native rituals shown that are hard to watch. At one point I had to cover my eyes. They're a valuable texture of the film though as it gives a sense of how expansive Ugandan society is. It is not merely the us vs. them that it seems on first blush. It's hundreds of us against hundreds of thems. All the while Amin stands as the great shadow of how he will shape everything we see.

I wasn't expecting much at first from this little obscurity, but now it seems one of the most essential documentaries I have ever seen being a compelling view of one of the least studied in cinema moments of history.

Another real obscure documentary, this time by the king of Cuban cinema is The Art of Tabaco which is just a fun and flavorful doc reminiscent of Les Blank’s food films.

Lancelot of the Lake is definitely one of the great Camelot films, but my main takeaway is that Breslin could be hilarious. A lot of his films from this era could be funny, but the surprise here is that it is an effective drama with a consistent undercurrent of comedy unlike Devil’s comedic format or Gentle Woman’s bursts of humour. Bresson rather concocts a dramatic tale of self piece that is funny because of when it is not unlike Monty Python at their driest.

[Rayon Vert]

Swept Away: a film so great it created one of the more specific genres ever.

My write-up from some years ago:

Swept Away. I saw this again last night, watching the new blu (which looks terrific - really a different experience from the old LW Collection dvd). Anyway, as much as I was underwhelmed revisiting Seven Beauties a week prior, this really made me appreciate how strong a director Wertmüller could be. It's understandable that the film should have caused so much controversy upon release during the peak of the women's movement, but now with all that distance it's obvious that W was having fun satirizing every ideological position and perspective - opposing not only politics (communist vs. "Social Democrat", i.e capitalist liberal) and gender (chauvinist male vs. progressive female), but also class (rich vs. working class) and geographical background/ethnicity (northerner vs. southerner) - and exploring if it's possible to cast off one's social identity to find something deeper.

Gennarino's revenge and physical beating of Raffaella goes on a bit much, but it's obviously exaggerated because of the national comedic tradition the film is steeped in and, perhaps more significantly and more relevant to the film's themes, it shows how, sadly, it's Gennarino who in the end is truly the biggest prisoner of his mental constructs and who, tragically, loses out and ruins something special because of that. The film is really both funny and moving in the end, and with its slight L'Avventura associations (the yacht in the Mediterranean, the isolated island, the hut on the island) it's a visually gorgeous movie, which this blu really brings out.

[therewillbeblus]

Can you please add Toshio Masuda's Prophecies of Nostradamus? I've only sampled it, but the first five minutes alone are absolutely bananas

[swo17]

Added

[mizo]

Lancelot of the Lake is definitely one of the great Camelot films, but my main takeaway is that Breslin could be hilarious.

Sorry to pick you up on a typo, but I couldn't resist because I enjoyed imagining an Arthurian romance starring Jimmy Breslin. Sounds like a great lost SCTV sketch

[therewillbeblus]

I’ve only experienced the film referred to by its untranslated French title, so that plus the director typo had be convinced for a minute that there was a bizarro-world Lancelot film I had never heard of

[bottlesofsmoke]

Swo, could you add Blake Edwards’ The Tamarind Seed? It’s a fun little romantic Cold War spy movie, not going to rank super high for me but quite enjoyable for what it is.

[swo17]

Added

[the preacher]

Could you add the following titles?
ARG Leopoldo Torre Nilsson's Boquitas pintadas
CUB Sergio Giral's El otro Francisco
ESP José Luis Borau's Hay que matar a B.
TUR Lütfi Akad's Diyet
TUR Yilmaz Güney's Arkadas

I also have fond but distant memories of a batch of (low rated) British thrillers: Juggernaut, Ransom, Diagnosis: Murder and even Peter R. Hunt's Gold...

[swo17]

All added but I put the Giral in 1975.

Care to sell us on any of these films?

[knives]

I don’t think I see it on the masterlist, but Yamashita’s Father of the Kamikaze needs to be a top priority for everyone. Using a dry and matter of fact reportage that reminds me of The Great Gatsby he delves into the politics of war with such ferocity that it drains me completely.

[swo17]

Oh, by the director of Big Time Gambling Boss? Added, thanks!

[knives]

And now I want to see Big Time Gambling Boss.

[therewillbeblus]

Can you please add Toshio Masuda's Prophecies of Nostradamus? I've only sampled it, but the first five minutes alone are absolutely bananas

Having finally watched this, I can confirm that the rest holds up and only accumulates eclectic madness! This is a fascinatingly comprehensive apocalyptic vision, partially scientifically-measured and eerily predictive, while also venturing into full gonzo-mode of exaggerated sci-fi adventure. The chamber-drama portions are surprisingly dense and realistic, especially in the way the film engages with social politics between nations. It's very effective at bringing us into this world via familiar discussions of privilege and resources, and the film seems to be saying a lot about how we default to oversimplified diagnostics and blame for events when the truth is more complex and perspective-based. And yet everyone can certainly join in around the hopelessness! Though thankfully, for such a cynical film, the apocalyptic insanity comes in involving and enjoyable modes of stylistic escalation - a Godzilla movie about an eroding environment, with completely unrealistic regurgitations of alien terror to boot. It reminded me of the successful merger I noticed when recently watching Unearthly Stranger - though on a much larger and looser scale of chaos!