1975: the year that changed cinema forever

Reviewing Barry Lyndon for the New Yorker in December 1975, a California girl made a plea for one of her countrymen to come in from the bitter English cold. “I wish Stanley Kubrick would come home to this country to make movies again, working fast on modern subjects,” Pauline Kael wrote. “Maybe even doing something tacky, for the hell of it.” It’s telling that in the midst of dinging the director she’d once dubbed ‘Stanley Strangelove’ for what she saw as the excessive misanthropy and insufficient momentum of his 18th-century picaresque – “a three-hour slide-show for art history majors” – Kael cast aspersions on Kubrick’s patriotism. Her thesis, such as it was, was that living and working in the United Kingdom had left a Brooklyn-born hustler cut off from his authentic artistic impulses – the unfortunate victim of lofty literary ambitions and a tightened sphincter. “There was more film art in his early The Killing than there is in Barry Lyndon,” wrote Kael acidly. “And you didn’t feel older when you came out of it.”

For all her staunchly anti-intellectual posturing, Kael was a clever dialectician, presiding regally over a film-critical discourse defined largely by devotion to and dissent from her chosen positions. In 1975, Kael’s sneering disdain for Barry Lyndon was contextualised by her similarly performative – and far more persuasive – enthusiasm for Robert Altman’s Nashville, itself a three-hour epic drenched in misanthropy but fast, modern and surpassingly tacky. (The garish Tennessee-meets-Vegas ensembles of Henry Gibson’s Top 40 crooner Haven Hamilton predate Glen Campbell; he’s the original Rhinestone Cowboy). Tellingly, what Kael responded to most ecstatically in Nashville was its star-spangled virtuosity, the way it smuggled a strain of exotic, transatlantic sophistication on to salt-of-the-earth home turf. Set at a massive country and western summit populated by glad-handers, rubberneckers and lone gunmen, Nashville was a come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-America party, minus the perceived snobbery of the European auteur cohort. She especially loved the bit where one yammering foreign correspondent – “Opal from the BBC”, brilliantly played by Geraldine Chaplin as a cold fish out of water – observes a group of rowdy, ten-gallon revellers and sighs “pure, unadulterated Bergman” before noting that “[they’re] all wrong for Bergman”. It’s a great line, and a nifty way for a pop-cultural omnivore like Altman to have his fancy Swedish takeaway and eat it, too. Kael didn’t review Arthur Penn’s Night Moves that same year, but it’s easy to picture her smirking at Gene Hackman’s glancing review of My Night at Maud’s therein – he thought Eric Rohmer’s 1969 talk-a-thon was “like watching paint dry”.

The major hardware in 1975 went elsewhere: the Cannes Palme d’Or to Algeria’s Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina for Chronicle of the Years of Fire (still the only African title so honoured, and only intermittently available for streaming) and the Best Picture Oscar to Miloš Forman’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a universally praised hymn to nonconformity that placed Jack Nicholson and his joker’s grin in complicity with the viewer. “I tried, didn’t I?” pleads the counterculture warrior to his fellow bedraggled asylum dwellers, and to us. “Goddammit, at least I did that.” Lovable losers – and pyrrhic victories – were growth sectors in 1975, and Jack’s manic rabble-rousing in Cuckoo’s Nest slotted in nicely alongside Al Pacino’s hoarse-voiced showmanship in Dog Day Afternoon, a stranger-than-fiction hostage drama riven by sharply observed class, ethnic and gender tensions, and directed by Sidney Lumet with a documentary-inflected immediacy that made it a crowd-pleaser in spite of its fatalism.

Both Nashville and Dog Day Afternoon end with sudden, brutal and realistic acts of violence. The year’s most shocking moment of gunfire, however, came in Patricio Guzmán’s clandestinely produced documentary The Battle of Chile: Part I, when an Argentinian journalist filming an attempted military takeover (the prelude to Pinochet’s successful coup) was shot by a Chilean army corporal. The footage is as nightmarish as anything ever recorded – a POV on the receiving end of a bullet, the image suddenly wavering as the camera and its operator both fall to the ground. Guzmán’s film directly addresses US involvement in the overthrow of Salvador Allende, connecting, albeit at a distance, to the ambivalence about American values cascading through homegrown productions like Nashville, whose send-up of showbiz venality proliferating in the shadow of corporate capital suggested an artist surfing the zeitgeist.

Barry Lyndon, by contrast, was designed to be timeless: a period piece about the eternal struggle for upward mobility in a universe where the paths of glory lead you-know-where. This summer, the 50th anniversary of Kubrick’s film is marked by an updated 4K UHD from Criterion – an ideal graduation gift for art-history majors, although it seems like a missed opportunity for Criterion to have not included X user @flanthippe’s 26-second fan edit “Barry Lyndon x 21 Savage: ‘a lot’” as a special feature. There is a lot to like about this edit, a slyly monumental work of screwed and chopped montage which syncs images from the film to spectacularly on-point call-and-response lyrics from British-American rapper 21 Savage’s Grammy-winning hit (“How much money you got? (A lot). How many problems you got? (A lot)”); it’s a considerably more perceptive work of film criticism than Kael’s pan of Barry Lyndon. I defer to Katie Kadue’s marvellous Letterboxd appreciation of @flanthippe’s “fast cuts between slow zoom-outs that remind us we live in a context but the context is changing and it’s hard to keep up”.

The desire to do a slow zoom out on 1975 as a particularly context-changing year in modern cinematic history – a high point equidistant from the independent sabre-rattling of the late 60s and the conglomerate complacency of the 80s – comes from an honest place. So do all the hypothetical-polemical cage matches between its keynote films. Forget Barry Lyndon versus Nashville: how about One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest versus Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, which swapped out Nicholson’s holy-fool histrionics for a seductive ultimate passivity? Or John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King versus Kurosawa Akira’s Dersu Uzala, magisterial 19th-century adventure pictures by ageing masters, shot through with themes of comradeship and culture clash? Or Frederick Wiseman’s Welfare, with its granular systemic analysis of cash-strapped claimants and harried case workers versus Albert and David Maysles’ Grey Gardens – a referendum on exploitation-as-empathy akin to Wiseman’s own Titicut Follies – whose wizened to-themanor-born subjects Big and Little Edie (cousins to the Kennedys and, as such, effigies of a fallen Camelot) make self-conscious spectacle of their own squalor?  

Or: how about Jaws versus Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles? This one is irresistible. In one corner: an epochal blockbuster, typically summoned on trumped-up (but not unreasonable) charges of inventing both high-concept marketing and ancillary driven distribution; in the other, a movie made on (and consigned to) the industrial margins, one that cultivated and weaponised the very thing the young Steven Spielberg was congenitally allergic to – deliberate, confrontational tedium – in the service of a differently visceral sort of horror. Much more than Barry Lyndon’s longueurs, Jeanne Dielman was designed to make the viewer feel older. As Chantal Akerman said: “With my films, you’re aware of every second passing through your body.”

It’s either a tragedy or a blessing that Kael never reviewed Akerman’s distended domestic drama, although retrospective kudos is due to J. Hoberman for his self-described “strategic belligerence” in pointing out her absence (in print) for the film’s press screenings in 1983, the year of its delayed American theatrical premiere. Kael’s love for Jaws was, perhaps, a foregone conclusion, since Spielberg’s film – and its voracious, big-mouthed antagonist – perfectly embodied the idea of trash as an appetiser for art: here, at last, was a B movie with a sense of montage skilful enough to evoke (for Kael, at least) Eisenstein, minus any pesky revolutionary sentiments. Jaws’ greatness as a mainstream entertainment is as sturdy and bulletproof as Bruce the shark himself, and yet its legacy as a popcorn entertainment is linked to perceived nutritional deficiencies; by giving audiences so much high-fructose spectacle to chew on, Jaws turned pretty much anything else (including, but not limited to, minimalist Belgian masterpieces) into an acquired taste.

It’d be cute, maybe, to propose Jaws and Jeanne as secret sharers, separate but equal exercises in suspense cinema, engineering under the sign of Hitchcock. The Master’s oft-cited spiel about the bomb ticking away under the (dining room) table applies strangely well to Akerman’s film, whose explosive twist is hiding in sight the entire time, and whose protagonist embodies two separate Psycho-logical truisms: that a boy’s best friend is his mother, and that we all go a little mad sometimes. (For a movie that actually tries consciously to unite Spielberg and Akerman, try Bruno Dumont’s 2003 Twentynine Palms, with its swimming-pool stalking scene and fatal pair of scissors). The recent coronation of Jeanne Dielman as the Greatest Movie of All Time – unseating no less than Hitch’s Vertigo (1958) at the top of the Sight and Sound list – makes putting it in conversation with more conventional and/or canonical contemporaries irresistible. So: if not a double bill with Jaws, how about pairing Jeanne with Bryan Forbes’s mechanically effective film adaptation of The Stepford Wives, whose custom-tooled fembots are all too happy to stay in the kitchen (and thankfully programmed not to turn their husbands into meatloaf)? Or Jonathan Demme’s skeezy second feature Crazy Mama, whose intergenerational heroines slash back against a vicious capitalist patriarchy? (One can only imagine Shirley Clarke’s version of the same material, had she not been fired by Roger Corman just prior to shooting.) Or how about mashing up Delphine Seyrig’s methodical laundry folding and meticulous bathtime routine with Ann-Margret writhing amid ­torrents of laundry detergent and Heinz in Tommy? How many baked beans you got? A lot.

The case for Ken Russell’s phantasmagorical rock-opera-cum-commodity-fetish farce as an all-timer is there for anybody brave (or tasteless) enough to make it; I personally prefer its gaudy, deluxe incoherence to the year’s other proto-MTV landmark, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, although the latter endures as a landmark in spectatorial practice and a very era-specific sort of self-reflexivity. From its opening lines, sung by a smiling, disembodied pair of red lips – “a different set of Jaws” per the film’s strategically tweaked second-wave ad campaign – Jim Sharman’s film speaks the language of seen-it-all cinephilia. “Michael Rennie was ill the day the Earth stood still / But he told us where we stand”: the key word in Richard O’Brien’s lyric is “we”, suggesting a community of fans familiar with tropes and tradition and eager to do the time warp back to a stylised version of the 1950s – American Graffiti (1973) for freaks rather than normies, though finally no less celebratory of boy-meets-girl normality. For “erotic nightmares beyond any measure”, the place to be was not the old Frankenstein Place, but the Republic of Salò, where Pier Paolo Pasolini staged the year’s most notorious horror show, linking decadence and depravity through a mise en scène every bit as painterly and assured as Kubrick’s in Barry Lyndon, tableaux of indelible abjection to be watched with eyes wide shut.

Divining the difference (or relationship) between (qu)easy exploitation and genuine transgression has been grist for the film-critical-mill since long before Salò (Pasolini’s spiritual predecessor Luis Buñuel had already depicted the 120 Days of Sodom, albeit behind closed doors, in 1930’s L’Age d’or). In 1975, the international grindhouse was in full swing, with Canada alone producing two movies adjacent to Salò’s ‘Circle of Blood’: David Cronenberg’s Shivers (whose original title, Orgy of the Blood Parasites, offered a succinct appraisal of its contents) and Don Edmonds’s Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, whose inventory of Nazisploitation included an Iron Cross and a golden shower. Whatever the artistic gap between Pasolini, Cronenberg and Edmonds (who will not be entering the Criterion Collection anytime soon alongside the other two), Salò, Shivers and Ilsa each became lightning rods for moralistic journalism. In Toronto, Cronenberg was threatened with eviction after a raft of bad local press; in the New York Times, Vincent Canby admitted to walking out of Ilsa (a fair enough response) while later manfully sitting through Salò in order to proclaim that Pasolini’s masterful, urgent analysis of the social, historical, cultural and economic factors underpinning authoritarian regimes “dehumanizes the human spirit… which is supposed to be the artist’s concern”.

Given the perniciousness of so many movies about the triumph of the human spirit – many of them made by artists unconcerned with much beyond awards – Canby’s rejection of Salò can be read, retrospectively, as an inverted sort of endorsement, or a testament to the necessity of the long view as opposed to snap judgements. With this in mind, the most influential film-cultural premiere of 1975 was probably not a movie but a television show: the review round-up Opening Soon at a Theater Near You, which aired on the Chicago PBS affiliate WTTW. The hosts, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, were newspaper critics who gradually developed a kind of antipathetic vaudeville routine, like younger versions of the mutual antagonists played that year by Walter Matthau and George Burns in The Sunshine Boys; their conversational style stood in compelling opposition to the magisterial monologuing of a Kael, synching with a larger tendency to shape analysis to the contours of consumer reporting. It also began a process of levelling the vocational playing field, making film criticism seem at once attainable and aspirational, anticipating the algorithmic present tense in which we now live (such as it is) and quarrel (mostly online). To paraphrase Barry Lyndon, a movie that has stood the test of time that it set for itself: good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, we are all equal – and ­posting – now.