1971-1980

  • Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen – Riddles of the Sphinx (1977)

    Laura Mulvey1971-1980ExperimentalPeter WollenUnited Kingdom

    Synopsis:
    A complex treatise exploring feminism, motherhood and sexual difference in seven numbered chapters. Headings are: Opening Pages; Laura Talking; Stones; Louise’s Story Told in 13 Shots; Acrobats; Laura Listening; Puzzle ending.Read More »

  • Manfred Kirchheimer – Bridge High (1975)

    Manfred Kirchheimer1971-1980ArthouseShort FilmUSA

    Bridge High is an evocative passage across a suspension bridge. Moving from the country to the city, the film expands the half minute it takes a car to cross, into a nine-and-a-half minute trip, choreographing cables, girders and arches into an exuberant dance.Read More »

  • Glauber Rocha – Claro (1975)

    Glauber Rocha1971-1980ArthouseBrazilPolitics

    In the words of the director, a movie about ‘the colonizers in the view of the colonized’, the movie presents a series of disconnected happenings throughout Europe and Brazil emphasizing the perception of human life as trance-like experiences and thus offering a view of the human history as a connection of symbolic behavior.Read More »

  • Franz Marischka – Zum Gasthof der spritzigen Mädchen AKA The Inn of the Lively Girls (1979)

    1971-1980ComedyFranz MarischkaGermany

    In the countryside, somewhere in the Bavarian Nowhere. Kirchenwirt Alois is financially up to his neck. His restaurant runs extremely bad, and only the bailiff regularly looks at him.Read More »

  • Michael Haneke – After Liverpool (1974)

    Michael Haneke1971-1980DramaGermanyTV

    Synopsis:
    An attempt to illuminate the basic relationship between man and woman. A series of individual examples show how they get to know each other, how they fall in love, how they have their first arguments, how they discover difficulties in communication, and how they end up living together. The snapshots from everyday life are ciphers for the entire lack of contact of those who are closest to each other, whose only desired goal is to remain silent together. Because words destroy feeling, sensation, relationship, substance. The phrase has become the real, it replaces the lost ego. Understanding without understanding, routine instead of togetherness. What still takes place is the monologue, the soliloquy, the idiom. The anxious question will be: and what comes after that? Probably the same thing, over and over again.Read More »

  • Jazzsiam – Aridang (1980)

    Daniel Petrie1971-1980DramaThailand

    Korea 1953, the year of the greatest fighting and migration in the history of the land of the Morning Peace, the Thai independent army division, commanded by Colonel Prasit Reungyam was assigned to a special operation as an advance 9th infantry division. (under the United Nation’s security council treaty.) Major Pongpan’s injury was treated by a village girl names O- bunri, both fell in love, the major promised to love only her. That same year the war was over and Major Pongpan has to go back to Thailand, unable to take any time off to visit O-bunri for three years because of his duty in the army and his mother to take care of. When he finally decided to go to see her at her house on top of the mountain, there is an avalanche, everyone escaped except O- bunri who died in the mountain.Read More »

  • Claude Chabrol – Une partie de plaisir AKA A Piece of Pleasure (1975)

    Claude Chabrol1971-1980DramaFrance

    Philippe advocates total sexual freedom and strongly encourages his partner Esther to do the same. But when the young woman decides to take him at his word, Philippe finds it intolerable. And that’s when all their problems begin…Read More »

  • Claude Lelouch – Iran (1971)

    Claude Lelouch1971-1980DocumentaryFranceShort Film

    Short documentary with varied footage from Iran. The Shah’s regime commissioned several soft-propaganda films of this nature from European filmmakers during the 1970s. Its existence and production is more remarkable than the film itself.Read More »

  • Andrzej Wajda – Ziemia obiecana AKA The Promised Land (1975)

    Andrzej Wajda1971-1980DramaPolandPolitics

    Quote:
    Made after THE DAMNED, but before 1900, this operatic-style melodrama, about the industrial revolution in Lodz ca. 1895, is far better than either. Like the other two films, it takes an extreme situation in history and makes it more extreme, piling on the excess. Two examples here: a garden party that’s like a Roman orgy, with naked women, tigers in cages, etc., and a scene where a worker grapples with his boss and they fall into a giant machine which instantly spews out their bodies as huge chunks of raw meat. But whereas Visconti, and, particularly, Bertolucci, ultimately drown under their excesses, Wajda maintains total control over his narrative. Read More »

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