1971-1980

A rare film by Juraj Jakubisko about the power of music.Read More »

Quote:
In 1923, sensing the gathering storm of “fear, danger, and catastrophe” in Germany, the composer Arnold Schoenberg wrote a devastatingly prescient and heartbreaking letter to his former friend, the painter Wassily Kandinsky. Schoenberg aligned his fate with that of all Jews, knowing they were soon to face exile or violent death. Straub-Huillet’s film, a recitation both of Schoenberg’s letter and Bertolt Brecht’s 1935 speech to the International Congress in Defense of Culture, is a fierce condemnation of anti-Semitism, German crimes against humanity, and the barbaric war machine of capitalism.
—MoMARead More »

Quote:
In 1923, sensing the gathering storm of “fear, danger, and catastrophe” in Germany, the composer Arnold Schoenberg wrote a devastatingly prescient and heartbreaking letter to his former friend, the painter Wassily Kandinsky. Schoenberg aligned his fate with that of all Jews, knowing they were soon to face exile or violent death. Straub-Huillet’s film, a recitation both of Schoenberg’s letter and Bertolt Brecht’s 1935 speech to the International Congress in Defense of Culture, is a fierce condemnation of anti-Semitism, German crimes against humanity, and the barbaric war machine of capitalism.
—MoMARead More »

IMDB says:
An elegiac ode to a loner who finds it difficult to fit in and the inevitable eruption of his frustration, Isolation of 1/880000 tells the story of Takemitsu, a disabled young man caught in the “examination hell” of trying to get into one of Japan’s top universities. Director Sogo Ishii (now renamed as Gakuryu Ishii) was the original 8mm punk, whose works expressed unhinged energy and made speed, intensity and rebellion their stylistic and thematic center, carrying over into his later 16mm and 35mm films such as Crazy Thunder Road and Crazy Family. In contrast, Isolation prefigures the more ethereal aesthetic of his big budget 1990s films.Read More »

Quote:
Correction Please is a formally adventurous and rigorously philosophical essay on the nature of early cinema, made under the auspices of the Arts Council of Great Britain in the late 1970s. It emerged in the era of works like Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) and Anthony McCall and Andrew Tyndall’s Argument (1978), two other instances of filmmaking-as-film-theory to which Burch’s otherwise singular project might be compared. The topic of Correction Please is the development of narrative cinematic language from film’s inception to the period of sound—what Burch has dubbed “the gestation of the Institutional Mode”—investigated through a series of tautly structured segments, including ten archival examples of so-called “primitive” films made prior to 1906, animated diagrams explicating these early works, quotations from Maxim Gorky, Christian Metz, and Lillian Gish, and, most dramatically, a series of five staged sequences that recapitulate and analyze emblematic formal properties of five different chapters in cinema’s evolution.Read More »

SYNOPSIS:
Originally produced in 1972 as a segment of the television series “Hollywood Television Theatre.”

Legendary filmmaker Jean Renoir’s suspenseful and romantic tale of a beautiful French actress struggling to avoid the deadly politics and forbidden passions of Nazi-occupied France.

During World War II, an acting company in occupied Paris is notified that a German officer will be stopping by to see their play. The stage manager–who also happens to be the lover of Carola, the lead actress–asks her to “play up” to the visiting German for the good of the play, but when the officer arrives, it becomes clear to the manager that the German and Carola have had a previous relationship, and that she is still in love with him.Read More »

Yumi is a young orphan girl. She studies in a sewing school paid by her mother’s hard work as a bar hostess. All their plans will be disrupted when the mother’s boyfriend will rape Yumi, virgin and innocent.

The film sometimes “helps itself” with some psychoanalytic clichés to move forward or gives substance to its tale (For ex., Yumi plays cards almost as a genetic gift). But there’s more truth in the simple portrait of the young girl Yumi and in many details of the Japanese way of life, society and way of laws (an ironic comparison of gambling and prostitution)… including a scene which captures with an amazing realism the violence of greed.Read More »

A marked advance on Sontag’s first two films (Duet for Cannibals and Brother Carl) in terms of imagination and cogency, this personal essay about contemporary Israel reflects much of the same passion and intelligence to be found in her non-fictional prose. Addressing itself to tragic and contradictory elements in the state of Israel itself rather than a broader consideration of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it intermittently suggests the influence of Russian documentary film-maker Dziga Vertov in its use of sound and grasp of visual syntax. But while many of Vertov’s works are songs of celebration, Promised Lands – through statements by a novelist, physicist, psychiatrist, and a harrowing final sequence of a soldier being ‘treated’ for shock – is closer to the feeling of a scream. Like some of Sontag’s other work, it may suffer from an attraction to morbidity that detracts from a wholly lucid exposition. – Time OutRead More »

“The summer of 1939. Marie, at 13, goes with her parents to visit her grandmother in a small town near Avignon. Although rumors of war reach the countryside, it’s an idyllic place. Marie’s parents are constantly making love. Surrounded by sexual frankness, Marie fancies herself a woman and develops a crush on Alexander, the town’s young Jewish doctor. She’s despondent when he treats her as if she were a child. After Marie’s father abruptly leaves for a few weeks to assist with a relative’s harvest, Marie’s mother and the doctor disappear into the woods for hours at a time. Marie tries to spy on them. When dad returns, what will the family and the doctor do?”Read More »