1971 was an extraordinary year in film

Every so often, a strange alchemy leads to a particular year producing a disproportionate amount of cultural gold. Such was the case, 50 years ago, in 1971. In music, those 12 months gave birth to a mind-boggling array of instant classics across rock 'n' roll, reggae, soul, and beyond – records that included Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, Paul McCartney's Ram, and Joni Mitchell’s Blue, among countless others. In the movies, meanwhile, 1971's legacy was an unforgettable mosaic of images in game-changing works: the sort of worldwide creative output that few could turn their eyes from, whether it pleased or offended them.

1971 gave us, among other things, A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick's shocking descent into dystopian cruelty; Get Carter, the British crime film, whose murky fatalism offered an antithesis to the cheerful escapism of the swinging sixties; Dirty Harry, in which Clint Eastwood's squinting, gravel-voiced cop announced a return to cowboy justice against hippie "punks"; and Two-Lane Blacktop, the minor-key masterpiece of US road movies, with its disaffected, drifting youth, sun-browned and scruffy-haired, melancholy against the roar of their Hemi engines.

And that's not even scratching the surface: in British and American cinema alone, there was artwork as varied and accomplished as Shaft, McCabe and Mrs Miller and The French Connection; Harold and Maude, The Last Picture Show and The Devils; Sunday, Bloody, Sunday, Klute and Vanishing Point.

And 1971 was also situated bang in the middle of several remarkable movements: American blaxploitation, Italian crime movies, and Bollywood cinema, among others. It was the year that gave us works from masters like Robert Bresson (Four Nights of a Dreamer) and Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout), and directorial debuts from Elaine May (A New Leaf) and Clint Eastwood (Play Misty for Me).

The beginning of an uncertain age

Why was it such a special year? Well, 1971 stood at the precipice of a wild decade – described as one in which movies actually mattered by film historian David Thomson. In terms of Hollywood filmmaking, the first spectacle-driven, market-orientated blockbusters (like Star Wars and Jaws) had not yet arrived on the scene. By the late 1960s, the industry was floundering financially, and many of the struggling major studios were bought out by non-media companies, famously Gulf & Western Oil Company in the case of Paramount. By '71, film production in Hollywood had slowed to a trickle, and cinema admissions were less than a quarter than what they had been during their heyday in the 1940s. There was no set path for studios to follow, and no certain road into the future of filmmaking.

When critics and scholars talk about the remarkable artistic flowering that came from the "New Hollywood" of the '70s, they often talk about how artists slipped through the cracks in the chaos between the old guard fading away and the new guard taking over. By 1971, this seemed to be precisely what was occurring.

Partly because of their desire to make films that pandered to the youth market, and partly because of a genuine inability to come up with a reliable barometer of box office success, studio heads gave unprecedented freedom to younger writers and directors to lead the way. This blooming movement saw independently-minded filmmakers and artists shattering the forms and paradigms of traditional film style, and along with it the censorious rules of the past vis-a-vis sex, politics, and violence. It resulted in a whole decade of remarkable filmmaking, and it's in the films of 1971, where this new age was at its freshest, that the transfer of power can be felt most exhilaratingly.

The phenomenal richness of the creative output in 1971 and beyond was not just about the material circumstances of the industry, but the profoundly unsettled era that filmmakers were responding to. In the US, there was a distinct hangover from both the political assassinations of the '60s (John F and Bobby Kennedy. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X) and the continuation of the Vietnam war; the mental anguish of exploding skulls and napalmed children on the evening news; the outrages of the My Lai massacre and unpunished war criminals in the US military. The entire edifice of faith and optimism in national life had begun to crumble. In Britain, there was rebellion against the droning conformity and classism of a nation still hanging onto pre-war values; mounting, regular sectarian violence in Northern Ireland; and the rise of the National Front.

For a good sense of what the collective mood may have been then, it's worth watching the new Apple+ series 1971: The Year that Music Changed Everything, produced by Oscar-winning documentarian Asif Kapadia, which contains a great deal of compelling archival footage from the time. Over the course of eight episodes, it explores in great detail the socio-political backdrop that informed the artists of the time, whether it be the Attica prison riots, Black radicalism from Los Angeles to London, or the plight of suburban housewives grappling with second-wave feminism. Similarly, movies – from Shaft to Klute – were touching on the very same subjects.

Of course, progressive though so much in '71 was, the backlash against those movements was also building up steam, and that was apparent in cinema, as in wider society. Amid US films, there was often a fascinating split: on the one hand you had pro-establishment works like Dirty Harry, which would quietly reinforce cops as heroes… and on the other those like Vanishing Point, with an anti-heroic speed freak on the run from the law, which embraced the spirit of the counterculture and sought to expose the powers that be.

Understandably, many filmmakers of the year had the tendency to wear their political leanings on their sleeves. Films like Dirty Harry would use the Manson murders as an excuse to paint youth movements as dirty and psychotic, requiring a blunt application of police force. Meanwhile cops were painted as a force of oppressive white supremacist power in Melvin van Peebles' landmark Blaxploitation film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song ("This film is dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man", it proclaims.) It probably helped Sweet Sweetback that it was an entirely independent venture, with no limit on its polemical worldview.

Another truly independent film from that year embodies a dissenting vision better than nearly all others: Punishment Park, from the maverick British filmmaker Peter Watkins, which casts a caustic observational eye on an America convulsed with violence and civil unrest and imagines an alternate reality of the nation turned into a right-wing police state. Punishment Parkis a pseudo-documentary, in which a British film crew follow a selection of government-detained US anti-war protestors, Black Panthers, and feminists placed in internment camps for their risk of "insurrection". There, in a cruel cat-and-mouse game, they are given an opportunity to try to escape – but if they don’t make it, armed police will mow them down.