With Watergate providing ammunition to feed the creative juices of directors and writers in Hollywood, Alan Pakula reached back a little further for the second part of his paranoia trilogy. It serves as a critique of the Warren Commission's findings from almost a decade earlier, a report that always seemed destined to deliver pre-determined answers, rather than the truth.

The apparent whitewash sowed the seeds for the decades of conspiracy theories around the assassination of John F Kennedy that were to follow. Pakula grows one of these into his own take on the rumours, placing Warren Beatty at the heart trying to track down the truth.

He plays investigative reporter Joseph Frady who works for a small-time newspaper. We first…

The Parallax View perfectly manifests why the 1970s is my most treasured decade in film history. The next lines are not a review of the movie, but a kind of tribute to American New Wave cinema. If you want to hear me raving in a dramatic but completely honest manner about how fucking exceptional the decade was, just go ahead and read on. Every word came from the bottom of my heart.

When someone asks me what this or that '70s movie is about, I tell them : 'You know, sometimes less is more. Synopses are useless; the importance of the raw story dwindles and atmosphere takes over. The surface only exists for the sake of the depth underneath. It's…

[Notes from a larger paper for students]

A film like The Parallax View is an example of a studio-financed, independent production. Its executive producer, Gabriel Katzka, ran his own company and co-produced with all of the major studios during the 1970s (as well as co-producing a kung fu film with Hong Kong’s Shaw Bros). Pakula himself began as a producer at Columbia Pictures in the 1950s, but formed his own producing-directing team with Robert Mulligan to make films like To Kill a Mockingbird (Universal, 1962) and Baby, The Rain Must Fall (Paramount, 1965). But even when he became his own director as well, Pakula never remained with a single studio. Warner Bros. produced both of Pakula’s other “paranoia films,” Klute…

Of all the conspiracy thrillers that Hollywood turned out in the 1970s this might (possibly) be the strongest of the bunch. It gets a little too trippy for my liking at the end, but up until that point it is a gripping ride, dripping with paranoia, and high level seediness that made it hugely relevant then - it has some eerie surely not coincidental nods to the Kennedy assassination from just over a decade prior (there are subjects that happened a decade ago nowadays that you still can’t talk in such shadowy terms about), and came out in the midst of Nixon’s impeachment, it was a dark movie for a dark time - and it remains so today.

It’s lead…

pairs well with spliff. took me an additional hour to get through first viewing as i had to pause neurotically throughout in order to transcribe the parallax corporation's personality inventory wherever it appeared. will post here later.

Observation on the politicians who are assassinated throughout this film: almost nothing is ever said about their actual politics/ideologies. I think this ambiguity was intentional, in order to make the movie appealing to a wider swathe of left/right viewers by never explicitly venturing into the political. Intentional ambiguity allows viewers to project their own politics onto the political actors in the film (that includes the Parallax Corporation!). To this point: I recall the scene on the airplane, in which one of Senator Gillingham's…

Durante a primeira metade se comporta como um thriller que nunca atinge a tensão que poderia consolidar, já que está sempre distante e trabalha de forma precoce seus conflitos. Isto é, não dá tempo para que a construção da cena, consequentemente, o situamento do espectador, seja sedimentado. Segue uma linha de causa e consequência em espaços curtos de tempo. As emoções não aumentam e nem acumulam ao passo que progride, pois assim que experimentadas, se dissolvem completamente. Em outras palavras, não ergue antes de tombar. Algo que Chinatown, obra lançada no mesmo ano, faz com perfeição.

Entretanto, aos poucos se ajeita. A divisão de blocos focados nessa dinâmica da surpresa, em uma realidade onde nada é plenamente confiável e o…