1951-1960

Summary:
Broodthaers’s first film, Clef d’Horloge was made using a borrowed camera and some film stock that he had been given. It was shot at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, in 1956, during an exhibition of works by Kurt Schwitters. The film is made in negative and positive and is based on several works that were on display. It premiered on 23 April 1958 at ‘Filmexprmntlfilm’, an experimental film convention in Brussels.

La Clef de l’Horloge, a so-called documentary about the poet, painter and uber-bricoleur Schwitters, is ‘rounded off’ by adding a love poem. The film shows close-ups of Das Sternenbild [The Constellations]. Starry skies and other similar constellations often reappear in later works and also recur in his films.Read More »

The Unforgiven is a 1960 American western film directed by John Huston. It stars Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn, Audie Murphy, Charles Bickford and Lillian Gish. The story is based upon a novel by Alan Le May.The film, uncommonly for its time, spotlights the issue of racism against Native Americans and people believed to have Native American blood in the Old West. The movie is also known for problems behind the scenes. John Huston often said this was his least satisfying movie.Read More »

Quote:
This Belgian surrealist work consists of two films, one commenting on the other, concerning a young man with a crucifixion complex. Imagining crosses everywhere, he even cuts his fried potatoes in the shape of a cross. Unable to buy a large cross, he settles for sixty francs worth of small ones, which he carries of in a paper bag. When the cross he finds to crucify himself on proves too small, a kindly priest volunteers to nail his feed to the floor. – J.H. Matthews, Surrealism and Film, 1971Read More »

“Shetlandsgjengen”, which translates as “the Shetland-gang”, relates the true story of the illegal traffic across the North Sea from German occupied Norway to Shetland during World War II. A small group of Norwegian sailors loosely connected to the British navy take refugees from Norway to Shetland in small fishing-boats, equipped only with low-caliber weapons to protect themselves from German airplanes and patrol-boats. The film is closely based on real events, and many of the members of the gang, including the leader, called “Shetlands-Larsen” play themselves.Read More »

Quote:
Hitchcock’s long-standing fear of the police is what originally attracted him to a newspaper account of a family man wrongly identified as an armed robber. The Wrong Man pays scrupulous attention to such things as the details of police procedure and the eventual apprehension of the real culprit – before the conviction of the wrongly accused man (Fonda), but after the stress has driven his wife (Miles) to mental breakdown. The result is Hitchcock’s most sombre film, unrelieved by his usual macabre humour; the black-and-white photography and the persecuted Fonda’s sharply chiselled features lend an impressive documentary feel. It’s not generally rated among the master’s best works, largely because of the intractability of the source material (or Hitchcock’s unwillingness to dramatise the events). But there’s still plenty here for Hitchcockophiles: a Jesuitical strain (the man happened to be a devout Catholic), a complicity of guilt (as the wife irrationally comes to blame herself); and it’s pure noir.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘It is June 1941 and a company of German soldiers is stationed near the Lithuanian border. While on leave, three soldiers – Wagner, Lick and Paulun – go off on a hunting trip. All is fine until one of them accidentally shoots their captain’s daughter. Out of fear, the three men decide to leave the body and tell no one of the accident. Tensions mount and the soldiers are pushed to the breaking point when accusations and troubled memories collide.’
– DEFA Film LibraryRead More »

During WWII the valet to the British Ambassador to Ankara sells British secrets to the Germans while trying to romance a refugee Polish countess.Read More »

Follow-up to Ed Wood’s “Plan 9 from Outer Space” about the walking dead, It opens in a cemetery. Criswell, the “real” medium, rises from his coffin to tell us of “monsters to be despised.” Dr. Acula (Kenne Duncan) is a phony medium aided by Valda Hansen, a bogus ghost, and big Tor Johnson, wearing rags and horrible scar makeup as Lobo. The doctor swindles people by pretending to contact dead relatives, but then accidentally succeeds in reviving a bunch of corpses that bury him alive! Sat unreleased for 23 years because Wood couldn’t pay the lab bill! Followed by “Sinister Urge” in 1961 (Wood’s last film).Read More »

Synopsis:
With the purpose of using barbasco roots in the production of cortisone, a pharmaceutical company sends a scientist to investigate the possibilities of exploitation in Veracruz, but the man gets lost in the jungle and lives a strange romantic adventure in a remote location called Paradise.Read More »