1971-1980

From 1972 until 1974, Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan, along with a Chinese film crew, documented the last days of the Cultural Revolution, marking the end of an era. The vast amount of footage they shot was edited into twelve films of varying lengths. Focusing on ordinary people spread over a wide geographic area-many of whom were living and working in collectives-the filmmakers recorded a unique moment in history, and also captured some of the more enduring aspects of Chinese culture.Read More »

Lucio Marcaccini’s only film, Hallucination Strip is a psychedelic trip with a social commentary. Bud Cort, in his debut performance, plays Massimo Monaldi, a student involved in political protests and juvenile delinquency. When Massimo steals a valuable tobacco box, he quickly becomes tangled in a dangerous web between the police and the mafia. Culminating in an extended and elaborately choreographed party sequence, underscored with an excellent soundtrack by Albert Verrecchia, Hallucination Strip excels with it’s not-so-subtle mix of sex, drugs, religion, politics and corruption.Read More »

Film Review
Georges Franju’s last film for the cinema was to be his second homage to the silent Louis Feuillade crime serials of the 1910s – the first being his inspired remake of Judex in 1963. Nuits rouges is a curious cinematic beast that owes as much to the adolescent American fantasy-thriller serials of the 1940s and 1960s as it does to Feuillade. It is certainly not what you would have expected from a man with a reputation as a serious filmmaker and co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française, France’s national film library.Read More »

Lightning Over Water is a penetrating and touching film of the last days of cult American director Nicholas Ray, most well-known for Rebel Without a Cause.

.”I knew that he wanted to work, to die working”, Wim Wenders says in the movie. And through his work with Wenders and the crew, Ray transformed his dying into an act of collaboration and a work of art.

Dying slowly of terminal cancer, Ray chose not to institutionalize himself in a hospice and fade away in an old people’s home but stayed in his modest New York City loft, surrounded by his closest friends — a sharp and poignant contrast to the comparative luxury of his Hollywood years.Read More »

Since he works many hours in the maternity ward of a Czech hospital, the comic couplings of a young doctor take place in whatever out-of-the way spots he can find. Sometimes he has a few free hours, and he takes his women to a secluded spot. Some of these spots have become legends: once he took his girl to a junkyard, and their lovemaking became the object of attention of a horde of workers poised on cranes in any spot they could find. His two primary loves are the wife of the head of the clinic and one of the nurses there. When he discovers that he is falling in love with the nurse, he proposes marriage, but she is much too independent to put up with the likes of him for long – even if she is pregnant with his child.Read More »

September 1972. A Palestinian commando called “Black September” takes hostage the Israeli delegation at the Munich Olympics. A forgotten détournement work by the video pioneer Carole Roussopoulos.Read More »

In 1867, with Garibaldi’s forces close to bringing Rome into the Italian kingdom, Monsignor Colombo da Priverno, a world-weary judge on the papal court, wants to resign, disgusted by the violence to which the papacy resorts to hold secular power. That night, three rebels blow up the Zouaves’ barracks. Colombo learns that a brief liaison with a countess 20 years’ before produced a son, one of the rebels arrested for the bombing. He uses his influence to gain the youth’s release, hides him, and then engages in doomed battles of wit with the court and with the Black Pope to free the other two. Can this priest be a father, blunt power, and live out his faith?Read More »

Set against the backdrop of the 1967 Six-Day War, the movie adaptation of Naguib Mahfouz’s novel follows the escapist, drug-fuelled riverboat meetings of a group of frustrated Egyptians from various walks of life.Read More »

featuring Andrey Konchalovskiy on the script
Quote:
[…]Andrei Konchalovsky had, together with Eduard Tropinin, written the script for The End of the Ataman, directed by the renowned Kazakh film-maker Shaken Ajmanov. The film dealt with the special task of the Red officer Chadiarov (played by Asanali Ashimov), who in 1921 has to kill the ataman Dutov,a collaborator with the Whites.Chadiarov discloses during this operation the spy in the Red headquarters in his Kazakh home town. In order to fulfill this task, Chadiarov, who is a Chinese prince, has to get himself arrested as a spy by the Soviet commander; then he escapes, crosses the border and sides with the ataman, who resides in China. Chadiarov fulfills the secret mission successfully, while its full scale and significance transpire only at the end of the film. In its use of cavalry chases, escapes and hide-outs in the steppe, this film is fully within the genre of the ‘Eastern’.Read More »