1981-1990

  • Michael Blackwood – Deconstructivist Architects (1990)

    1981-1990ArchitectureDocumentaryExperimentalMichael BlackwoodUSA

    A documentary about the early beginning of the deconstructivist era of the architecture flourishing in the 80´ties.
    Interviews with Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, Frank Gehry, Daniel Liebeskind, Derrida, Micheal Sorkin and more.Read More »

  • Kaspar Rostrup – Dansen med Regitze AKA Memories of a Marriage (1989)

    1981-1990DenmarkDramaKaspar RostrupRomance

    From: Amazon.com
    Memories of a Marriage (based on Martha Christensen’s best-selling novel, Dansen med Regitze) is a wonderful, moving and superbly acted film featuring what may be the greatest on-screen performance by the luminous Ghita Nørby, one of Denmark’s finest actresses (and a lovely person–I met her once in Seattle). The film traces the relationship between Regitze and her husband, Karl-Aage; in the present, Regitze has received devastating news about her health. Thus, much of the film is a flashback to the ups and downs of their marriage, which began when they first met under the Occupation in World War II. Regitze is a strong-willed young woman, whereas Karl-Aage seems more weak and pliable. Still, they love each other and complement. Read More »

  • Bille August – Pelle erobreren AKA Pelle the Conqueror (1987)

    1981-1990Bille AugustDenmarkDrama

    When his wife dies, Lassefar takes his 12-year-old son Pelle from their home in Sweden to Denmark in search of a better life. Signing on as laborers at a large farm, father and son undergo numerous trials, including prejudice against immigrants and run-ins with those more powerful than themselves in both the physical and the social sense. Over the course of a year, young Pelle learns what it takes to survive in a harsh and unforgiving world.Read More »

  • Nikos Papatakis – I Fotografia AKA La Photo (1986)

    1981-1990DramaGreeceNikos Papatakis

    Quote:
    Ilias Apostolou, a young furrier who has had a hard time under the dictatorship, leaves Castoria in 1971 to emigrate to France, where he hopes to join a distant relative of his, Gerassimos Tzivas, who has been living there since 1950. With him, he takes nothing from his homeland but a photograph of a person that he finds on the pavement. He asks Gerassimos to help him in finding work in Paris. A misunderstanding around the photograph, however, sets off a series of dramatic events.Read More »

  • Pat O’Neill – Water and Power (1989)

    1981-1990DocumentaryExperimentalPat O'NeillUSA

    ”This rarely screened 1989 masterpiece by Pat O’Neill is a moving meditation on industrialization, focusing on the dystopic desert created by Los Angeles’s vast water consumption. O’Neill conceived the film partly as an answer to Godfrey Reggio’s mind-numbing Koyaanisqatsi (1983), a hypnotic inventory of touristy landscapes showing a world out of balance. In contrast O’Neill creates images full of internal contradictions, using optical printing to collage different locales and suggest the inevitable conflict of industry and nature. One slow dissolve between the Owens Valley desert and Los Angeles at night suggests a direct cause and effect: the city flourished only by despoiling the land. Using time lapse to make weather changes visible, O’Neill renders people as fleeting shadows whose power to alter the landscape fails to mitigate the fragility and shortness of human life on a geologic scale.” – Fred Camper, The Chicago ReaderRead More »

  • Alejandro Jodorowsky – Santa Sangre [+ director’s commentary] (1989)

    Arthouse1981-1990Alejandro JodorowskyArchitectureCultMexico

    Quote:
    Santa Sangre is the surreal horror story about a young man, Fenix (Axel Jodorowsky) who has grown up in a circus with his mother Concha (Blanca Guerra) and his philandering father. Fenix witnesses a brutal fight between his mother and father, at the end of which his mother loses both of her arms and his father commits suicide. Fenix spends years in an insane asylum, before his mother persuades him to act as her hands in her bizarre nightclub act. Soon, Concha is having Fenix perform a variety of murders, where he is killing every female in sight. Though the film has some of the hallucinatory qualities of Jodorowsky’s earlier films, Santa Sangre doesn’t quite have the same punch, particularly in terms of cerebral and emotional impact, despite its fine visuals. Santa Sangre is available in both R-rated and NC-17 edits.Read More »

  • Joris Ivens – Une histoire de vent AKA A Tale of the Wind (1988)

    1981-1990ArthouseDocumentaryFranceJoris Ivens

    Premiere: Filmfestival Venice 1988
    Awards: Golden Lion (Filmfestival Venice), Félix (European Filmaward of the European Film Academy)

    Joris Ivens’ last film, made with Marceline Loridan, is a testamentary view on his own life and the changes in the world. After Pour le Mistral this film is his second attempt to film the invisible: the wind. On location in China they try to capture the wind as a natural phenomenon, and as metaphor for the constant changes in Culture and Society. In 1988 the film premiered at the film festival of Venice, where Joris Ivens received the Golden Lion for his complete oeuvre.Read More »

  • Kihachi Okamoto – Jazz Daimyo (1986)

    Arthouse1981-1990AsianJapanKihachi Okamoto

    Quote:
    A Nutshell Review: Dixieland Daimyo, 26 October 2006
    Author: DICK STEEL from Singapore

    My initial reaction was, this sure is one strange movie. Set in the late 19th century and after the end of the American Civil War, three slaves decided to make their way back to Africa, but en route, found themselves on the shores of Japan after a shipwreck. From then on, it’s a weird mix of Japanese shogun intrigue and jazz music fused into a somewhat nonsensical end.Read More »

  • Rene Daalder – Population: 1 (1986)

    1981-1990CultMusicalQueer Cinema(s)Rene DaalderUSA

    Quote:
    Like fellow Dutchmen Paul Verhoeven and Jan De Bont, Rene Daalder was drafted by Hollywood to make genre films, though his inclinations ran a little artier. Daalder achieved some cult success with the 1976 drive-in classic Massacre At Central High; then Russ Meyer asked him to work on the star-crossed Sex Pistols movie Who Killed Bambi? Newly infatuated with punk rock, Daalder struck up a friendship with Tomata Du Plenty, leader of the theatrical L.A. synth-punk act The Screamers. Throughout the first half of the ’80s, Daalder and Du Plenty tried and failed to get multiple music-video projects off the ground, until in 1986, they finally released Population: 1, a quasi-science-fiction art-punk musical cobbled together from pieces of footage Daalder shot with Du Plenty over the years, cleverly layered with the help of state-of-the-art image-manipulation effects.Read More »

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