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the preacher wrote: Tue Aug 15, 2023 8:44 am Not sure it makes my list, but Antonio Margheriti's Con la rabbia agli occhi (Death Rage) is worth adding.

Spoiler

Also Mes nuits avec... Alice, Pénélope, Arnold, Maud et Richard (The Kinky Ladies of Bourbon Street), but that is another story.

I've added both

Some films for your consideration...

Hockey (Bogdan Dziworski)
Elementarz (Wojciech Wiszniewski)

Two of the best from the Polish documentary school. Dziworski excelled at sound design so his take on a hockey match really brings the proceedings to life, while Wiszniewski continues to confound with compelling imagery

Couleurs délicieuses sur fond bleu (Christian Lebrat)
RIYL: pressing on your eyeballs for a free lightshow, lightsabers, teal & orange

In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution (Chuck Statler)
Basically two Devo music videos strung together, but quite radical (and a little frightening) compared to most other music videos from the decade. Included as an extra on Criterion's Island of Lost Souls release.

Sloan Square: A Room of One's Own (Derek Jarman & Guy Ford)
Part experimental film, part behind-the-scenes footage for Sebastiane (also eligible this year!), and part act of rebellion with an interesting backstory. Available on the Sebastiane disc of the BFI's first Jarman set

Todo modo (Elio Petri)
Il deserto dei Tartari (Valerio Zurlini)
Great team building entertainment for your next corporate retreat

La Paysagiste (Jacques Drouin)
Incredible pinscreen animation viewable on NFB's website. It's also included on a DVD set that I think may be OOP but as of this writing there's at least one copy available at Amazon for just $20

Nuts in May (Mike Leigh)
RIYL: camping, following the rules, Alison Steadman

Who Can Kill a Child? (Narciso Ibáñez Serrador)
I, Pierre Rivière, Having Killed My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother... (René Allio)
Self-explanatory

I’m getting rather busy now, so I don’t know when I’ll finish the cheat sheet, but here’s the draft as it stands now. I’m up to the R named directors.

I’m not too busy to keep up watching though. One of the reasons I love this project is the surprises and I got big one in finding out that Mario Monicelli directed dramas. While overall I enjoyed his Caro Michele it does suggest he was better off sticking to comedies. The many high qualities here are stymied from it being stuck in the mold of ‘70s mature dramas. There’s a slightly indirect narrative here as the story is told through letters to the unseen title character instead revolving around his family eventually settling on his possible baby mamma.

She’s compelling played and often exciting in a this is an ‘important’ character sort of way, but often feels less a person and more a set of ticks for bourgeoisie audience members to nod along to as then condescendingly acknowledge how terrible other bourgeoisie are to the working class.

That’s a pretty harsh critique that might be an interest killer for some reading, but I do want to emphasize that I was always engaged and that on the baseline of entertainment it does work.

“I now know that I’m going to be uncomfortable through this whole project, from beginning to end.”

There’s a great sequence about forty minutes into Underground (ds. Emile de Antonio, Mary Lampson, Haskell Wexler) where the five participating members of the militant organization The Weather Underground take to wondering aloud about having subjugated themselves to a process they entered into with sympathetic collaborators. To conceal their identities, Wexler’s been shooting the fugitive “professional revolutionaries” through muslin, in silhouette, in anonymous cutaways; he’s now shooting into a mirror that shows the subjects from behind, seated in front of the visible filmmakers, looking up at them. “You could come join us on the floor.”

”What is the best way for us to make a film that moves other people, that moves many people to feel they can make a revolution in this country?”

It’s openly propagandist – the film’s title card is the group’s logo, and though the secret interviews were conducted over three days in April, another title claims it’s May Day – and yet the group is right to be wary. Because in explaining their motives, ideologies, and methods and defining themselves within the context of other movements they reveal themselves. They want to show the world they’re not “middle-class adventurists,” but against footage of Civil Rights leaders, victorious revolutionaries (Ho Chi Minh, Castro), and the VVAW they come off as white, intellectual, and sheltered – even when some of that historical footage features these same interview subjects at earlier rallies, even against a scroll of WU bombing incidents.

But they are also articulate and aware and self-aware enough that their self-conception has evolved; bouts of self-criticism have made them less chauvinistic and militaristic and (they say) less condescending and frustrated with people not immediately enamored of their messaging. Perhaps that’s what makes them more sufferable when a modern-day viewer is confronted with anti-authoritarian actions that nominally resemble obviously abhorrent current events (there is more than one way to attack the Capitol, but there’s a positive unease when that particular bomb blows.) Or perhaps it’s that their self-absorbed futility makes them more amusing than dangerous. They are not without insight and may not exactly be “muttering mutilated Marxism,” but when asked what role they have to play in 1975, there’s a long-winded non-answer about developing “full revolutionary consciousness.” They are very proud they self-published a 156-page book! They started an obscurely titled newspaper that lasted six issues! A wall hanging that reads, “The future will be what we the people struggle to make it,” attracts such constant camera attention in the film that it may as well say, “Live Laugh Love!”

The most accessible parts of the film, as de Antonio predicts at them, aren’t ideological, they’re practical. Their individual backstories and behaviors, and the juicy deets about mission mishaps and brushes with the law are both humanizing and tantalizing curiosities whether you’re a member of the Ecumenical Holding Company or the Ecumenical Liberation Army. They are, after all, wanted criminals.

In the end I am not sure if the documentary is listworthy, but I think its accomplishments and failures make more complete this year’s parade of resistants and truthtopowerers: The Union Maids; Kopple’s striking miners in Harlan County and Buba’s striking independent truckers in Ohio and Mekas’ general strikers for peace; Pakula/Goldman’s Woodstein, Ashby’s Guthrie, perhaps Gordon Parks’ Leadbelly, and Lumet/Chayefsky’s childless widower with an 8 rating and a 12 share.

swo, if you don’t add this to the available titles, you’ll just be doing what the FBI wants you to do. And who wants to do that?

Added

swo17 wrote: Sat Jul 01, 2023 4:51 pm ELIGIBLE TITLES FOR 1976

VOTE THROUGH AUGUST 31

Reminder that lists are due tonight

My list is in. Last minute as usual. Hope I didn't confuse Taxi Driver with Adventures of....Or vice versa.

I absolutely forgot to submit a list and just did it. if it's too late, that's totally okay

I'm getting a late start today so I haven't closed it off yet

excellent, I even added an extra I forgot! looking forward to results

The 1976 List



##. Film (Director) points/votes(top 5 placements, aka likely votes in decade list)/highest ranking

01. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese) 302/14(9)/1(x7)
02. All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula) 295/15(8)/1
03. Network (Sidney Lumet) 146/8(4)/1
04. The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg) 142/8(4)/2(x3)
(tie) Chinesisches Roulette [Chinese Roulette] (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) 142/8(2)/3(x2)
06. Carrie (Brian De Palma) 138/9(2)/4
07. Monsieur Klein [Mr. Klein] (Joseph Losey) 136/8(3)/1
(tie) Die Marquise von O... [La Marquise d'O...] (Éric Rohmer) 136/8(3)/3
09. Cría cuervos... (Carlos Saura) 132/9/6(x2)
10. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes) 124/9(1)/1
11. Le Locataire [The Tenant] (Roman Polanski) 117/8(2)/4
12. L'Argent de poche [Small Change] (François Truffaut) 115/8/6(x3)
13. Cadaveri eccellenti [Illustrious Corpses] (Francesco Rosi) 110/7(2)/3
14. Nickelodeon (Peter Bogdanovich) 108/6(4)/2(x2)
15. Im Lauf der Zeit [Kings of the Road] (Wim Wenders) 98/5(3)/1"
16. Harlan County, U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple) 93/5(3)/1
17. Grey Gardens (Albert & David Maysles, Ellen Hovde & Muffie Meyer) 90/5(2)/3
18. The Other Side of the Wind (1976/2018) (Orson Welles) 86/5(1)/5
19. L'innocente (Luchino Visconti) 84/4(3)/4(x2)
(tie) Martin (George A. Romero) 84/5(2)/3
21. Assault on Precinct 13 (John Carpenter) 81/4(3)/1
(tie) Novecento [1900] (Bernardo Bertolucci) 81/5(2)/2
23. Casanova (Federico Fellini) 80/6(3)/3(x2)
(tie) Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May) 80/5(2)/4
25. Az ötödik pecsét [The Fifth Seal] (Zoltán Fábri) 74/4(3)/1
26. Ansikte mot ansikte [Face to Face] (Ingmar Bergman) 73/5/7
27. Mannen på taket [The Man on the Roof] (Bo Widerberg) 68/5(1)/5
28. News from Home (Chantal Akerman) 67/4(1)/1
29. Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (Robert Altman) 62/4/7
(tie) Rocky (John G. Avildsen) 62/5/8
31. Lost Lost Lost (Jonas Mekas) 58/3(1)/1
32. Obsession (Brian De Palma) 57/3(1)/5
33. Robin and Marian (Richard Lester) 53/4/9
(tie) Family Plot (Alfred Hitchcock) 53/4/12(x3)
35. Insiang (Lino Brocka) 51/3(1)/2
(tie) Allegro non troppo (Bruno Bozzetto) 51/3/6
(tie) Todo modo [One Way or Another] (Elio Petri) 51/4/7
(tie) 愛のコリーダ [Ai no korīda] [In the Realm of the Senses] (Nagisa Ōshima) 51/4/6
39. The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood) 50/3(1)/5
(tie) The Omen (Richard Donner) 50/4/6
41. Der starke Ferdinand [Strongman Ferdinand] (Alexander Kluge) 49/3/8
(tie) شطرنج باد [Shatranj-e baad] [Chess of the Wind] (Mohammad Reza Aslani) 49/4/7
(tie) Marathon Man (John Schlesinger) 49/7/10
44. Le Juge et l'Assassin [The Judge and the Assassin] (Bertrand Tavernier) 47/2(2)/1
45. Nuts in May (Mike Leigh) 44/3(1)/5
46. Il deserto dei Tartari [The Desert of the Tartars] (Valerio Zurlini) 39/2(1)/2
(tie) The Devil's Playground (Fred Schepisi) 39/2(1)/2
(tie) Next Stop, Greenwich Village (Paul Mazursky) 39/3/6
49. Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (Bruce Conner) 37/2(1)/5
50. The Signalman (Lawrence Gordon Clark) 35/2(1)/1

ALSO-RANS

Blizna [The Scar] (Krzysztof Kieślowski) 34/3/12
Ich will doch nur, daß ihr mich liebt [ I Only Want You to Love Me] (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) 33/2/9
Storm Boy (Henri Safran) 31/2(1)/2
La Dernière Femme [L'ultima donna] [The Last Woman] (Marco Ferreri) 30/2(1)/2
Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et mon frère... [ I, Pierre Rivière, Having Killed My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother...] (René Allio) 29/2(1)/4
I, Claudius (Herbert Wise) 28/2/6
The Missouri Breaks (Arthur Penn) 26/2(1)/5
God Told Me To (Larry Cohen) 26/2/6
Brutti, sporchi e cattivi [Down and Dirty] (Ettore Scola) 26/2/10
Noroît (une vengeance) (Jacques Rivette) 26/2/10
Bound for Glory (Hal Ashby) 26/4/15

The Bad News Bears (Michael Ritchie) 25/3/10
Le Plein de super [Fill 'er Up with Super] (Alain Cavalier) 20/2/8
¿Quién puede matar a un niño? [Who Can Kill a Child?] (Narciso Ibáñez Serrador) 17/2/11
The Street (Caroline Leaf) 13/2/14
Mad Dog Morgan (Philippe Mora) 12/2/18
The Front (Martin Ritt) 10/2/17
やくざの墓場 くちなしの花 [Yakuza no hakaba: Kuchinashi no hana] [Yakuza Graveyard] (Kinji Fukasaku) 10/2/19

ORPHANS

Film (Director) highest ranking

لباسی برای عروسی [Lebasi baraye arusi] [The Wedding Suit] (Abbas Kiarostami) 11
Bugsy Malone (Alan Parker) 10
Alice, Sweet Alice (Alfred Sole) 21
Con la rabbia agli occhi [Death Rage] (Antonio Margheriti) 23
Silver Streak (Arthur Hiller) 13
The Pink Panther Strikes Again (Blake Edwards) 24
Hokej [Ice Hockey] (Bogdan Dziworski) 23
Don's Party (Bruce Beresford) 3
Crossroads (Bruce Conner) 18
Une vraie jeune fille [A Real Young Girl] (Catherine Breillat) 14
Oz (Chris Löfvén) 7
Couleurs délicieuses sur fond bleu (Christian Lebrat) 12
In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution (Chuck Statler) 18
Mado (Claude Sautet) 3
Burnt Offerings (Dan Curtis) 14
Sybil (Daniel Petrie) 11
Sloan Square: A Room of One's Own (Derek Jarman & Guy Ford) 22
Mes nuits avec... Alice, Pénélope, Arnold, Maud et Richard [The Kinky Ladies of Bourbon Street] (Didier Philippe-Gérard) 24
The Last Tycoon (Elia Kazan) 23
Canoa (Felipe Cazals) 22
Winifred Wagner und die Geschichte des Hauses Wahnfried von 1914-1975 [The Confessions of Winifred Wagner] (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg) 17
La Paysagiste [Mindscape] (Jacques Drouin) 2
La Victoire en chantant [Black and White in Color] (Jean-Jacques Annaud) 8
Ici et Ailleurs [Here and Elsewhere] (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville) 10
Six fois deux, sur et sous la communication [Six Times Two: Over and Under Communication] (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville) 14
Godzilla – Last of the Creatures (Jeff Keen) 15
獨臂拳王大破血滴子 [Du bi quan wang da po xue di zi] [Master of the Flying Guillotine] (Jimmy Wang Yu) 24
The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (John Badham) 13
The Girl Chewing Gum (John Smith) 2
The Eagle Has Landed (John Sturges) 23
道成寺 [Dōjōji] [Dojoji Temple] (Kihachirō Kawamoto) 17
犬神家の一族 [Inugami-ke no ichizoku] [The Inugami Family] (Kon Ichikawa) 16
Lipstick (Lamont Johnson) 25
Anatomie d'un rapport [Anatomy of a Relationship] (Luc Moullet) 17
The Memory of Justice (Marcel Ophuls) 6
Tatlong Taóng Walang Diyos [Three Years Without God] (Mario O'Hara) 5
Kilenc hónap [Nine Months] (Márta Mészáros) 9
Not a Pretty Picture (Martha Coolidge) 3
Silent Movie (Mel Brooks) 22
Vizi privati, pubbliche virtù [Private Vices, Public Virtues] (Miklós Jancsó) 19
Satan's Slave (Norman J. Warren) 13
La batalla de Chile: El golpe de estado [The Battle of Chile: The Coup d'état] (Patricio Guzmán) 6
Dear Phone (Peter Greenaway) 25
La casa dalle finestre che ridono [The House with Laughing Windows] (Pupi Avati) 25
Satansbraten [Satan's Brew] (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) 10
Massacre at Central High (Rene Daalder) 17
The Ritz (Richard Lester) 22
Murder by Death (Robert Moore) 20
The Grim Reaper (Ron Ormond) 22
Up! (Russ Meyer) 23
জন অরণ্য [Jana Aranya] [The Middleman] (Satyajit Ray) 7
Osânda [The Punishment] (Sergiu Nicolaescu) 6
मंथन [Manthan] [The Churning] (Shyam Benegal) 4
Children (Terence Davies) 9
Der Fangschuß [Le Coup de grâce] (Volker Schlöndorff) 17
Herz aus Glas [Heart of Glass] (Werner Herzog) 11
Elementarz [The Primer] (Wojciech Wiszniewski) 21
कभी कभी [Kabhi Kabhie] [Sometimes] (Yash Chopra) 9
Kristina Talking Pictures (Yvonne Rainer) 21
Bankiet [Banquet] (Zofia Oraczewska) 20

19 lists submitted

Thanks Swo. Though boo to those who aren’t up with Up!

knives wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2023 5:55 pm Though boo to those who aren’t up with Up!

I just happened to watch it for the project and didn't care for it, but would've been interested in reading a plug from you. It was better but less interesting than Supervixens, which felt like Russ Meyer's version of Zabriskie Point, cheekily conveying vapidity with vapidity, though that doesn't make it good

Thanks swo - Top Ten + Orphans

1. Taxi Driver
2. Kings of the Road
3. Nickelodeon
4. All the President’s Men
5. Obsession
6. God Told Me To
7. The Other Side of the Wind
8. Martin
9. Chinese Roulette
10. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

13. Satan’s Slave
17. Anatomy of a Relationship
21. Kristina Talking Pictures
22. The Grim Reaper

------------------------------
Pleasantly surprised to see Family Plot, Todo modo and Next Stop, Greenwich Village make the main list, and it doesn't look like my last minute switch of Who Can Kill a Child? from 10 to 11 would've impacted it making the main list. Curious who placed Kings of the Road as number one? I didn't expect that to slip from my top spot, especially since it was comfortably-situated in my All-Time Top Ten 'til not too long ago

Surprised that Terence Davies was my orphan. Maybe it's assumed that his Trilogy were early sketches for his later masterpieces? I found Children to be a stark, visceral and fully formed dramatisation of his childhood that, whilst deeply personal, avoided alienating or distancing the viewer.
Alice, Sweet Alice was another orphan but my discovery of the year and a guilty pleasure. It had no pretensions other than to be a bloody good slasher and was all the better for it.

Thanks once again Swo for all your work on this.

therewillbeblus wrote: Fri Sep 01, 2023 8:27 pm Curious who placed Kings of the Road as number one?

01 Kings of the Road
02 The Man Who Fell to Earth
03 Mister Klein
04 Judge and the Assassin
05 Marquise of O
06 Small Change
07 All the President’s Men
08 Chinese Roulette
09 Robin and Marian
10 Marathon Man

Forgot about this short Polish animation, which would've made my list:

Bankiet [Banquet] (Zofia Oraczewska)

swo17 wrote: Sun Sep 03, 2023 5:00 am Forgot about this short Polish animation, which would've made my list:

Bankiet [Banquet] (Zofia Oraczewska)

I hadn't noticed before, but this short is included as an extra on Radiance's Szulkin set. Check it out!

Trás-os-Montes (António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro) I was not in the right headspace to fully access this quiet, digressive rural film with a hodgepodge semi-narrative, but I felt I still had to mention it here because of the number of brilliant landscape and pastoral images throughout. The finale, for example, captures at length the smoke of a train passing through a valley in semi-darkness—coiling and crawling like a shape-shifting snake—in a stunning, time-freezing manner unlike pretty much anything else I've seen in all the other shots of all other trains in movies. I think swo in particular might get a lot out of this one.

That was nice, thanks for the rec!

L'Ordinateur des pompes funèbres is an extremely silly but smart madcap dark comedy, featuring an animated Trintignant as an actuarial who begins plotting to lead people to their own demises, using calculated methods from his work's supercomputer, for his profit. It's best not to spoil the places this goes, but I found it wildly entertaining from beginning to end. Aside from Trintignant's brilliant lead perf, the supporting female players - Bernadette Lafont and Mireille Darc, in particular - are always captivating either through exuberance or dry wit, and keep this consistently engaging with aid from its breakneck pace across a short runtime. This is no L'apprenti salaud on a Masterpiece scale, but there are striking similarities - the energy in its editing across scenes of brief zany antics, and a focus on absurd plotting from a rogue male bored and agitated with the systems he's entrenched within

From the director of Luc Besson's Taxi!

I suppose I must watch this. Does the French Blu-ray have English subs?

swo17 wrote: Fri Apr 04, 2025 9:18 pm I suppose I must watch this. Does the French Blu-ray have English subs?

I have no idea, the Amazon listing only mentions French, which is strange since the DVD reportedly has English subs