1971-1980

Synopsis:
Japanese pink film in Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno series starring Asami Ogawa and directed by Masaru Konuma. Ogawa’s debut film, this was the seventh and last entry in the Office Lady Journal series, which had been launched in 1972 with Office Lady Journal: Scent Of Female Cat. In their Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films, the Weissers write, “This film is a perfect end to the series. Konuma is the master of free-form, rambling cinema. He manages to make ordinary life seem extraordinary with moments of kinkiness (i.e., the eroticism of a sex scene with Ms. [Aoi] Nakajima wearing a full kimono dress; or another segment where Asami is making love in a room full of baby chicks).”
— From wikipedia.Read More »

All Movie.com Plot Synopsis by Hal Erickson
With Mon Oncle Antoine, actor Jean Duceppe established himself as Canada’s principle purveyor of eccentric relatives. Playing the uncle of 15-year-old Jacques Ganon, Duceppe acts as the lad’s confidante through the difficult coming-of-age process. The Canadian backwoods and the mining-town milieu of the 1940s are displayed to excellent nostalgic advantage in this retrospective piece from writer/director Claude Jutra (who also plays a supporting role). Though relatively unknown in the states (and often dismissed as unremarkable by below-the-border critics), Mon Oncle Antoine is regarded as a classic of the Canadian Cinema. The film won an unprecedented eight statuettes at the 1972 Canadian Film Institute Awards, including best picture and best director.Read More »

Two Soviet partisans on a mission to gather food contend with the winter cold, the occupying Germans, and their own psyches.

Letterboxd review by Lara Pop ★★★★½:
It rarely gets bleaker than The Ascent. Larisa Shepitko’s tale of perseverance in the face of imminent death surprised me on several counts. For the first half of the movie, I couldn’t figure out the significance of the title. If anything, Shepitko presents its exact opposite. The barren, snow-covered landscape, where death lurks in every grinding step man takes, devours the movie in its all-consuming white death. The shaky camera movement enhances every sound made in the white silence as the camera zooms in on man’s face and outlines the thin crust of ice scratching his cheek with its cold tendrils, stretching, reaching, with one goal in mind: to get to the innermost layer: the spirit; and to break it. It is a tableau of a frostbitten feast, an icy infusion of a deathly descent, straight into the vein. I couldn’t figure out why I was watching a film named its exact opposite.Read More »

Quote:
In a small city of Brazil, a woman named Flor marries a man named Vadinho, but once married she finds that he is a good-for-nothing. She works teaching cooking and he takes all of her money to gamble. After Vadinho dies, Flor marries Tedoror, the owner of a drugstore. Flor is happy with her new husband but misses the love life with her previous husband. When one day the ghost of Vadhino comes back to peruse her.Read More »

Quote:
At the climax of Harold Pinter’s vaguely allegorical but wholly chilling play The Birthday Party, the broken hero is being taken away by strangers, no doubt to a bad place. The locals, who have no idea what sort of political act of terror is being committed, stand by helplessly, but one of them rises and says, “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do!” Even though Pinter never makes a specific point of reference as to what deplorable regime is imposing its will, the viewer intuitively understands the message. So it is with Andrzej Zulawski’s The Devil. International audiences unfamiliar with Polish politics might not know or care that his horror film was based on actual events from the turbulent 1960s, during which communist authorities provoked a group of Warsaw students into staging anti-censorship protests. Read More »

Synopsis:
The film interprets a story from the Uttara Kanda of the epic poem Ramayana, where Rama sends his wife, Sita, to the jungle to satisfy his subjects. Sita is never actually seen in the film, but her virtual presence is compellingly evoked in the moods of the forest and the elements. The film retells the epic from a feminist perspective, and is about the tragedy of power and the sacrifices that adherence to dharma demands, including abandoning a chaste wife.Read More »

Synopsis:
A couple uses extremely black comedy to survive taking care of a daughter who is nearly completely brain dead. They take turns doing the daughter’s voice and stare into the eyes of death and emotional trauma with a humor that hides their pain.Read More »

Quote:
A small town in Germany in the early 70s. Hille, the son of the local preacher, tries for the second time to graduate high school. Despite sophisticated efforts at memorization, he knows he won’t succeed this time either. At the same time other, more ominous problems occur: a choir girl thinks he impregnated her. His sister Dimuth, allegedly a successful model, returns from Rome followed by her pimp. The Silesian bell festival his father is planning threatens to become a political disaster. The impending doom spreads. Dimuth’s former classmate Uli, an apprentice at the local sewage plant, discovered tumorous swans and dead fish in the river, then drowns mysteriously in its polluted waters. Two students hiding in the bell tower of the church plan a terror attack.Read More »

Quote:
Bergman’s little-seen English-language film starring Elliott Gould and Bibi Andersson, which charts the course of a doomed affair, earned mixed reviews on release in 1971 and was quickly overshadowed by his subsequent works – but it’s time to recognise it as a major entry in the director’s canon.

It’s unsurprising that many myths and misconceptions have arisen surrounding Ingmar Bergman, that of the terminally gloomy Swede being merely the most prevalent. Here, after all, is someone acknowledged as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time yet viewed by those none too familiar with his body of work as a whole as a forbiddingly lofty, aloof philosopher rather than an artist or entertainer. (Even a feature in last month’s Sight & Sound claimed that some of Bergman’s films might today “be considered so wilfully opaque and mired in symbolism as to be past the point of parody”.)Read More »