1971-1980

IMDB
Very rare XXX mondo-style film in which a psychiatrist explains to his students several stories of sexual deviants. Each vignette begins with the doctor citing a fact-based newspaper/magazine story of abhorrent sexual behavior.Read More »

Just as many American studio-era directors found acclaim abroad that was denied them in their home country, by 1980 Akira Kurosawa’s reputation outside Japan exceeded his esteem at home. As uncompromising as ever, he found considerable difficulty securing backing for his ambitious projects. Unsure he would be able to film it, the director, an aspiring artist before he entered filmmaking, converted Kagemusha into a series of paintings, and it was partly on the basis of these that he won the financial support of longtime admirers Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. Set in the 16th century, when powerful warlords competed for control of Japan, it offers an examination of the nature of political power and the slipperiness of identity. Read More »

Quote:
Mark Rappaport’s second feature film (amongst a remarkable string of off-beat, experimental narratives that runs from CASUAL RELATIONS to CHAIN LETTERS) takes off from the deliberate anachronism of using modern props, performance styles and attitudes to evoke the romantic entanglements of the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Rich La Bonte) with three sisters: Constanza (Margot Breier), Sophie (Sasha Nanus) and Louisa (Sissy Smith). This melodramatic plot of rejection, pining and sacrifice may have its basis in reality, but everything else is strictly stylized: back-projected settings, mix-and-match historical costumes, primary-colored walls, actors striking poses and the miming to records of Mozart arias, frequently interrupted by the raw audio track of real, untrained singing. Read More »

Deus Ex
I have been many times very ill in hospitals; and I drew on all that experience while making DEUS EX in West Pennsylvania Hospital of Pittsburgh; but I was especially inspired by the memory of one incident in an Emergency Room of SF’s Mission District: while waiting for medical help, I had held myself together by reading an April-May 1965 issue of “Poetry Magazine”; and the following lines from Charles Olson’s “Cole’s Island” had especially centered the experience, “touchstone” of DEUS EX, for me: Charles begins the poem with the statement, “I met Death – ,” and then: “He didn’t bother me, or say anything. Which is / not surprising, a person might not, in the circumstances; / or at most a nod or something. Read More »

Two men and a woman plan to steal 1,5 Billion Yen…(guernica)Read More »

A “Three Movie Buffs” review:
This early Fassbinder film tells the story of two very different women, both friends, in a small German town. One is Berta an innocent maid and virgin who falls hopelessly in love with Karl, the first man she has sex with. The other woman is Alma the town slut. She is sleeping her way through all the soldiers (or pioneers as they are called) that are in town to build a bridge.Read More »

Nora Helmer has years earlier committed a forgery in order to save the life of her authoritarian husband Torvald. Now she is being blackmailed and lives in fear of her husband’s finding out and of the shame such a revelation would bring to his career. But when the truth comes out, Nora is shocked to learn where she really stands in her husband’s esteem.Read More »

In Serbia, Baron Frankenstein lives with the Baroness and their two children. He dreams of a super-race, returning Serbia to its grand connections to ancient Greece. In his laboratory, assisted by Otto, he builds a desirable female body, but needs a male who will be superbody and superlover. He thinks he has found just the right brain to go with a body he’s built, but he’s made an error, taking the head of a gay aesthete. Meanwhile, the Baroness has her lusts, and she fastens on Nicholas, a friend of the dead lad. Can the Baron pull off his grand plan? He brings the two zombies together to mate. Meanwhile, Nicholas tries to free his dead friend. What about the Baron’s children?Read More »

Quote:
Unlike the erotic surrealism mastery of his peer-filmmakers such as Buñuel, Robbe-Grillet and even Raúl Ruiz, Pierre Zucca in his Roberte (adapted from Pierre Klossowski’s novel) tends mostly toward a “non-professionalism” and aesthetical economy. Where the enchanting force of his work is driven by an atmospheric sense of strangeness and oddity, an ambient surreality: a complex simplicity, when precisely less is more!Read More »