1961 in film.

Top ten box-office films of 1961:

1. West Side Story
2. The Guns of Navarone
3. El Cid
4. The Parent Trap
5. The Absent-Minded Professor
6. Lover Come Back
7. King of Kings
8. 101 Dalmations
9. La Dolce Vita
10. Come September

(NOTE: I used the international release date for films which is why La Dolce Vita is a 1960 film but appears in the 1961 box office)

What are your top three films for 1961? We will keep a running tally and eventually have some sort of bracket. For me it would be:

1. La Notte
2. Yojimbo
3. A Woman is a Woman

What are some of the forgotten gems from the year? What is overrated? What did you discover at a young age and what did you discover later?

YEARS IN FILM • forum.chorus.fm

 

Yojimbo is my shit.

Kurosawa forever.

 

watched west side story for the first time a few days ago

 

1. Breakfast at Tiffany's
2. The Hustler
3. Yojimbo

 

This is a tougher one for me than 1960, quite a few I love.
1. A Woman is a Woman
2. Yojimbo
3, Through a Glass Darkly

that is one hell of a top 3 for one year imo

 

1. Last Year at Marienbad
2. Lola
3. La Notte

 

1. Last Year at Marienbad
2. Yojimbo
3. Viridiana

 

I watched it last night, liked it a lot. Lots of great stuff visually and was surprised how many of the songs I already knew without knowing they were from this.

 

1. One-Eyed Jacks
2. Yojimbo
3. Lola

 

La Notte is usually one the least heralded of that trilogy but it always spoke to me more. Antonioni is someone who I really need to see more films from. His fingerprints are much more evident on the typical European arthouse films than someone like Godard, Fellini, or Bergman.

 

I revisited Victim recently and was even more impressed than when I first watched it as a teenager. Dirk Bogarde’s performance is outstanding, especially knowing how deeply personal it was and how much he fought for certain scenes to be included.

 

1. The Human Condition
2. Yojimbo
3. A Woman is a Woman

The Human Condition is one of the best films I've ever seen, might be cheating classing all three parts as one but that's how I watched it. Probably my favourite film of the entire decade, everything about it is fantastic. Yojimbo is obviously a classic, I think it was my first Kurosawa and might still be my favourite.

I just watched A Woman is a Woman for the first time today and loved it, really fun film. Had me laughing out loud a few times and the music/editing gave it a sort of unhinged vibe that I was really into. It also reminded me of Punch Drunk Love a lot visually which is one of my favourite looking films.

Also rewatched Through a Glass Darkly and appreciated it a lot more the second time around, very close between those two for my third place.

Last Year at Marienbad is another one I want to try again at some point because I wasn't a big fan of that at all and I love the other Resnais films I've seen.

 

how frequently are you planning on doing these threads? hoping to have a little time to watch a film or two from each year, particularly the early stuff that I missed a lot of

 

Once every three days. You can always just add them to a watchlist. It is a lifelong process to catch up on the classics.

 

I feel like this would be more fun as a weekly kinda thing than an every few days kinda thing. Give people time to watch/rewatch some movies from each year & talk about 'em in the thread.

 

obviously catching up on films is a lifelong process, but being able to watch one or two from each year while going along would be nice. I don't think every 3 days is too fast, since we are doing 60 years, but weekly still seems feasible and would probably get more people participating especially pre 90s/2000s

 

People can still post in the 1960 thread.

 

Ok, but like, half the fun of this kinda thing is having time to discover/rediscover together, as a community. I’m not gonna bump the 1961 thread when everyone else is already on 1965.

If you want this to be more inviting to participation & discussion with more people, letting the threads breath more before powering forward will make that better. If you’re just impatient to see the winner of a bracket, might as well just have one thread for the whole project instead of these separate year threads & do a year per day.

 

what's the point of me playing catch up when you've already decided the bracket winner for that year and moved on? I don't really care how you decide to do it, but maybe at least leave the voting open longer than 3 days...

 

I like the every three days time but I admit I probably have more movie watching time than most. The 1960 thread seemed to be mostly done after a couple of days but maybe more people would join if we had longer? Could always save the voting until later to give more time for people? Ideally the threads could still be active to discuss down the line as well if people watch something from a specific year and want to talk about it.

I'd be fine with it slowing down if people want more time to watch/discuss stuff though.

 

You were the one who said you didn't want to lead it yourself. You are complaining about something you admitted you wouldn't want to lead yourself.

If a week, why not two weeks? Why not a month? People can bicker over any timeline.

 

The point of watching films is to enjoy them. You can do it on any timeline you want. Hundreds of films come out every year so there is no perfect timeline for a cutoff.

 

The key word is “yourself.” I didn’t wanna be the main point person because I didn’t think I’d be the best person for that role.

To try & explain myself better, just one more time: I think weekly makes it easier to have more people involved & make it more of a community experience. Since people have different schedules, but most people’s schedules have some kinda weekly rotation, it’s the most natural interval. Every thread, for example, will be active during one weekend; if someone’s day off is Tuesday, every thread has one of those, too.

And, if more people can get in, it’ll foster more discussion. Which, will in turn incentivize more participation, etc.

If that’s not what people want, if you’d rather have a mini-Grammys (with even less discussion), that’s cool. I dunno, maybe what I’m looking for is better served by the Chorus Canon thread.

 

I don't know how this project started or what was agreed upon before, I'm just here because I saw a space open up to discuss older films, which isn't that common around here. That said, three days feels like an approptiate window to me. Extending it beyond feels like it would kill any momentum, especially when there's relatively few people participating as of now. Everyone has had different experiences and has been watching for different periods of time, so just dropping the list you have at the moment makes sense to me. Any resources anyone finds in these threads could just serve as a way to exlore on your own terms outside of the project. If this were structured as a film club or something, where everyone is expected to have watched (a) certain film(s) to contribute, a longer window would be more fitting. But no one will ever see everything and the point seems to reflect on what you have seen and to then discover more based on what everyone else shares.

 

To speak to something overlooked/underrated, Henri Colpi's The Long Absence is an incredible film. I watched it for the first time this summer in my Nouvelle Vague revisited course. Colpi is probably better known as an editor, having worked on Resnais' first two features, but he also edited works by Varda, Clouzot, and Shuji Terayama. Marguerite Duras (who also wrote Hiroshima, mon amour, among her many career accomplishments) wrote the film too. It's got a very similar feeling to those Resnais films from the 60s, dealing in fractured memory and relationships reflecting the aftermath of WW2. Notably, it shared the Palme with Viridiana at Cannes in '61 but has obvlious not maintained the same widespread recognition of that film. Highly recommended.