- Playtime
The Music Box’s highly successful 70mm Film Festival is back for a second edition, and a few titles from last year’s fest have returned for your viewing pleasure, including Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. (If you missed one of the sold-out screenings of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, here’s your shot at redemption.) The slate of new titles includes Lawrence of Arabia, Tron, and another Kubrick offering, Spartacus. In an age when films are very rarely shot and screened on actual film, something like the 70mm Fest is a valuable asset for moviegoers who aren’t ready to say goodbye to celluloid, the sad reality being events like these are all but certain to grow more scarce as time goes on. Best to enjoy it while we can. Below are my five favorite movies shot on 70mm film.
- Cheyenne Autumn (dir. John Ford, 1964) Generally considered a minor work, Cheyenne Autumn is the ideal bookend to Ford’s westerns. The film is usually written off as a half-baked mea culpa to the treatment of Native Americans in cinema and otherwise, and while the film certainly has an apologetic tone, it’s also the sort of late-period self-reflexive meditation one finds in the oeuvre of many great artists. Everything from the wistful Monument Valley imagery—aided by the 70mm photography, naturally—to the satirical Dodge City sequence suggests Ford is looking back and reassessing his career to date. It’s the closest he came to a self-portrait, one of the more uncharacteristically personal films of his career.
