[The Daily] ’77

“Forty years ago,” begins Earl Douglas at the Interrobang, “the country was still reeling from Vietnam and Watergate, Elvis died, punk and disco took full flight, and New York City dealt with record heat, a blackout, a financial crisis and the Son of Sam. It was also a big year for Hollywood as Star Wars broke box office records worldwide and forever changed how movies were made and marketed. The Film Society of Lincoln Center will look at this monumental year with a three week retrospective of movies that captured the period and laid the blueprint of what was to follow.”

“A scan of the 33-film lineup in the FSLC retrospective reveals symmetries and consonances,” writes Melissa Anderson in the Village Voice. “Two American greats, Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep) and David Lynch (Eraserhead), made their first films; a European maestro, Luis Buñuel (That Obscure Object of Desire), completed his last. Three paragons of New Hollywood—Robert Altman (3 Women), John Cassavetes (Opening Night), and Martin Scorsese (New York, New York)—each at least a decade into their careers, released films in this annus mirabilis that follow only the idiosyncratic dictates of their makers. Working in a vastly different registers and idioms, UK queer firebrand Derek Jarman (Jubilee), then in his ascendant phase, and Senegalese doyen Ousmane Sembène (Ceddo), at roughly the midpoint of his oeuvre, created works that are united in their insurrectionary ire.”

The Voice has also posted a round of 1977 top tens, an overview of the year by Andrew Sarris accompanied by lists from Tom Allen, J. Hoberman, and Terry Curtis Fox. What may immediately strike you is how high the New German Cinema was riding at the time. Fox’s top three:

• The American Friend (Wim Wenders) [image above]
• Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog)
• Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven or Chinese Roulette (or any of the other six Fassbinders)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher tops Hoberman’s list and Effi Briest comes in at #2 on Sarris’s—where we find Herzog’s Stroszek at #10.

“But the release of a handful of classics of New German and American independent cinema is not enough to explain the near-mythical status that some accord to the year 1977,” writes Cosmo Bjorkenheim at Screen Slate:

Italian philosopher and cultural critic Franco “Bifo” Berardi has written about it as a “year of premonition” for capitalist civilization. It was a “year of violence,” bringing with it massive riots throughout Italy, the kidnap-murder of ex-Nazi industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer by German leftist armed struggle group the Red Army Faction (whose leaders also died that year, in prison, under mysterious circumstances), and an unprecedented wave of youth suicides in Japan . . . It’s the end of modernity and the beginning of postmodernity, the replacement of the kind of open-eyed innocence and “utopian rebellion” represented by Charlie Chaplin (who died on Christmas Day that year) by a dystopian imaginary woven by the likes of Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs. Last but not least, Berardi claims that the end of the modern project of political autonomy was announced by Saturday Night Fever, which advocated hedonist escape from the quotidian work cycle at the expense of collective action.

’77 opens Friday, August 4, and runs through August 24.

VIDEO

For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.

from The Criterion Current http://ift.tt/2tZBVgI