1981-1990

Plot Synopsis by Robert Firsching
Horror film actor Michele Soavi’s directorial debut was this stylish giallo thriller about an escaped lunatic terrorizing the cast of a stage musical who get locked in a theater after dark. David Brandon, Barbara Cupisti, and perennial victim Giovanni Lombardo Radice (aka “John Morghen”) lead the cast, most of whom spend their time sniping at each other with amusingly typical backstage cruelty. The murder scenes are the film’s primary attraction, artfully handled by Soavi in setpieces such as a blue-lighted stage strewn with feather-covered bodies. Read More »

Synopsis:
A famous psychologist, Margaret Ford, decides to try to help one of her patients get out of a gambling debt. She visits the bar where Mike, to whom the debt is owed, runs poker games. He convinces her to help him in a game: her assignment is to look for “tells”, or give-away body language. What seems easy to her becomes much more complex.Read More »

Improvisation by Paul Vecchiali and Françoise Lebrun – On Paul’s initiative, Françoise and Paul met after a long separation, on the pretext to search in commun for a lost memory, a song. It soons appears that Paul’s objective is to win her back.

Quote:
Quand j’écrivais le scénario de En haut des marches, je me suis trouvé en panne à un moment du récit. Impossible de discerner ce qui me bloquait. En sortant d’Auditel, qui comptait une dizaine de salles de montage où travaillaient, entre autres, Jacques Demy et Éric Rohmer, j’ai croisé Françoise Lebrun, connue elle aussi au Studio Parnasse.Read More »

Synopsis:
This is Ogawa Productions’ first major film from their Yamagata period. They had already started photography on Magino Village-A Tale but they were drawn to this village deep in the high country above Magino when a particularly cold bout of weather threatened crops. Inevitably, their attention strayed from the impact of weather and geography on the harvest to the “life history” of Furuyashiki Village. On the one hand, Ogawa returns to his roots by playing with the conventions of the science film. At the same time, he discovers a local, peripheral space in which to think about the nation and the state of village Japan. From this “distant perspective” in the very heart of the Japanese mountains, Ogawa discovers a village still dealing with the trauma of global warfare and struggling for survival as their children flee for the cities.Read More »

Tatyana Prokofievna is an ageing woman with a diva’s behavior, but her life is uneventful, ordinary and dull. To escape the everyday slumber she seeks companionship of young men. She provides shelter and becomes involved in their problems. Her ex-boyfriend has married a younger woman. Tatyana is forced to keep her loneliness hidden because of her role as hostess.

Won grand prix “Golden Leopard” at the Locarno International Film Festival, 1990Read More »

Quote:
Naive young bank teller Betty Parrish falls for her tennis instructor who is living a separate life as a male hustler and small time drug dealer. He gets in over his head and as the films title would indicate is murdered triggering Betty to start poking around Mike’s other life to find out what happened and who he was.Read More »

Quote:
Yohei, a punk rocker, has to become a Buddhist monk in order to inherit a mountain temple. Yohei though initially rebelling against the tough monastic discipline learns to adjust. Then his girlfriend shows up, enticing him to return to his rock ‘n’ roll roots.Read More »

Paul Chevrolet is the alias of a writer of hard-boiled detective-novels, Leopold (Peter Faber), who still owes his ex-wife Willie (Jenny Arean) a great deal of money. In his latest detective-novel, gangster-boss Boy Pappa (Eddie Constantine) is introduced, who gets pursued by Leopold’s alter ego: Scotty. After writing a philosophical manuscript, ‘The Ultimate Hallucination’, Leopold gets in contact with publisher’s daughter Susanne (Liz Snoyink) who resembles his character Savannah MacKnight. Also, Boy Pappa really seems to exist. From that moment on, reality and fiction intertwine.Read More »

Quote:
“I CALL FOR A THEATRE IN WHICH THE ACTORS ARE LIKE VICTIMS BURNING AT THE STAKE, SIGNALLING THROUGH THE FLAMES.” – Antonin Artaud

Julian Beck and Judith Malina picked up the torch from Artaud and carried it into the theaters and streets of the world for more than 40 years. Their Living Theatre inspired the off-Broadway movement in the 40’s and 50’s and the radical theatre in the 60’s and 70’s. This tale of social and esthetic breakthrough weaves excerpts from their most controversial productions with on-the-road interviews with Beck and Malina, who define their lifelong commitment to a revolutionary art in which politics and theatre are inseparable.Read More »