POETS OF URBAN ANXIETY
From March 11 – April 12, the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art film department presents “Paranoia Films of the ’70s”.
“Whether overtly political or simply horrifying, many popular films of the ’70s contain an underlying sense of parnoia. A confluence of events — the political assassinations of the ’60s, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and Chappaquidic — led a number of prominent filmmakers to suggest that authority cannot be trusted and that even the strangest conspiracy theory can have some basis in truth.
“Often focusing on a lone hero, frequently an outsider or an otherwise troubled individual, the films of the ’70s were extremely effective at conveying the alienation and disillusionment that followed the euphoria and utopian dreams of the ’60s. Paranoia films went one step further: the hero himself was a man of unstable personality and questionable motives who could be manipulated or summarily dispatched at the will of nameless corporations or otherworldly forces.
“Not surprisingly, genre filmmaking received a new energy in the ’70s and the era is marked by a series of unsettling and stylistically audacious films noirs, thrillers, horror and science fiction films, and disaster movies that moved well beyond their traditional audience base to become crossover hits (e.g. Chinatown, The Exorcist, Earthquake).
“For filmmakers like Polanski, Friedkin, and Carpenter, it was a small step from paranoid to paranormal; while Penn, Scorsese and Pakula — all poets of urban anxiety — contributed to the movement with some of grittiest, sexually explicit, and violent films of their day.”
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Scott Macaulay
