my favorite movies of 1978:

(1) Days of Heaven

(2) Girlfriends

favorite of 1978:

Days of Heaven

(Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, Linda Manz. Directed by Terrence Malick.)

Days of Heaven stands out for its visuals above all: it won the Oscar for Best Cinematography, but wasn’t even nominated for any of the top 5 Oscars. This New York Times piece on the movie explains:

Capturing the Magic Hour, the narrow sliver of time just around sunrise and sunset, is a difficult task for filmmakers. They’re limited in how much time they can film before the light becomes too bright or too dark. When they succeed, as Malick and the cinematographer Nestor Almendros do here, the effect is impressionistic: Characters appear softer in the faded light; scenes are warmer from the reddish tone sun’s rays; objects or extras can be backlit against the purple and pastel skies to enhance the depths of the colorful natural landscape.

Ebert’s insight helped me watch this movie in the right frame of mind:

“Days of Heaven” has been praised for its painterly images and evocative score, but criticized for its muted emotions: Although passions erupt … all the feelings are somehow held at arm’s length. This observation is true enough, if you think only about the actions of the adults in the story. But … this is the story of a teenage girl, told by her, and its subject is the way that hope and cheer have been beaten down in her heart. We do not feel the full passion of the adults because it is not her passion: It is seen at a distance, as a phenomenon, like the weather. …

Linda Manz, in her movie debut, not only played the teenage girl but also spent many hours improvising all of her narration, which was then edited down for the movie. The male lead, Richard Gere, said of Manz’s work on this movie (quoted in a Criterion essay published after she died at age 58 in 2020): “Anyone with that kind of brilliance, you just give them space. … She was a kind of unique, extraordinary, eccentric wild animal. And some jewels came out of her mouth.” She wasn’t credited as a writer.

A video essay on the movie:

Stream Days of Heaven on Amazon Prime (leaving after January 2024), Kanopy or these sites.

2nd favorite of 1978:

Girlfriends

(Melanie Mayron, Anita Skinner, Christopher Guest, Eli Wallach, Bob Balaban. Directed by Claudia Weill.)

Creative types deal with loneliness and self-doubt in this indie time capsule of ’70s New York City.

For a long time it was hard to see Girlfriends, but Criterion just put out a restored version on blu-ray (and DVD). Kubrick loved the movie: “I thought it was a wonderful film. It seemed to make no compromise to the inner truth of the story, the theme, and everything else.”

This quote is from a scene where the Jewish female protagonist, a struggling photographer (Melanie Mayron), reacts to the reactions to her work:

I must have seen about 50 people in the last three days. “Yes your work is good, very good, but we’re just not needing anything right now. … You have a very good eye, young lady!” Young lady, young lady, young lady! You know, I’m going to be old by the time I get to do what I want, and by then I will have forgotten what it was.

Stream Girlfriends on these sites.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.