1971-1980

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This miniseries based on the Fantomas novels of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, takes the Fantomas character back to his sinister roots. After the comedic Andre Hunabelle films of the 60s, filmmakers Claude Charbrol and Juan Bunuel went back to the original books for their inspiration. The results are magnificent. The series is a reinvestigation of the pulp roots of the character, while infusing the surreal, dreamlike qualities that the original texts inspired in the works of Juan Gris, Rene Magritte and Luis Bunuel (who is referenced, along with Apollinaire, in the first episode.)Read More »

Avere vent’anni (To Be Twenty) – (the title refers to the famous phrase at the beginning of Paul Nizan’s book, Aden Arabia: I was twenty years old. I will never allow anyone to say that these are the best years of my life.), was shot by Fernando di Leo in 1978. He also wrote the script which dates back to some years earlier and came from the desire to portray new female characters who had established a revolutionary psychology, and attitudes in society after 1968.

The intermediaries for this story are two young travelers, Tina and Lia – played by Lilli Carati and Gloria Guida, both very popular actresses at that time, who leave the Italian provinces and go to Rome to join a “community” and are under the illusion of being able to live in complete freedom, especially sexual freedom, without restraints or limits.
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Critical Appraisal (From Wiki)
Midnight Eye’s review of A Woman Called Sada Abe compares it to In the Realm of the Senses, notes, “Aside from being less sexually explicit, it is also smaller scale, more intimate, more cinematically stylised and arguably more erotic.”[5]

A Woman Called Sada Abe is generally considered one of Nikkatsu’s five best Roman porno films.[1] Many Japanese critics consider it to be superior to Oshima’s internationally better-known In the Realm of the Senses, and Junko Miyashita is called a more realistic Sada Abe than Eiko Matsuda.[2] Miyashita’s performance in the film has been judged one of the best of her career, and the film has been called director Tanaka’s masterpiece.[1]Read More »

from MOMA:
Nagy Shaker was studying stage design in Rome and Paolo Isaja ran a ciné-club that specialized in experimental cinema when they met at the Rome Film School. They decided to collaborate on their respective film projects, and with the help of friends, they launched into production, casting an American nurse of Italian descent who was in Rome at the time. The film, a meditation on freedom at the turn of the 1970s, utilizes the full vocabulary of experimental cinema to evoke youthful experimentation and energetic abandon. The two alternated between directing, filming, and recording sound. Jamil Suleiman authored the musical score and Renzo Rossellini financed the print.Read More »

At 25, Helena (Mimsy Farmer) is “middle-aged” for a prostitute. When 15-year-old Julien’s callow friends try to pick her up (not knowing that she is a prostitute), she allows Julien (Pascal Sellier) to win her favors. Something about him appeals to her, and she sees him from time to time. Bespelled by his first sexual and romantic experiences with her, he is at first blind to the nature of her profession but gradually understands it. Meanwhile, she has come to care for the boy more than she planned to, and to keep from causing him further harm, she breaks off with him. Even though Julien is devastated, his father, an understanding man, is able to help.
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Writer and pedagogue Fernand Deligny influenced a number of artists and French intellectuals. His work on autism influenced Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the rhizome. Francois Truffaut turned to his ideas to complete Les 400 Coups. Throughout the film Deligny plays with the possibilities of the camera to live and think closer to the human subject, offering with Le Moindre Geste a unique film to the world, one of most fascinating in French cinema. Situated [visually] between mountain western and integral neorealism, the film tells the story of two teenagers, escaped prisoners of an asylum, running away through the Cevennes.Read More »

From xploitedcinema.com:

Historical drama around the sexual exploits of the young Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Alexander Borgia and sister of the infamous Cesare Borgia.
Simonetta Stefanelli stars as the ruthless Lucrezia Borgia in Luciano Ercoli’s take on the Borgia family. In the early 16th century, Italy is ruled by the powerful Borgia family, led by Cesar Borgia and his sister Lucrezia (Martine Carol). In a ruthless power play, Cesare plots to have his sister’s husband murdered.

But without her brother’s knowledge, Lucretia has taken a strong lover who will challenge the Borgias, but Cesar’s love for his sister will once again lead to the demise of Lucrezia’s lover and unite the 2 siblings in an incestuous relationship.Read More »

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Consistently voted as one of the greatest national films of all time by Iranian critics, Tranquility in the Presence of Others is an early film by Iranian auteur Naser Taghvai. A painfully honest portrayal of alcoholism and promiscuity and their effects on family relations, Tranquility hails from the deepest corners of Iranian society but delivers to a universal audience, exploring themes that remain relevant to this day.

In the film, a retired lieutenant who has recently married a much younger woman after the death of his wife returns from rural Iran to Tehran to live with his two daughters. The housemaid tries her best to hide from him the fact that his daughters live a life of decadence and promiscuity. Nevertheless, his uneasiness with their lifestyle leads him to alcohol and slowly drives him to insanity. Suicide attempts, unwanted pregnancies and marriages and tense relationships between family members create an environment far from the poetic Tranquility of the title.Read More »

Plot Synopsis: In the bourgeois circles of Europe after the Great War, can anything save the modern man? Harry Haller, a solitary intellectual, has all his life feared his dual nature of being human and being a beast. He’s decided to die on his 50th birthday, which is soon. He’s rescued from his solipsism by the mysterious Hermine, who takes him dancing, introduces him to jazz and to the beautiful and whimsical Maria, and guides him into the hallucinations of the Magic Theater, which seem to take him into Hell. Can humor, sin, and derision lead to salvation?Read More »