Cinematographer Henri Decaë would have celebrated his 101st birthday on July 31. “It was he who liberated the camera from its fixed tripod,” Michel Marie wrote, and “made the New Wave possible.” The contributions of Decaë (and fellow cinematographer Raul Coutard) to the films and the possibilities of the New Wave (and, by example, to…
A milestone on the road to the Seventies Film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, an adaptation of Edward Albee’s Tony Award winning play starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, was released fifty years ago. Successfully bringing the play to the screen – with the explicit approval of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) –…
How fascinating was the filmmaker known as Eric Rohmer? When his mother died in 1970, she had no idea her son was a famous director. As Rohmer’s own son explained, she “did not know about my father’s filmmaking activities, which she never for a minute suspected. She thought he was a schoolteacher.” Forget about the…
At Mid Century Cinema we are slaves to the academic calendar, which means that the last month has been an especially hectic one, something we note by way of apology for letting Bertrand Tavernier’s seventy-fifth birthday slip by on April 25th without proper notice. But better late than never, especially for one of our favorite…
Fifty years ago this week, Mid Century Cinema favorite Claude Chabrol released The Line of Demarcation, an occupation/resistance drama that unfolds in a provincial French town straddling the river marking the frontiers of formal German administration of French territory. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re not alone. Chabrol made somewhere between fifty and sixty…
The fourth feature film of Alain Resnais, La Guerre Est Finie (The War is Over) opened in Paris on May 11, 1966. That it is his definitive masterpiece is a minority position. Resnais, revered for his intelligent, haunting, elliptical stories and brilliant, daring experimentation with the possibilities of cinematic time, is best known for his widely…
A semester of seventies films draws to a close with Chinatown, a monumental achievement in which every element of the movie contributes to its overall vision perfectly and could scarcely be improved upon, starting with Robert Towne’s screenplay—one of the greatest ever written. The final version of the script was sculpted from Towne’s much longer,…
The sensation that was Taxi Driver settled in as the eleventh screening at our semester of the seventies film. Directed with brilliant, baroque virtuosity by Martin Scorsese (on the heels of his breakthrough Mean Streets and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore), Taxi Driver was the result of an extraordinary convergence of the talents of three…
A semester of seventies films offered with its tenth entry a (modest) respite from the usual darkness and despair, with the sex-comedy Shampoo (1975). Of course, everything is relative—it’s still the seventies out there, and we surely don’t get the ending we were rooting for, leaving George (Warren Beatty) as diminished, desolate and despairing as…
Another week, another landmark movie – business as usual for a semester of seventies films. Network (1976), comes in the final year of the New Hollywood (in 1977 the writing was on the wall as Network and Taxi Driver lost best picture to the feel-good entertainment that was Rocky, as the morally unambiguous Star Wars…