It is World War II in German-occupied Romania. Nazi soldiers have been sent to garrison a mysterious fortress in a remote area of the Carpathian Alps. A nightmarish discovery is soon made, forcing them to turn to a Jewish historian for help in battling the mysterious force killing their men. They soon discover the massive stone fortress was not built to keep anyone out—it was built to keep something in.Read More »
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This interview with Castoriadis was conducted in 1989 by famed filmmaker Chris Marker for Marker’s own television series L’héritage de la chouette (“The Owl’s Legacy”). Eighty-one minutes long, the raw footage originally recorded in French has been translated into English (via easy-to-read subtitles) and edited anonymously as a public service. Here, Castoriadis lays out and examines the contributions of ancient Greece to questions of contemporary relevance relating to democracy, politics, philosophy, art, poetry, economic and social reorganization, and the creative chaos that underlies all existence.Read More »
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Released in English-speaking countries as The Rose King, the German Der Rosenkonig is another of director Wern Schroeter’s self-indulgent studies of intense, artistically expressed human passion. The scene is a large Portuguese estate. Still-beauteous widow Magdalene Montezuma lives in empty luxury on the estate with her son. This close familial relationship is shaken up, but ultimately strengthened, by the arrival of a low-born laborer. Director Schroeter unfolds his tale with the slightly surreal logic of a midsummer daydream.Read More »
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Fresh from the tangled dramas of two temporarily halted film productions—including his collaboration with Coppola—Wenders used the cinematic quagmires as fodder for a film about filmmaking. Patrick Bauchau, a Wenders-like German arthouse director, is in the midst of making a black-and-white existential science-fiction feature called The Survivors in Portugal when his funding from a US studio is suddenly cut. The lull in production allows the cast and crew—which features Viva, Robert Kramer and Samuel Fuller—to ponder their relationships to the film and indulge in philosophical rambles and wandering detours, biding their time as needs, both creative and practical, float to the surface. Austerely zooming in and out of narrative focus, with an eye on both Hollywood noir and European arthouse, The State of Things meditatively and wryly captures little truths of cinema’s strange dimension. As Fuller’s cinematographer states, “Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic.”Read More »
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Traveling by train from one end of the country to the other, the DEFA documentary team interviewed East German women of different ages and backgrounds. In this masterpiece, they reveal their personal and professional frustrations, hopes and aspirations–and, in doing so, paint a portrait of a changing society. This ground-breaking documentary caused a sensation when it was first shown in the East German city of Leipzig in 1988. Exactly one year later, when the Berlin Wall fell, it was on tour in the USA, sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Later the DEFA Film Library would be housed at the same institution.Read More »
This film is based on a novel by Boris Vasiliev and takes place in a small Russian provincial town in 1940, one year before Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The every day life of class 9B is a larger than life portrait of Stalininism and of unconditional loyalty to party dogma.
At a birthday party a girl, one of the students, recites poetry by a “bourgeois” author. The information leaks out and her liberal father is arrested as a dissident. The daughter is faced by the class teacher and asked to publicly renounce her father which leads to a tragedy. This causes both inner and outer conflicts, the colleagues start to rebel and to question their loyalty, be it to the class teacher or the soviet ideology itself.Read More »
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When the Fog is Swept Away, The Houses and Craftsmen of Old (Eastern Black Sea Region) is documenting rapidly vanishing old houses and craftsmen for the new generations.Read More »
Filmed here for a special episode of The South Bank Show, DV8 Physical Theatre’s production of Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men was inspired by the grisly world of the notorious 80’s serial killer Dennis Nilsen. He was responsible for 16 murders in London. The majority of his victims lived on the edge of society and were visitors at his home.
“I was left with an endless search through the soul-destroying pub scene and its resulting one-night stands …passing faces and bodies, the unfulfilled tokens of an empty life. A house is not a home and sex is not a relationship. We would only lend each other our bodies in a vain search for inner peace.” ~ Dennis Nilsen.Read More »
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This French drama explores the desolation felt by a young girl whose divorced concert pianist mother and businessman father are too self-absorbed to give her any attention. Louise (Sophie Rochut) stoically attempts to carry on, despite the disregard of those around her. Her stoicism is shattered by a few moments of incidental friendliness from a journalist. She runs away to find him, despite not even knowing his name or address. She returns home, unsuccessful, and throws herself in the river. This suicide attempt momentarily brings mother and daughter together, but we are left with little hope that things will really be better in the long run. Writer/director Michele Rosier tells this sad story with a minimum of melodramatics, which makes it even more effective.Read More »