The average cinephile will require no encouragement to check out any random documentary about the cinema of the United States’ glorious 1970s.
Does Breakdown: 1975, an essay film for Netflix on that extraordinary year, feature cunningly edited clips from Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville and Taxi Driver? It does. Are excerpts intercut with Donna Summers’s Love to Love You Baby? Uh-huh. Is it narrated by Jodie Foster? You bet. That may be the only information you need to set aside 96 minutes over the festive period.
In truth, Morgan Neville’s film begins as if it is going to give you only what you expect. Talking heads such as Josh Brolin, Ellen Burstyn and Seth Rogen turn up to assure us this was a time like no other. We hear again that the unstoppable success of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, an imperishable classic, then gave the studios the ammunition they needed to curtail the perceived excesses of the post-1960s film-making oddballs. Peter Bart, veteran producer and writer, tells us 1975 was the most important year in the history of American cinema.
So far, so familiar.
As the film zips on, however, it turns into a wider history of how the US processed the legacies of Watergate and Vietnam. The former crisis was reflected in films such as The Conversation and All the President’s Men. Vietnam was, however, so far as cinema then went, the “topic nobody wanted to talk about”.
Away from the movie theatre, Neville, an Oscar winner for 20 Feet from Stardom, settles on the near-forgotten phenomenon of Est – derived from Erhard Seminars Training – as a key to unlock the solipsism at the centre of the decade.
This bizarre self-improvement project invited devotees into an epically comforting fatalism that excused any personal miscalculations. What better non-religion for an era that someone here describes as “post-everything and pre-nothing”?
Breakdown: 1975, like the best films of that period, never lets up on entertainment as it pursues a serious end. We don’t get just Network and Harlan County, USA; we also get The Towering Inferno and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. All contribute to sharp analysis of a body politic apparently unaware of its own psychological instability.
Dickens was really on to something with that “best of times … worst of times” stuff. The age of wisdom. The age of foolishness.
Streams on Netflix from Friday, December 19th
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