Over black screen we hear a subway car, the rumbling of the tracks fading in and out like a wave. We hold like this for close to two minutes as the credits pass by. Then the first image. A woman, desperate look on her face, grasping onto a pole in the middle of a packed subway carriage. As it reaches the next stop and the carriage empties out, she moves to a newly vacant seat. Moving is difficult, she’s in pain. She looks close to tears.

We cut to an apartment and a disinterested, emotionless man in a paint speckled shirt barely looks at the woman from the train. “Hurt?” he asks. “It hurt,” she replies. She’s just had a “free scrape”, an illegal abortion. The actress is Kitty Winn, a familiar face from The Exorcist franchise, whose soft-spoken emotionally sensitive performance in The Panic in Needle Park would seem to predict as meteoric a rise as her co-star, a young mop-haired pre-Godfather Al Pacino.

The Panic in Needle Park, directed by fashion-photographer-turned-film-director Jerry Schatzberg, is a raw, unflinching look at heroin addiction in 1970’s New York City. Unlike the later Trainspotting, it doesn’t rely on stylistic freneticism to paint its picture, but instead it depicts all the grit and dirt of its world completely straight. It isn’t cruel, it’s not judgmental, but it is unforgiving and it is at more than one time difficult to watch.

It is a blessing then that the actors that carry us through the experience give us some of the strongest performances of that half of the decade. Al Pacino is as charming and singular here as he is in the Dog Day Afternoons and The Godfather Part Twos the decade would later give us, and in Kitty Winn we’ve an almost unfair glimpse at what could have been a stellar career if only she’d been given the right parts.

But The Panic in Needle Park was not only the first film to star the future Michael Corleone but also the first film written by journalist/novelist couple Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. Joan Didion at this time was already something of a literary celebrity, a novelist as well as one of the most defining and distinctive journalistic voices of the era. Her biting, anxious and seemingly effortlessly cool voice was perfect for the oncoming New Hollywood era and you only need to read an essay from Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album to realise that it’s a shame there weren’t more films to her name.

This is a film that makes me think maybe Robert Towne was onto something when he said that screenwriting is closer to what a journalist does than to what a novelist does. It’s a film that makes me wish more journalists would have written screenplays. What would a film written by George Plimpton, or Joe McGinniss, or Gay Talese look like?

The perfect match for Didion and Dunne’s straight, sharp writing, the 1970’s saw an onslaught of fast film stocks that, for the first time in cinema’s history, meant filmmakers no longer required two dozen huge, blaring stage lights for every set-up. All of a sudden, we had films like William Friedkin’s The French Connection, Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, and Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park. The rough cinema verite style that would come to define the New Hollywood era and its directors like Martin Scorsese, Bob Rafelson and John Cassavetes, would not have happened if it wasn’t for the sudden availability of these fast, light sensitive, grain heavy film stocks, that meant real locations, natural light and the volcanic spontaneity of actors like Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino.

Anyone who shoots New York City in anything but the grainiest of film stocks isn’t doing it right. New York City, for all its charms, is a dirty town. The only way to be honest to it is with the rich colours and grit of 24 frames of celluloid a second. There’s a cleanliness to digital filmmaking that I struggle to find a fitting use for. Film is expressive, and not thanks to post production grading or colour timing, but entirely on its own. Cinema is not meant to be a picture-perfect replication of reality and it isn’t meant as an impression, that’s theatre, it’s something else. It’s a time capsule. That’s cinema.

PBS American Masters: Mike Nicholls

Mike Nicholls, the ever-charming and supremely talented director of The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge, is beautifully portraited in this documentary directed by his long-time collaborator Elaine May. The PBS American Masters catalogue has been building since 1986 and, in its time, has featured some of the best documentaries produced since. Every time the chance appears to watch one of the many, many, many documentaries related to film, I highly suggest you do so.

Altered States

The last film written by Network and Marty screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, Altered States stars William Hurt, one of the best actors of the 80’s, and, for my money, is the most intelligent body horror film ever made. But even though the film has competent direction through-out, some excellent framing, editing, performances and, of course, stellar writing, nothing could satisfy Chayefsky who would take his name off it, instead being credited by his birth name “Sidney Aaron”.

Big Wednesday

From the man who brought you Conan The Barbarian, Dirty Harry, Dillinger and Apocalypse Now comes this really kind of underrated coming of age film about surfers during the 60’s. While his history with asthma stopped screenwriter John Milius from ever serving in the war he’d write his most famous film about, he did his fair share of surfing and Big Wednesday may be as close to an auto-biographical film we’ll ever get from the man.

The Thin Blue Line

Every crime documentary made since 1988 owes it all to Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line. It’s difficult to talk about this without getting into spoilers, but it’s an intensely fascinating telling of a man on death row who may or may not deserve to be there. Whether it’s your first Errol Morris doco, or one you’ve seen a dozen times, it’s never a bad time to watch it.

The Hit

Starring Terrence Stamp as henchman turned informer awaiting his execution at the hands of hitmen John Hurt and Tim Roth, The Hit is a gangster road film directed by High Fidelity director Stephen Frears and a bone fide cult classic. As the three travel from Spain to Paris everything that could possibly go wrong, goes wrong, and like it reads on the poster: “Even bad men have bad days”.

Every time I’m on the train heading to the Astor to see an old film print, at around South Yarra Station I start to question whether or not it’s going to be money well spent. Faded and near destroyed prints of films like McCabe and Mrs Miller always make me worry about whether it’s going to be worth the honestly pretty reasonable ticket price. It’s a ridiculous thing to question, for someone like me at least, because of course it’s worth it. But for every print I’ve seen that, even after more than half a century, is still in brilliant condition, I must have seen a dozen that were barely watchable. So why bother?

Back in 2015, the Melbourne Cinematheque hosted a month of Paul Thomas Anderson pictures. His first five films all on original 35mm prints and there was something said during the introduction of Hard Eight that really stuck with me. Turns out, the print we saw that night of Anderson’s first feature was one of only three known to still exist. “It seems it’s easier,” said the speaker, “to find prints of films from 50 years ago than it is to find prints from 15.”

Seeing Hard Eight up on the big screen, I almost couldn’t believe how rich the colour and grain of the print was, something that’s completely lacking from both the last official DVD release and the HD-TV rip that’s floating around. Details this minute and obsessive may seem a bit trivial, but it was incredible how much more I felt myself just lapping up how the film looked seeing it on 35. And while I have absolutely no idea how many prints of Hard Eight once existed, perhaps it was only ever three, I can’t help but think that if we don’t ever get that long awaited Criterion Collection 4K restoration the experience I had might not be possible in a decade or two.

It’s an oft-repeated statistic that close to, if not more than, half of the films made before 1950 are lost forever, and there’s no question that to have a film on sub-par rushed DVD release only is better than having nothing at all. But, as is often quoted in the originaltrilogy.com forums, films should evoke or stay true to the period they were made in. Everyone knows the most flagrant example of this in George Lucas’s infamous Star Wars Special Editions, but even Blu-Ray releases that are, by most people’s standards, pretty damn good often are subject to small changes that arguably make a lot of difference.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is the perfect example. Its 4K release and the accompanying Blu-Ray is one of the best, it’s gorgeous to look at and feels relatively true to what the original intention was. There’s no egregious CGI, no digital “cleaning” of film grain that ought never have been touched, no recuts and re-edits no one asked for. But, turns out, it’s a far cry from what anyone originally saw in 1981. Every release of that film, since the original Laserdisk to now, has been subject to warmer and warmer colour corrections. That iconic heavy red hue over the Nepal bar sequence towards the beginning? Turns out, that was never there in the original theatrical presentation.

If I were ever going to develop some kind of a gambling problem, the closest thing to it would be these film print screenings. Because that’s what it is, it’s a gamble. Sure, there’s every chance it’ll be barely watchable. But nothing beats the scratches, the legitimate film grain, the idea that there’s some passionate person loading the reels and waiting for those cigarette burns in the top right corner.

And all too often now, taking the gamble that the print you’ll see at the Astor Theatre or ACMI will be any good is the only way you’ll ever be able to see a film the way it was originally intended. No one should wait around for the studios to release yet another restoration of films they’ve already worked on more than half a dozen times, and the beautiful obsessive amateur film restorers on forums like originaltrilogy.com can’t do everything, but if you see that there’s an original release print of a film you haven’t seen at all or seen a thousand times before, go see it. Take the risk that it’ll be a mess. Just see it, chances are you’ll have an experience you may never have a chance to repeat ever again.

A Field in England

Ben Wheatley, with films like Free Fire and High Rise, seems to be making a career out of making the kinds of films that people are so sure no one makes anymore. Set during the English Civil War, A Field in England, while certainly not for everyone, is a throwback to the slow-moving atmospheric horror films of the 1970’s. Though flawed, it’s one of the most original English language films to be released in years.

Bill Cunningham New York

Endearing and more than a little odd, Bill Cunningham was a fashion photographer for the New York Times from 1978 up until his death in 2016. This documentary highlights and celebrates the eccentricities, brilliance and keen eye of one of the greatest and most humble candid photographers ever to live. We see a man not interested in changing the landscape of photography, or fashion, or in creating art, or anything even remotely pretentious or highfalutin. He just loves fashion.

Blow Out

“Murder has a sound all of its own.” If that isn’t a contender for greatest tag-line of all time, what is? Directed by Brian De Palma and starring John Travolta, Blow Out is an absolutely thrilling political conspiracy thriller with more than a little bit of influence from Alfred Hitchcock. It’s so good even Pauline Kael raved about it.

Ran

No one does Shakespeare like Kurosawa. Ran, loosely based off King Lear, is no question the greatest Shakespeare adaptation Akira Kurosawa ever made but a strong contender for his best film. Made toward the end of his career, Ran may not feature Kurosawa regulars Toshiro Mifune or Takashi Shimura but the performances across the board in this film are impeccable. It doesn’t waste a moment of its near 3-hour run-time and is guaranteed to stay with you for a long, long time. An unforgettable epic and a masterpiece.

Don’t Look Now

Whether they’re editors like David Lean or cinematographers like Nicholas Roeg, some of the most fascinating directors are the ones that come to the job from roles other than screenwriting. Starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, Roeg’s third narrative feature film is a haunting ghost story set primarily in Venice, Italy. While gaining plenty of notoriety thanks to its frank depiction of sex, Don’t Look Now is an absolutely gripping and bone-chilling thriller.