Polish poster by Jerzy Flisak for Conversation Piece (Luchino Visconti, Italy, 1974).
Fifty years ago, on this very day, the New York Film Festival entered its teenage years. It opened, as the much more mature 63rd edition will tonight, with an English-language film by a renowned Italian auteur: in that case, Luchino Visconti’s Conversation Piece. Visconti was 68 at the time and at the tail end of his career; he would pass away six months later.
Tonight, the festival opens with 54-year-old Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, which, like Conversation Piece, is also headlined by a major American star playing a professor—Julia Roberts now, Burt Lancaster then—grappling with the sins and dilemmas of a younger generation. (Coincidentally, Guadagnino had a long-term professional and romantic partnership in the 2010s with Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, Visconti's great-great-nephew.)
1975 was a banner year for movies. The very day the festival opened, you could see the following new releases on commercial New York screens: Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, Sydney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, Lina Wertmüller’s Swept Away, and Woody Allen’s Love and Death. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was still going strong four months into its theatrical release, as was Robert Altman’s Nashville, still playing three months after its opening. You could also see revival screenings of Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) and The Exorcist (1973), Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), Claude Chabrol’s Just Before Nightfall (1971), and two other Wertmüller movies, The Seduction of Mimi (1972) and Love and Anarchy (1973). Who needs a film festival?
But if it was a great year for movies, it was not such a great year for New York, or the US as a whole for that matter. The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Chairman, William F. May, and President, Martin E. Segal, opened their introduction to the festival program thus: “Times are hard. We are in the middle of a nationwide recession. There are unresolved problems in many other parts of the world. The city of New York is in financial difficulty...So it is not unreasonable to ask why the opening of the 13th New York Film Festival should be an occasion for rejoicing.” Something similar, in fact much more foreboding, could be written today. But Segal and May go on: “The answer seems to us relatively simple: it is a well-established fact that in difficult times people turn to the arts for respite from their troubles.”
The 1975 NYFF had nineteen features, two 60-minute films, and fifteen shorts which screened over two weeks and three days (this year there are at least fifteen features screening every single day.) Of the 21 carefully curated films, all but five were European; eight of these sixteen European films were from France, including the Retrospective selection, Jean Renoir's La Chienne, and only one (Miklós Jancsó’s Electra, My Love) was from Eastern Europe. Four of the five remaining features were from the US and one (Ousmane Sembène’s Xala) was from Africa. In his program introduction the director of the festival, Richard Roud, railed against expectations for geographic diversity: “The New York Film Festival is not the United Nations.” But it is still shocking that the 1975 NYFF didn’t contain a single film from Asia or Latin America (though one of the hour-long films, Martin Smith’s Compañero, was a British documentary about a Chilean activist and the other, James Ivory’s Autobiography of a Princess, was a British film about memories of India).
A half century on, five directors from the 1975 slate are still with us, namely Ivory (now 97), Volker Schlöndorff (86), Margarethe von Trotta (83), Werner Herzog (83), and André Téchiné (82). And all of them have made new films within the last few years, with Herzog premiering his newest just last month.
I’ve tried to find the most interesting poster for each film that played in the 1975 festival. Some have a great selection of international designs—I was spoiled for choice with Schlöndorff and von Trotta’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum—while for some, only one low-res poster may exist. My favorite design of all must be Jerzy Flisak’s for Conversation Piece, above, but other highlights include Peter Sickert’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, René Ferracci’s Black Moon, Adela Jakabová’s Electra, My Love, and the UK quad for India Song. The only films I couldn’t find any posters for were the aforementioned hour-long British films, since both were made for TV and 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.
US 1970s re-release poster for La Chienne (Jean Renoir, France, 1931).
German poster for Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1975).
US one sheet for Grey Gardens (David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde & Muffie Meyer, USA, 1975).
French grande for F for Fake (Orson Welles, France, 1973). Design by René Ferracci.
German poster for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Werner Herzog, West Germany, 1974). Design by Peter Sickert.
1975 Czech poster for Electra, My Love (Miklós Jancsó, Hungary, 1974). Design by Adela Jakabová.
French grande for Black Moon (Louis Malle, France, 1975). Design by René Ferracci.
French poster for The Wonderful Crook (Claude Goretta, Switzerland, 1975). Design by René Ferracci.
French grande for Xala (Ousmane Sembène, Senegal, 1975).
German poster for The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (Volker Schlöndorff & Margarethe von Trotta, West Germany, 1975). Designe by Anneliese Ernst.
US one sheet for Hearts of the West (Howard Zieff, USA, 1975).
German poster for Moses and Aaron (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, West Germany/France/Italy, 1975).
Italian locadina for Exhibition (Jean-François Davy, France, 1975).
UK quad for India Song (Marguerite Duras, France, 1975).
French poster for Milestones (Robert Kramer & John Douglas, USA, 1975).
US one sheet for Smile (Michael Ritchie, USA, 1975).
French poster for French Provincial (André Téchiné, France, 1975). Design by René Ferracci.
US one sheet for The Story of Adele H. (François Truffaut, France, 1975).
Full-page advertisement for the 13th New York Film Festival in the New York Times on Sunday, September 7, 1975.
Official poster by Carol Summers for the 13th New York Film Festival.
At these links, you can see my previous New York Film Festival flashbacks to 1963, 1965, 1968, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974 and 1988.
Keep reading our fall festival coverage.