70s film auteurs

But my favorite, one of my favorite films ever, is "Nashville". I wish I had the time to write a lengthy essay, but this film is brilliant on just every level. We're talking about directors, of course, but the acting deserves a special mention as well; all of it is first-rate, and many interesting and quirky performances are featured.

All of Altman's films of this era were shot in widescreen Panavision; don't even bother watching a "pan and scan" copy of any; you're really going to lose not only some of the atmoshere but often some of the action.

Destroy: everything by that overrated misonthrope Scorsese, Friedkin's 'Exorcist' - an overwrought bore, and all Altman 'cept, maybe 'McCabe & Mrs Miller', 'Nashville' and I wouldn't mind seeing 'Popeye' again. Just for the fuck of it.

"Have any of the directors really survived artistically?"

No. Except Spielberg ('AI' is class) and Malick but he has only made one film since the 70s and that was the excellent 'Thin Red Line' - which, of course, lost out at The Oscars to Spielberg's inferior 'Saving Private Ryan'.
But I don't rate much later stuff by Coppola, Friedkin, Bogdanovich etc. Though I did enjoy Scorsese's 'After Hours' - his best film.
They all have too much freedom, too much genuflection, too much too much!

Yes, sorry, my mistake. Shoula been: Classic Roeg = 'Performance'

Duds: Drawing a blank on this

I almost wish I didn't suggest this thread, because I don't have the time, the foucus, or the writing talent to do it justice. I don't think Altman is as good now as he was in the 70's, although he still has the guts to mount "big productions" (Short Cuts, Ready to Wear) as well as smaller films, and anything he does counts as a prestige piece. To be fair, the man is pretty old now.

Lumet doesn't really count as an 'auteur' in my mind because he's so bloody inconsistent - 'Murder on the Orient Express' for fuck's sake! - and because its hard to pick out any thematic/visual consistency in his films (I guess you could say he's concerned with matters of truth and justice.) 'Dog Day Afternoon' has a magnificent script and great actors - John Cazale! - but I think prob. 'Prince of the City' (1981) is Lumet's best, deepest film. The same could also be said for Hal Ashby - his finest movie ('The Last Detail') owes as much to Robert Towne's brilliant script as it does to Ashby's direction: see also Polanski's 'Chinatown' (which brings us back to existential detective flicks....)

Sorry to go against the grain, but although Altman's 'Nashville' is clearly a tour-de-force of organisation, I also find it to be bitter, condescending and misanthropic - a bit like Mike Leigh, who made his best films in the seventies. Scorcese didn't really put a foot wrong throughout this decade - I even like the dopey 'Last Waltz' - and Paul Schrader's 'Blue Collar' is one of the best debuts of all time (such a shame he so badly lost the plot after 'American Gigolo'.)

Shit, I could drone on about this for hours, and we haven't even touched on world cinema yet (Rivette, Oshima, Pasolini, Eustasch, Victor Erice, Bergman, Truffaut, Tarkovsky etc.), or all of the great horror movies made in the seventies - 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre', 'The Exorcist', 'Dawn of the Dead', 'Eraserhead', 'Deep Red', 'Suspiria', 'Shivers', 'Rabid', 'The Brood' and so on.

I think I'm turning into the Pinefox - why are modern films so very very BAD?

In the end - and this is something which counts against Mallick and Kubrick - you have to keep making films. This has the down side of you possibly making a bad one every now and then (something Coppola has really gone nuts on, and Spielberg has fallen into). Lumet may be patchy but his good stuff bristles. MArty and Allen are about the only two who have remained relatively consistent - even their bad movies are interesting and fit into their canon (Alice and Bringing Out The Dead both make sense when you look at their careers).

Obviously, these films themselves are hugely important in the history of cinema etc. You only have to look to the eighties to realise that. But with the exception of Scorcese, Altman, Nichols (may have left somebody out), I sometimes feel that what they were doing in the seventies was more important than it was entertaining. Strange that until this thread I never counted Allen as one of the gang, though...

Second generation of auteurs appearing now? David O.Russell, Spike Jonze, Sophia Coppola, Steven Soderbergh (to a different but no less important extent), Paul Thomas Anderson....

the conversation = grate movie abt lonely obsessive delusion, tho politically somewhat idiotic (like all jfk conspiracy stuff) (tho i spose you *could* argue it critiques the futility and ultimate cretinism of absolutely outsiderdom as an effective socially critical position...)

equus (ethan you mentalist) is a TERRIBLE film on every level: its worst sin is the employment of richard fucking burton

why are contemp movies so "bad"? becoz too many ppl ape the wrong aspects of the generation being praised here (the miscued concept of AUTEURDOM in particular: ie that one man's artistic vision respected >>> better deeper movie).

I think Lars von Trier and Harmony Korine are better film-makers than any of the above.

great modern auteur: atom egoyan!

equus = better than network

Gloria = bettah

"It is just a little bit weird that if I appear in Europe, anywhere, and I go often—to teach, to festivals, when and where there are retrospectives of my work (I’ll go almost anywhere I’ve never been before, because I like to travel)—that I find a great deal of interest in my work. On the other hand these pictures are never discussed, never shown, nor are the other filmmakers involved in them...in America. Which led me to develop a kind of 'Fuck America' attitude. They don’t want to have anything to do with me, I won’t have anything to do with them."

—Director Bob Rafelson

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1744

Have a funny story about seeing Bob Rafelon at the Cinemateca in Madrid that I will tell you the next time I see you.

Lumet doesn't really count as an 'auteur' in my mind because he's so bloody inconsistent

Although I agree with the second half of the sentence, the thought is all wrong: believing in auteurism means accepting bloody inconsistency.

I can appreciate Rafelson's frustration, insofar as I've often expressed exactly the same sentiment with regards to the programming at Toronto's Cinematheque. Year-round we get series devoted to Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Bela Tarr, Sokurov, Zhang-ke, etc.--which is great, I'm grateful there's someone who plays that stuff--but the great American films of the '70s barely exist. You're lucky if a couple of things show up in a two-month programme. Ten years ago the rationale may have been that we had other rep houses that regularly played Taxi Driver and Nashville and the rest; those theatres have long since closed and reopened as second-run mainstream-Hollywood houses, though, so that rationale no longer works. But the real reason I'm posting is that the comment seems petulant coming from Rafelson. I love Five Easy Pieces, but did he ever make a second worthwhile film? The King of Marvin Gardens and Stay Hungry are okay, the couple of films I saw after that were worse, and there's a lot I haven't seen. His words would carry more weight coming from a number of other directors.

I think Head, Marv Gardens, Black Widow and Blood & Wine are all "worthwhile."

Yes--if okay = worthwhile, which it does, then he has. I should have said, did he ever make a second really good film (i.e., somewhere close to as good as Five Easy Pieces)? None of the five I've seen qualify. I just think his complaint loses a lot validity after a quick look at his filmography.

People w/ less than that get talked about a lot more.

I'd be interested in knowing who you have in mind. One comparison I'd make is Jerry Schatzberg. I think Panic in Needle Park and Scarecrow are both good; I've never seen Puzzle of a Downfall Child, but it's on my short list of things I really want to see/buy. [i]Joe Tynan was pretty good, too. To me, though, Rafelson is much better known, with less to show for it.

I wasn't specifically talking about the '70s, so we could bring up a couple of this year's Oscar-nominated directors.

As far as contemporaries go, Dennis Hopper? Michael Cimino? But if you want to sub Michael Ritchie or Walter Hill or Alan Rudolph into Rafelson's point in place of him, that's fine.

Hopper and Alan Rudolph for sure. Cimino...close call; I'd have to get brave and sit down with Heaven's Gate again for the first time in years, but I suspect that HG + The Deer Hunter are greater on balance than Five Easy Pieces + any second Rafelson film. I definitely prefer Ritchie on the basis of The Candidate, Smile, and The Bad News Bears alone. Anway, just to get back to Rafelson's original comments, I do wish North American art houses devoted more time to American films of the '70s. You could even do pretty well staying clear of Scorsese and Altman and the overly-familiar stuff; there's still Panic in Needle Park, Smile, Desperate Characters, 92 in the Shade, Short Eyes, Straight Time, Loving, Cisco Pike, Made for Each Other, The Heartbreak Kid, and lots else. (If I fuck up on the italics again, I've giving up on them forever.)

You know who doesn't get talked about? Robert M Young, whose Alambrista! (shot-on-the-fly Mexican farmworker dodging Immigration Services) just came out on CC.

http://www.criterion.com/films/28101-alambrista

He also did Short Eyes, Rich Kids, One Trick Pony, Extremities, and a '90s noir I like called Caught.

They used to show Rich Kids a bunch on THIS TV. I think I saw most of it spread out over 3 or 4 seperate airings. Still not on DVD, but probably will soon be a MGM M.O.D. (Made On Demand disc). There's a funny story about its production in Steven Bach's Final Cut regarding one of the executives who'd read the script and greenlit the project only to wake up days later realizing the film was really about juvenile sex, which led to what Bach felt was a fatal defanging of the script.

you only really need to see two or three peckinpah films, one of them MUST be 'bring me the head of alfredo garcia' and the others should be 'the wild bunch' and something else. ignore anything from the 80s.
― ethan, Thursday, October 11, 2001 8:00 PM (10 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ethan is OTM ... peckinpah is pretty overrated.

Network = dud for inspiring Aaron Sorkin.

Great movie (i guess) but christ such a ridiculous hectoring script. i totally lost it when William Holden told Faye Dunaway about "impugning his cocksmanship." i mean good lord. still, so prescient and still relevant despite the ott speeches