This week’s movie was Francis Ford Coppola’s New Hollywood landmark The Conversation, one of the three films produced under the auspices of The Director’s Company, a partnership formed by hot-off-celebrated-hits Coppola (The Godfather), William Friedkin (The French Connection), and Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show). The arrangement with Paramount Pictures – modest budgets in exchange…
This week’s movie was actually Klute, but once again, having posted on that great film already, we decided to take the opportunity to talk about the next entry in Alan J. Pakula’s “paranoid trilogy”—The Parallax View. (All the President’s Men would round out the set.) One of the great paranoid thrillers of the seventies (possibly…
Mid Century Cinema favorite and enigmatic Art House Rock Star Robert Bresson’s eighth feature film, Mouchette, had its Paris premiere fifty years ago this week. We have always had a special fondness for Mouchette. Generally averse to rankings, we nevertheless have no trouble identifying this as our third favorite Bresson, behind, in no particular order,…
This week featured our first introduction to Robert Altman, one of the prominent figures in the New Hollywood pantheon. Over the final three decades of his career, Altman would release more than his share of great films—but there is nothing to compare with his remarkable stretch of nine films from 1969 to 1975, arguably the…
Fifty years ago this week Ingmar Berman’s Persona opened in the U. S. One of the landmarks in the history of film, it is about the convergence of personalities between an actress (Liv Ullmann), mute and withdrawn after falling silent in the middle of a performance, and the nurse (Bibi Andersson) charged with her care. …
This week’s screening for The Politics of the Seventies Film was The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), an achievement that represents everything the New Hollywood aspired to be: small scale, minor key, intensely personal, expressly cinematic, and ultimately indelible. “The King of Marvin Gardens is Monopoly minus the reassurance of toy money,” wrote David Thomson,…