1976 was a strange year for movies. Good, even great films were being made, but many of them were virtually impossible to see. Theaters were closing, distributors became increasingly cautious and conservative. Meanwhile, filmmakers picked projects that were difficult, intended for small audiences and in some cases hard to sell even to those.
In writing this column, we usually try to make films sound entertaining and accessible. But many of the best films of 1976 are difficult and demanding. It doesn't make sense to try to popularize them. The mid-'70s was a time of helplessness and lack of direction. People felt something was wrong but didn't know what to do about it. Criticism of society included an awareness that it probably wouldn't change anything.
All the top ten films of 1976 reflect this. There are no joyrides here. In 1976 film artists were still allowed to make films that expressed the mood of the times. The contemplative or meditative aspects of these films might seem boring to viewers used to the Die Hard level of analysis of the human condition. But films like that, which have nothing but action scenes and peak moments, end up nullifying and blunting the viewer, and are therefore more boring than The Killing of a Chinese Bookie or Kings of the Road, films devoid of pyrotechnics that concentrate on character, relationships, and hard choices.
We now cut to Jesus, like in Scorpio Rising. Rossellini's Messiah has Jesus characterize people as unwilling to dance when music is played and unwilling to be moved when others suffer. Viewers can remain indifferent to the music and suffering of 1976 by claiming that the films aren't entertaining enough. But we hope, with the Rev. Jack Van Impe in Ormond's The Grim Reaper, that something will speak to you through the presentation of these motion pictures.
The top ten
1. The Messiah (Il Messia; Roberto Rossellini, Italy)
For his last feature film, the neorealist Rossellini made a Jesus picture that calmly dispenses with everything audiences expect from a cinematic life of Christ. He drains his film of all spectacle so he can freely zoom through a series of tableaux designed to rationally explain the philosophy and historical background of The Gospels. The Messiah is not a film about miracles or the supernatural. Nor is it a film about the physical suffering of Jesus. Scenes of the dead being raised and The Stations of the Cross are left out so that a better sense of the power and necessity of Christ's words can emerge. Rossellini's Last Supper is an underplayed, almost throwaway scene shot from an angle no one else would've thought to use—an angle for daily life, physical reality, and quiet observation.
2. Duelle and Nor'west (Noroît) (Jacques Rivette, France)
The best films of Jacques Rivette, the least known major figure of the French New Wave, improvise spaces where fantasy and reality infect each other. Duelle and Nor'west are the two finished parts of a proposed four-part cycle called "Scenes from Parallel Life." In Duelle, Bulle Ogier and Juliet Berto play sun and moon spirits, respectively, who spend 40 days on earth each year to compete for a magic crystal that will allow them to become mortal. Played mostly in sumptuous interiors and observed in handheld long takes, the arcane plot comes with hints of film noir and lesbian vampire films and benefits from spirited acting (especially by Ogier). If more people could see this film, it would probably inspire a New Age movie cult. Geraldine Chaplin and Bernadette Lafont star in Nor'west, a lurid dream of a female pirate film complete with buried treasure, murders, and revenge, to the accompaniment of free improvisation by a trio of musicians. Richer in movement and incident than its predecessor, Nor'west is also more violent, darker in mood, and more impressively theatrical. Rivette's Seventies work in general remains a virtually invisible touchstone for experimental fiction film. While waiting for the "Scenes from Parallel Life" video box, you should watch Céline and Julie Go Boating, Rivette's dazzling 1974 hit.
3. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, USA)
A deglamourized crime movie about a guy named Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara), who owns an odd cabaret-style strip joint and owes money to the mob. Set in a murky Los Angeles and shot so that what little light gets through goes into the audience's eyes, Killing takes Cosmo down unexpected alleys on out-of-the-way bus routes. Ultimately, he and the movie arrive at a place where men's fantasies of hip swagger and control fall apart. By turns harsh and laconic, compassionate and boorish, Cassavetes's movie disallows easy answers and ignores the usual considerations not just of gangster-type pictures, but of movies in general. The cast is wild and unpredictable, especially Azizi Johari as Cosmo's put-upon stripper girlfriend, and Timothy Carey as a weird, violent hood named Flo.
4. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, USA)
Taxi Driver is a film that's too famous for its own good. Robert De Niro's awkward and disturbing portrayal of Travis Bickle has probably been imitated more times than James Cagney by now. The film's notoriety tries to reduce it to the level of would-be classics like Network, or to mere sociology. Seeing the film wipes all that away. The performances (Cybill Shepherd, Albert Brooks, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel) are undiminished, the photography (by Michael Chapman) bolder than it could've seemed when the film was released. Taxi Driver is a rarity for a studio-financed feature. It's one where the violence isn't "violence," and the unresolvable pain and confusion of American existence, no matter how distressing, serve as raw material for a formally sophisticated film. This shouldn't be taken for granted in the age of the live-action cartoon. Bernard Herrmann, world-famous for his Psycho score, composed the music for Taxi Driver and died shortly after it was recorded. It sets the standard by which all lonely-saxophone-over-lush-orchestra movie music must be judged.
5. Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit or In the Course of Time; Wim Wenders, West Germany)
Robert (Hanns Zischler), a pediatrician who has just left his wife, drives his Volkswagen into a river and hitches a ride in the truck of Bruno (Rüdiger Vogler), a traveling movie-projector repairman. The two men's odyssey through West Germany is an eerily displaced road movie in lush, haunted black and white. Singing along with American records on Bruno's jukebox, Robert and Bruno act out an American mythology of freedom-in-movement that they tacitly know they can't fulfill. The geographical border they finally run up against externalizes those they carry with them: Robert seeking freedom from his obsessions, Bruno trapped in the freedom of total detachment. Kings of the Road is a pivotal '70s film because of its melancholy awareness of itself as coming at the end of a certain time period. Disconnected from the future, it sums up the past in a series of farewells and sees the present more or less as debris, signs with letters and numbers that no longer mean anything because the reality they stand for has been dismantled.
6. In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no corrida; Empire of the Senses; Nagisa Oshima, Japan)
A young woman who works as a servant in a geisha house throws herself into an all-or-nothing sexual relationship with the man who owns it. Based on a true-crime story that took place in Japan in 1936, Oshima's once-banned investigation of out-of-control, life-threatening sex does not shy away from its explicit subject matter—not at all. Instead of sensationalism, though, Oshima presents the sex scenes matter-of-factly, only occasionally cutting to a glowing close-up of actress Eiko Matsuda holding a knife in her teeth. Scenes of the lovers walking at night in the rain or of soldiers marching through the street stand out all the more for the almost continuous, obsessive, loss-of-consciousness fucking. Typical dialogue: "Bite me harder."
7. The Marquise of O... (Die Marquise von O...; Eric Rohmer, Germany)
An adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's classic. During the anti-Napoleonic campaigns in northern Italy in the early 19th century, a Russian officer (Bruno Ganz) saves a widowed young noblewoman (Edith Clever) from attempted rape by his soldiers. Soon afterward, she finds herself pregnant without any idea of how, and the officer urgently wants to marry her. Director Rohmer is better known for contemporary-set studies of love and moral dilemmas. By bringing a calm, cool tone and a fluid feeling of space and light to this period story elaborately concerned with social codes, Rohmer and cinematographer Nestor Almendros open it up while respecting its formal rules. The result is surprising, involving, and effortlessly charming.
8. Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (Robert Altman, USA)
After winning near-unanimous acclaim for his 1975 Nashville, Altman confused and alienated almost everybody with this portrait of the American hero as alcoholic, racist, and fraud. Not quite a comedy, not exactly a Western, messy and multilayered to the point of incoherence, Buffalo Bill and the Indians stages American history as a Wild West show in which no matter what disastrous accidents happen, the hero keeps returning on his white horse to engage in rigged contests. Paul Newman's Bill is probably the best thing this too-often, too-easily self-satisifed actor has done. He makes us curious enough about the character to want to see what, if anything, lies behind his fakeness and immaturity. The film eventually feels shallow, but it's an unusual shallowness, that of a dream half-believed in. The cast, too, is unusual, even by Altman standards: Newman, Burt Lancaster, Geraldine Chaplin, Joel Grey, Harvey Keitel, Will Sampson, Pat McCormick.
9. Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000; Alain Tanner, Switzerland)
Four French-Swiss couples, having emerged from the politicized '60s, cope with the disillusioned '70s by various micro-political subversions: organic farming, Tantric sex, undercharging old pensioners at a supermarket, teaching history students about how capital works, foiling an evil development scheme. Tanner's brisk, complex, lighthearted film, co-written by novelist/cultural theorist John Berger (Ways of Seeing), is full of subtle insights about the problems of being "post"-something, and it skillfully avoids being too smug about celebrating its characters' craziness. Sadly, the film's guarded optimism about their possibilities now seems excessive, these days when Jonah (born during the course of the story), now 23, is probably either strung out or working on a management degree.
10. I Only Want You to Love Me (Ich will doch nur, dass Ihr mich liebt; Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany)
A socialist-realist indictment of the family, consumerism, and wage-slavery, this purposefully drab and deceptively straight-ahead drama concentrates as much on really ugly wallpaper and cement cityscapes as it does on psychology. A young man (Vitus Zeplichal) tries hard to please his parents, can't, and moves to Munich with his new wife, where he spends money on things he can't afford and works as much as possible to pay for them. In the opening titles, Fassbinder calls the film as "a fairy tale about obligations." It would be hard to find a graver one.
Honorable mention
1. God Told Me To (Demon; Larry Cohen, USA)
God Told Me To is a crazy, bad dream Martin Scorsese or Paul Schrader might have and do everything they could to forget. It's a slapdash, inverse Taxi Driver for people whose only recourse is to Jesus and aliens. A rash of murders is being committed in New York, and each time the murderer is caught, he offers the film's title as an explanation. There are no toeholds in this fast-moving, claustrophobic film; the camera circles and probes, every cut is strange, cheap color effects fight with gritty realism for screen space. Tony Lo Bianco, as the cop investigating the whole thing, gets more and more confused until he slowly realizes it's somehow all his fault. Andy Kaufman has a bit.
2. Her Venetian Name in Deserted Calcutta (Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert; Marguerite Duras, France)
Feeling that her 1974 film India Song somehow wasn't finished, Duras returned to the ruined chateau where it was filmed and shot this strange alternate version of that painful love tragedy. In the second version, the entire soundtrack of India Song (featuring the sublime voice of Delphine Seyrig) plays over shots in which the camera glides through the rooms of the deserted house and over its grounds. Only at the end of the film do people appear, less as characters than as witnesses to an event that has failed to occur. Respected as a novelist, Duras is virtually unknown as a filmmaker (her best known film work was the screenplay for Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour). Most of her films are, in one way or another, "difficult," and the difficulties of Her Venetian Name are certainly unique, but so are its rewards. An unrepeatable blend of beauty, distance, and eroticism.
3. Here and Elsewhere (Ici et ailleurs; Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, France)
In 1970 Jean-Luc Godard went to the Middle East to make a film about the Palestinian armed struggle. After returning to France, he abandoned the film. Five years later, he and his new collaborator, Anne-Marie Miéville, integrated the footage with new scenes shot in France and added voice-over thoughts about filmmaking, politics, and culture. The result is a brisk, bracing 55-minute essay in which the filmmakers address their own complicity with a general failure, amid the media's non-stop barrage of assembly-line images, to see and hear the reality of either France or Palestine.
4. Harlan County U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, USA)
This color documentary about a coal miners' strike in an isolated part of Kentucky is a frightening account of American labor relations. The miners of the Eastover Mining Company, who work under brutal conditions where they're in constant danger from cave-ins and black lung, attempt to get a new contract through the United Mine Workers of America that will at least guarantee them a minimum of health coverage. They're almost immediately besieged by armed goons hired by the mine's owners. Kopple shot this film over a four-year period under conditions far removed from those of today's talking-head-and-archival-photo documentaries. She gains the trust of the miners and their wives by letting them explain themselves and by putting herself and her crew in the line of fire with them, rolling camera even when there's only enough light to expose capitalism at its most inhuman.
5. Keoma (Enzo G. Castellari, Italy)
The end of the line for the Italian Western. Halfbreed Franco Nero returns to his hometown to help fight the local despot, bring medicine to plague victims, and settle the score with his bullying half-brothers. Castellari, a first-class stager of action scenes, is also good at pouring on the doom-laden atmosphere. On the soundtrack, a woman singer wails a fervid running commentary on the plot, joined late in the film by the Leonard Cohen-like croak of Nero (who also dubs his own dialogue in heavily Italian-accented English), droning about his onscreen predicaments: "Yah, I'm here, in front of these men,/Gun in hand and waiting for what will be." What will be turns out to include a shootout in which the soundtrack consists almost exclusively of the cries of a woman giving birth.
6. Mr. Klein (M. Klein; Joseph Losey, France)
Robert Klein (Alain Delon), an art dealer making a quite a nice living buying art from Jews in the occupied France of 1942, has an unseen double. This double is also named Robert Klein, has a girlfriend that looks like his, even reads the same books he does, like Moby Dick. There's one difference: the other Klein is Jewish. The Delon Klein finds this out, reports it to the police, and, of course, in trying to prove he's not the other Klein, can't. Losey, an American director who was blacklisted in the '50s and moved to Europe to keep working, knows intimately what it's like to be the other Mr. Klein, "a hibernating snake waiting for a better season." He needs all his guile to pull this one off, which he does, barely resorting to the weirded-out vagueness his later work is known for.
7. The Grim Reaper (Ron Ormond, USA)
Grim isn't strong enough a word for this tour through the psyche of fundamentalist Christianity, courtesy of Ron Ormond and his Nashville-based Ormond Organization. The film begins at the funeral of a racing car driver who died without having accepted Christ as his personal savior. The kid is therefore now undoubtedly in hell, as the film spells out relentlessly. He shows up as a ghost in his mother's bedroom, complaining: "Mama, I can't stand it! .... Mama, hell is so hot!" What with flashbacks, southern-accented reenactments of Bible stories, a vision of life in hell, and such slick fire-breathers as Jerry Falwell and Jack Van Impe hectoring the camera, there's a lot packed into this 60-minute film and none of it is boring. Ormond was a long-time king of exploitation movies before deciding to dedicate his filmmaking talents to the Lord. The Grim Reaper has the vitality of Ormond's pre-Jesus work: spook-show makeup and atmosphere, a high-impact story sense, a deadpan camera style, and amateur actors who plumb all 57 varieties of inadequacy in their struggles to emote in closeup.
8. Stay Hungry (Bob Rafelson, USA)
Rafelson, who also made Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens, both with Jack Nicholson, was a fine observer of character as it turned to desperate nuttiness. Stay Hungry is lighter in tone than those films, its social comedy broader, owing to the presence of Jeff Bridges, Sally Field, and the pre-Conan Arnold Schwarzenegger in its lead roles. Set in Birmingham, Alabama, and focussing on life at a gym where Arnold, known as "Mr. Santo," is training for a Mr. Universe contest (he also bowls 200, is an Olympic-class swimmer, was a curling champ back in Austria, plays a mean country fiddle, and likes to work out in a Batman get-up), the film floats around pleasantly, and lingers in the mind for days. Its hopefulness is winning.
9. Lips of Blood (Lèvres de sang; Jean Rollin, France)
Jean Rollin's low-budget, quasi-underground erotic vampire films are ultra-distilled, slightly cloying Gothic potions. Reducing storyline to a minimum and concentrating on stylized imagery, Rollin's work has a naïve, picture-book-like aspect, together with a sophisticated sensibility obviously steeped in the avant-garde. The hero of Lips of Blood, an aging hippie, becomes obsessed with the childhood memory of an encounter with a mysterious girl in white in a ruined castle. His search for her leads to a seaboard ending that's either sublime or ridiculous, depending on how the film has worked for the viewer. Weird and hermetic as Lips of Blood is, it connects in various ways with other '76 films: one can easily imagine its central couple meeting the heroes of Kings of the Road at a deserted movie theater or sharing a macrobiotic meal with the characters of Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000.
Most wanted
1. The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, USA)
Welles shot The Other Side of the Wind, a French-Iranian coproduction he partly financed himself, between 1970 and 1976 in California, Arizona, and France. The editing was largely completed in 1976, but for obscure legal and financial reasons, the film has never been released. The movie concerns an aging filmmaker played by John Huston. Peter Bogdanovich, the director of Paper Moon, has a big part in it and describes it as among Welles's best work in movies. Welles has been dead for over twelve years now, and most of the films he left in various states of completion remain unseen. How can important work by the man who made Citizen Kane, a man who is among the most fascinating artists of the 20th Century, be neglected this way? No matter how messy, The Other Side of the Wind deserves to be seen. Didn't It's All True prove that?
2. We Can't Go Home Again (Nicholas Ray, USA)
While teaching at Harpur College (State University of New York, Binghamton), director Nicholas Ray (Rebel without a Cause) and his students shot footage for a film that, while intended to give the students hands-on experience, turned into an intensely personal statement by Ray about two generations' mutual seduction and betrayal. A cinematic behemoth, shot in various film formats and on video, and using multiple-screen images in a way that may have influenced Godard and Miéville's Here and Elsewhere, We Can't Go Home Again was shown at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, then reedited in 1976. Although it has had occasional screenings since Ray's death in 1979, it still needs a distributor.
3. Anti-Cine (Javier Aguirre, Spain)
Basque director Aguirre is best known for Dracula's Great Love and The Hunchback of the Morgue, two bad horror movies starring Paul Naschy, Spain's answer to Lon Chaney, Jr. The latter film is notorious for a scene in which Naschy sets fire to live rats to stop them from eating a rotten corpse he hopes to bring back to life. Mysteriously, Aguirre has an alternate career as one of Spain's foremost avant-garde filmmakers. In 1972 he published his manifesto, Anti-Cinema: Notes for a Theory. An Aguirre film called Anti-Cine is listed as a 1976 release in one source; but we know nothing else about it. It could be a compilation of Aguirre's short experimental films, which include "Entropic Fluctuations" and "Plus-X Tautologos." From The Hunchback of the Morgue to "Entropic Fluctuations" is a stretch that no American director seems inclined or able to span. Could Wes Craven (Scream) even secretly aspire to be "against cinema"?
Overrated
1. Network (Sidney Lumet, USA)
Network is the kind of film you don't have to see because someone could tell you about it and not only would it be just as good, it'd be better. All Lumet and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky had to do to make an interesting film was stay on Howard Beale (Peter Finch), the TV newscaster who's losing his mind and reimagining himself as "the mad prophet of the airwaves," a man who's "mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore." Instead they expose us to the machinations of executives William Holden and Faye Dunaway, cardboard characters it's impossible to care about. The film even resorts to unmotivated, omniscient narration to move the story along. The one thing that makes it interesting is that the world Network criticizes in such a muddled way has completely won out.
2. All the President's Men (Alan Pakula, USA)
Some guys who worked for President Nixon did something they're not supposed to do, and Nixon knew about the whole thing anyway. That's about as deep as it gets in this lengthy newsroom drama that tries to be a political thriller, but lacks both politics and thrills. As the famous Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein, Robert Redford (who also produced) comes off bored, and Dustin Hoffman, despite his innate likability, seems more annoyed at Redford than at Republican injustice. Blame Pakula's lackluster direction and William Goldman's repetitive, tiring script.
3. 1900 (Novecento; Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy)
Two children are born in northern Italy: the bastard grandson of a peasant and the heir of a landowner. They grow up to be Gérard Depardieu and Robert De Niro, respectively, and sustain their friendship on opposite political sides through the rise of fascism. There are some great scenes in this five-hour epic (shortened to four on its US release), especially toward the beginning and the end, when Bertolucci's grandiose camera style somehow comes to grips with the fantasy quality of the narrative. The long, confusing middle of the film, dominated by Dominique Sanda's dreary kook and Donald Sutherland's manic, skull-smashing black-shirt, is mostly fattened-up melodrama.
4. The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, UK)
David Bowie arrives from outer space and uses his planet's technological secrets to start a high-tech corporate giant. Ex-cinematographer Roeg makes chic, depressing movies that throw vast swathes of visual detail on the screen in aggressively scrambled patterns in order to confuse the viewer into thinking that something deeply serious is being said just below the level of comprehension. This failed science-fiction is one of Roeg's most discouraging efforts, not just because of its preposterous length (140 minutes), but because the premise and cast (Buck Henry, Candy Clark, Rip Torn) are interesting enough that one feels, while watching the film, a sense of waste in addition to the usual Roeg-induced anguish, boredom, and disgust.
5. Seven Beauties (Pasqualino Settebellezze; Lina Wertmüller, Italy)
What remains the most inexplicable '70s movie phenomenon? Sensurround? Sunn Classics pictures? Willard and Ben, or Benji? We'd like to nominate the fantastic success of the films of Lina Wertmüller. Can anyone see anything in them except Fellini-ism pushed to its most unattractive extreme, the point where film form completely breaks down in the most uninteresting way possible? It's films like Seven Beauties that have made European art films the butt of jokes about how impossible to understand they are, about how dull they are, about how all the shots are wide-angles, and how all the actors are grimacing and repellent. Giancarlo Giannini stars as a small-time hood who has to join the Italian army. He winds up in a German concentration camp, presided over by Shirley Stoler; a situation too much for any movie to bear. Seven Beauties doesn't so much expose fascism as rub your face in it—over and over again.
6. Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, USA)
This big and smeary movie, another one starring Dustin Hoffman with a script by William Goldman, starts off as a comedy about old men with car problems, but soon turns sour. Hoffman plays a graduate student whose secret-agent brother (Roy Scheider) gets him wrapped up in a plot involving a rich, aging Nazi dentist (Laurence Olivier). Schlesinger shoots this imitation Fritz Lang thriller like he wants to have one shot of everything in the world in it, and have everything that could ever happen to anyone happen. A list is unnecessary, but surely this is a bit much to attempt in any film. He ends up unable to create any kind of cohesive space, much less a world. The famous torture scenes are endless, and the film seems obsessed with putting things in people's mouths. As in Seven Beauties, fascism is examined and found evil, yet worthy of exploiting to shock us.
Check out more from Club Havana's Secret History of Cinema:
Introduction;
1939;
1946;
1953;
1968;
1983; and
1994
Chris Fujiwara and A. S. Hamrah are Club Havana Productions.
A version of this article originally appeared in the Media Zone of the Web site Tripod.
