The 70's

gimli2112

so im watching JAWS thinking this is one of the best movies ever made. hasn't dated. & im thinking what other movies from that era still make the grade

the shining
godfather
star wars (brain candy but still good)


there's only one from the 80's looking at you pachino

krudler

Loads of films from that era are worth watching. The Conversation (dated tech aside), Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, The French Connection, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Rocky, Manhattan, All The President's Men, Halloween, The Warriors, Alien, Dawn of the Dead, all hold up as worthwhile and watchable movies, there's tons more too.

the 70's was probably the best decade for mainstream Hollywood ever tbh.

Tipsy McSwagger

The Shining is from 1980

pixelburp

krudler wrote: »

the 70's was probably the best decade for mainstream Hollywood ever tbh.

It was also home to some of Hollywood's worst films; it's easy to swoon over the greats of that decade (though no list threads please heh), but time & hindsight has allowed us to forget the mountains of rubbish that was made in that era. Any decade that, in the middle of its disaster porn fad, gave us material such as The Swarm, or Night of the Lupus does not deserve unconditional love

I only mention it because invariably in these sorts of threads someone has a go at this decade, pointing out Transformers and the like as proof they don't make em like they used to and how the 1970s was an unblemished era.

gimli2112

@ tipsy yeah wasn't sure about the shining

@ krudler thank you I'm an idiot excellent movies you quoted

krudler

pixelburp wrote: »

It was also home to some of Hollywood's worst films; it's easy to swoon over the greats of that decade (though no list threads please heh), but time & hindsight has allowed us to forget the mountains of rubbish that was made in that era. Any decade that, in the middle of its disaster porn fad, gave us material such as The Swarm, or Night of the Lupus does not deserve unconditional love

I only mention it because invariably in these sorts of threads someone has a go at this decade, pointing out Transformers and the like as proof they don't make em like they used to and how the 1970s was an unblemished era.

Ah yeah every decade has mountains of rubbish being made too, the 70's/early 80's had tons of Jaws ripoffs and creature features and awful slasher films in the post- Halloween/Texas Chain Saw years. but as far as mainstream Hollywood films for grownups there's some fantastic films from that era.

e_e

Let's not ignore some of the great non Hollywood films of the decade:

Aguirre: The Wrath of God
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
Celine and Julie Go Boating
Fantastic Planet
House
Jeanne Dielman
Killer of Sheep
The Mirror
Solaris
Stalker
Stroszek
Suspiria
Vengeance Is Mine
The Wicker Man
A Woman Under the Influence

Sad Professor

The 70s were a great decade for American cinema. A second golden age. But in terms of world cinema I think the 50s were better. So many masters working at the top of their game. Hitchcock, Huston, Wilder, etc in Hollywood. Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi in Japan. Lean, Powell/Pressburger in Britain. And Bergman, Fellini, etc in Europe. It was a ridiculously productive decade for Hollywood, the peak of the film noir period. The films were visually and thematically darker than anything before or since (though the 70s were more subversive). It was also the best decade for westerns.

johnny_ultimate

I must admit it slightly frustrates me the pedestal Hollywood cinema in the 1970s are sometimes placed, as if it was the definitive, peerless Golden Age of Cinema, and it's been a downhill slope since. No: cinema had reached definite maturity as early as the 1920s and 30s (Murnau, Vigo, Dreyer, Eistenstein etc... are still effectively without equal), perhaps even a bit earlier if we're decent enough to include good old racially troublesome Griffith And the explosion of new talent in 1970s Hollywood was just one of an endless series of peaks that have occurred since and continue to do so. If anything, the 70s marked Hollywood just sort of catching up to some of the incredibly interesting and experimental things that had been going on elsewhere for decades.

The French New Wave directors, for example, were proving subversive and aesthetically revolutionary from the 1950s (following on from the inspiration of Renoir et al), to the degree that many of the great 70s Hollywood films actually seem a tad timid in comparison. Jacques Tati was reinventing comedy cinema with the likes of Playtime, perhaps the most stylistically extraordinary slices of comedic cinema since Keaton: I struggle to think of any film since that has achieved such a purity of vision. The Japanese New Wave of the 50s and 60s were incredibly provocative times - starting with the pulpy but paradigm-shifting Sun Tribe films, and then expanding to the amazing and challenging works of auteurs like Nagisa Oshima, Kaneto Shindo, Masaki Kobayashi and Shohei Imamura: the natural successors to the more classically brilliant likes of Mizoguchi, Ozu, Naruse, Yamanaka etc... And even within Hollywood, your Hitchcocks and Welles and Wilders and Sirks and Kubricks and more had all been doing incredibly interesting things within the Hollywood system for a long, long time. That's not to mention the unclassifiables like Satyajit Ray or Andrei Tarkovsky: the kind of infinitely influential filmmakers Hollywood circa 1974 would not have existed without.

Don't get me wrong, the 1970s produced absolutely stunning films, from Hollywood and beyond. I only belatedly got around to watching Nashville last week, for example - a film of such epic scope, distinctive style and genuine depth that it's hard to think of any direct comparisons. It birthed Wim Wenders, Terence Malick (I'd still cite Days of Heaven as one of the most visually splendid slices of pure American cinema ever produced), Werner Herzog (only a handful of American directors have ever managed the consistency and crazy ambitions of Herzog's 1970s output) and countless others amongst those already mentioned in the thread, and brought others like Woody Allen to maturity. And we can't forget that as many things the likes of Spielberg and Lucas changed for the better (and really, cinema is richer with their participation), they also directly encouraged many of the negative trends that would change Hollywood for the worse.

As for the 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s? Cinema kept ticking away in fascinating new ways that are too numerous to mention here: from Kiarostami to Miyazaki, Tarr to Carruth.

The 1970s were just one chapter in the story of film (read in Mark Cousins voice for maximum effect), but it's just one chapter in an epically long and interesting book. There's absolutely no benefit picking out one chapter as 'the best': it's the whole spectacular story that's exhilarating, and that book ain't finished yet.