Like any given year during the peak of his filmmaking, 1976 was quite a busy year for Rainer Werner Fassbinder. This year, in particular, bears significance because three of his most notable films were all released then, each one of them extremely different in genre, story and even quality. Amongst the films he produced in…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
Network (1976)
I first watched Network about a decade ago, when I initially sought it out after discovering that it is considered a seminal piece of New Hollywood filmmaking, and an essential example of satire. I thought it was a splendid film, but one that felt fundamentally cold and detached, and no matter how hard I tried,…
El desencanto (1976)
Over the past few decades, the private lives of some individuals have become increasingly public with the rise of reality television and more intimate documentaries. We can point to two specific early examples of personal life being public entertainment. The first is An American Family, the PBS documentary series broadcast in the early 1970s that…
Sebastiane (1976)
You can say quite a lot about Derek Jarman. You can accuse him of being a reckless cinematic provocateur, as well as hailing him as an artistic stalwart, a filmmaker and visual artist that approached tricky subjects such as human sexuality in relation to society in a time when it wasn’t entirely easy to get…
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)
Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara) considers himself quite a renaissance man. He owns and operates The Crazy Horse West, a Los Angeles strip club, where he tries to shed the image of these institutions as being sordid, sleazy pits of debauchery, attempting to redefine the industry and put “entertain” back into “adult entertainment”. However, behind closed…
Robin and Marian (1976)
Imagine this – a veteran who has fought around the world for a noble but volatile leader returns to his hometown in order to take revenge on the man who caused him and his friends suffering all those years ago, and upon his return, gets the old gang back together, including his former lover, to…
Camouflage (1976)
In the heart of the tranquil Polish countryside sits a quiet summer camp that serves to be the annual retreat for a multicultural group of university students who gather to study Linguistics and enjoy the peace of being out of the city. At the core of the retreat are two men – Jarosław Kruszyński (Piotr…
Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
Assault on Precinct 13 reaffirmed something that I’ve slowly started to believe is less of an opinion and more of an unquestionable fact – John Carpenter is one of the most visionary filmmakers of his generation. While his cinematic career will deservedly be defined mainly through the lens of his two horror masterpieces Halloween and…
Duelle (1976)
Jacques Rivette’s Duelle is an intersectional film, existing at the nexus of various audacious ideas – fantasy and film noir, fiction and reality, life and death, and absolutely everything in between, finding itself very often in the margins of several conflicting, almost contradictory themes. A chilling but poignant work occurring towards the end of the…
Smile Orange (1976)
The Mocha Beach Hotel sits on a tranquil shoreline in the seaside region of Jamaica. Tourists from Europe and North America flock to this hotel to take in the gorgeous scenery and the vibrant night-life around the city, where they are given the chance to experience Jamaica from the perspective of its inhabitants. Smile Orange…
The Postmodern Pelican 