French grande for Small Change (François Truffaut, France, 1976). Design by Jouineau Bourduge.
Another year, another Truffaut, another Fassbinder, another Visconti, another Renoir revival. The 1976 New York Film Festival—which ran from October 1 to 17—was nothing if not true to its brand. But the 14th New York Film Festival, programmed by Richard Roud, Susan Sontag, Richard Corliss, Charles Michener, and Roger Greenspun, was still a relatively small affair, showcasing just eighteen features and eleven shorts. It was also still a defiantly Euro-centric program, top heavy with French cinema. Both the opening- and closing-night films were French (François Truffaut’s Small Change and Eric Rohmer’s The Marquise of O, respectively) and there were four other French features in the mix along with an Agnès Varda short. There were three films from Germany, two from Italy, and one from Switzerland. But whereas the previous year there were no films from Asia, the 1976 fest branched out with films from India (Satyajit Ray’s The Middleman, 1975), Hong Kong (King Hu’s A Touch of Zen, 1971) and Japan (Nagisa Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses and Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese-Russian co-production Dersu Uzala, 1975).
The 1976 NYFF is full of great films, but not as many out-and-out masterpieces as in other years. In the world at large, cinema seemed to have taken a step back after the banner year of 1975 (which was so chock-full of barnstormers that Morgan Neville made a documentary about it last year). In my piece on the 1975 festival I listed all the major movies that were playing in commercial theaters in New York the weekend that the NYFF began (concluding “Who needs a film festival?”). In 1976 it was a different story. The biggest ads in The New York Times on October 1, 1976, were for the boy-and-his-dog weepie Where the Red Fern Grows, a Jack Lemmon film (Alex & The Gypsy), an Italian film starring Marcello Mastroianni (Sunday Woman), a Dennis Hopper western (Mad Dog), a Giancarlo Giannini romp (How Funny Can Sex Be?), a Redd Foxx comedy (Norman…Is That You?), a horror movie (Burnt Offerings), and a compilation film of “the most hilarious, brilliant scenes in film history” called All About Us: America at the Movies—none of which I had ever heard of before I scrolled through the Times’ archives. The only two high-profile films I did know were Alan Parker’s Bugsy Malone and Martin Ritt’s The Front. But buried among the smaller ads are more promising signs of life in Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Barbet Schroeder’s General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait (1974), Peter Watkins’s Edvard Munch (1974), Paul Verhoeven’s Keetje Tippel (1975), and—in its “10th Smash Week”—Bertrand Tavernier’s The Clockmaker of St. Paul (1974). Also, opening five days later at the Ziegfeld, and seemingly having its very first New York showing, was Andrei Tarkovski’s Solaris (it had played at the Chicago Film Festival in November 1972 but had seemingly been passed over by the NYFF that year).
But Lincoln Center had Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, Kurosawa, Fassbinder, Francesco Rosi, Marcel Ophuls, Satyajit Ray, and Nagisa Ōshima. Sadly, 50 years on, only two of the NYFF Class of 1976 are still with us: Wim Wenders (31 then, 81 now, and with a new film this year, From Inside Out – The Architecture of Peter Zumthor) and Barbara Kopple (now 80, also with a new film this year: Union Town) whose world premiere of Harlan County U.S.A. was one of the two sensations of the festival. Alexander Kluge, whose Strongman Ferdinand was in the 1976 edition, passed away on March 25 of this year at the age of 94.
The other sensation of the festival didn’t actually play at the festival. Ōshima’s famously sexually explicit In the Realm of the Senses was seized by customs officers who were in attendance at its press screening, and confiscated for alleged obscenity. It had to be replaced at the last minute with Ōshima’s 1971 film The Ceremony. Apparently this is the only time in NYFF history that they have been unable to show a scheduled film. A judge later ruled that the film had been improperly detained (the story made the front page of The New York Times) and the Film Society screened it at MoMA in December, honoring New York Film Festival ticket stubs.
This governmental prudishness is surprising when you see that there were ads for porn movies in The New York Times in those days, films like In the Heat of the Knight and two seemingly unrelated pornos called Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy and Through the Looking Glass (pull quote: “Hard core pornography at its best. A ‘Marnie’ like mystery and the ‘Exorcist’ with incest. Ladies, you’ll like it.”)
I’ve tried to find the most interesting poster for each film that played in the 1976 festival. The highlights include Jerzy Flisak’s Polish poster for his countryman Walerian Borowczyk’s The Story of Sin (1975), Averardo Ciriello’s Italian in medias res cliffhanger for Dersu Uzala, and Satyajit Ray’s own type-centric collage for The Middleman.
The only feature film that I couldn’t find any poster for was Fassbinders’s Fear of Fear (1975), which was made for television and seems to have never had a theatrical release.
The posters are shown below in the order in which the films played in the festival. Artists and designers are credited where known.
Italian 2-foglio for Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1943).
US one sheet for Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (Alain Tanner, Switzerland, 1976).
Japanese poster for In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Oshima, Japan, 1976). Art by Susumu Masukawa.
Japanese poster for The Ceremony (Nagisa Oshima, Japan, 1971).
French poster for Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, West Germany, 1976). Art by E. Watcker.
US poster for The Memory of Justice (Marcel Ophuls, France, 1976).
Italian 2-foglio for Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa, Japan/USSR, 1975). Art by Averardo Ciriello.
French poster for Illustrious Corpses (Francesco Rosi, Italy, 1976). Design by Jouineau Bourduge.
Polish poster for The Story of Sin (Walerian Borowczyk, Poland, 1975). Art by Jerzy Flisak.
French poster for Surreal Estate (Eduardo de Gregorio, France, 1976).
German poster for Strongman Ferdinand (Alexander Kluge, West Germany, 1976).
Hong Kong poster for A Touch of Zen (King Hu, Hong Kong, 1971).
Indian poster for The Middleman (Satyajit Ray, India, 1975). Design by Satyajit Ray.
French poster for Duelle (Jacques Rivette, France, 1976).
French poster for Nana (Jean Renoir, France, 1926).
French poster for Harlan County, U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, USA, 1976).
French grande for The Marquise of O (Eric Rohmer, France, 1976). Design by René Ferracci.
Official poster by Allan D’Arcangelo for the 14th New York Film Festival.
Full-page advertisement for the 14th New York Film Festival in the New York Times on Sunday, September 12, 1975.
At these links, you can see my previous New York Film Festival flashbacks to 1963, 1965, 1968, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975 and 1988.