english description :
In this French tour-de-force a young student (Jacques Speisser) decides to have no more interaction with the world than is needed to minimally sustain life. His increasingly automaton-like behavior is coupled with a strange clarity of insight about the world around him. His inner musings as he wanders the luminous streets of Paris are narrated in the form of an unwritten diary by Ludmila Mikael.Read More »
All of us Jess Franco fans know that he was a musician before being a filmmaker, yet we don’t know much about his musical tastes. Jazz apart, what musical genre or what composers does he prefer?
The choice of using Franz Liszt’s scores in some of his films could give us our first answer. Many Franco fans will remember the trumpet solo in the night-club where Miss Death performs her shows (MISS MUERTE, 1965): it’s a transcription from Franz Liszt’s Dream of Love No.3 in A Flat Major (as a matter of fact a nocturne), one of those piano “Love Melodies”, once very popular, that all good-family ladies and girls liked to play in their houses. Franco has used this sentimental melody numerous times, in the most disparate transcriptions. It will be just the Dream of Love No.3, strummed by Lina Romay on a small piano, which will magically open a strong-box full of gold bars in the last scene of LA NOCHE DE LOS SEXOS ABIERTOS (1981).Read More »
Written by the celebrated Catalan author Quim Monzo and his collaborator, Roser Fradera, Hic Digitur Dei is a decadent musical set in the last days of Franco’s dictatorship. Starring Rosa Novell, Pep-Maur Serra, Xabier Elorriaga, Maruja Torres, Montserrat Carulla, Alfred Luchetti, among others.Read More »
The young but traveled Ana arrives in a manor in the countryside of Spain to work as nanny of three girls and finds a dysfunctional family: the matriarch is a sick old woman obsessed by death and having constant nervous breakdown; her son José was raised dressing girl’s clothes until his First Communion and is obsessed by military clothes and stuffs; Juan, the father of the three girls, is a pervert since his childhood that writes pornographic letters to Ana; his wife Luchy has suicidal tendencies; and the mystic and religious eremite Fernando, who was inflicted to flagellation in his childhood, lives recluse in a cave. The presence of Ana disturbs the three brothers with tragic consequences.Read More »
A send-up of the bawdy life of Romantic composer and piano virtuoso Franz Liszt (Roger Daltrey), with ubiquitous phallic imagery and a good portion of the movie devoted to Liszt’s “friendship” with fellow composer Richard Wagner (Paul Nicholas). This movie begins during the time when Franz would give piano performance to a crowd of shrieking teenage fans while maintaining affairs with his mistresses. He eventually seeks Princess Carolyn of St. Petersburg (Sara Kestelman) (at her invitation), elopes, and, after their marriage is forbidden by the Pope (Sir Ringo Starr), he embraces the monastic life as an abbé.Read More »
Review:
Norman Mailer wrote:
According to Vogel–founder of Cinema 16, North America’s legendary film society–the book details the “accelerating worldwide trend toward a more liberated cinema, in which subjects and forms hitherto considered unthinkable or forbidden are boldly explored.” So ahead of his time was Vogel that the ideas that he penned some 30 years ago are still relevant today, and readily accessible in this classic volume. Accompanied by over 300 rare film stills, Film as a Subversive Art analyzes how aesthetic, sexual, and ideological subversives use one of the most powerful art forms of our day to exchange or manipulate our conscious and unconscious, demystify visual taboos, destroy dated cinematic forms, and undermine existing value systems and institutions. This subversion of form, as well as of content, is placed within the context of the contemporary world view of science, philosophy, and modern art, and is illuminated by a detailed examination of over 500 films, including many banned, rarely seen, or never released works. I think that it must be the most exciting and comprehensive book I’ve seen on avant-garde, underground, and exceptional commercial film. The still pictures are so well chosen that their effect is cumulative and powerful.Read More »
Plot Synopsis:
A tobacco company cynically offers a 25 million dollar prize to an entire town that can quit smoking for thirty days. One small Iowa town is determined to make it; but will their community lose its soul in the process?Read More »
By Liv Ullmann
(Translated by the author in colloboration with Gerry Bothmer and Erik Friis)
Published by Knopf, 1977
(Origianly published in Norwegian as Forandringen, 1976)
Quote:
She opens herself to us as she writes about working with Bergman (“No studio is as silent as his… To film with Ingmar is long stretches of happiness where everything seems real”): about living with Bergman (“His dream was the woman who had been created in one peice, but I crumbled into bits and pieces if he wasn’t careful”):about travelling with him: about his monumental genius and idiosyncrasies; She lets us feel the almost overwhelming flow of her own feelings for her young daughter; She tells us about her first love, about the husband she left, the family she came from, the people she relies on..Read More »
Frenzy is a 1972 thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and is the penultimate feature film of his extensive career. The film is based upon the novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square by Arthur La Bern, and was adapted for the screen by Anthony Shaffer. La Bern later expressed his dissatisfaction with Shaffer’s adaptation.[1] The film stars Jon Finch, Alec McCowen and Barry Foster and features Billie Whitelaw, Anna Massey, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Bernard Cribbins and Vivien Merchant. The original music score was composed by Ron Goodwin.
Frenzy was Hitchcock’s first film to earn an R-rating in the United States, as Psycho was originally released unrated.Read More »