Above: Official poster by Yves Tinguely for the 12th New York Film Festival in 1974.
The twelfth edition of the New York Film Festival, which took place 50 years ago this week, in September 1974, could have been convincingly called the New York European Film Festival. Out of the seventeen new feature films playing, all but two were European: seven French, three German, two Italian, two Swiss, and one British. Though festival director Richard Roud wrote in the program that “one of the most exciting developments in world cinema these past two years has been the re-emergence of the American film,” there was in fact only one American film in the main lineup (the world premiere of John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence) though there was also a program of four American shorts by Mirra Bank, Martha Coolidge, William Greaves, and an exciting upstart named Martin Scorsese.
There was just one film from South America and not a single one from Asia or Africa, nor any features from Eastern European or Russian. Among the shorts, there were two Yugoslavian, one Polish and two Czech, including one by Jan Svankmajer. Of the two retrospective showings, one was French (Jean-Pierre Melville’s Les Enfants Terribles, 1950) and one German (Max Ophüls’s Liebelei, 1933).
That said, the festival was chock-full of future modern classics: the aforementioned Cassavetes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: Spectre and Celine and Julie Go Boating, Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac, Wim Wenders’s sophomore feature, Alice in the Cities, and the festival’s Closing Night selection, Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty. (There was also a mini-retrospective of Buñuel that ran four of his films back-to-back over six hours on the final Saturday).
Along with those there were second-tier films by major directors—Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien, Alain Resnais’s Stavisky, Miklos Jancsò’s Rome Wants Another Caesar, Alain Tanner’s The Middle of the World, and Ermanno Olmi’s The Circumstance. There were also, as always, a handful of films that have since more of less disappeared from the broader cinephilic consciousness, including the Opening Night film Don’t Cry with Your Mouth Full, the Brazilian Night of the Scarecrow, Daniel Schmid’s La Paloma, and Alexander Kluge’s Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave (which played with an hourlong Claude Chabrol called The Bench of Desolation). There was also Jack Hazan’s David Hockney documentary, A Bigger Splash, which was revived a few years ago.
I’ve brought together posters from all the features in the festival with the exception of Jancsó’s Rome Wants Another Caesar (which Vincent Canby called “a movie of such ridiculous pretensions that it restores a lofty reputation to philistinism”); it was made for Italian TV, never released theatrically, and therefore doesn’t seem to have one. Of the existing posters, the highlights are René Ferracci’s bawdy, colorful, and cartoony festival bookends for Don’t Cry with Your Mouth Full and The Phantom of Liberty. Also quite cartoony are Raymond Savignac’s brilliant posters for Lancelot du Lac and Panignett’s plasticine bas-relief for Celine and Julie Go Boating. Other highlights are the typography-heavy American designs for A Woman Under the Influence and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and the gorgeous re-release posters by Hans Hillmann for Liebelei and by Masakatsu Ogasawara for Les Enfants Terribles. I am also rather fond of that very utilitarian UK quad for Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave, a film for which I did not expect to find a poster. (Thank you, Posteritati).
All the posters are shown below in the order in which the films played in the festival.
French grande for Don’t Cry with Your Mouth Full (Pascal Thomas, France, 1973). Design by René Ferracci.
German 1966 re-release poster by Hans Hillmann for Liebelei (Max Ophuls, Germany, 1933).
Left: Brazilian and French posters for The Night of the Scarecrow (Sérgio Ricardo, Brazil, 1974). Right: La Paloma (Daniel Schmid, Switzerland/France, 1974). Designers uncredited.
US one sheet for Lacombe, Lucien (Louis Malle, France/Italy/Germany, 1974). Designer uncredited.
US one sheet for Stavisky (Alain Resnais, France/Italy, 1974). Designer uncredited.
French grande by Raymond Savignac for Lancelot du Lac (Robert Bresson, France/Italy, 1974).
UK poster for Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave (Alexander Kluge, West Germany, 1974). Designer uncredited.
UK quad for A Bigger Splash (Jack Hazan, UK, 1974). Designer uncredited.
French poster for Out 1: Spectre (Jacques Rivette, France, 1974). Designer uncredited.
French poster for The Middle of the World (Alain Tanner, Switzerland, 1974). Design by Charles Rau.
US one sheet for Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1974). Designer uncredited.
Japanese poster by Masakatsu Ogasawara for Les Enfants Terribles (Jean-Pierre Melville, France, 1950).
French grande for Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, France, 1973). Design by Panignett.
German poster for Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders, West Germany, 1974). Designer uncredited.
Italian poster for The Circumstance (Ermanno Olmi, Italy, 1974). Artist uncredited.
US one sheet for A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, USA, 1974). Designer uncredited.
French grande for The Phantom of Liberty (Luis Buñuel, France, 1974). Designer uncredited.
Full page advertisement for the New York Film Festival in the New York Times on Sunday, September 8, 1974.
At these links, you can see my previous New York Film Festival flashbacks to 1963, 1965, 1968, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1973 and 1988.