The 1972 Mini-List

[swo17]

ELIGIBLE TITLES FOR 1972

VOTE THROUGH APRIL 30

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

[therewillbeblus]

Can you please add Betty Tells Her Story (Liane Brandon) and Cut-Throats Nine (Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent? Also, just want to make sure Belladonna of Sadness (Eiichi Yamamoto) is 1973 and not 1972, since it was the only film missing from SNAPSЖOT when I cross-checked with my '73 shortlist

[swo17]

I've added those, the latter to 1973

[yoshimori]

My (current) second favorite film of 1972, after Hara's truly shocking Sayonara CP doc, is Frank Perry's Play It as It Lays, which I'm not seeing on the current list of eligible films. Amazing performances and New Wave cutting. Do I have the year wrong?

Would also recommend, besides the obvious art film faves, the Pennebaker/Dylan Eat the Document; Jissoji's Uta [Poem]; The Mattei Case; and Syberberg's Ludwig. Haven't seen the other Syberberg film on swo's list, but will add it to my watchpile.

[swo17]

I've added the Perry film, thanks!

[Rayon Vert]

De Palma's Sisters has been 1972 on Wiki and IMDB for a while now. No problem either way, just need to know!

I also don't see Rivette's Out 1: Spectre.

[swo17]

I'm going to leave Sisters in 1973.

Does anyone want to be able to vote specifically for Spectre as opposed to the more nebulous "Out 1" which could in theory encapsulate both cuts?

[Rayon Vert]

I was going to vote for Spectre because it's in a different year and it would make my cut, but if it only makes sense to vote for 1 of them and not both, then I won't.

[therewillbeblus]

My (current) second favorite film of 1972, after Hara's truly shocking Sayonara CP doc, is Frank Perry's Play It as It Lays, which I'm not seeing on the current list of eligible films. Amazing performances and New Wave cutting.

Oh, I'm glad you mentioned this, as it's been one of the most-anticipated films in my kevyip for this decade due to the repairing from Pretty Poison - I just didn't dig into that file when combing through what was missing from the master list!

Does anyone want to be able to vote specifically for Spectre as opposed to the more nebulous "Out 1" which could in theory encapsulate both cuts?

If timing allows, I was planning to watch both cuts this month, especially since I've never seen Spectre and many here have stressed that it feels like a very different (and even superior) film to the original cut. I have no stake in the decision, but I am curious to hear a discussion from those who've seen both. Given the substantial trimming, do they feel like different movies enough to warrant separatism? (If for no other reason, I'd be interested in the experiment to see which version would place higher on the respective year lists)

[Rayon Vert]

My memories are too vague to offer a discussion, but I did rate the longer version higher. But I watched Spectre right after the original so of course I was missing the magical impact of the length of the first cut.

[swo17]

If timing allows, I was planning to watch both cuts this month

Well go ahead and watch it that way, and if you or anyone else here states that they want to be able to vote specifically for Spectre I suppose I can add it. Though for me, it would kind of be like having separate listings for each cut of Blade Runner. I don't know how well you'd be able to gauge preference for the flow of one cut vs. another based on how they rank in each year, because I think a lot of people would simply vote for Out 1 because it's the main one and then not vote for Spectre because they already voted for Out 1

[Rayon Vert]

Thanks for spelling that reasoning out, swo. I won't vote for it then since I'll vote for Out 1 for 1971.

[therewillbeblus]

If Blade Runner was recut into a short film only one-third of its original length released in a different year, I’d probably consider it an entirely different film, rather than shaving off a minute- but maybe I’m a madman for seeing those as hardly comparable! I mean, depending on the changes, I might consider the new cut of B’Twixt Now and Sunrise to be a different film than the original cut of Twixt..

[swo17]

I also only have one listing for Apocalypse Now

[therewillbeblus]

Well, again, no idea if it’s just less/more footage added to/taken from the same places like Apocalypse Now or more radical rearranging (ostensibly Twixt) that changes the film’s narrative and tone more drastically, but I see those as very different things and that’s the question I’m posing to the forum

[Rayon Vert]

A slightly different case out of curiosity (and I didn't pay attention back then): what happened with the English- vs. Spanish-language versions of 1931's Dracula?

[swo17]

Well those were different casts and crews filming a similar story on the same set at different hours. That feels unambiguously like two different films to me. I'm not saying you can't think of Spectre as a substantially different film, just that it doesn't do a given film any favors if there's vote splitting between variant edits, not to mention the added complication of these edits often coming out years later. If you like B'Twixt substantially more in its new form, I should think that would enhance your view of the whole aura of the 2011 film, and when we vote for that year, I think it will be generally understood that some people may have different preferred edits out of the options available. In contrast, I don't think a vote for Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) would carry the Spanish version along with it any more than it would any subsequent film adaptations.

That said, I don't want anyone to feel like they're unable to vote how they would prefer to vote (hence why I have separate listings for the entire Up series vs. each installment, for instance) so if anyone wants to be able to vote specifically for Spectre in spite of what I've just said, indicate so here and I'll add it

[therewillbeblus]

Hey swo, can you please add Red Squad to the masterlist?

[swo17]

Added, thanks

[therewillbeblus]

Some '72 viewings, mostly new:

The King of Marvin Gardens: I was really taken with this complicated film on a rewatch, which perfectly melds the bleak impotence of a confounding early-70s vibe with lucid, palpable experience in a way that Drive, He Said completely failed at achieving. The key variable seems to be an honest, relatable narrative, where deep-rooted family dynamics and insulated personal yearnings are explored and exposed, carefully yet without restraint. This isn't an easy note to find let alone sustain, but Rafelson understands that people are not in their essence (or driven by) a reductive identity. They are more than that brand, but they are also redefined by their current state of impact on the people they interact with, and we recontextualize relationships and their value constantly based upon the current moment's information in friction with a part of us that knew the identified person during an earlier stage of life when we were both different people. This is a tragedy of the inherent history we accrue over years; the traumas, withering energy, evidence of inevitable pain, dissonance between where we feel we should be in maturation and where we perceive we are, and a frustrating, dejected confusion at what life looks like in adulthood that is both era-specific and timeless. It's a tragedy focused on long-term relationships, particularly with family members who grow together and apart continually forever; isolated existential crises overlapping sloppily with an interpersonal conflict of compulsions around where to place their will.

Julia Anne Robinson has the quietest part of the central foursome, but her performance is secretly a deeply authentic depiction of a child torn between parentification and a compromised enthusiasm for brewing self-actualization. Her character might be the best manifestation of the organic forlorn reality these people were contending with in 1972 - soft, poisonous anti-cathartic stimuli soberly grazing them more often like a cold windchill than an aggressive beatdown. At least the latter offers more tactile engagement, a distraction, and some closure. The highlight the film is Robinson's brief exchange with Nicholson that indirectly acknowledges the selfishness in seeking and holding onto our connections, for they're the few holds we can understand and depend upon, even if they're predictably unpredictable. Her slightly-broken but slightly-stoic responses are so natural that they transcend either a sad or hopeful reading into the grey soup that is her and their and our experience. I also love how Dern's capitalistic interests corrode with his lifestyle comprised of makeshift family members Ellen Burstyn and her daugher, who embody the stray institutional-dismantling principles that contributed to free love ideals. It's a boiling pot of fatalistic disorientation and aggressive pining for purpose that ignites the climax, and then, even more depressingly, yields the pale despondent coda in the aftermath.

Red Squad: This excitedly original and topical doc was made by activists in early-70s NYC, who essentially use the medium to apply surveillance to exploit fascistic secret police surveillance on civilians in their city. Their reflexive adoption of their subjects' monitoring and agitation tactics is deliberately cheeky in its instigation, but this humor never undercuts the unsettling potency of what they're investigating and disclosing. Richard Brody wrote a relatively personal and insightful piece on the film that's worth checking out.

Hickey & Boggs: Billy Cosby co-stars with I Spy co-star Robert Culp in the latter's narrative directorial debut, where the two star as private eyes whose dispassionate demeanor can barely pass for cool. The conditions are dark, and Walter Hill's busy script -while a bit of a mess on its own- manages to serve as a kind of sloppy but resilient fusion of skills-stretching in the hand's of Culp's TV-programmer sensibilities. This artistic mishmash unintentionally mirrors the on-screen depiction of the company man's self-preserving if anxiously-reactive adaptation to new contexts during this acutely shifting epoch. Culp shoots this exactly like the light spy adventures he's observed firsthand on set, but he's occasionally capable of leaning into the alarming shade of this tragic milieu by sharpening his edits and either cutting out or diluting characterization, which appropriately shields personality behind a wall of detachment to fit the material. It's an odd approach- one that seems antithetical for an actor-turned-director who's directing himself- to sacrifice the colorful possibilities in celebrity for the writer's intended attitude, but it probably works better than the alternative. That's not to say that Pulp and Cosby don't exercise their egos through brash or playful conduct, but they're almost always so monotonous that you have to squint to recognize the deadpan interplay.

And yet I'm giving this movie too much credit. Culp and Cosby seem to believe they're playing funny and interesting characters 80% of the time, and they have their moments of comic interplay and a few individually showy bits, but it's difficult to watch this movie and not spend a good chunk wondering what tone Culp is trying to locate and maintain and if it's in friction with Hill's. Either way, I don't find much compelling going on here outside of this authorship scrimmage somehow not nosediving, which seems worthy of praising as a small success. It's just.. not involving or fun or impressive without reaching for contextual merit. I would probably forget about the movie tomorrow if it weren't for Bill Cosby playing a cold man who rarely smiles and can be rather brutal, which is easily the closest I've come to seeing the monstrous force so many survivors have over the decades. Talk about context affecting a viewing experience..

Play It as It Lays: At once dense and novelistic, and thinly veiled and loosely experimental, this adaptation successfully gels seemingly-incongruous approaches because of Perry's command over the material, the strength of Didion's source, and commited bold performances from Weld and Perkins. This is a much better film about existential surrender than the average ones using people in roles of fame and reflexively fragmented elisions in form to express ennui in an eroding culture of self-destructive magnetism, because it seeks to ascend beyond its milieu and surface-level signifiers in the little details. Weld and we ingest the sound of a breeze permeating her state yet failing to consuming her with anything of substance, yielding an apathetic emptiness rather than appreciation for beauty in the accompanying sunset. Or take her narration, that evades the current moment to parse through her family's history, but still winds up arriving at no focal point of significance to alleviate the distress burning her soul. This film is less about narrative than it is about that feeling of dysphoria that those ultra-sensitized to self-medicate with mind and body-numbing vices. It's hard enough for a director to capture this state, but for a writer to abandon ready-made devices in script-writing to synergize around such intangible experience is quite impressive. I have no doubt this more-or-less matches the novel's style, but that doesn't mean it would confidently translate well into a legible screenplay, so props remain. I have no idea how this movie got sold or made (especially since it's basically just a more self-serious and grounded version of A Safe Place), but I'm so grateful it did. Filter Petulia's thematic resonance of agents fighting the zeitgeist's vacuum through Puzzle of a Downfall Child experimentally-sensory collage of temporal disorientation, and you have some idea of what you're working with- though I think it's way closer to the former film's richness than the latter's dismal pleasures. This was the new-to-me film I was most looking forward to watching this decade, and it's an easy list-maker.

They Only Kill Their Masters: Lax neo-noir swapping in James Garner's tired modern clean-cut detective for a hipster-loser from the past or present a la Gould's Marlowe or Phoenix's Doc Sportello, though still imbuing the same kind of lackadaisical, inept -yet sharp and determined when it counts- overall persona. This isn't anywhere nearly as good as Altman or PTA's films, but its cut from the same ilk of early-70s noir charms that The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun was, also fitted with an anti-climax, though it's nowhere near as fun or surprising or intelligent as that film either. The best element comes in the bizarre script, which seems determined to shake up audiences by regurgitating all the pent-up quips being suppressed during the code era noirs by a writers room of Mad Magazine adolescents. Katharine Ross saying, "I guess dikes don't take the pill" in nonchalant 'hard-boiled' conversation isn't even a standout head-turner in this movie.

[dekadetia]

Could Wakefield Poole's Bijou be added? Also, should William Greaves' Nationtime be considered here or in 2020?

[therewillbeblus]

Sitting Target

Wow, this unsurprising hidden gem from the Tarantino archives must really be a forgotten British crime film since it's seemingly been mentioned zero times on this board (outside of a passing reference by colin almost 11 years ago), and contains many elements that would appeal to a diverse focus group of filmlovers. Oliver Reed and Ian McShane play two ostensibly-psychopathic antiheroes who escape from prison on a mission to kill Reed's wife who has left him to have a baby with another man. She explains the situation to him in the opening scene, but only after some generous conversation that seems to be at once sourced in sincere compassion and anxious delay, afraid of the predictably threatening response and compassionately devastated that she's going to hurt the man she loved. It's a brilliant moment of complex hesitation that's tender and selfish and proof that rich dynamics can be conveyed in the elisions inferred by circumferential behavior - though the film's ultimate goals are revealed to subvert these impressions by exposing details from those blindspots that undercut any chance at humanist prosperity, just like Reed's fated viciousness that's generated to defend against this vulnerable part of his personality. The film is constructed as one giant sick joke disguised in tonic flourishes - psychological self-preservation, skewered and then validated.

Much like its central characters, this is a film without patience, with an urgent need for executing brutality, and possessing skilled impulses to flex its interventions when the time is right; a grindhouse film that makes no time for detours of exploitation, imbues radically freewheeling and intrusive camerawork in perfect synergy with Reed's experiential state, and crafts a dark, sadistic narrative path peeling back onion layers 'til nothing's left; skin scraped on asphalt down to the chiseled bone. Yet somehow the focus also manages to hold space for some skeptical empathy towards Reed's man-on-the-run, emasculated and on a one-way existential expedition for control via the only means he knows how: violent retribution as the projection of his impotence. There's ample evidence that Reed either has no interest in or cannot be stimulated by other means available to him outside of his lost love, so therein lies an implied tragedy that frays in friction with the harmful actions that trump a deeper investigation into the wells of his sensitive core. That is, until the film unveils that it's been committed to this terminal all along.

The form is so in sync with Reed - occasionally taking unprompted avant-garde breaks from the forward momentum of his myopic quest to temporarily bask in disoriented yearning through psychedelic phantasmagoria, but ultimately defaulting to raw, fierce activity to mask the pain - that the mise en scene reflexively informs the relativist value of the reaction. So for the bulk of this ride, we're flooded with cinematic pleasures as our top priority. The soundtrack, score, visual aesthetic choices, technique in blocking and staging, and approach to characterization are all eclectic and offbeat, while maintaining a devoted sincerity to the hard-boiled tone and unbridled drive of the principal vehicles somersaulting through endlessly inventive chaotic set pieces. There's a brief early sequence where the two escapees encounter a guard dog and engage in an acute fight/flight tussle that's suffocating and dizzying and barbaric. The dog loses and they move on to the next immediate obstacle. The whole film is like this, and it's exhilarating. A late cat-and-mouse episode where Reed hides from and fights off motorcycle troopers on a rooftop through a maze of clotheslines is probably both the coolest and most experimental action set piece of the decade.

Here's hoping someone at WB revisits this and realizes their DVD demands an upgrade. It's easily a contender for the upper tier of my list and the best discovery of the decade so far

[swo17]

Could Wakefield Poole's Bijou be added? Also, should William Greaves' Nationtime be considered here or in 2020?

I've added both, thanks

[DarkImbecile]

Red Psalm / Még kér a nép (Jancsó) — As I work through Jancsó's films, I keep thinking it might happen — particularly as the dialectical elements become both more prominent and more repetitive — but I have yet to tire of masterfully executed long takes of perfectly choreographed movement bolstered by powerful uses of sound, music, and symbology. The incredible final shot — of only about two dozen total — features some of the best of the film's dreamy imagery and action, but there are some of the more powerful images in Jancsó's filmography throughout Red Psalm: the burning of a pyre of rifles, piles of provisions, or a church's spire; doves held against the breasts of beautiful innocents; the stigmata of glorious socialist resistance on the hands of the righteous alternating between blood and cloth; and, perhaps most striking of all, a soldier slowly kneeling in a river darkening with blood.

Perhaps more telling about the transfixing quality of the Jancsó's work than my own ongoing interest is the fact that my daughters, ages 10 and 6, wandered by in the middle of the film and ended up sitting and watching more than half an hour of it, occasionally asking questions but mostly just watching as people danced, sang and spoke a strange language, and moved hypnotically among each other. I ultimately had to put them to bed, but the younger kid asked me what happened to all the people the next morning — I gave her a sanitized version.

[swo17]

A couple year reminders:

I have Lucifer Rising as 1972 even though the soundtrack of the now-circulating version wasn't completed until 1980.

I also have Sydney Pollack's Amazing Grace documentary as 1972. My understanding is that it was initially scheduled for release this year but then had post-production issues and kept being blocked by Aretha Franklin until her death in 2018