Fortunately, there are signs that the appetite for big-screen reissues is growing and some of the smaller distributors are responding. Just released is the 40-year-old The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovich's elegy to small-town 1950s America, and mid-May sees the reissue of Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese's 1976 drama of paranoia and urban alienation. Originating from an era which has been called Hollywood's second Golden Age, both films have been deemed worthy of registration by the US Library of Congress.

Other than an air of unease typical of their time, and the coincidental presence in both of the actress Cybill Shepherd, they have little in common. Taxi Driver I have viewed countless times, and yet watching it on the big screen revealed so much more: the bloodshot cinematography of Michael Chapman, the theatricality of the set-ups, the bigness of its themes. For younger generations, Robert De Niro is a figure of intentional fun in mainstream comedies such as Meet the Fockers; but here, as Travis Bickle, the insomniac would-be assassin, disgusted by the decadence and decay of New York in decline, they have the chance to see him before he started to spoof himself — urgent, dangerous, physically slight yet filling the screen.

The violence of the climax still shocks simply because the tension has been allowed to mount and is all-enveloping; modern film-makers would be discouraged by fearful studios from taking their time in such a way, and television by its very dimensions simply cannot sustain suspense in the same way. Neither can the small screen deal easily with what seems like a lack of narrative drive. The Last Picture Show, shot in nostalgic black and white, its only soundtrack emanating from what we hear on the car radios in the dusty Texan town in which it takes place, ambles from one small incident to the next, yet by the end its portrait of youthful sexual beginnings and middle-aged disappointments amounts to something far richer, all the more so for the complete absence of the sort of sentimentality which would undoubtedly be ladled on today in a quick grab for a short cut.

The best movies of the 1970s had not "got small". How we generally experience them has. Look out for these releases, and experience what cinemagoing used to supply us with — a sense of occasion.