I recently realized that I could put together a pretty good series on Hollywood in the 70s from DVDs and Blu-ray discs in my home collection. Then I discovered that the Pacific Film Archive had a better one on the way using 35mm prints.
In other words, I only recently took a look at the new, September/October PFA schedule.
Unlike the hypothetical series I could show my friends, the PFA’s The Outsiders: New Hollywood Cinema in the Seventies mostly avoids the acknowledged classics. There’s no Easy Rider, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, or Dog Day Afternoon. Of the 17 films in the series, only Badlands and Mean Streets still have major reputations today. Other significant works in the series include Killer of Sheep, The Last Picture Show, and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Many of the films were independently financed and didn’t receive a major release at the time.
The new schedule also includes the UCLA Festival of Preservation, which started Thursday night with Cecil B. DeMille’s 1935 The Crusades. It also screens two noirs from the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, Robert Altman’s 1982 Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, and three episodes of the old TV series This Is Your Life that focus on Holocaust survivors. Both Wanda (screening tonight) and Native Land take a semi-documentary, neo-realistic look at America. There’s also a new series of Vitaphone shorts.
Five recent music documentaries “demonstrate that music can be more about a relationship to the world than the ordering of tones or sounds” in the series Sounding Off: Portraits of Unusual Music. Two filmmakers, Yilmaz Güney and Dziga Vertov, get their own series.
Bayflicks 