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The 1970s have long been celebrated—and decried—for their excess, from their hedonistic lifestyles and corrupt politics to heavy drugs to ornate fashions. At the center of this culture of profligacy was the innovative, and sometimes transgressive, movie industry, which had changed drastically since the beginning of the 1960s: Young filmmakers who witnessed the expanding attitudes, technologies, and budgets of ’60s cinema were determined to embellish its auteurist fancies. This growing phenomenon was no more apparent than in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 space opera 2001: A Space Odyssey, which permanently transformed cinema’s aesthetic potential as both a mass cultural spectacle and a private directorial vision.
After 2001, filmmaking projects became more ambitious in size and scope, focusing on themes of countercultural utopia, exotic landscape, philosophical tourism, and speculative history. Genres like horror, science fiction, disaster, and fantasy, previously relegated to B-picture deals, garnered million-dollar budgets and better visual effects, while independent art films, afforded new levels of permissiveness, plunged into more challenging territories of sex, violence, and social taboo on a human scale—from kink to feminism and gender identity, the horrors of colonialism and war to the horrors of meat. In the instances when these separate paths converged (see, for example, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now or Alejandro Jodorowsky’s aborted Dune film), they produced some of the most monumental follies of the decade.
In that spirit, Vogue has assembled a list of some of the 1970s’ most visionary films. These movies are not simply the biggest-budgeted or most outrageously plotted, but rather works that encapsulate an impulse within the decade to unveil unseen worlds—of the inner and outer varieties—or to explore new emotional territories where the camera had yet to traverse. Both independent and studio-made, the included films share an ambition for breaking visual and narrative dimensions in search of the limits of the cinematic experience.
More (1969), Zabriskie Point (1970), and Performance (1970)
At the beginning of the 1970s, this trio of films highlighted the ominous collapse of a Western counterculture that promised a revolution of “love, peace, and understanding” in the previous decade, but had turned increasingly to violence, decadence, and burnout. In each film, the protagonist retreats to an exotic or hidden locale in an effort to escape his old life or flee his crimes and start anew. In Barbet Schroeder’s debut film More, German student Stefan (Klaus Grünberg) and his new lover Estelle (counterculture star Mimsy Farmer) travel to the craggy bluffs of Ibiza to frolic naked and experiment with heroin; in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, student protestor Mark (Mark Frechette) escapes the police in Los Angeles in a stolen plane and meets young hippie Daria (Daria Halprin) in Death Valley; in Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammel’s Performance, underworld criminal Chas (James Fox) flees a London mob boss against whom he has transgressed by hiding inside the basement apartment of a former rock star (Mick Jagger). For these peripatetic characters, their rejection of the conventional world and search for a new identity ends in failure and, ultimately, their own deaths.
Unsurprisingly, these films lean heavily on themes of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll (Pink Floyd scored the soundtrack for More and part of Zabriskie Point; the Rolling Stones were meant to compose the music for Performance), but what makes them most compelling is their penetrating focus on characters in search of alternative worlds amid a breakdown in the larger social or moral order. All three were critical and commercial failures upon initial release: More was initially banned in parts of Europe due to its depictions of heavy drug use; Zabriskie Point was lambasted as the worst film in Antonioni’s career; and Performance was shelved for two years by studio executives for being incomprehensible. However, they have since been reappraised as insightful accounts of the counterculture’s breakdown, as well as visual templates for the new decade’s grittier, more provocative filmmaking style.
How to watch More: Stream on the Criterion Channel.
How to watch Performance: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Serene Velocity (1970)
Ernie Gehr’s 23-minute experimental film Serene Velocity may seem like little more than a mundane camera exercise or a visual irritant upon first viewing—and it is certainly those things. But the trance-inducing recording of an anonymous basement hallway also marked a new investigation into how images could be created and transformed with more aggressive, optical effects. Shot over the course of one night by Gehr (who reportedly dunked his head into water to stay awake) and composed of thousands of static shots at various focal lengths and intervals, Serene Velocity centers a technical premise that represented a real perceptual leap in visual storytelling. Are we watching the oscillation of flat images or a movement back and forth through space? Are we moving toward some sort of exit or are we eternally suspended? One of the landmarks of the structuralist film movement, Serene Velocity anticipates the hyperkinetic cinema that would follow: from the primitive digitality of 1980s cyberpunk films to the computer-generated mixed realities of The Matrix and Marvel movies, to Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending meta-epics (see Gehr’s equally vertiginous ’90s film Side/Walk/Shuttle for a prequel to Nolan’s gravity-defying shots in Inception). While Serene Velocity may be anything but serene, its provocative accelerationism demonstrated the camera’s ability to act as a weapon that could not only record reality but also recreate it.
How to watch: Stream clips on YouTube.
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) and Suspiria (1977)
Were you to combine Alice in Wonderland and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla with the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, the result might begin to approach the singular strangeness of Jaromil Jires’s Czech New Wave classic Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. Based on Surrealist poet Vítězslav Nezval’s 1935 novel, Valerie is a coming-of-age fairytale in which the titular 13-year-old experiences her sexual awakening while suffering the return of old family secrets in the figure of a black-hooded vampire who may or may not be Valerie’s lost father. The precise time period of the film is unclear, but there is more than a hint of late-medieval folklore about it, a genre that celebrated lust, pleasure, worship, and death as equal parts of life’s folly. As an artifact of the ’70s, Valerie has every outré fetish you might expect from softcore teensploitation, including ephebophilia, lesbian play, incest, and numerous lacy chemises; but it also contains strong images of youth revolt, anti-clericalism, and the sort of sex-positive fairytale revisionism that would appear in third- and fourth-wave feminism. Valerie is also a sensual feast, with scenes of soft-lit boudoirs, stygian crypts, frolicking water nymphs, witch burnings, and a beautiful danse macabre finale. This is ’70s mad-hatter exploitation at its most Gothic.
Valerie is no doubt the elder cousin to Dario Argento’s horror fantasia Suspiria. If you have already seen Argento’s film, imagine all of the starring roles played by eight-year-olds and you will have an idea of the Italian director’s original intention. For better or worse, this version never came to fruition—but Argento’s panchromatic horror film bears the residues of a Gothic fairytale, from its naive dialogue and childlike ballet recitals to its oversized, Lewis Carroll-inspired set design and ornate death scenes. The premise—a coven of witches lives inside the prestigious Tanz Akademie and possesses its dance students—is merely a delivery system for Argento’s psychotropic mise en scene, which intensifies as the viewer plunges deeper into the secrets of the dance academy. Suspiria imparted a Baroque palette to the horror genre that made every frame into a painterly tableau resembling the work of Ernst Kirchner or Disney’s Snow White.
How to watch Valerie and Her Week of Wonders: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, Tubi, or YouTube.
How to watch Suspiria: On DVD or Blu-Ray
The Exorcist (1973)
Without question the most innovative and affecting horror film since Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho, The Exorcist invented a popular sub-genre of demonic possession movies while vastly expanding the visual language of fear within mainstream cinema. Director William Friedkin, working from William Peter Blatty’s source novel, crafted a slow-burn chamber piece about a precocious 12-year-old girl, Regan (Linda Blair), who is gradually overtaken by an ancient demon and battles a duo of Catholic priests in the climactic finale. While possession and demon seed movies had been produced as B-film novelties since the silent era, Friedkin elevated the form to the level of a tour-de-force prestige picture, using a methodical plot—and a series of increasingly choreographed scenes of Regan’s possession—to transform the innocent visage of a child into the face of evil. Among the film’s most infamous images: the possessed’s spinning head, gangrenous flesh, and levitating body, as well as a masturbation sequence that remains controversial 50 years later. He also added quasi-subliminal imagery and elaborate sound design composed of modern classical music, incidental noises, and the scariest voice-over in movie history. The disturbing quality of these sequences were accentuated by the film’s otherwise realistic, almost mundane, portrayal of the family household, with its natural, domestic lighting and muted palette. The effect was a verisimilitude that suggested demonic possession was not the melodramatic fabrication of Hollywood or Rome, but a real possibility in any American family. Such realism also anticipated the massive popularity of found-footage horror films in the early 2000s. But perhaps the most compelling tribute to The Exorcist’s masterful vision of evil was the supposed resurgence of new and lapsed Catholics who flocked to the Church for years after its release.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
The Holy Mountain (1973) and Dune (1974, uncompleted)
After he made his two previous psychedelic cult movies, Fando y Lis and El Topo, it was difficult to imagine how Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Chilean Surrealist filmmaker, puppeteer, performance artist, theorist, and magus/alchemist could eclipse his own deranged hijinks. Fando y Lis had sparked a riot during its Acapulco premiere and was subsequently banned in Mexico, while El Topo, often considered the magnum opus of the midnight movie circuit, became notorious for Jodorowsky’s (confabulated) admission of an onscreen rape. Not to be outdone, Jodorowsky returned in 1973 with The Holy Mountain, another pilgrimage–conversion narrative (in the mold of El Topo), which includes a Christ-like thief, an alchemist, a chimpanzee, a limbless dwarf, a prostitute, and various converts who encounter different tests and temptations before ascending the holy mountain between heaven and earth in search of the Immortals. Whereas Jodorowsky had made his previous two feature-length films on shoestring budgets with small ensembles and realistic settings, The Holy Mountain was bankrolled by one-time Beatles and Rolling Stones manager Allen Klein, allowing Jodorowsky to direct, score, costume, and set-design the film. Jodorowsky’s emboldened visual palette went some way in distilling his integration of Western messianism, gnostic psychomagic, and Eastern meditation with mind-blowing images of divinity, violence, suffering, and aberrant sexuality. He also reportedly offered the cast of the film various psychedelics during shooting. Even among head-warping ’70s cult films, The Holy Mountain reaches unexplored heights.
As a historical postscript, Jodorowsky attempted to follow The Holy Mountain with the first onscreen adaptation of Dune, on which he reportedly spent millions of dollars in pre-production costs assembling Salvador Dalí, Gloria Swanson, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Pink Floyd, and artists H.R. Giger and Jean Giraud. Hollywood studios balked at Jodorowsky’s 14-hour screenplay and 3,000-drawing storyboard. Although the film never went into production, Dune’s visionary premise and unwieldiness arguably laid the groundwork for the era of blockbuster science-fiction and outer space films that came after it.
How to watch The Holy Mountain: Stream on Apple TV or Prime Video.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
In the years after the release of envelope-pushing classics like Psycho, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Exorcist, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s ability to terrify, repulse, and even sicken (stories of actual vomiting were reported in some theaters) showed director Tobe Hooper’s precocious vision of homespun horror. Unlike The Exorcist, which was developed and distributed by Warner Brothers for the hefty sum of 12 million dollars and displayed the seamless polish of a Gothic novel, TCSM’s independent budget was a mere 100,000 dollars, lending the production the dirt-encrusted aura of a snuff film. The resulting “true story” of Sally Hardesty’s encounter with a backwoods cannibal family accomplished something truly unique in American filmmaking: it raised the aesthetic of the home-movie exploitation film to the rarefied levels of opera and Greek tragedy. Some critics called the film a thinly veiled broadside against the Vietnam War, other critics labeled it a lampoon of the modern family or agitprop for vegetarianism. In fact, TCSM was both a narrative parable and a visceral experience like nothing that had previously appeared on film. In its prescience, the film established much of the formula for the subsequent slasher and torture porn genres of the 1980s and 2000s. More than that, TCSM’s punishing sensorial assault—based largely on the power of visual suggestion and an arsenal of cheap effects—presaged how the spectacular violences of modern life would be packaged, commodified, and consumed in the expanding mediasphere like a tube of ground chuck.
How to watch: Stream on Peacock, Apple TV, Prime Video, Tubi, or YouTube.
India Song (1975) and Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
One of the great literary figures of the French Nouveau Roman of the 1950s, Marguerite Duras also pursued work as a screenwriter and filmmaker, beginning with her collaboration on 1959’s Hiroshima Mon Amour. India Song remains her most recognized film, though not for being any less inscrutable than her previous work. Based at least in part on Duras’s own childhood experiences as part of the French colonial class in Asia (she was born and spent much of her early life in Vietnam), India Song is not the cosmopolitan tour of the subcontinent that its title suggests. Rather, it is a huis clos set almost entirely within the decrepit interior of a French embassy in Calcutta, where a diplomat’s wife, Anne-Marie (Delphine Seyrig, star of Last Year of Marienbad), carries on various liaisons with other men in her social circle. Detached from their outside surroundings and the colonial world that they have conquered, the figures inside the house’s drawing rooms saunter and embrace with unbearable fragility, as if phantasms of the house or residues of distant memories. They do not speak, but perform to a polyphonic soundtrack of voices whispering observations of the characters, hazy recollections, and bits of gossip alongside hummed songs, blues piano, nocturnes, waltzes, and tangos. A philosophical descendent of Marienbad, this is slow cinema at its most insular and decadent. Prior to filming, Duras reportedly did not revisit Calcutta and, instead, chose to invoke the place entirely from her memory. She ultimately used an abandoned chateau in the suburbs of Paris for the main shooting location, a mocking jab at French colonialism and a dark realization of the characters’ placelessness.
Released in the same year as India Song and starring the same actor, Delphine Seyrig, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is the other seminal female-centric film of the mid 1970s. Chantal Akerman’s anti-visionary, visionary work is the obverse side of India Song: a glacial, three-hour inventory of the title character’s bourgeois routine, which she occasionally interrupts by prostituting herself to visiting customers. The two films have long been called archetypes of “slow cinema” and, less generously, of tedium. But where India Song’s protracted images of colonial decadents are rapturously enigmatic and untethered to time, Jeanne Dielman is striking for its images of the mundane and forgettable accretions of domestic life spread out over precisely three afternoons. Where India Song’s Anna-Marie and her various colonial suitors move languidly and speechlessly through the chateau like ghosts, Jeanne Dielman is continually flittering between the chores of cooking, cleaning, and errand-running. Where India Song is overstuffed with voice-over and music, Jeanne Dielman is silent for long stretches. Yet both films prove equally rich for their fascinating depictions of women (and women filmmakers) moving through new registers of time and space as they had never before appeared onscreen.
How to watch India Song: Stream on the Criterion Channel.
How to watch Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: Stream on Max or Apple TV.
Mirror (1975)
Even amid the behemoths of modern cinema, Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky stands out as the medium’s philosopher–king and epic poet par excellence. In the English-speaking world, Tarkovsky is most often compared to Stanley Kubrick for both directors’ unparalleled blend of conceptual rigor and visual innovation. Tarkovsky and Kubrick moved seamlessly between genres while continually challenging the narrative and filmmaking structures within which they worked. They also nursed predilections for both epic histories and futurist science fiction, the latter of which frequently veered into cosmic mysticism. In many ways, the 1970s belonged to Tarkovsky, with three mammoth releases considered his most ambitious: Solaris, Mirror, and Stalker. Of these, Mirror is Tarkovsky’s most personal and intimate film, though it is no less awe-inspiring than the others. Composed of a patchwork of memories of Tarkovsky’s mother set to the poems of the filmmaker’s father (poet Arseny Tarkovsky), Mirror shifts fluidly back and forth in time to imagined scenes from the director’s interwar childhood, Second World War adolescence, and postwar adulthood. Throughout, the film is replete with rapturous visuals that oscillate between the beatific and horrifying: a sudden windstorm blows through lush pasture, a rural barn burns to the ground as the family silently assembles to observe, Tarkovsky’s mother appears as an apparition in a flooding room, a nameless woman disappears from the family’s apartment but leaves a warm cup of tea to steam on the table.
Needled constantly by critics to explain the film’s deeper meaning, Tarkovsky relayed an anecdote, which has subsequently become famous, of a cleaning woman who impatiently kicked a group of critics out of a theater after a screening of Mirror with her pithy verdict on the film: “Everything is quite simple: Someone fell ill and was afraid of dying. He remembered, all of a sudden, all the pain he’d inflicted on others, and he wanted to atone for it, to ask to be pardoned.” To Tarkovsky’s astonishment, she had described the film’s premise perfectly.
Uncompromising—and, some would argue, incomprehensible—in its vision, Mirror was initially rejected for release by the Soviet film board for its esoteric narrative. It has been subsequently lauded as Tarkovsky’s masterwork and one of the greatest films of all time.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Sebastiane (1976)
British experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman’s debut feature is a fictional history of Catholic martyr and queer icon Saint Sebastian, a third-century Roman soldier who was executed by arrows for his Christian-inspired pacifism. In Jarman’s queer parable, Sebastian (Leonardo Treviglio) is exiled to a penal colony at the edge of the Roman world for defying the rapacious emperor Diocletian. There, he must choose between the brutal diktats of the Roman state or the non-violence of his religious conversion. While in captivity, Sebastian becomes an object of desire for the colony’s centurion, who tortures and ultimately executes him for denying his affections. Filmed for a predominantly gay audience but inspired, in part, by the figurative male nudes of Renaissance and Baroque paintings, Jarman’s homoerotic vision—performed entirely in Latin—combines Western classical and vernacular traditions into one of queer cinema’s most visually sumptuous period pieces. (Purposeful insertions of modern anachronisms and an electronic score by Brian Eno further accentuated Jarman’s play between classicism and camp.) Sebastiane received a major theatrical release in Britain, an unprecedented feat for a gay-themed film at the time.
How to watch: Stream via Metrograph at Home.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Even after the rising popularity of the American anti-war movement, by the beginning of the 1970s Hollywood studios were still dedicated to producing mostly elegiac Second World War movies like Patton and Tora! Tora! Tora!, which focused on America’s victorious defeat of the Axis powers. The tribulations of Vietnam, however, remained a delicate subject that few major studios would touch until well into the decade. Films like Go Tell the Spartans, Coming Home, and The Deer Hunter, sometimes referred to as “vetsploitation,” were the first in a string of war movies to present the extreme carnage and crushing aftermath of deployment to Vietnam. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, however, was an entirely different animal. Neither a realistic portrayal of the battleground nor a romanticized melodrama of the soldier’s return, Apocalypse Now is a Dantesque tour through the underworld of human folly. Coppola famously used a dog-eared copy of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness as a guide during filming, inspired by the 19th-century tale of an steamer captain’s search for a trader who had gone mad and become a warlord in the Congo. Coppola’s brutal imagery of napalm strikes, beheadings, hackings, and animal sacrifice immersed the viewer in an almost hallucinatory vision of war that most closely mimicked the experiences of the real thing. Decades later, the director claimed the film was not explicitly anti-war because of its celebratory images of violence, which had been co-opted by the pro-war crowd. But there are few other films before or since that have revealed the sheer physical barbarity and psychotropic horror of warfare.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.