Cinematic realism in the ‘70s
By Prithvijeet Sinha
For those who have seen 2022’s emotionally wrenching To Leslie, toplined by Andrea Riseborough’s tour de force performance that dares to show the price of an unfulfilled life, the imminent sense of connection with the material owes its debts to the ’70s. With its unobtrusive narrative, resonant treatment of small-town America, and needle drops like Dolly Parton’s Here I Am, there is an obvious harkening to the omnibus of John Cassavetes and Robert Altman. But the credit is due to the film’s director Michael Morris and writer Ryan Binaco for not just imitating the style of naturalistic filmmaking from an era where auteurism delved into the lives of women with rare empathy and psychological unravelling. Rather, it’s their own achievements that make discerning viewers like me cite one of the most prolific periods/decades of filmmaking. As I replay the film in my mind, Andrea’s very visage is so much like Shelley Duvall’s in vintage Altman oeuvre.
Even something as recent as Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters (2024) exercises the same tone where the focus on the claustrophobia of spaces and frayed emotions is reminiscent of the filmmaking ethos that continues to remind this cinephile of its enduring influence when it comes to disseminating realism and truthful characterisations.
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The 1970s, as the advent of the real and true, is an extensive archive where filmmaking reached new heights of authenticity in terms of subject matter and execution in storytelling, extricated from the necessarily diegetic use of music and melodrama, bringing welcome relief to the internalised shades of human endeavours.
What is particularly empowering to realise is that within the oeuvre of tentpole releases, character development was illustrated by long takes devoted to conversations between key people in the narrative, such as in Jaws (1975), Alien (1979) and even The Exorcist (1973). Can one possibly forget the dining-room conversation between Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary and Richard Dreyfuss where an interpersonal camaraderie exists to offset the mood of danger that is organically fleshed out by director Steven Spielberg? It’s a long take where smiles and affability, with Lorraine and Dreyfuss’ wit and Scheider’s laconic, reserved charm, stand in contrast to the individual instances in the screenplay where a grieving mother slaps the sheriff (Scheider) for his lack of action – it resounds far more because of the use of pithy words telegraphing her helpless emotional state. Or when Dreyfuss and Scheider are with the formidable shark-catcher Robert Shaw on a boat and their individual stands seamlessly address the pertinence of the issue at hand. There’s no foreboding situational musical cue or acting tick to overdramatise the proceedings. This slow-burning technique is particularly creepy and issues the vulnerability of the cast-members aboard USS Nostromo in Alien. Ridley Scott and his team let sound-effects and the gadgetry of the cavernous spaceship build up levels of tension without resorting to cheap gimmickry or jump scares.
Equally vulnerable are the moments in The Exorcist where a phone call from an absent father, a mother-daughter pair’s intrinsic bonding while the little girl is being put to sleep, or the extended opening sequence where Max Von Sydow’s archaeologist stationed in the Far East finds the heat, atmosphere and the inkling of evil with the discovery of ancient figurines and a sense of alienation, score the brutal underpinning of something invisible that upends normal lives. All three of them hence are not only beneficiaries of the quieter side of filmmaking that helps to divine the fearful in effective ways but ensures that the humanity of their particular domiciles and concerns wrought a moral centre. It is not just about the pursuit against insurmountable odds. It is about the confidence gained by interacting with each other through believable dialogues and colloquialisms of the everyday.
An ubiquitous feature as Carrie (1976) too finds its prom scene and especially the titular protagonist’s savage humiliation soundtracked by an overhead bucket’s movement and then the slow-motion unravelling coinciding with a hall full of laughter. The beeping sound of Carrie’s telekinesis and her mother’s cry of “they’re all gonna laugh at you” repetitively ringing in her head maps her psychological condition in that mortifying moment morphing to terror and mayhem in the annals of cinema.
This freedom of realism made the era’s compact body of work attach itself to the likes of Martin Ritt’s Sounder (1972), Hal Ashby’s The Landlord (1970) and Michael Cimino’s Thunderbolt & Lightfoot (1974) for instance. Three works that are distinct in their respective tonal registers and personal concerns but are able to balance the dramatic and comic elements with finesse precisely because they are not reliant on grand gestures or musical cues to heighten the situation. In their brevity of shots and lucid cinematographic output, they make the interpersonal bonds build authentic tales of the inner fight against racism in the South, a modern interracial community in Harlem, New York and an unusual “bromance” spread out over wide open American country roads respectively. In Sounder especially, the Depression era set story literally finds the humidity, the call of crickets, nondescript Southern homes, and barren patches dictating the characters’ journey. Also pertinent here are the voices of these African-American folks who pine, sing, stay silent and verbally recede when negotiating with racist authorities while talking and behaving in ways true to their socio-economic stations. This leads to the classic scene where Cicely Tyson runs towards Paul Winfield as he makes his way home after a year in prison. It’s the heat, the excited bark of the titular dog and Tyson’s impassioned call of her on-screen partner’s name that packs an emotional wallop for the ages. The sweltering atmosphere and the sounds of the surroundings serve as the soundtrack to this reunion. It’s this same unobtrusive benchmark that makes Tyson’s historic Emmy winning turn in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974) one of episodic gravitas and emotional resonance. Be it in the lakeside scene where a young black man’s speech becomes a source of discomfort for white eavesdroppers or the final stretch where a century old woman walks all the way to a water fountain to mark her evolution in the Civil Rights epoch. It’s just the mouth organ and the facial terrain of resolve that punctuate this outstanding passage in cinematic history sans dialogues or narrative preliminaries.
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Taking stock of non-diegetic use of music, Leonard Cohen’s lilting, acoustic soundtrack is a haunting presence in Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), with its meditative and realistic approach to the frontier using mostly the guitar to strip the Western genre of its grand-standing, epic vision. Take the final scene itself where the acoustic bulwark lends a poignancy to McCabe’s death in freezing snow and Mrs. Miller is physically frozen in an interior space, smoking, their individual tragedies written down in the final anonymity of their stations. Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks (1976) similarly delves into the frontier by casting the legendary likes of Marlon Brando, Harry Dean Stanton and Jack Nicholson. The real triumph here is in letting the action subsist on anticipation and dramatic understatement. Slow burn is the mode of operation in these instances.
This intimacy of interaction between two lonely young females in Three Women (1977) by Altman also designs scenes around both their individual and collective experiences. The atonal soundtrack in some crucial junctures cracks at the deeper tides of this relationship; though it never lets us forget that the lines between social alienation and taking over someone’s personal orbit can become blurred.
This was, after all, the era where boundaries of folk, rock, blues, country, and standard Americana were being readjusted, reframed for posterity, and adapted into malleable forms to inform the soft palettes of Joni Mitchell (her iconic album Blue), James Taylor (on songs like “You’ve Got A Friend”, “Fire and Rain”, “You Can Close Your Eyes”, “Carolina on My Mind”, and “Handy Man”), Roberta Flack (“Killing Me Softly”, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”), Linda Ronstadt (“Heart Like A Wheel”, “Lose Again”, “Blue Bayou”, “Desperado”), The Eagles (“Hotel California”, “Tequila Sunrise”, “Lyin’ Eyes”), and The Carpenters.
Which is why an exemplary documentary feat like Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978), a tribute to The Band’s swan-song and assortment of the biggest folk-rock artists of the time, feels so timeless in retrospect. It is about being of the moment, bringing one’s unobtrusive camera lens and love for music to a venue and preserving it for future discernment. Today, the film’s legendary status hasn’t dated one bit nor has the pioneering musical imprints of the artists in their ’70s heyday.
If music is the key then Lady Sings the Blues (1972) paints a raw, unerring portrait of the biographical picture where the soft, almost unbearably vulnerable notes of Billie Holiday’s oeuvre are given new life by megastar Diana Ross. The most affecting moments of Billie’s life are defined by music such as when she listens to Bessie Smith on the radio but nothing wipes out the circumstances of her life as an assault by a drunken man or her descent to working in a fallen place as a cleaner. Music is her key and the performances retain their emotive power here. However, the quiet coil and recoil of her trauma, dependency on drugs and mental breakdowns are all traced with the weight of a beleaguered personal history. There’s no music in these scenes, just the raw reflection of hardscrabble truths. This silence is suffocating and primal even as she’s in jail or in the hospital, battling lifelong demons.
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As we shift our gazes towards the era’s films and their relationship with action and reaction, titles like The French Connection, Invasion of The Body Snatchers, Straw Dogs and of course Taxi Driver come into our view for how they treat debased corners of human existence. The iconic car chase in The French Connection (1971) is all about the dogged pursuit of anti-social elements by Gene Hackman’s Popeye but it’s the automobile’s movements through New York City, its skidding tyres and mass of humanity in its way that finds parallels with slimy, dirty abandoned buildings and the subway. The ignominy of violence arising out of locational xenophobia and sexism bursts forth with silent backgrounds and immediacy of action in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971), mirroring the final showdown in a fallen hotel in Taxi Driver (1976), the corporeality of it all reflected in the body-horror dynamics of Invasion of The Body Snatchers (1978). The violence is unerring and the reactions spontaneous because the mid-century axis is relentlessly moving towards a brutal reckoning with the lawlessness of the world in each instance.
A more underrated counterpoint to the supposed action dynamics of a cop saga is found in Sidney Lumet’s The Offence (1973). Sir Sean Connery’s verbal and mental states inform much of the film’s sense of dread. In it, a bulb in an interrogation room, or a countryside’s dark recesses invoke the loss of humanity that gets into the head of a police officer. The silence boils and tears apart all his defences when faced with a manipulative antagonist.
From Eraserhead‘s (1977) similar invocation of industrial surroundings and ominous sound effects to A Very Natural Thing‘s (1974) subdued investment in the lives of men in love with other men in ’70s New York to the realistic stakes of a divorce in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) down to Iranian classic Chess of the Wind‘s (1976) impressionistic probe into human corruption of the mind, this era mined the subconscious and psychology to blur lines within genres and styles, giving us a body of work that has stood the test of time.
From the melodrama, strings-laden excesses and mostly inert studio sets of the previous decades, the 1970s came out of the woodwork of established norms to settle for unflinching realism. Gone was the necessity of happy endings or cliches. What was begotten was the grammar for not intruding upon individual lives with appendages of sentiment alone, but approaching crises and moral dilemmas with a touch of deeper understanding about the whys and whats of fraying social lines.
Hence I close this article with one of the most definitive images of the era that stands out for me. In Hal Ashby’s seminal Coming Home (1978), the journey of two individuals injured within a California military unit concludes with Tim Buckley’s beautiful ballad “Once I Was”. A montage sequence, the movements of these bodies towards liberation from constrictive ideals and personal freedom is not final but constructs their present as one of individual victory. That is how I see this whole period of cinematic canon as marking the advent of the real and true.
Image credit: online.stereosound.co.jp