- Paris, 5 January:
 With Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God, the German director Werner Herzog has offered us a spectacle far from his earlier experimental films. Inspired by the insane exploits of 16th-century conquistador Don Lope de Aguirre, who led a hazardous expedition through the wilds of Peru in search of El Dorado, the film does not attempt a mere historical reconstruction. Herzog, through the delirium of his hero, wished to reveal, not the story of conquest, but the fevered fascination of the lure of gold and of power. The final shot, an aerial view of a lone survivor on a raft, is masterly. Herzog had to overcome extremely difficult conditions during the shoot in the Peruvian Andes. He made the film in six weeks at extraordinary risk to the lives of his cast and crew. The director also had problems dealing with Klaus Kinski, whose intense performance is one of the great strengths of the film. Kinski, a temperamental man, often threatened to abandon the whole project.
- Hollywood, 7 January: Paramount is celebrating its founder Adolph Zukor's 100th birthday. Over a thousand people have been invited to a party in his honor. The estimated cost of the reception is $100,000.
- Paris, 14 January: The 30th Louis Delluc Prize has been awarded to Costa-Gavras for État de siège (State of Siege), with Yves Montand, a political film dealing with CIA involvement in Latin America.
 - Rome, 18 January: As a Marxist, Luchino Visconti should, in principle, be dedicated to the destruction of the class and culture he represents, and yet it is bourgeois European art that attracts him most -- Mahler, Bruckner, Lampedusa, Thomas Mann, Wagner... He is both repelled by and drawn to the decaying society that he depicts in such impressively loving detail. Visconti's latest film, Ludwig, which completes his trilogy of "German decadence," following The Damned (1969) and Death in Venice (1971), is no exception. This long (186 minutes) and unhurried look at the life and premature death of Ludwig II of Bavaria revels in the Bavarian locations and castles and the costumes and manners of the mid- to late 19th century. Helmut Berger, who has gained the nickname Ham Berger, is excellent in the title role, and looks uncannily like the tortured king. He ages convincingly from the young Ludwig who ascends the throne to the 41-year-old madman who drowns himself. Naturally, much of the film is taken up with Ludwig's patronage of Richard Wagner (Trevor Howard), and his platonic relationship with his beautiful cousin, Elizabeth of Austria (Romy Schneider).
- Italy, 18 January:
 While still in her teens, during the mid-1950s, Romy Schneider became the most popular young star of the German-speaking world as "Sissi," the future Empress Elizabeth, in three romantic films about the Austro-Hungarian royal family, all directed by Ernst Marishka: Sissi (1955), Sissi - Die junge Kaiserin (1956) and Sissi - Schicksalsjahre einer Kaiserin (1957). Usually shown cut together in the U.S. as one movie under the title Forever My Love (1962), they are part-operetta, part-Hollywood style biopic. The role of "Sissi" has haunted Schneider ever since, and is one that she has always mocked. Therefore, it took some convincing on Luchino Visconti's part to persuade the lovely star to reprise the role in Ludwig, this time as a more mature and cynical Empress, cousin to the King of Bavaria, in a very different kind of film.
- Malibu, 19 January: Jane Fonda has married political activist, co-founder of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and ex-Chicago Seven defendant, Tom Hayden.
- Rome, 2 February: A Bologna criminal court today lifted a ban on Last Tango in Paris, and acquitted the director of the film, Bernardo Bertolucci, its stars Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider and two others of obscenity charges. The trial started on 15 December and on 21 December the movie was siezed throughout Italy on orders from a deputy prosecutor in Rome. Bertolucci welcomed the news not just for the film but "for the freedom of expression in Italy."
- Avoriaz, 11 February:
 The ski resort of Avoriaz in the French Alps has been invaded by a very different type of tourist from the usual. For the last 12 days, fans have been gathering for the first International Festival of Horror and Fantasy Films, initiated by journalist and publicist Lionel Chouchan. The jury, headed by director René Clément, has given the first prize to an American film, Duel, made for television by a talented young director named Steven Spielberg. Written by Richard Matheson, adapting his own novel, it is an immensely effective man vs. machine thriller about a salesman driving along a highway who gradually realizes he is being chased across the country by a huge and menacing truck, the driver of which is never seen. The Special Jury Prize went to Themroc, an extremely strange French film directed by Claude Faraldo, in which the character communicate only in a series of formless noises. It tells of a factory worker, living in a squalid apartment, who suddenly rebels, causing anarchy.
 - New York, 1 March: As expected, a New York court has judged the sexploitation movie Deep Throat to be obscene. A stiff fine has been imposed -- twice the picture's box-office receipts. This judgment follows action taken against Deep Throat in a number of cities, notably in Miami and Toledo, Ohio, where it was seized by police on the day it was released. Directed by Gérard Damiano, Deep Throat follows the erotic adventures of a young woman, played by Linda Lovelace (born Linda Boreman in the Bronx, 10 January 1949), who discovers that one of her most important erogenous zones, her clitoris, no less, is located in her throat. This unique medical condition leads to a feast of fellatio. Released in New York last June in a Times Square theater that specializes in such fare, Deep Throat enjoyed such a phenomenal success that, like The Devil in Miss Jones, it transferred to an East Side art house. It is, indeed, rarely that a film of a pornographic nature manages to escape from the low-rent ghettos to which such movies are normally confined. Made at a reported cost of $24,000, the film promises to become one of the most profitable in film history.
- Los Angeles, 27 March:
 Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather has been voted Best Picture at this year's Oscar® ceremony at Los Angeles Music Center. Marlon Brando won the Best Actor award for his performance in the same movie. This was no surprise, but his reaction certainly was. The star did not attend the ceremony. In his place he sent an Indian woman called Sasheen Littlefeather (in reality an actress named Maria Cruz). Littlefeather read out a statement from Brando accusing the motion picture industry of "degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character." It seems you can't even give Oscars® away these days. This year's Best Actress was Liza Minnelli for her performance in Cabaret, which won seven other Oscars®, including Best Supporting Actor (Joel Grey), Director (Bob Fosse) and Cinematography (Geoffrey Unsworth). Best Supporting Actress was Eileen Brennan for Butterflies Are Free and Best Foreign Language Film was Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), directed by Luis Buñuel.
- Los Angeles, 31 March: The American Film Institute has honored John Ford with its first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by AFI president George Stevens Jr.. President Nixon attended the ceremony and personally handed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian award, to the film director.
- Washington, DC, 6 April: The American Film Institute's inaugural film fesitval was marred by confusion and charges of censorship. Only hours before the opening a New York distributor announced that a third of the films scheduled were to be withheld as a protest against the withdrawal of Costa-Gavras' picture État de siège (State of Siege). New York film critics have harshly criticized the affair.
- Stockholm, 11 April:
 Ingmar Bergman began working for television around the mid-1960s, a medium that he found stimulated his imagination. His latest TV production is a series consisting of six 50-minute episodes, collectively called Scener ur ett äktenskap (Scenes from a Marriage). It analyses the traumatic breakup of the 10-year marriage between Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and her husband Johan (Erland Josephson), who is seriously involved with a younger woman (Bibi Andersson). The rupture is painful for both, and each of them deals with it in a different way. The years pass, but they seem closer than ever since the divorce. Played largely in close-up, it creates a claustrophobic, hermetically-sealed atmosphere, while the terse exchanges and bitter silences convey a sense of bleak acidity in the beleaguered marriage. Though depressing, it is undeniably absorbing, with the director's style everywhere evident, especially in the sensitive handling of his accomplished cast.
- New York, 24 April: Jerry Lewis has removed his backing from the Network Cinema group (about 200 theaters) due to its serious financial difficulties. He blames the failure on a lack of suitable films for general audiences.
- Stockholm, 25 April: Ingmar Bergman's Viskningar och rop (Cries and Whispers), released here last month, is set to be picked up for international release.
 - New York, 16 May: Cheerfully ignoring the old theatrical warning to avoid acting with dogs or children, Ryan O'Neal has embarked on a movie which co-stars his own daughter Tatum. In Paper Moon, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, he plays a Bible-selling con man in Depression-era Kansas who falls in with a sassy, cigarette-smoking little girl who proves to be as sharp, if not sharper, than he is. It's a variation on the relationship between Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan in The Kid (1921), and while not quite in that class, Paper Moon nevertheless threatens to be a runaway hit. Inevitably, Tatum O'Neal steals the show as the self-possessed nine-year-old who succumbs to childish jealousy when grown-up Madeline Kahn (superb) comes along for the ride. The little tyke is already being tipped for an Oscar® nomination.
- London, 24 May:
 George Segal and Glenda Jackson strike sparks in A Touch of Class. He's the married executive who whisks prim Jackson off to Spain for a bit of sun and sex but finds her more than a mite quarrelsome. A Touch of Class harks back to many an older, and better, movie in which a cute meeting is followed by a long battle before the final clinch and fade-out. Segal dispenses lots of shaggy charm as the besotted businessman, dislocating his back in bed, but Jackson, essaying her first film comedy, is far too shrill.
 - Paris, 24 May: It was a while cutting Les Deux anglaises et le continent (Two English Girls, 1971) at the Victorine Studios in Nice that François Truffaut got the idea for his new film, La Nuit américaine (Day for Night). The sight of the decor for The Madwoman of Chaillot, Brian Forbes' 1969 British film, awoke his desire to make a film about making a film. The screenplay revolves around the shooting of a melodrama called "Je vous presente Pamela (Meet Pamela)," during which the juvenile lead (Jean-Pierre Léaud) falls hoplessly in love with the continuity girl; the married international star (Jacqueline Bisset) sleeps with him to keep him from abandoning the film; an Italian actress (Valentina Cortese) keeps forgetting her lines; the male lead (Jean-Pierre Aumont) is killed in an automobile crash; time and money begin to run out; and someone's pregnancy is beginning to show.
"Are films more important than life?" Léaud asks at one stage. Truffaut, himself playing the director called Ferrand, answers in the affirmative. Despite all the difficulties it reveals, La Nuit américaine is an exuberant celebration of filmmaking. Never before have the atmosphere and techniques of filming been so lovingly and vividly presented. The title itself ("American night") is a term for simulating night by the use of filters in daylight. We see how crowd scenes are organized, how crane and tracking shots are set up, dialogue agreed upon, actors and actresses encouraged and placated, props gathered and stunt work carried out. In one sequence, derived from his own La Peau douce (The Soft Skin, 1964), Truffaut shows the problems of introducing animals into a film, by using a stubborn kitten. La Nuit américaine also wittily explores the relationship between the audience and the film-within-a-film. "The most beautiful thing I have seen in a movie theater," he once said, "is to go down to the front, and turn around, and look at all the uplifted faces, the light from the screen reflected upon them." Georges Delerue's odd baroque music adds vitality to the already springy editing. The movie abounds with references to other films, directors and books (the novelist Graham Greene appears in an uncredited bit part as a money man), and special tribute is paid to Hollywood -- the film is dedicated to the Gish sisters, and Truffaut-Ferrand dreams of stealing stills of Citizen Kane from outside a movie theater as a child who resembles the "Little Tramp." Truffaut is at the center, soothing everyone from the stars to the continuity girl, and communicating his enthusiasm. The young actor in La Nuit américaine is heartbroken after his girl runs off with the stuntman. Truffaut's character consoles him: "People like us are only happy in our work."
- Cannes, 25 May:
 When they chose Jean Eustache's film La Maman et la poutain (The Mother and the Whore) and Marco Ferreri's work La Grande bouffe (Blow-Out) to represent France at this year's Cannes Festival, the selection committee could not have foreseen the furor that would ensue. Eustache's work provoked loud protests during and after the screening, primarily because of its crude dialogue. The director was almost physically assaulted when he exited the auditorium with Jeanne Moreau, who had taken his arm in friendship. The 215-minute film of a ménage à trois is witty, verbose and erotic, and consists mainly of monologues, conversations and confessions. The showing of Blow-Out was the last straw. This story, in which a group of four men hire some prostitutes and go to a villa in the countryside, engage in group sex and resolve to literally eat themselves to death, seems to have offended the defenders of good taste, morality and national pride, and there were cries of "Nauseating! Disgusting!" during the film's screening.
  As if this were not enough, Robert Bresson was furious that his picture, Lancelot du Lac (Lancelot of the Lake), was not selected in competition. He declared: "The Cannes Festival has sunk deep into mediocrity and error." After Bresson's film received almost as noisy a reception as those of Eustache and Ferreri, Michel Piccoli, one of the stars of La Grande bouffe, acted as spokesman for the director. "Monsieur Robert Bresson, in accord with his producers and the Society of French Directors, has decided not to show Lancelot du Lac this evening. Out of respect for the jury and the public, he would like to reserve his decision, but he would like to express his indignation at the conditions under which the Festival is taking place. The spirit that reigns over the selection and the organzation of the Festival seems to him to be contrary to the best ideals of cinema." The selectors explained that they wanted to make the Festival an "event," and chose French films that are "daring and original." This has gone beyond their wildest dreams, because the French entries have eclipsed all others, even the two films that shared the Grand Prix -- Jerry Schatzberg's Scarecrow and Alan Bridges' The Hireling, American and British productions respectively.
- Rhode Island, 6 June: Jack Clayton has started filming The Great Gatsby, based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald and starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.
- New York, 12 June: Marlon Brando let fly with his fists in anger at a photographer who was annoying him, and broke his jaw. Brando himself had to be hospitalized with a swollen hand.
- Washington, DC, 21 June: The Supreme Court has voted six to three in a decision that drastically modifies its previous attitude toward pornography. Henceforth, it will be left to state governments to decide what constitutes obscenity and whether a film should be protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution.
- Hollywood, 24 June: Seventy percent of the Screen Writers Guild have voted to end the strike that started on 7 March, bringing to an end the longest strike in the history of Hollywood.
- New York, 3 July: A spokesman for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor has announced that the couple have decided to separate, despite numerous attempts at a reconciliation.
- Cairo, 4 July: The opening of Salah Abou Seif's film Hammam el Malatili (The Baths of Malatili) has caused a sensation because of its author's daring exploration of all forms of sexuality.
- New Jersey, 4 July: Georgina Spelvin, star of the erotic film The Devil in Miss Jones, has been arrested. She was making a promotional visit to a movie theater that was showing her film.
- New York, 25 July: Alan Hirschfield, one of Herbert Allen's proégés, has replaced Leo Jaffe as president of Columbia Pictures Industries. Jaffe has become chairman of the company's board of directors.
- Los Angeles, 5 August:
 The second feature from 29-year-old George Lucas, American Graffiti, is a dreamy vision of adolescent life in a small California town in 1962, before Vietnam and the drug scene, a time of comparative innocence. Using the rock 'n' roll hits of the period on the soundtrack and with brilliant hyper-realist photography, the movie creates a finger-lickin' golden past. It also draws on memories of teen-pix of the 1950s, on which the director grew up. The refreshing little-known cast includes Richard Dreyfuss, Ronny Howard, Paul Le Mat, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark and Harrison Ford.
- Hollywood, 28 September: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's lion is not roaring as loudly under James T. Aubrey Jr.'s new streamlined regime as it did in the old Louis B. Mayer days. But Leo still intends to be heard from for the next 10 years under a new distribution deal with United Artists. The deal includes distribution to movie theaters and TV syndication. Distribution fees are confidential, but UA have also agreed to purchase MGM's Robbins, Feist and Miller music publishing company and its half interest in Quality Records of Canada for about $15 million.
 - Madrid, 8 October: Eight-year-old Ana Torrent is the lonely little girl in Victor Erice's impressive debut film, El Espiritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive). Her wide brown eyes reflect the world of her imagination, in which most of the film's events take place, especially centered on her obsession with finding Boris Karloff's good-bad monster after a traveling movie theater brings the film of Frankenstein (1931) to her village in 1940s Castille.
- New York, 17 October:
 Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford are an unlikely pairing in Sydney Pollack's The Way We Were, a romantic drama set against three decades of American political history. She's a left-wing activist and he's a Waspish literary type who meet, marry and divorce as the Second World War gives way to the Cold War and the menace of McCarthyism. The screenplay is by Arthur Laurents, who lived through the days of fear and betrayal in Hollywood in the early 1950s. However, director Pollack has been quick to reassure moviegoers that the film is a romance rather than a political tract, adding, "but I hope that audiences also ponder some of the movie's serious undertones." Redford gracefully plays second fiddle to Streisand, who apparently insisted on some of his scenes being cut. She also belts out a strong and haunting title song.
 - Paris, 25 October: On the release of her latest film, L'Histoire très bonne et très joyeuse de Colinot Trousse-Chemise (The Edifying and Joyous History of Colinot), directed by Nina Companéez, Brigitte Bardot has announced her retirement from the screen, soon after having celebrated her 39th birthday. She reached the decision because of the recent failure of Don Juan ou Si Don Juan était une femme... (Don Juan or If Don Juan Were a Woman, 1973), directed by her ex-husband Roger Vadim. She told a magazine, "I've made 48 films of which only five were good. The rest are not worth anything. I will not make another, and I will never visit a plastic surgeon." One of the great beauties of the cinema, she has refused to allow herself to be seen aging on screen. In fact, Bardot never really enjoyed acting, and will now be able to devote her time to the cause of animal welfare.
- New York, 31 October: Release of the American Film Theater's first production, The Iceman Cometh, a film version of Eugene O'Neill's play directed by John Frankenheimer, with Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan and Fredric March. Ely Landau founded the AFT with the idea of producing film adaptations of American theater classics. AFT audiences can become subscribers to the film series and receive reserved seating.
- Paris, 30 November: A tax inspector, Edouard Dega, has been accused of laxity in dealing with certain taxpayers, including the film directors Bernard Borderis and Alain Cavalier, who have been under investigation.
- New York, 5 December:
 Al Pacino, recently seen to such good effect in The Godfather, which gained him an Oscar® nomination for Best Supporting Actor, takes the title role in Serpico. It's based on the true story of a brave New York cop whose revelations in 1970 of institutionalized corruption rocked the police establishment to the core. In his role as the whistle-blowing cop, Pacino deftly subverts the tepid realism of director Sidney Lumet with an idiosyncratic portrait of a loner, isolated from his comrades by his incorruptibility and turning into a maddeningly modish hippie with beard, bobble hat and Old English sheepdog in tow. Man and dog survive the film, which was placidly scripted by Norman Wexler and Waldo Salt from Peter Maas' biography.
- Las Vegas, 5 December: Inauguration of the MGM-financed MGM Grand, the biggest hotel and casino complex in the U.S.
- London, 7 December: Technicolor is reported to have sold a film processing lab to Communist China for around £2.75 million.
 - New York, 17 December: The semi-autobiographical best-seller by Frenchman Henri Charrière, Papillon, has been made into a $13 million Hollywood movie directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. This pæan of praise to survival stars Steve McQueen as the convict determined to escape from Devil's Island where he has been sentenced to life imprisonment, and Dustin Hoffman as his feeble, thickly bespectacled friend. The suffering of the prisoners is particularly well depicted.
- New York, 19 December: American premiere of Charles Chaplin's A King in New York. Chaplin had always refused to release the film in the U.S. (it came out in Europe in 1957) until last year's reconciliation.
- Los Angeles, 26 December:
 Twelve-year-old Linda Blair is the child of every parent's nightmare in The Exorcist, vomiting jets of green bile over a priest and masturbating with a crucifix. William Friedkin's messy parable of demonic possession is packed with startling effects, not least the chilling moment when, almost subliminally, one realizes that Blair's head has turned around way beyond human limits. Ellen Burstyn plays the actress Chris McNeil, working on a movie in Washington, DC, who rents a townhouse in Georgetown. When her daughter Regan starts to exhibit strange behavior, she turns to priests Jason Miller and Max von Sydow to exorcise the Devil from her daughter's body. The demon's mocking voice was provided by Mercedes McCambridge. William Peter Blatty, whose previous screenplays include the decidely less shocking A Shot in the Dark (1964), The Great Bank Robbery (1969) and Darling Lili (1970), adapted his best-selling novel to the screen. But, even those who have previous experience with this horrifying story will no doubt admit that it is one of the scariest movies ever made. There's no doubt that some nightmares will result from this tale of the dark world between science and superstition.
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14 April - New York City, 
26 March - Blue Harbor, Jamaica,