The 1970 New York Film Festival – then only in its eighth year – looked to be a very promising affair. As the New York Times reported with enthusiasm on September 4, the event would feature “new films directed by Satyajit Ray, Luis Buñuel . . . Bernardo Bertolucci, Alain Resnais, Kenji Mizoguchi . ….
On August 3, 1970, about a year and a half after the fact, Performance, which promised the big screen debut of Mick Jagger, had its official premiere. Completed in 1968, the movie was shelved by a nervous studio spooked by its general decadence and envelope-pushing sex, drugs, and sadistic, fetishized violence—not to mention a disastrous…