’77 No Commercial Use

From the opening sequence, a few seconds taken from Werner Herzog’s La soufrière (subtitle “Warten auf eine unausweichliche Katastrophe” – Waiting for an Inevitable Disaster) lamenting the way the entire earth seemed to shake in the summer of 1976, until the closing sequence where viewers will feel invigorated by The Ramones performing Pinhead (“Gabba Gabba Hey”) on New Year’s Eve, it is all about 1977.

It was the year Elvis died and the filmmaker Luis Fulvio was born: he edited footage of riots, newsreels, interviews, pop concerts and clips from films (Buñuel, Fassbinder, Bresson) to deliver not just an overview, or pessimistic nostalgia, of a year that is arguably more interesting, and explosive, than that mythical year 1968. 1977 unfolds in front of our eyes with almost forgotten and often violent vitality, as a year of living dangerously, where safety was not first but last, because perhaps it was indeed a year when things could be changed.

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