Love Letters: 1967

Editorial It has been 50 years since 1967 and it struck us at Senses of Cinema that not only was this a notable anniversary, but that it also made for an interesting throughline to our cultural experience in t...

Sidney Poitier’s Dignified Touch in Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night We hear Detective Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) speak very few words in the early scenes of In the Heat of the Night. Tibbs is a st...

Volker Schlöndorff’s 1979 adaptation of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel The Tin Drum remains even by contemporary standards one of the most harrowing German films about World War II ever made. Unquestioningly, a grea...

“I felt annoyed. I could not remember being in love. That pain. Defencelessness. I thought – We wish their destruction” – Nicholas Mosley, Accident (1965) Following his foray into big-budget commercial filmmak...

You could be forgiven for thinking Eric Rohmer’s first film cycle, the ‘Six Moral Tales’ included six different moral tales. It doesn’t. In each film of the series, a man makes a choice between two women. To be...

Existential Dread and the Smell of Boiling Rice: A Love Letter to Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki, 1967) Hanada Goro (Shishido Joe), Tokyo’s “No. 3 assassin”, walks into a bar; his wife orders a double black la...

“Smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now.” – The Youngbloods, “Get Together” “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” – Steven Shorter, Privilege In 1967, rock ‘n’ roll...

(H)e(r)metic Art Ad Nauseam: David Lynch's Six Men Getting Sick (1967)  Part of our makeup as social animals is that certain of our activities, when visualised, tend to create a mirror effect in the viewer. Se...

Revisiting Playtime’s Style of Comic Democracy Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967) is the third of four films based on the character of Monsieur Hulot (Jacques Tati), which follows a self-effacing everyman as he vis...

Old Men and Animal Dreamers: The Jungle Book (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1967) The production of feature animated films emerged from a series of risky gambles that distinguished Walt Disney and his company from comp...

Coffin Joe: cultural icon, counter-cultural statement, sadistic lord of carnival horror. Once seen, rarely forgotten, often underappreciated, Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe is a loose English translation) was the cre...

“Don’t Tell Them Everything”: Portrait of Jason (Shirley Clarke, 1967) 9pm Saturday, December 3rd 1966: shooting begins on A Portrait of Jason. 9am Sunday, December 4th 1966: shooting concludes. Over twelve st...

The year 1967 was significant in cinema history, and if you’re trying to make sense of why, you don’t have to look much further than Mike Nichols’ The Graduate. It is a film which appears at a great turning poi...

End of Story, End of Cinema: Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend was released in Paris on December 29, 1967, capping a calendar year in which he premiered no less than three features and ...

That Candy Box of Vulgarity: Valley of the Dolls (Mark Robson, 1967) Upon the fifty-year anniversary of the release of Jacqueline Susann’s bestselling novel Valley of the Dolls in February 2016, many noted how...

Of all the “kitchen-sink, dirty-bed-linen, bad-complexion movie-makers” in the New American Cinema Group, a “self-help organization” that included Shirley Clarke, Jack Smith, and Robert Downey Sr., perhaps the ...

Infused with an almost classical reverence for romanticism, the unfolding emotions and narratives at the heart of John Huston’s work always seemed tied intimately to their settings. The environment, more than j...

“Cronenberg’s first ‘unpredictable peak’ emerges in his student film, From the Drain. An organic military weapon kills a soldier, throwing into question his current mission but sparing another who has no such d...

“Critics are very impressed by camera movement and what have you, but audiences are impressed by performance.” – Bryan Forbes To those familiar with his work, the mention of the name ‘Bryan Forbes’ can conjure...

Fifty years ago, on 12 May 1967, the Jury of the Cannes Film Festival awarded its top prize to Blow-Up, Michael Antonioni’s first English language film. Shot in London in late summer the previous year, it has i...