 Paris, 2 January:  Françoise Giroud, the secretary of state for culture and communiction, has just returned from the U.S. where she decorated Jean Renoir with the Legion of Honor. The ceremony took place at Renoir's Hollywood home last week. Aged 81, the great director is now unwell and cofined to a wheelchair. It is three years since Renoir found he could not work any longer, following the fate of his famous father, August Renoir. He did not remember that Françoise Giroud (under her real name of Gourdji) was continuity girl on La Grande illusion, over 40 years ago. At that time, she was taking her first steps as a writer, and claims to have contributed a few lines between Jean Gabin and Marcel Dalio in the final scene. Giroud recalls Renoir telling her, "You have talent, but it is necessary to first learn how to ruin it."
- Hong Kong, 3 January: Release of Zhong yuan biao ju (Revenge of the Patriots), directed by Au Yeung Chuen and starring Bruce Li, who has had a brief spell of stardom thanks to his resemblance to the late star Bruce Lee and his own considerable kung fu skills.
- Paris, 7 January: Following the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini last year, his film Mamma Roma (1962), starring Anna Magnani, is re-released in Parisian cinemas today.
- Paris, 8 January:
 The box-office hit, Cousin, Cousine, Jean-Charles Tacchella's second picture, has been awarded the Louis Delluc Prize. This charming and polished comedy revolves around two married couples who meet at a wedding that makes them cousins. Soon, they become entangled with each other's spouses. In the case of Marie-Christine Barrault and Victor Lanoux, they hold on to their virtue in the face of their partners' (Guy Marchand and Marie-France Pisier) adultery, until they decide to go away together. This work gently pokes fun at the hypocrisy of the French bourgeoisie.
- Manila, 2 March: Francis Ford Coppola has arrived in the Philippines to shoot the location scenes for Apocalypse Now.
- Paris, 2 March: Release of La Meilleure façon de marcher (The Best Way to Walk), the first full-length film directed by Claude Miller, who was formerly assistant to Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.
- Memphis, 3 March: The trial involving the film Deep Throat has started here in the capital city of Tennessee. Eleven people are charged with "conspiring to distribute obscene material from one state to another." In several states the film has already been the object of 11 trials; in eight of them the film was exonerated from the obscenity accusations.
 - Berlin, 4 March: For 11 weeks, young German director Wim Wenders traveled along the border between West and East Germany with his small team, consisting of his splendid cameraman Robby Muller and his two main actors, Hanns Zischler and Rudiger Vogler. The result is Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road), a complex, subtly comic, buddy-buddy road movie. It follows an itinerant film projector mechanic, and his friend fleeing his family, as they go around the repair circuit. Taking a gloomy view of the present state of German cinema, the film makes direct references to the silent pictures of Fritz Lang and his exile in America. Exile and borders are used both literally and metaphorically, and are conveyed in arresting black and white images.
- Paris, 10 March:
 Serge Gainsbourg has moved from singing to directing. The title of his first film, Je t'aime moi non plus (I Love You, I Don't), derives from the song he recorded with his companion Jane Birkin in 1969. Birkin has the starring role, that of an androgynous barmaid who falls in love with a homosexual truck driver in the middle of the desert. Gainsbourg says for him, "Film directing is the culmination of a year of architecture, 18 years of painting, and 17 years of singing."
 - New York, 11 March: Richard Lester's Robin and Marian, starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn, was premiered last night at Radio City Music Hall. This elegiac reworking of the Robin Hood legend, its mythic figures in the poignant autumn of their years, was rell-received by an entusiastic audience. However, the reception of this good-looking, well-acted film (made on location in Spain) was nothing compared to the reception that met Hepburn's arrival at the theater. This much-loved star, returning after a nine-year absence from the screen, was greeted by several thousand fans, changing "We love you, Audrey." The gracefully aging but still beautiful actress, who makes a splendid Marian, was visibly moved to the point of tears.
- Paris, 17 March: Release of François Truffaut's L'Argent de poche (Small Change), with Virginie Thévenet, Jean-François Stévenin and numerous children and teenagers, among them the director's two teenage daughters, Eva and Laura Truffaut.
- Rome, 17 March:
 Luchino Visconti has died aged 69 in his small apartment at 101 via Fleming, where he had lived for the last three years. Confined to bed for several days with flu, he died at the moment of the day he most loved to film -- the twilight. The great Italian director's death has not surprised those close to him, who watched him sadly getting weaker and weaker since he completed his last film, L'Innocente, which he directed from a wheelchair. Visconti never fully recovered from an illness that stuck him while filming Ludwig. Last year, a fall in which he broke a leg did not deter him from completing his swan song. Visconti, born the Duke of Modrone, was man of contradictions, all of which are reflected in his impressive body of work.
 - Los Angeles, 29 March: The greatest delight of this year's Academy Awards ceremony has been the Best Supporting Actor Oscar® won by George Burns for his performance in Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys. Vaudeville veteran Burns' last movie was made 37 years ago, but he was perfectly cast in The Sunshine Boys as the cranky trouper teaming up with his old partner Walter Matthau for a TV special. Burns' real-life comedy partner, Gracie Allen, died in 1964, but he remains philosophical about his new movie career. Puffing on his trademark cigar, he says, "It couldn't have happened to an older guy." Lee Grant was voted Best Supporting Actress for her performance as one of Warren Beatty's lovers in Shampoo. Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest won the Best Picture award and Forman was voted the Best Director, while Jack Nicholson took the Best Actor Oscar® for his portrayal of the feisty misfit in a mental institution and Louise Fletcher won for Best Actress for her role as the hard-faced nurse who clips his wings. Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman's screenplay made Cuckoo's Nest the first film to scoop all five major Oscars® since It Happened One Night (1934).
- Paris, 3 April:
 The César awards, the French equivalent of the Oscars®, were presented for the first time at a televised ceremony. Robert Enrico, the president of the Academy of Arts and Techniques of the Cinema, asked 950 film professionals to select the best French pictures shown during 1975. Jean Gabin, honorary president for the evening, joined Michèle Morgan on stage to present the first prize to Le Vieux fusil (The Old Rifle), directed by Robert Enrico. Bertrand Tavernier was named best director for Que la fête commence (Let Joy Reign Supreme). The acting awards were to Romy Schneider in L'Important c'est d'aimer (That Most Important Thing: Love), and Philippe Noiret in Le Vieux fusil. Winners in supporting roles were Marie-France Pisier for Cousin, Cousine and Jean Rochfort for Que la fête commence, making a total of four Césars for the latter.
 - Houston, 7 April: Howard Hughes, the eccentric aviator, oil-tool company heir, film producer and would-be movie mogul, has died at the age of 70. According to Variety he was taken ill while on board a chartered airplane, with a doctor in attendance, en route from Acapulco, Mexico, to the Mothodist Hospital at Houston, Texas. "Death was attributed to a stroke, but, as with nearly all details concerning Hughes in the past 20-odd years, was shrouded in secrecy." A familiar figure in Hollywood in his youth, the producer-director of Hell's Angels (1930) and The Outlaw (1943) and producer of Scarface (1932) acquired control of RKO studios in 1948, but ran it in such an unpredictable manner that there was little left when he sold out seven years later. In the 1960s he became a recluse, inaccessible to all but a chosen few.
- New York, 8 April:
 The political scandal that rocked the world has come to the screen. In All the President's Men, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman star as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters whose investigations into the Watergate break-in played a large part in the downfall of President Richard Nixon. Redford, familiar with political skulduggery since making The Candidate (1972), bought the screen rights to Woodward and Bernstein's book for $225,000, brought in Oscar®-winning screenwriter William Goldman and persuaded Hoffman to play Bernstein on the strength of his script. Director Alan J. Pakula, whose "conspiracy" films include The Parallax View (1974), has delivered the suspense the story demands.
- Westchester, 11 April: Frank Sinatra was photographed at a concert in the company of two notorious Maria crime bosses, Carlo Gambino and Paul Castellano.
 - Stockholm, 21 April: The great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman has just left his native land, perhaps permanently. He has good reason to complain about the way he has been treated. According to Bergman, who had been charged with tax evasion, he has been handled like a "vulgar exporter of perishables." It all started last January during the rehearsals for August Strindberg's Dance of Death at the Swedish National Theatre. The man who has contributed more than anyone else to the reputation of the performing arts in Sweden was rudely interrupted in his work, and arrested like a cheap crook. He has now given up his idyllic existence on the isle of Faro and is living in Germany. In a week's time, Ansikte mot ansikte (Face to Face), Bergman's new four-part series for Swedish television, will be shown. It will be interesting to guage its impact on the critics and public of the country he has abandoned.
- Salt Lake City, 27 April: A document purporting to the the will of Howard Hughes, who died just over two weeks ago, has been left by an unknown person at the Morman Church's headquarters. One of Hughes' assistants has referred to it as "a very clever forgery."
- Los Angeles, 30 April: Having married Richard Burton a second time in South Africa in October 1975, Elizabeth Taylor has divorced him for a second time. The couple have announced that the second marriage has not fulfilled their hopes and from now on it would be better for each of them to go their own way. In recent weeks, Taylor has been consoling herself in the company of Iranian ambassador Ardeshir Zahed and U.S. Navy Secretary John Warner.
- Paris, 26 May:
 Opening today and coming directly from its warm reception at the Cannes Festival is Roman Polanski's The Tenant, with the small Polish emigré director himself in the arduous title role. Indeed, he plays a displaced Pole who moves into a shabby Paris building. He soon discovers, however, that the previous occupant had thrown herself out of the window and is dying in the hospital. (Remember the resident of the Dakota flying out of the window in Rosemary's Baby?) After visiting her and tentatively beginning a romance with her best friend (Isabelle Adjani), he becomes aware of strange happenings in the house, and he descends into paranoia. Like the figure K in Kafka's novels, Polanski's Kafkaesque character uncomprehendingly believes himself to be guilty of a crime he has not committed. The atmosphere of the film is subtly created, and the weird events are revealed by the probing camera of Sven Nykvist (Ingmar Bergman's usual cinematographer). Veterans Melvyn Douglas, Shelley Winters, Jo Van Fleet and Lila Kedrova give fine support.
- Buenos Aires, 27 May: The Argentinian film director Raymundo Gleyzer has been abducted by the death squad of the military dictatorship. Gleyzer, director of documentaries and fiction films, is one of the Argentinian pioneers of the "ciné de base" movement aimed at disclosing social injustices. Thus, he joins the thousands of "disappeareds," and his friends and family do not hold out much hope for his safe return.
 Cannes, 28 May:  The president of this year's Cannes Festival jury, the American playwright Tennessee Williams, has made it known that he considers Taxi Driver too violent. Therefore, it was rather surprising that the Martin Scorsese movie was awarded the Palme d'Or. Indeed, Taxi Driver is probably the most violent film seen at Cannes, although it is a just refection of that which confronts America today. The main character, magnificently played by Robert De Niro, is a paranoid loner, alienated from urban society. A Vietnam vet, he sees New York as "an open sewer," stressed by the director's hellish vision of the city. The Special Jury Prize was shared between Carlos Saura's Cria cuervos (Raise Ravens) and Eric Rohmer's The Marquise of O. Saura's film, a dreamlike attempt to enter the mind of an unhappy child, contains two superb performances from Ana Torrent and Geraldine Chaplin. Rohmer's picture, made in Germany, is an ironic and touching version of the classic Von Kleist novel. Ettore Scola was named best director for the hilarious satire,Brutti sporchi e cattivi (Down and Dirty).
- Hollywood, 10 June: The American cinema magnate, Adolph Zukor, has died at the venerable age of 103. Zukor's life was a true rags-to-riches story. Born in Hungary, he was selling rabbit skins in the the streets of New York at the age of 16. By the time he was 30 he had started buying up penny arcades to transform them into nickelodeons. The creator of Famous Players Pictures, he became head of Paramount in 1935.
- Washington, DC, 1 July: A uniquely told story opens to the public today at the Smithsonian Institute for the American Bicentennial. Filmed in IMAX, the world's largest film format, by Jim Freeman and Greg MacGillivray, To Fly!, is a visual and aural experience rather than a historical epic. Audiences are treated to a 27-minute history of American aviation as they float over the Vermont countryside and Niagara Falls in a balloon, thrill to the spirit of flying from wild barnstorming to the precision of the Blue Angels, and explore the beauties of flight with a cross-country cruise, hang-gliding in Hawaii and a rocket lift-off. It will be shown on a screen 75 feet wide and five stories high at the Theatre for the National Air and Space Museum.
- Berlin, 6 July: Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians has carried off the main prize, the Golden Bear, at the Berlin Festival. Altman, who had in fact written an open letter to the head of the Festival asking that his film be ignored, refuses to acknowledge the version produced by Dino De Laurentiis for European distribution.
- Paris, 16 July: Claude-Jean Philippe presented Le Roi des Champs-Elysée during the Channel 2 program "Ciné-Club." The film, directed by Max Nossek in 1934, was the only Buster Keaton film to be shot in France.
- Karlovy-Vary, 20 July: The main prize at the 20th Festival -- which, since 1960, has been alternating with the Moscow Film Festival -- was awarded to the Cuban director Humberto Solás for his La Cantata de Chile.
- Paris, 30 July: Simone Signoret has managed to finish her autobiography La Nostalgie n'est plus ce qu'elle était (Nostalgia Is Not What It Used To Be), despite being very bust with the television series "Madame le juge."
- Los Angeles, 2 August:
 The celebrated Austrian-born director Fritz Lang has died today at the age of 85. One of the great names who put the German cinema on the map in the 1920s with such memorable films as Der Müde Tod (Destiny, 1921) and Metropolis in 1927, he fled to Paris when the Nazis came to power in 1933, then moved on to Hollywood where he fitted uneasily into the studio system. Though Lang directed a wide variety of projects during the course of his long career, he will be best remembered for his thrillers, particularly because of his originality in using the genre to make comments on the state of contemporary society, from Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922) and M (1931) to You Only Live Once (1937) and The Big Heat (1953).
 - Los Angeles, 23 August: Clint Eastwood took over the direction of his latest picture, The Outlaw Josie Wales, from its co-scenarist Philip Kaufman when the two men fell out over the character of Josey Wales. The result is Eastwood's finest film to date, both as actor and director. He plays a peacable Missouri farmer whose family is murdered by Unionist guerrillas. He takes his revenge as a Confederate guerrilla, and when the Civil War ends sets off for Texas with a bounty on his head, reluctantly acquiring a motley bunch of companions on the way. They set up a commune which draws Wales back into the world of emotions. At the film's climax, they must defend it against Wales' pursuers. This is a superb Western of epic scope and, thanks to Bruce Surtees' cinematography, great pictorial beauty. Eastwood is supported by some spirited playing, notably from Chief Dan George as a self-mocking Indian ancient, and John Vernon as Wales' compromised Civil War commander, condemned to hunt him down.
- Tokyo, 15 September:
 One would have thought that the fashion for pornography on Japanese screens was a sign of the easing of censorship in the Land of the Rising Sun. But the problems that have beset director Nagisa Oshima reveal this to be far from the truth. After having been banned, his Ai no corrida (In the Realm of the Senses) has finally been allowed a release, but in a maimed version. For example, one sex scene has been cut in order to mask the genitals of the couple. Ai no corrida was inspired by an actual court case in 1930s Japan. A married man and a married geisha employed in his household retreat from the militarist Japan of 1936 into a world of their own where they obsessively act out their sexual fantasies. Finally, in a quest for the ultimate orgasm, she strangles and then castrates him. Although it undoubtedly enters the realm of pornography on occasion and the ever-present sex between the leading actors is "real," the film treats seriously the link between eroticism and death (a theme previously dealt with a few years ago by Bertolucci in Last Tango in Paris). The film's Japanese title gives an idea of its ritualistic element -- "the corrida of love."
- Los Angeles, 23 September: A preview is being held of Marathon Man, directed by John Schlesinger and starring Laurence Olivier, Roy Scheider and Dustin Hoffman.
- Washington, DC, 6 October: Congress has passed a new copyright law to replace that of 1909. It will take effect on 1 January 1978. Protection now lasts for the life of the author plus 50 years. In the case of films only the producer will be recognized as the author.
- New York, 14 October: The most popular movie ever shown on American television is Gone With the Wind. The film, shown in two parts by NBC last week, was viewed on successive nights by 33.9 and 33.7 million households.
- Jerusalem, 29 October: Simone Signoret, Michèle Morgan, Kirk Douglas and Danny Kaye were part of an honorary committee for the first Jewish Film Festival which is taking place here.
- Rome, 1 November: Release of the second part of Bernardo Bertolucci's epic Novecento (1900). The film traces the social evolution in the Italian provinces in the early 20th century. Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu star.
- Los Angeles, 8 November: Premiere of Elia Kazan's The Last Tycoon, adapted from the unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Robert De Niro plays the title role, said to have been based, by Fitzgerald, on Irving G. Thalberg.
- Los Angeles, 11 November: Universal and Walt Disney Pictures have commenced legal proceedings against the manufacturer and distributor of videotapes, Sony-Betamax, for breach of copyright laws.
 - Los Angeles, 14 November: After working with her on Chinatown, Roman Polanski described Faye Dunaway as a "gigantic pain in the ass." With a reputation for being difficult, Dunaway also seems to relish playing the bitch on wheels, and they don't come any bitchier than her ruthless TV programming executive in Sidney Lumet's Network. She continues to rave about the ratings while bedding understandably dispirited newsman William Holden. Dunaway's is the most incisive performance in writer Paddy Chayefsky's gleeful exposé of the cynical world of television, in which the ailing network of the title exploits newscaster Peter Finch's on-screen breakdown to boost its ratings.
- New York, 15 November: Michael Eisner, who comes from the television industry, has been appointed head of Paramount.
- France, 19 November:
 Five days ago, Jean Gabin, the actor most associated with the golden age of French cinema, died at the Ameican Hospital in Paris where he had been admitted two days earlier. Because he was shocked by the way the press and public had invaded the funeral of Fernandel in 1971, he decided not to be buried, but to have his ashes dispersed over the sea, like those of sailors. During the war, Gabin had been in the navy and had fond memories of his seagoing days. Last Wednesday, the cemation took place at the Pére Lechaise cemetery, and today his ashes will be cast into the Irish Sea in the presence of his family and close friends, among them Alain Delon.
 - New York, 21 November: The B-movie is alive and well, albeit in inflated form, in Rocky, the story of a washed-up boxer who gets a million-to-one shot at the world title and self-respect. The story parallels that of Rocky's begetter, named Sylvester Stallone, an obscure actor who shares the pug's blue-collar background. Stallone was offered $300,000 for his script -- said to have been written in three days. Altough he was broke, he demanded $75,000, a percentage of the profits and the lead. He got all three and delivers a performance bursting with the blue-collar heroism beloved by Americans. Strong performances fill this film: Talia Shire as Rocky's shy girlfriend, Adrian; Burt Young as her abusive brother, Paulie; Carl Weathers as Apollo Creed, a Muhammed Ali-type of champion who discovers, too late, that Rocky can go the distance; and Burgess Meredith as the world-weary old trainer, Mickey, who sees the greatness in Rocky and brings the fighter to discover it himself. Director John G. Avildsen captures the smell of sweat as Rocky pounds through the Philadelphia streets on the way to his rendezvous with destiny.
- New York, 30 November: The French film Cousin, Cousine, directed by Jean-Charles Tacchella, has been enthusiastically received here by both critics and the public.
- Paris, 1 December:
 Alain Tanner's new film, Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000 (Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000), reveals once again the Swiss director's interest in Utopian possibilities of change. With the English Marxist writer John Berger, Tanner has created that rare species, a polemical comedy. In what might be called the European version of The Return of the Secaucus 7, it focuses on the lives of eight people in Geneva -- a copy editor, a secretary, a rural worker and his factory worker wife, a farmer and his wife, a teacher and a supermarket cashier -- all trying to maintain the ideals of the events that brought them together that May in Paris in 1968. They called themselves "the minor prophets", and the way they "predict" the future is by their daily, common lives. Far from being mere cyphers, the characters are warmly and vividly portrayed. The title character is a child who is the carrier of all their hopes for the future. And that hope is not a big one. The gentle sadness of this movie is perfectly complemented by Jean-Marie Senia's evocative musical score.
 New York, 5 December: David Carradine convinces as the legendary Depression-era folk singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory. It recounts his journey from Texas to California, his political activism among fellow migrant workers and his rise to fame through the medium of radio. Ashby, with cameraman Haskell Wexler, evokes the images made famous in the 1930s by photographer Walker Evans -- soup kitchens, hobo camps, dust storms and hopping freight trains -- in a film that is high on sentiment but skimps on Guthrie's songs. One is reminded that Carradine's father, John Carradine, made a similar grueling journey in the film of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, directed by John Ford in 1940.
- New York, 18 December:
 Sam Goldwyn once said, "If they loved it once, they'll love it twice." Slamming Sam would have had to eat his words over producer Dino De Laurentiis' botched remake of King Kong. Here, newcomer Jessica Lange flounders in a feminist version of the role made famous by Fay Wray. Worse, however, was De Laurentiis' publicity blitz that his Kong was a 40-foot robot and a miracle of modern technology. Except for a few shots, the Great Ape is impersonated by a man in a gorilla suit, designed and worn by makeup man Rick Baker. Willis O'Brien must be turning over in his grave.
 - New York, 18 December: Barbra Streisand treads a well-worn path in a second remake of A Star Is Born. This time the background is the world of rock music. Kris Kristofferson and Streisand are the ill-starred couple, her meteoric rise to fame mirrored by his vertiginous fall from grace and descent into alcoholism. A literate screenplay by John Gregory Dunne, Joan Didion and director Frank R. Pierson, and superlative singing from Streisand (especially on the theme song, "Evergreen"), ensure that while comparisons with the Judy Garland-James Mason 1954 predecessor are invidious, this new version should keep Streisand fans happy and the box-office busy.
- Los Angeles, 22 December: Release of the newest "Dirty Harry" movie, The Enforcer, directed by James Fargo. Following a reprimand from his superiors for his somewhat destructive approach to his work, San Francisco police Insp. Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) finds his new partner to be female (Tyne Daly). Though none too pleased with this, the job has to come first -- in this case the City being held to ransom following an arms robbery by a gang prepared to blow up the toilets in the police station itself.
- Paris, 27 December: According to the results of a survey published by L'Express on the subject of film censorship, 65 percent of those questioned agree that some type of control is needed.
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21 January - 
3 March - Los Angeles,