Above: 1973 New York Film Festival poster designed by Niki de Saint Phalle.
The 61st edition of the New York Film Festival, which opens tonight, has 32 films in its Main Slate, fifteen films in its Spotlight section, ten films and seven collections of shorts in the Currents sidebar, and eleven revivals. That's over 60 feature films. Fifty years ago, in 1973, the 11th edition of the festival had just eighteen feature films and nineteen shorts.
Just like this year’s opener—Todd Haynes’s May December—1973’s opening night film, François Truffaut’s Day for Night, had premiered four months earlier at the Cannes Film Festival. And as with this year’s festival, the 1973 edition opened, fifty years and one day ago exactly, in the shadow of an artists' strike. Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians had been picketing the New York Philharmonic outside Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, where the festival was taking place, but agreed not to disrupt the NYFF’s big night. The New York Times the next day devoted much of their opening night coverage to the strike, as well as to the crowd outside who were hoping to see celebrities “like Shirley MacLaine” but failed to recognize Truffaut (who arrived on the arm of Lillian Gish!), Andy Warhol, or Dennis Hopper as they arrived. The Times reporter, Fred Ferretti, also noted that “there was only a smattering of evening dress. Most people came to the festival dressed casually. There were short dresses, evening gowns, pants suits and blue leather shirts” and “a couple of ‘Impeach Nixon’ T-shirts.”
NYFF Main Slates give us a fascinating snapshot of a certain time in film history and remind us how some films endure while others disappear. Of the eighteen features in the 11th NYFF, at least one third of them are now regarded as stone-cold classics: Day for Night, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, Terrence Malick’s Badlands, R.W. Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, and Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore. (Their canonical status is underlined by the fact that five of those six are available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection and The Mother and the Whore will no doubt soon be joining them, given Janus’s current Eustache retrospective). There was just one Revival selection in the 1973 fest: Fritz Lang’s 1922 Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (which is the only other of the 18 films currently available on Blu-ray in the US). Andrei Rublev, while seven years old, was getting its belated US premiere. Of the eleven remaining films, eight are second-tier works by major directors: Satyajit Ray’s Distant Thunder, Werner Herzog’s Land of Silence and Darkness, Claude Chabrol’s La rupture and Just Before Nightfall, Straub-Huillet’s History Lessons, Joseph Losey’s A Doll’s House, Krysztof Zanussi’s Illumination, and Claude Lanzmann’s Pourquoi Israel. And then there were three lesser-known outliers: Gianni Amico’s Ritorno, James Frawley’s Kid Blue, and Denys Arcand’s Rejeanne Padovani.
Ray’s Distant Thunder was the only film in the festival from outside Europe or North America (thirteen of the features were from Europe, three from the US, and one from Canada). And despite the fact that the poster for the festival name-checked three major female directors—Leni [Riefenstahl], Shirley [Clarke] and Agnès [Varda]—there were no feature films directed by women in the 1973 fest. (Danièle Huillet, who co-directed History Lessons with her husband Jean Marie-Straub, was not credited in the catalogue as a director.) The festival poster, however, was created by the French-American sculptor, painter, and filmmaker Niki de Saint Phalle, whose 1976 film Un rêve plus long que la nuit is playing in a restoration in this year’s NYFF.
Sadly, if one were to try to organize a 50th anniversary reunion at festival party venue Tavern on the Green tonight, only five of the class of 1973 would be able to attend: Malick (now 79 years old), Scorsese (80), Herzog (81), Arcand (83), and Zanussi (84). Those five, however, are still remarkably very much active, and all have made new films within the last couple of years.
I’ve managed to find posters for fourteen of the eighteen films that played in the 1973 festival, and I’ve tried to find the most interesting or representative poster for each one. Ritorno, Pourquoi Israel, and Land of Silence and Darkness were all made for TV, so it makes sense that there were no theatrical one sheets for those films. And no poster seems to exist for Straub-Huillet’s History Lessons, although it got a release from New Yorker Films. Here are the rest, presented in the order in which the films screened at the festival.
Above: 1974 Czech poster for Day for Night (François Truffaut, France, 1973). Design by Stanislav Duda.
Above: Polish poster for Illumination (Krzysztyof Zanussi, Poland, 1973). Design by Franciszek Starowieyski.
Above: USA one sheet for Kid Blue (James Frawley, USA, 1973). Designer uncredited.
Above: French Canadian poster for Réjeanne Padovani (Denys Arcand, Canada, 1973). Designer uncredited.
Above: UK quad poster for A Doll’s House (Joseph Losey, UK, 1973). Artist uncredited. At the same time this was playing at the NYFF, a rival film adaptation of Ibsen's play, starring Claire Bloom and Anthony Hopkins, was playing in theaters.
Above: USA one sheet for Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, USA, 1973). Designer uncredited.
Above: Italian poster for La Rupture (Claude Chabrol, France/Italy/Belgium, 1970). Art by Piero Ermanno Iaia.
Above: 1973 USA one sheet for The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, France, 1973). Designer uncredited.
Above: French poster for Just Before Nightfall (Claude Chabrol, France/Italy, 1971). Designer uncredited.
Above: 1987 Czech re-release poster for Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR, 1966). Art by Karel Teissig.
Above: French poster for Distant Thunder (Satyajit Ray, India, 1973). Designer uncredited.
Above: 1973 German poster for The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (R.W. Fassbinder, West Germany, 1972). Designer uncredited.
Above: 1962 German re-release poster for Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (Fritz Lang, Germany, 1922). Design by Karl Oskar Blase.
Above: USA one sheet for Badlands (Terrence Malick, USA, 1973). Designer uncredited.
Above: Columbia Pictures ad in the festival catalogue, advertising their two prestige releases selected for the festival.
Above: full-page New York Times ad advertising the festival slate on September 8, 1973, complete with mail-in order form.
Above: opening weekend New York Times ad for Day for Night on Sunday, October 7, 1973.
At these links, you can see my previous New York Film Festival flashbacks to 1963, 1965, 1968, 1969, 1971, 1972, and 1988.