- Paris, 1 January: Isabelle Adjani has left the Comédie Française. After the success of La Gifle (The Siege), the young actress is preparing to film l'Histoire d'Adèle H. (The Story of Adèle H.) with director François Truffaut.
- Stockholm, 1 January:
 Ingmar Bergman took two years to prepare, and nine months to shoot, his adaptation of Mozart's Die Zauberflote --- Trollflöjten (The Magic Flute), originally made for Swedish television. The entire opera was filmed in a studio reconstruction of the interior of the exquisite 18th-century Drottningholm Theatre. The production (sung entirely in Swedish) is a model of opera films, respecting the theatrical conventions yet making the experience cinematic. Bergman also demystifies the performers by showing them backstage at the intermission, playing chess, reading a comic book and smoking. Despite a few perverse liberties taken with the text, it is an enchanting work, which replaces the darkness and gloom of Bergman's usual world with light and joy.
- Paris, 21 January: President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who was so moved by seeing Marcel Carné's le Jour se lève (Daybreak) (1939) on television, has invited the cast to lunch at his official residence, the Elysée Palace. Actor Jean Gabin is the only one to have refused the invitation.
- Los Angeles, 22 January: Superior Court Judge Norman R. Dowds today lifted a temporary restraining order against a segment of Hearts and Minds, a documentary produced by Bert Schneider and Peter Davis about the Vietnam War. Walt W. Rostow, national security advisor to President Lyndon Johnson, had tried to bar the use of an interview of himself, which he feels is damaging to his image.
 - Baltimore, 24 January: The gorgeously corpulent transvestite Divine is the star of John Waters' extravaganza of bad taste, Female Trouble, released last October. The film portrays the life and times of Dawn Davenport, showing her progress from loving schoolgirl to crazed mass murderer -- all of which stems from her parents' refusal to buy her cha-cha heels for Christmas. She runs away from home, is raped, becomes a single mother, criminal and glamorous model before her inevitable rendezvous with the electric chair. Divine, born Harris Glen Milstead in Baltimore in 1945, has fulfilled the dream of every drag queen by becoming a genuine movie star.
- Avoriaz, 26 January: At the closing ceremony of the third International Fantasy Film Festival, the main prize was awarded to the musical horror film, Phantom of the Paradise, a satirical rock opera from director Brian De Palma.
- Paris, 29 January: Patrice Chéreau has released his first film, La Chair de l'orchidée (The Flesh of the Orchid), based on a James Hadley Chase novel, with Bruno Cremer, Simone Signoret, Edwige Feuillère and British actress Charlotte Rampling.
- New York, 31 January: Lawyers for the Walt Disney Co. have filed suit to have the "Mickey Mouse Club Song" removed from the soundtrack of the pornographic film, The Happy Hooker. The music is played during an orgy scene.
- Cairo, 3 February:
 Millions of fans took part in the funeral procession of Oum (Mother) Kalsoum through the streets of Cairo today. Born the daughter of a village imam, Kalsoum learned to sing by eavesdropping on her father's singing lessons with her brother. When her father heard her powerful voice, he invited her to join in. Kalsoum used to dress as a boy to sing without harassment from authorities. She quickly achieved local fame, and moved to Cairo in 1923 to begin a career that would mark the entire Arab-speaking world. Kalsoum quickly adapted to the ways of the city's cultural and social elite, and her appeal was central to the rise of Egyptian radio, starting in 1934, and television, starting in 1960. Despite personal crises and chronic health problems, Kalsoum continued to expand her reputation for decades, interpreting works by great poets, starring in films, delivering masterful radio interviews, and creating immortal music year after year. She was hailed as "the voice and face of Egypt." At the height of her career, politicians took care not to compete with her weekly radio show in which she would unfold lyric poems, taking up to an hour to complete one piece. When Kalsoum died, millions flooded onto the Cairo streets to mourn her. She left no children, just 286 songs, 132 of them based on the poems of Ahmed Ramy. -- Gateway of Africa
 - New York, 11 February: Warren Beatty's fingerprints are all over his latest picture, Shampoo, directed by Hal Ashby. Beatty is the star, producer, and, with current hot property Robert Towne, co-writer of this sweet and sour comedy with a political message. Set on the eve of the 1968 presidential election, it follows the amorous adventures of Beatty's hairstylist to the stars (he "does" Barbara Rush) as he gradually grasps the emptiness of his existence. Beatty says the film is not just about "a handful of characters but a whole country in a process of disintegration through hypocrisy and a loss of leadership and values."
- Paris, 5 April:
 Three days before the annual Academy Awards ceremony, Georges Cravenne has announced the creation of a French cousin of Oscar®, to be called César after the name of the sculptor who will make the statuettes. These will be presented each year by those in the movie industry to the best French films, performers, directors and technicians. The secret vote will be based on the Academy model in order to keep up the suspense until the last moment. Cravenne has left for L.A. to "spy" on the American event.
 - Los Angeles, 8 April: The Academy Awards ceremony is now 47 years old, and this year it has been dominated by Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part II, which has carried away six Oscars®. It was chosen as Best Picture and Coppola was voted Best Director, not letting Bob Fosse steal his thunder this year. Coppola also shared the Best Screenplay prize with Mario Puzo, and Robert De Niro scooped the Best Supporting Actor Oscar® for his portrayal of don Vito Corleone as a young man, just arrived in America. De Niro's dialogue was almost entirely in Italian, with one notable exception: "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse." The Godfather sequel -- which some consider better than the original -- also won Oscars® for score and art direction. The Best Actress award deservedly went to Ellen Burstyn for her performance in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore as the widow setting off with a child in tow on a voyage of self-discovery. Although directed by Martin Scorsese, the film was very much Burstyn's project. She found the screenplay and reworked it, chose the cast and director and sold it to Warners for 10 percent of the profits. Art Carney was a surprise choice as Best Actor for Harry and Tonto, a bittersweet comedy directed by Paul Mazursky. Ingrid Bergman won the Best Supporting Actress award for her performance as a shy spinster in the Agatha Christie tale Murder on the Orient Express, allowing her to join Helen Hayes and Jack Lemmon as the only actors who have won Best Actor/Actress and Best Supporting Actor/Actress awards.
- New York, 9 April:
 In Professione: reporter (The Passenger), Michelangelo Antonioni's first film in five years (excepting Chung Kuo, a documentary on China), the Italian director has returned to the theme of the search for identity. The mesmerizing and enigmatic film stars Jack Nicholson as a journalist in North Africa, who comes across a dead man bearing a striking resemblance to himself. At the end of his tether, he exchanges passports with the corpse, hoping to lead a new life. In Spain, he meets Maria Schnieder, a French girl, with whom he continues his travels. The film ends with a stunning seven-minute single-shot sequence.
- New York, 16 April: Variety has announced that Universal intends to run a TV advertising campaign with prime-time viewing spots for the release of Jaws. This method replaces the usual step-by-step approach. The studio feels that the high initial investment will prove economically worthwhile.
- New York, 5 May: The Lincoln Center Film Society has paid tribute to Paul Newman and his wife Joanne Woodward for their contributions to the cinema.
 - Cannes, 23 May: The winner of this year's Palme d'Or at Cannes is Chronique des années de braise (Chronicle of the Burning Years), from Algerian Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina. This impressive 175-minute film recounts the history of Algeria from 1939 to 1954, the year the revolution began, through the lives of the inhabitants of two impoverished villages. It's one of the most ambitious and expensive productions to come out of the Third World. The Special Jury Prize was given to Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (Every Man for Himself and God Against All, aka The Enigma of Kaspar), Werner Herzog's riveting telling of the true story of the strange young man who suddenly appeared mysteriously from nowhere one day in Nuremberg in 1828. The best actor prize went to Vittorio Gassman for Profumo di donna (Scent of a Woman), and Valerie Perrine won the prize for best actress for her performance as Honey Bruce in Bob Fosse's Lenny.
- Los Angeles, 25 May: The American Film Institute has organized a ceremony for the release of a new postage stamp honoring the memory of D. W. Griffith.
- New York, 11 June:
 Woody Allen's new film, Love and Death, shows him maturing as a director. Shot mainly in Hungary, it is better constructed and more handsome to look at than his previous four movies. In addition, the film amply demonstrates his preoccupation with the two subjects of the title, albeit through his New York Jewish humor. Allen's opening voice-over, as the leading character, tells us he is about to be executed for a crime he didn't commit. "Isn't all mankind ultimately executed for a crime it never committed?" he asks, then deflates such pretentions by adding the gag lines: "The difference is that all men go eventually. I go six o'clock tomorrow morning. I was going to go at five o'clock, but I got a smart lawyer... got leniency." The film is full of such duality of purpose. Allen's script, a pastiche of 19th-century Russian novels and certain Soviet films (in particular, Eisenstein's), also resembles the kind of period romp that used to feature his idol, Bob Hope. Set in the time and place of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Allen plays an inveterate coward called Boris Grushenko, who becomes a war hero in spite of himself. He marries his beautiful cousin Sonja (played by Diane Keaton) and they go to Moscow to assassinate Napoleon. However, Boris can't go through with it because "he's probably someone's grandfather." In one of the rare occasions in comedy, the hero dies, and at the end is seen dancing away with Death, in the manner of another of his heroes, Ingmar Bergman.
- New York, 18 June: The American Legion has protested against, and is asking for a boycott of, the documentary about Vietnam Introduction to the Enemy. The film is co-directed by Haskell Wexler, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.
 - New York, 21 June: In Jaws, an adaptation of Peter Benchley's best-seller and directed by Steven Spielberg, a peaceful little New England holiday resort is getting ready to celebrate the Fourth of July when a great white shark claims its first two victims. When the mayor (Murray Hamilton) refuses to close the beaches and lose holiday trade, local police chief Brody (Roy Scheider) watches helplessly as the shark comes back for more. Enlisting the help of Richard Dreyfuss' breezy shark expert and Robert Shaw's Ahab-like shark hunter, the sea-fearing Scheider sails off to kill the monster. But the hunters soon become the hunted.
- Hollywood, 7 July: Hollywood appears to have found a new gilt-edge hero to add to its long list of furry and feathered friends -- a not-so-friendly, 25-foot-long great white shark, named "Bruce" by the cast and crew of Jaws. Steven Spielberg's film is helping to revive an otherwise gloomy year at the box office. According to Universal the film has grossed $25.7 million in box-office receipts around the country since its release two weeks ago.
- Moscow, 10 July: The absence of an American presence at the film festival her has been noticed. According to Jack Valenti, president of the MPAA, Hollywood's participation in the preceding years' festivals had not produced results worth of further effort. The impact of American films on the Russian market remains insignificant.
- Sydney, 9 August:
 Director Peter Weir, who made his debut last year with The Cars That Ate Paris, has followed it with an atmospheric and unnerving mystery, Picnic at Hanging Rock. Preparing for a St. Valentine's Day outing in 1900, girls draped in immaculate white dress prepare for a picnic at the nearby volcanic formation, Hanging Rock, and Weir hangs an air of dark foreboding over the proceeding. "You'll have to love someone else, because I won't be here very long," says one virginal girl, Miranda (Anne Lambert), to her friend. Her words are prophetic: during the picnic, Miranda, along with two other girls and an uptight schoolmistress, vanish into the rock. While a search party repeatedly returns to the rock to look for either the girls or the reasons for their disappearance, Weir leaves the mystery unsolved, but it would seem that they have been claimed by the rock itself, a phallic force of nature. Weir skillfully moves from the recognizable world of the girls' school, thrumming with emergent sexuality, to a pagan environment in which "modern" values have no meaning. He transforms the landscape and weather into menacing and eerie images; outlines of faces can be seen in the rocks, while the oppressive heat beating down on the picnic doubles as an atmospheric metaphor for the girls' unbearable social and sexual confinement. These images and other plot twists toward the end hint that this mysterious vanishing, on some level, was actually a form of spiritual escape -- the only out, other than death, from the film's bleak, tightly structured community.
 - Tokyo, 12 August: The distinguished Japanese director Akira Kurosawa has recovered from a 1971 suicide attempt to make Dersu Uzala, based on the journals of Valdimir Arseniev. Dersu Uzala guides the young Russian scientist on a topographical expedition in 19th-century Siberia. In actor Maxim Munzuk's warm portrait, Uzala emerges as a wily expert in the art of survival, on several occasions saving his Russian employer and friend (played by Yuri Solomin) from a sticky end. In one bravura set piece he constructs a shelter as a storm brews up, and the heroes fight time and exhaustion to stay alive in the wicked snowstorm -- rendered magnificently on the 70mm screen with its six-track stereo sound.
- Washington, DC, 13 August: D. W. Griffith's great film The Birth of a Nation has been declared out of copyright as a result of proceedings started by Epoch Productions against the Museum of Modern Art.
- London, 14 August:
 Richard O'Brien's stage hit, The Rocky Horror Show has been transferred to the screen by writer-director Jim Sharman as The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A camp horror movie spoof loaded with sex, transvestites and rock music, O'Brien's monster of a musical is located somewhere between Gay Liberation and Z-movie Gothic. Tim Curry reprises his stage role of Frank-N-Furter, whose annual convention of transvestite Transylvanian aliens is interrupted by the arrival of "straight" couple Brad and Janet, played by Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon. The songs are addictive (just try getting "The Time Warp" or "Toucha Toucha Touch Me" out of your head), the raunchiness amusing, and the plot line utterly ridiculous -- in other words, this film is simply tremendous good fun. Audiences, though, have stayed away in droves. Perhaps a few die-hard fans can persuade a theater-owner to show it at midnight or something. It just might catch on.
- New York, 31 August: Benji, directed and scripted by newcomer Joe Camp, is an unexpected hit. The film has already grossed about $23 million -- from an estimated $500,000 production cost -- and, judging by the long lines outside the Guild Theater in Manhattan where the picture is currently showing, it looks set to make a killing.
- France, 31 August: Pierre Blaise, the young actor discovered by Louis Malle for the title role of Lacombe Lucien, has been killed in a car accident. He was born in 1955 in Moissac, and first worked as a woodcutter. Recently, there had been rumors in the press that he was Brigitte Bardot's new love. Sadly, he was only able to appear in three other films before his untimely death.
- Hollywood, 2 September: John Milius has said that Apocalypse Now will be the most violent film ever produced. He has just completed the writing of the script.
- Deauville, 12 September:
 André Halimi and Lionel Chouchan are the driving force behind the first European festival of American film, which is being held in Deuville, the resort that provided the elegant backdrop to Claude Lelouch's Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman,1966). Henri Langlois is one of the sponsors of this festival, which declines to award prizes. At Deauville, films are shown but not judged. The program is comprised of seven categories, including works that have yet to be premiered, independent productions and films made for television. Two eagerly awaited films are Robert Altman's Nashville, a kaleidoscopic view of the home of American country music, and Rollerball, Norman Jewison's view of gladiatorial sport in a future dystopia.
- Stockholm, 17 September: Ingmar Bergman has received an honorary doctorate of philosophy from the University of Stockholm.
 - New York, 21 September: Al Pacino is up against it in Dog Day Afternoon, directed by Sidney Lumet. He has a mountain of debts, an unhappy wife and a male lover who wants a sex-change operation. So he enlists the help of John Cazale to rob a Brooklyn bank. The heist goes horribly wrong and the two men wind up holding the employees and customers hostage while the incident snowballs into a city-wide ordeal. Pacino delivers a mesmeric performance as the loser who begins to relish the notoriety he wins while negotiating with the cops in the sticky heat of a New York summer. The film is based on a real-life event (nothing surprises New Yorkers) and has been tautly scripted by Frank Person, drawing on an article by B. F. Kluge and Thomas Moore.
- Rome, 27 September: Luchino Visconti, who has been in a wheelchair since a fall last April, has started shooting L'Innocente (The Innocent), based on a novel by Gabriele D'Annunzio, with Giancarlo Giannini and Laura Antonelli.
- Paris, 8 October:
 François Truffaut has described his new film, L'Histoire de Adèle H. (The Story of Adele H), as "a musical composition for one instrument." That instrument is the exquisite 19-year-old Isabelle Adjani. Truffaut's dramatization of the true story of Adèle Hugo, the daughter of French author-in-exile Victor Hugo, and her romantic obsession with a young French officer is a cinematically beautiful and emotionally wrenching portrait of a headstrong but unstable young woman. Adèle (Adjani, whose pale face gives her the quality of a cameo portrait) travels under a false name and spins a half-dozen false stories about herself and her relationship to Lieutenant Pinson (Bruce Robinson), the Hussar she follows to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Pinson no longer loves her, but she refuses to accept his rejection. Sinking farther and farther into her own internal world, she passes herself off as his wife and pours out her stormy emotions into a personal journal filled with delusional descriptions of her fantasy life. Beautifully shot by Nestor Almendros in vivid color, Truffaut's re-creation of the 1860s is accomplished not merely in impressive sets and locations but in the very style of the film: narration and voiceovers, written journal entries and letters, journeys and locations established with map reproductions, and a judicious use of stills mix old-fashioned cinematic technique with poetic flourishes. The result is one of Truffaut's most haunting portraits, all the more powerful because it really happened. -- Sean Axmaker, amazon.com
- Botswana, 10 October: Elizabeth Taylor has remarried Richard Burton. Their divorce was made final in June 1974.
 - Munich, 10 October: Volker Schlöndorff's analytical style and a liking for parables is especially suited to social and political subjects as he has previously shown in films such as Der Plötzliche Reichtum der armen Leute von Kombach (The Sudden Fortune of the Poor People of Kombach, TV, 1971), and Strohfeuer (Summer Lightning, aka A Free Woman, TV, 1972), an ironic feminist comedy on divorce, both co-written with and featuring his wife Margarethe von Trotta. In adapting Heinrich Böll's novel for their latest film, Die Verlorene Ehre der Katherina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum), Schlöndorff and Von Trotta have shifted some of the emphases of the original to make a statement on modern terrorism and police methods in Germany. Nevertheless, Böll's attack on the yellow press remains powerfully intact as the principal theme of the film. Angela Winkler plays Katharina Blum, who spends a night with a young man, a new acquaintance who is, unknown to her, under police surveillance as a left-wing terrorist. The encounter has serious repercussions for her; taken in for questioning, she is released only to find herself mercilessly hounded by the press who turn her into an object of public opprobrium. Katherina Blum has consolidated the reputation of Volker Schlöndorff, and has added considerably to the prestige of the New German Cinema, unafraid to tackle contemporary political subjects.
- Hollywood, 28 October: Actor Charlton Heston has been re-elected chairman of the American Film Institute. George Stevens Jr.'s position as head of this prestigious body has been renewed for another three years.
 - Rome, 1 November:
 The film world is stunned by the murder last night of Pier Paolo Pasolini under particularly horrifying circumstances. The Italian director was found this morning on the beach near the shantytown at Ostia. The explanation offered that it was a sexual crime seems plausible. Pasolini never made a secret of his homosexuality nor of his attraction to the low-life, as depicted in his first feature, Accatone (1961). Certain people, however, will rejoice at his death. He was reviled by the extreme right wing and his last film Saló o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom) fueled their hatred even more. Pasolini's friends Bernardo Bertolucci, Ettore Scola, Mauro Bolognini and Laura Betti have all expressed their deep sorrow at the loss of this poet of the cinema, dead at the age of 51.
- Hollywood, 3 November: Kathleen Nolan is the first woman to be elected president of the Screen Actors Guild.
 - Paris, 5 November:
 The decreee, adopted by the government a week ago, which has decided to exclude X-rated pictures from subsidy, has provoked much anger. According to some politicians, the plan goes against the fundamental non-preferential basis for aid to the cinema industry. A special list of movies that are considered pornographic has been drawn up. There is a risk that a number of films of quality, given an X certificate because of their eroticism, will not receive financial aid. A film such as Walerian Borowczyk's La Bête (The Beast) could be deemed pornographic. This would be a scandal, because the film is an astonishing transposition of the "Beauty and the Beast" tale. Among the other recently released erotic films that have a certain artistic ambition, one could cite Just Jaeckin's Histoire d'O (The Story of O).
- Rome, 6 November: The Italian Communist Party has decided to handle all the funeral arrangements for Pier Paolo Pasolini as well as the commemorative service to be held at the Campo del Fiori. The director was brutally murdered three days ago.
- New York, 20 November:
 For his second American movie, exiled Czech director Milos Forman has brought his humor and sharp observation to bear on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, derived from Ken Kesey's 1962 counter-culture bestseller. Kirk Douglas, who had starred in the dramatization on Broadway, tried for years to get a film version off the ground, but his son Michael and Saul Zaentz pulled it off as producers, at a cost of $3 million. Although the 1960s setting of the state mental institution still stands as a metaphor for a comformist society, the film has replaced the novel's drug-induced subjectivity with a more realistic stance. Jack Nicholson is brilliant as the anti-hero McMurphy, fighting the system as represented by Nurse Ratched, played with chilling authority by Louise Fletcher. Nicholson organizes a basketball game, gives a baseball commentary in front of a blank TV, slips porno cards into a playing deck, takes his fellow patients on a truant excursion of deep sea fishing, and generally wakes them out of their apathy. But he is defeated in the end.
 - New York, 20 November: With Barry Lyndon, director Stanley Kubrick has forsaken the ugly future of A Clockwork Orange for a journey back into the 18th century. Adapted from a minor novel by William Thackeray, the film follows the rise and fall of the Irish adventurer of the title, played by Ryan O'Neal. Deserting the British Army, he marries wealthy widow Marisa Berenson and becomes the master of a great estate. But Barry Lyndon is eventually undone by his own greed and egotism and we leave him alone, poverty-stricken and minus one of his legs. Sadly, one can muster little sympathy for him, as a miscast O'Neal is simply not up the task of suggesting the complexities that lie beneath his character's arrogant exterior. While the film lacks a human center it is, nevertheless, an astonishing feat of mise en sc`ne, presenting the 18th century through the eyes of the 20th with a painterly precision worthy of the landscape and portrait masters of the period. The price Kubrick pays for his perfectionism is to have created a glittering ornament with a hollow center.
- Paris, 21 November: The cinema sex magazine L'Organe has been banned.
- Paris, 1 December: Joseph Losey has completed the first day of shooting of Monsieur Klein, starring Alain Delon.
- New York, 15 December: Twentieth Century-Fox's board of directors has decided to go ahead with the production of Star Wars. George Lucas has been working on his original script since May 1974 and has finally convinced Alan Ladd, Jr., the head of production for the studio, to back the project.
- Hollywood, 25 December: Composer Bernard Herrmann has died. He was best known for his imposing film scores for directors Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock.
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4 June - Los Angeles,