The HFA’s annual all-night marathon roars back with an exciting program of seven key films from 1977, a banner year for the New Hollywood wave that transformed American cinema and popular culture. Bathed in the crepuscular glow of the studio system’s slow decline, these films channel the traumas and tumults of the decade, often in the figure of a tortured anti-hero, as alternately embodied by William Devane’s Vietnam veteran bent on vengeance in Rolling Thunder and Jack Nance’s angst-ridden bachelor in one of the year’s most influential films, Eraserhead. Masculine anxiety shaped many now classic 1977 films including William Friedkin’s ultimate road movie, Sorcerer, an epic adventure of an international group of escaped criminals forced to drive explosive-laden trucks through the heart of darkness. Testosterone levels are raised to even further, stranger heights in Pumping Iron, a revelatory and rollicking backstage documentary chronicling Arnold Schwarzenegger’s fervent quest to win a fourth Mr. Olympia title. To open the program, Jonathan Demme’s lesser-known Citizen’s Band embraces an Altmanesque brand of messy comedy to offer a gently rambling ode to small-time America and the strange, vernacular joys of ham radio. An important inclusion is Robert Young’s ¡Alambrista!, a gripping and still all too-timely documentary-style chronicle of an undocumented Mexican worker trying to escape the cruelly arbitrary net of US immigration. While 1977 is known to many as the year of Star Wars and the launch of the interminable franchise that followed, it also featured Steven Spielberg’s more soulful, melancholy vision of life in outer space, now seen from Earth, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  

Presented in beautiful 35mm prints, all but one from the HFA collection, Marathon ’77 will also include rare 16mm short films and many trailers drawn from the vaults of the HFA and the Brattle Theatre. – Haden Guest

Start times are approximate. One admission fee covers the entire night and allows patrons to come and go throughout the night. Several short “breaks” of trailer shows are interspersed between features.