Movies of the 70s

For many film lovers, the 1970s represent a high-water mark in creativity, a golden age of individualist directors making their marks. In this book you’ll find a host of key movies of the era that saw a flowering of creativity and the arrival of the blockbuster with the likes of Jaws and Star Wars.

The 1970s: that magical era betwixt the swinging ’60s and the decadent ’80s, the epoch of leisure suits and Afros, the age of disco music and platform shoes. As war raged on in Vietnam and the Cold War continued to escalate, Hollywood began to heat up, recovering from its commercial crisis with box-office successes such as Star Wars, Jaws, The Exorcist, and The Godfather. Thanks to directors like Spielberg and Lucas, American cinema gave birth to a new phenomenon: the blockbuster.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, while the Nouvelle Vague died out in France, its influence extended to Germany, where the New German Cinema of Fassbinder, Wenders, and Herzog had its heyday. The sexual revolution made its way to the silver screen (cautiously in the U.S., more freely in Europe) most notably in Bertolucci’s steamy, scandalous Last Tango in Paris. Amid all this came a wave of nostalgic films (The Sting, American Graffiti) and Vietnam pictures (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter), the rise of the antihero (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman), and the prestigious short-lived genre, blaxploitation.

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The editor

Jürgen Müller has worked as an art critic, a curator, a visiting professor at various universities, and has published extensively on cinema and art history. Currently he holds the chair for art history at the University of Dresden. Müller is the series editor for TASCHEN’s Movies by Decade titles.