BLACHEFAN

King: A Filmed Record ... Montgomery to Memphis (1970) As one of the first public figures to have his entire career documented, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., became an astute judge of the media and knew how to exploit his celebrity to further his cause. After King was assassinated, television pioneer Ely Landau envisioned producing a 10-minute film tribute to the slain leader. Landau and his colleague Richard Kaplan assembled thousands of reels of film and rebuilt events from a variety of sources in their effort to condense King's life without losing his message. The first edit ran 10 hours, but the team eventually pared it down to 185 minutes. The resulting documentary illustrates King's development as one of the preeminent champions of the civil rights movement, while demonstrating how he became a media sensation.

Hospital (1970) Not to be confused with Arthur Hiller's narrative fiction film "The Hospital" starring George C. Scott, 1970's "Hospital" was another of documentarian Frederick Wiseman's forays into public institutions; he had previously made "Titticut Follies (1967) and "High School" (1968). On assignment for NY public TV station WNET, Wiseman takes his cameras into New York's Metropolitan Hospital and, literally, focuses on life and death. Paying special attention to the hospital's Emergency Room, Wiseman's film highlights doctors and patients and the legal and ethical decisions both must face. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/hospital.pdf

Five Easy Pieces (1970) Jack Nicholson coaches Susan Anspach as she plays a Mozart piece on the piano. Library of Congress Collection. In director Bob Rafelson's "Five Easy Pieces," gifted pianist and musical prodigy Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson) turns his back on his upper-class roots and potential to live the life of an oil rig worker with a pregnant waitress girlfriend (Karen Black). An intense character study, the film exudes the themes of alienation and self-destruction that often appeared in films of the 1970s. The release of "Five Easy Pieces," closely following that of "Easy Rider" (1969), helped solidify Nicholson's position as an A-list star. "Five Easy Pieces" was nominated for multiple Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Jack Nicholson, Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Karen Black, Best Picture, and Best Original Screenplay.

I am Somebody (1970) Madeline Anderson’s documentary brings viewers to the front lines of the civil rights movement during the 1969 Charleston hospital workers’ strike, when black female workers marched for fair pay and union recognition. Anderson personally participated in the strike, along with such notable figures as Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young, all affiliated with Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Anderson’s film shows the courage and resiliency of the strikers and the support they received from the local black community. It is an essential filmed record of this important moment in the history of civil and women’s rights.

The Wild Bunch (1969) Viewed as hyper violent at the time of its release, this film seems almost tame by modern standards. Aging desperadoes out for a final payday learn too late and at too high a cost that they have become obsolete. Peckinpah's direction, brilliant performances by the entire cast, beautiful cinematography and most especially landmark editing make it a true American classic. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/wild_bunch.pdf

Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (1969-1971) Considered a landmark of experimental cinema and one of filmmaker Ken Jacobs' most popular films, "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son" was created by re-photographing a 1905 paper print short film as a means of exploring the parameters of film art and the act of watching films. Through techniques ranging from slow and studied examinations of individual paper print images to probing experiments in manipulation of motion and light, Jacobs created a "structuralist film" masterpiece.

Our Lady of the Sphere (1969) A leading figure in the California Bay Area independent film movement, Lawrence Jordan has crafted more than 40 experimental, animation and dramatic films. Jordan uses "found" graphics to produce his influential animated collages, noting that his goal is to create "unknown worlds and landscapes of the mind." Inspired by "The Tibetan Book of the Dead," "Our Lady of the Sphere" is one of Jordan's best-known works. It is a surrealistic dream-like journey blending baroque images with Victorian-era image cut-outs, iconic space age symbols, various musical themes and noise effects, including animal sounds and buzzers.

Midnight Cowboy (1969) John Schlesinger's gritty look at the seedy side of urban American life is frequently disturbing, but Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight's electric performances make it difficult to turn away. Voight plays Joe Buck, a good-lucking Texas stud looking to hustle rich New York women, and Hoffman is Ratso Rizzo, a small-time thief who seeks his own fortune by managing the naïve ladies man, and the cold, cruel realities of life that befell them both. Despite its original X rating (later downgraded to an R), the film won the best-picture Oscar, defeating the crowd-pleasing "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." Waldo Salt's screen adaptation of James Leo Herlihy's novel also won an Oscar.

Medium Cool (1969) Set in 1968 Chicago, including scenes outside the Democratic National Convention, a TV news reporter (Robert Forster) must come to terms with his conscience and his ambition while juggling a budding relationship with a single mother (Verna Bloom) and her son (Harold Blankenship). Written, directed and photographed by Haskell Wexler, one of the most influential and celebrated cinematographers in the business ("In the Heat of the Night," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"), this film is most notable for melding fictional and non-fictional content in a documentarylike style.

The Learning Tree (1969) This visually beautiful and moving, if somewhat sentimentally melodramatic, story of a black teenager growing up in Kansas in the 1920s was the first feature film by a black director to be financed by a major Hollywood studio. Acclaimed photojournalist Gordon Parks directed, produced, wrote, and composed the score of this adaptation of his 1963 semi-autobiographical novel. Essentially a coming-of-age story, the film focuses on Newt Winger (Kyle Johnson, son of "Star Trek" co-star Nichelle Nichols). Newt's nemesis is Marcus Savage (Alex Clarke), an embittered young man burdened with an absent mother and a negligent, angry father. Newt, by contrast, is supported by his hard-working, understanding mother (Estelle Evans), who has kept her son on the square despite the hardships and racism he must face. Parks depicts the ambiguous racial attitudes of blacks and whites in the Kansas town with an ironic complexity rarely found in earlier films about racism. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/learning_tree.pdf

I Am Joaquin (1969) "I Am Joaquin" is a 20-minute short film based on an epic poem published by Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales in 1967. Gonzales' poem weaves together the tangled roots of his Mexican, Spanish, Indian and American parentage and a past mythology of pre-Columbian cultures. The film is important to the history and culture of Chicanos in America, spotlighting the challenges of discrimination. Luis Valdez, often described as the father of Chicano theater, produced and directed the film as a project of Teatro Campesino (the Farmworkers Theater), which he founded in 1965. Valdez later directed the Chicano-themed "Zoot Suit" in 1981, a retelling of the early 1940s Los Angeles race riots, and "La Bamba" in 1987.

High School (1969) Filmmaker Fred Wiseman employed the techniques of a burgeoning documentary style known as direct cinema to capture reality truthfully and without narration. Wiseman roamed freely through Philadelphia's Northeast High School to document students continually clashing with administrators who confuse learning with discipline. Richard Schickel, writing in "Life" magazine, called this a "wicked, brilliant documentary about life in a lower-middle-class secondary school." At 75 minutes, this is one of Wiseman's shortest documentaries, yet the impact is as memorable as his longer films. Wiseman's film "Hospital," made two years later, is also on the Registry. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/high_school.pdf

Easy Rider (1969) This low-budget film of alienated youth struck a game-changing blow to Hollywood when every studio tried to duplicate its success. Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda wrote a loose screenplay, improvising large portions as filming progressed, and Hopper directed the story of two bikers trekking from Los Angeles to Mardi Gras in New Orleans in search of "the real America." Occasionally banal and dated, the film's cinematography by László Kovács, pop music score featuring Bob Dylan, Steppenwolf, The Band and The Birds, and breakout performance by Jack Nicholson render it a fascinating time capsule. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/easy_rider.pdf

Czechoslovakia 1968 (1969) With film smuggled out of state-operated film studios and filmed by private citizens as events unfolded, the United States Information Agency (USIA) fashioned a film that documented 50 years of history and political turmoil in Czechoslovakia from its inception as a nation in 1918 through the bloody Russian invasion in 1968. Robert Fresco, who produced a series of television documentaries for David Wolper's company, and Denis Sanders, who had been producing documentaries with his brother Terry since the early 1950s, wrote and directed this 13-minute film which won the Best Documentary Short Subject Oscar in 1969. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/czech.pdf

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) Directed by George Roy Hill and written by William Goldman, this highly popular film features critically acclaimed performances by Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Katharine Ross as the real-life outlaws of the American West and their female companion. The music by Burt Bacharach adds to the film's nostalgic appeal as well as its alternatingly melancholy and humorous mood. While the film and director Hill were denied Academy Awards, Goldman and cinematographer Conrad L. Hall did take home trophies, as did Bacharach for his score and for the song "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," co-written with Hal David. Having already established a reputation for themselves, Butch and Sundance rob the same train twice, incurring the wrath of the railroad which hires the best trackers in the business to bring them in. Pursued over steep cliffs and rocky gorges, the pair decides it's time to go to Bolivia to try their luck, but it soon runs out as scores of soldiers wait for them to make one last run for it.

Brandy in the Wilderness (1969) This introspective "contrived diary" film by Stanton Kaye features vignettes from the relationship of a real-life couple, in this case the director and his girlfriend. An evocative 1960s time capsule—reminiscent of Jim McBride's "David Holzman's Diary"—this simulated autobiography, as in many experimental films, often blurs the lines between reality and illusion, moving in non-linear arcs through the ever-evolving and unpredictable interactions of relationships, time and place. As Paul Schrader notes, "it is probably quite impossible (and useless) to make a distinction between the point at which the film reflects their lives, and the point at which their lives reflect the film." "Brandy in the Wilderness" remains a little-known yet key work of American indie filmmaking. Article by Director Paul Schraeder from 1971. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/brandy_edited.pdf

Putney Swope (1969) When writer-director Robert Downey Sr.'s surrealistic satire of Madison Avenue and black power, "Putney Swope," opened in July 1969, New York Times critic Vincent Canby characterized it as "funny, sophomoric, brilliant, obscene, disjointed, marvelous, unintelligible and relevant," while New York Daily News reviewer Wanda Hale damned it as "the most offensive picture I've ever seen." A cult classic from an earlier time, Downey's wildly irreverent underground breakout film presents hilarious vignettes of an ad agency takeover by black nationalists. Although noting that power ultimately corrupts the militants, Henry Louis Gates Jr. reminisced that he and fellow black students at Yale loved the film as a utopian fantasy that offered them a realistic path—infiltration, then transformation—for social change.

My Name Is Oona (1969) Born in Sweden in 1931, Gunvor Nelson in 1953 moved to the U.S. where she spent the middle years of her life before moving back to Sweden in the early 1990s. She taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1970-92, influencing a generation of new filmmakers. She carved out a distinctive niche in underground avant-garde American film during the 1960s and ‘70s though Nelson strongly prefers the term "personal cinema." Much of her work during this period concerns perceptions of feminine beauty. In "My Name is Oona," Nelson paints an expressive portrait of her 9-year-old daughter's flowing, dreamlike interactions with the forces of nature via experimental techniques such as the superimposition of fleeting images, dynamic editing and slow-motion cinematography. The sublime effect created in "Oona" provides a lyrical, 10-minute look into the non-linear, vivid, sometimes wild or scary world of childhood memory and imagination, as well as a child's halting steps toward self-realization.

Why Man Creates (1968) Saul Bass, the graphic designer and filmmaker best known for his posters and credit sequences for such films as "North by Northwest," "Anatomy of a Murder" and "Psycho," wrote and directed this animated Oscar-winning short documentary examining the nature of creativity. "Why Man Creates" is divided into eight sections, each preceded by a hand that writes the names and sub-categories of each chapter: The Edifice, Fooling Around, The Process, Judgment, A Parable, Digression, The Search, and The Mark. Co-written by Mayo Simon and financed by Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation, the film distills its narrative into metaphors represented by Bass's signature iconography. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/why_man_creates.pdf

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968) William Greaves worked at the intersection of many cultural focal points, including as an original co-host and producer of the landmark "Black Journal" public television series. He, however, is perhaps best known for his prolific work as a documentary film director and producer. He was associated with more than 200 productions during his career. His best-known film, "Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One," faced a strange, lengthy road to recognition. As recounted by Richard Brody in The New Yorker, Greaves shot the film in 1968 and completed production in 1971 in hopes of a debut at the Cannes Film Festival, but was turned down. The film then spent two decades unseen before being rediscovered by a Brooklyn Museum curator who premiered it at a retrospective of Greaves' voluminous work in cinema. Its acclaim grew and caught the attention of a later champion, actor/director Steve Buscemi. The film is a unique 1960s' time capsule, a telling look at the myriad tensions involved in film creation—a film on the making of a film—with three camera crews recording different parts of the process and personalities involved (director, actors, crew, bystanders). Though Greaves is undoubtedly the film's visionary auteur—notable for an African-American filmmaker in the 1960s—it is truly a film made collectively by Greaves and his multi-racial crew, whose staging of an on-set rebellion becomes the film's drama and its platform for sociopolitical critique and revolutionary philosophy. Filmed entirely on location in New York City's Central Park, with a score by Miles Davis, Greaves' film serves as a vivid tabloid of this heady historical era and a memorable document of this creatively prosperous period of American independent filmmaking. The New York Times' critic A.O. Scott lauded the film's creativity and imagination: "It is one of the great New York films, one of the great experimental films, one of the great '60s films, one of the great black films—just one of the great films, period, largely because it remains so fresh, so radical and so hard to assimilate more than 45 years after it was made." The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/symbio.pdf

Salesman (1968) As documentary filmmakers, Albert and David Maysles gravitated toward the fringes of society for their "cinema direct: nothing between us and the subject." In this film, the brothers and frequent collaborator Charlotte Zwerin focus on a waning American phenomenon: the door-to-door salesman; specifically, four representatives of the Mid-American Bible Company. At the center is Paul "The Badger" Brennan who reflects on his career choice with the refrain of the pop tune "Is That All There Is?" New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby observed that the Maysles Brothers transcend superficiality with compassion by showing that "the salesmen are no less vulnerable than their customers."

Rosemary's Baby (1968) With "Rosemary's Baby," writer-director Roman Polanski brought his expressive European style of psychological filmmaking to an intricately plotted, best-selling American novel by Ira Levin, and created a masterpiece of the horror-film genre. Set in the sprawling Dakota apartment building on New York's Central Park West, the film conveys an increasing sense of unease, claustrophobia and paranoia as the central character, convincingly played by Mia Farrow in her first starring role, comes to believe that a cult of witches in the building is implementing a plot against her and her unborn child. The supporting cast that Polanski assembled—John Cassavetes as Rosemary's husband, Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer as their neighbors, and Ralph Bellamy as her doctor—portray believably banal New Yorkers who gain nearly total control over Rosemary's daily life during her pregnancy. Insistent that "a thread of deliberate ambiguity runs throughout the film," Polanski maintains that the film's denouement can be understood in more than one way.

The Producers (1968) In a broad comedic style with which he would become associated, Mel Brooks began his directorial career with this satire of backstage Broadway. Zero Mostel plays a down-on-his-luck producer and Gene Wilder is the neurotically nerdy accountant with whom he schemes to make a fortune. By severely (and illegally) overfinancing a show that's sure to flop, the partners avoid repaying the backers -- little old ladies Mostel's conned into backing the show. All goes awry when the show is a hit. Brooks tempers the over-the-top gags and stereotypical characters with a touch of sweetness to give the audience an entertaining ride. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/producers.pdf

Planet of the Apes (1968) Franklin J. Schaffner directed this adaptation of Pierre Boule's sci-fi novel about a society ruled by a race of highly civilized apes. Charlton Heston portrays an astronaut who crashes on a strange planet where inarticulate humans are kept penned-up and creatures that look like oversized chimpanzees and talk like men and women run the world. Heston's life is in danger when ape leader Maurice Evans discovers he can speak, but sympathetic ape scientists Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter risk their own safety by protecting him. Scripted by Michael Wilson and "Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling, the film won a special Academy Award for John Chambers's simian makeup, and spawned four successful sequels and two TV series. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/planet_apes.pdf

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) Disdained as "Spaghetti Westerns" when they first appeared in American movie theaters, the best of these films, such as "Once Upon a Time in the West," are now recognized as among the greatest achievements of the Western movie genre. Director Sergio Leone's operatic visual homage to the American Western legend is a chilling tale of vengeance set against the backdrop of the coming of the railroad. Ennio Morricone's magnificent score (especially the elegiac "Jill's Theme") is likewise recognized for its brilliance. The expanded essay is below this description. https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/once_time_west.pdf