1981-1990

Intimations of conspiracy hover over a group of actors in this underrated but decidedly major work from New Wave master and former Cahiers du Cinema editor- in-chief Jacques Rivette. Four young women share a house on the outskirts of Paris and study acting under a demanding teacher (Bulle Ogier). Outside class, each is questioned by a mysterious investigator on the trail of a former roommate who may be involved in a criminal enterprise. Rivette’s characteristic preoccupation with the intersections between daily life and performativity creep into every corner of this wholly engrossing mystery, which eventually expands beyond the confines of the film itself. Shot by DP Caroline Champetier (HOLY MOTORS) in a glorious late-‘80s palette of deep reds, golden yellows, and dark teals, this playful revisiting of his debut PARIS BELONGS TO US launched the second phase of Rivette’s career.Read More »

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In this avant-garde drama, five main protagonists talk incessantly and occasionally scream at each other, while making it clear that verbal fights are going to lead to mayhem since they carry knives and guns to back up their angry outbursts. At the core of this emotional whirlpool are Carol (Maruschka Detmers) and Alma (Jane Birkin) whose relationship is under stress because of the others, especially Carol’s husband (Andrew Birkin). Laure Marsac received a 1984 Cesar award for Most Promising Young Actress for her unnamed, secondary role as a young girl in this film.Read More »

Set in a surprisingly minimalist San Francisco, Patrick Tam’s stylish slasher movie manages to evoke both Antonioni and Mario Bava in this tale of a ravishing young co-ed (Brigitte Lin) whose studly boyfriend (Chang Kuo-chu) turns into a demented stalker after the suicide of his sister.Read More »

An American TV-journalist is interested in the trail of some strange mystery embedded in a mountainous region of the USA. After much red tape, he is allowed to enter the area. A sullen guide convoys him through several farms inhabited by even more sullen and withdrawn people. The journalist cannot help minding their weird behaviour, and especially that of one kid who also seems to be a math whiz. With some effort, he discovers an explanation to the mystery and convinces his guide to help him reveal it to the rest of the world.Read More »

Now a respected teacher of temporal observers, Dominick has not visited the past for several years. He is content with his lot, resigned to the idea that he will never again see Jane, the lover he left in 1980, or their son. Then his boss gives him a new mission: to find out what has become of one of Dominick’s students, Pyrus Bonnington, who has gone missing in 1982.Read More »

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Rüdiger Neumann is a filmmaker and professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg whose teaching has influenced two generations of filmmakers, many of whom now play an active role in shaping German cinema today. In the 1980s and 1990s, the HfbK was the only experimental and political alternative to the film schools in Munich and Berlin. Rüdiger Neumann’s controversial Thursday seminars are legendary. These five keys films by Rüdiger Neumann are released for the first time on this DVD.Read More »

The life and times of the Scandinavian artists’ colony who lived in Skagen on the Danish coast during the 1890s. Not so much a biographical account, rather a portrait of a way of life. The painters became famous for the way they used the light in their work, and this has also been mirrored in the cinematography. Written by Mattias ThuressonRead More »

“[On BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS] Some people have said, “But, oh, it’s not a black film. It’s a film about the working class.” Good — the working class is a universal class. It’s a bigger social identity than the particulars. That’s the kind of politics we hope that people can realize.”
Billy WoodberryRead More »

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Faceted, fragmented, and oneiric, Philippe Garrel’s Elle a passé tant d’heures sous les sunlights… (She Spent So Many Hours Under the Sun Lamps) is more exorcism than expurgation, elegy than lamentation – an abstract, yet lucid chronicle of love and loss, death and birth sublimated through textural, self-reflexive impressions, visceral gestures, and metaphoric tableaux. A profoundly personal film dedicated to the memory of friend and fellow filmmaker (and May 68 idealist) Jean Eustache, and haunted by the unreconciled specter of Garrel’s failed relationship with Nico, the film opens to a crepuscular image of a couple – perhaps an actor and his lover (Jacques Bonnaffé and Anne Wiazemsky) as apparent surrogates for Garrel and Nico – in the midst of a breakup on a public street on a cold, winter evening, as their seemingly tenuous reconciliation is truncated by the subsequent shot of the couple returning home, and an all too familiar rupture as she once again lapses into the desensitized haze of heroin addiction in the distraction of his preoccupying rehearsals.Read More »