1971-1980

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«La Région Centrale» was made during five days of shooting on a deserted mountain top in North Quebec. During the shooting, the vertical and horizontal alignment as well as the tracking speed were all determined by the camera’s settings. Anchored to a tripod, the camera turned a complete 360 degrees, craned itself skyward, and circled in all directions. Because of the unconventional camera movement, the result was more than merely a film that documented the film location’s landscape. Surpassing that, this became a film expressing as its themes the cosmic relationships of space and time. Cataloged here were the raw images of a mountain existence, plunged (at that time) in its distance from civilization, embedded in cosmic cycles of light and darkness, warmth and cold.Read More »

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Alan Clarke first released Scum in 1977 as a BBC TV-film, yet the BBC disapproved of the film due to the amount of raw, harrowing realism which had been packed into a short running-time. Therefore the BBC banned the version, and it was not until fifteen years later that the TV-version was aired on the UK’s Channel 4. Though, to get around not being able to release the TV version of Scum Alan Clarke opted in for developing a remade, feature-length version to be aired at cinemas, this was released in 1979. The film sent shockwaves through cinemas across Britain, causing huge controversy from the media, government and British public. Some people saw the film as a “visceral image of a flawed system”, while others saw the film as “exploitive trash in the form of a documentary”.Read More »

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An erotic drama about complicated love affairs and blackmailing. Dina, the young wife of elderly manager Gantar meets attractive student Luka and falls in love with him. All her further activity is submitted to one and only goal: to get Luka for herself.

Banned for over a decade because of its explicit sexual situations, when this film was released in Yugoslavia in 1983 the explicit scenes had become tame. Other than the notoriety it obtained through censorship, the film has an undistinguished story about the forbidden love affair between the older wife of a sports director and a young athlete.
~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie GuideRead More »

Synopsis (possible spoilers):
“Middle-aged businessman, Simon Leotard finds his future in jeopardy when his partner Julien commits suicide after having accumulated a mass of debts. Simon’s unscrupulous business rival Lepidon offers to save him from bankruptcy by buying his company, at a discount rate. Reluctant to fall into Lepidon’s trap, Simon decides to resolve the crisis himself. A prostitute, Mado, provides him with the solution to his problems…”
– IMDbRead More »

Description: Soviet documentary “defending the Chinese people from their enemies, the Maoists”. NB: The film clearly documents the activities of the Red Guards although it never mentions them by name. This has been reflected in the cataloguing. Also, ‘Peking’ has been used instead of ‘Beijing’, again to reflect the content of the film.Read More »

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One of Kuchar’s few feature-length works is this ribald pastiche to postwar Hollywood melodrama, that period when the studios were trying very hard to be adult. The intricate, overheated plot involves a nurse trapped in an unhappy marriage who escapes the big city in search of greener pastures in Blessed Prairie, Oklahoma. Swerving from earnest homage to dark satire, Kuchar simultaneously imitates and savages the legacy of Sirk, Preminger and Minnelli that inspired him, gleefully intertwining the suggestive and the scatological, while also pointing towards the later postmodern parodies of Cindy Sherman. The Devil’s Cleavage is also a rich time capsule of 1970s San Francisco, replete with cameos from Curt McDowell and Art Spiegelman.
– The Harvard Film ArchiveRead More »

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A distillation not of Jacques Tati per se, but of communal spectacle and creation — cinema. The circus is the setting, abstracted into blank spotlights but with the audience always present, always as much a part of the show as the jugglers, acrobats, contortionists, drummers, and assorted pratfall artisans. At the center is Tati, silver-haired in a turtleneck, miming taking punches in the ring, riding a horse, directing traffic, swinging a tennis racket in slow-mo. Playtime and Traffic exhausted the French producers, so the auteur staged his swansong as a Swedish TV-special, a casual affair, a slender recording of dance-hall whimsy and a profound summarization of a man’s life and art.Read More »

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Between 1957 and his death in 1976, Marcel Broodthaers made approximately fifty films. The exact number is difficult to determine: Several no longer exist; some are multipart “programs” assembled from groups of short films (many appropriated from industrial or otherwise “authorless” sources); and others are subtle variations on previous works. A recent exhibition at pioneering curator and collector Thomas Solomon’s new gallery, Solo Projects, paired a 16-mm silent film, Un Voyage en Mer du Nord (A Voyage on the North Sea), 1973-74, with a thirty-eight-page, French-bound book that shares its title and ostensible subject matter: the pairing of a late-nineteenth-century amateur painting of an archetypal European ship and a twentieth-century photograph of a pleasure boat against a modern urban backdrop. The roughly four-minute film is projected on a retractable home-movie screen–a Broodthaers motif–and the book displayed on a simple wooden shelf, lit by a single spotlight.Read More »

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“A filmmaker and academic, Stephane Marti has pursued cinema as a visual art form, divorced from the codes of the dominant narrative cinema, since 1976. He is a passionate and militant advocate of Super-8, a filmmaking tool which he has used for 30 years.

His work has been shown in festivals and international presentations and has elicited numerous articles and interviews. His flamboyant, baroque and sensual style focuses principally on the Body and the Sacred.

Baroque shades of red and gold fill the frame and dominate the color palette. These pure colours are captured by a mobile, trembling camera, whose gaze is projected with desire towards the bodies of the actors. The plasticity of the masculine subject’s skin is the axis of its gaze.Read More »