1981-1990

Plot summary [wikipedia.org]
The narrative opens in the decade before World War I. We are introduced to the central protagonist of the story, Hans Castorp, a young German. We encounter him when he is in his early 20s, about to take up a shipbuilding career in Hamburg, his home town. Just before beginning this professional career he undertakes a journey to visit his tubercular cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, who is seeking a cure in a sanatorium in Davos, high up in the Swiss Alps. In the opening chapter, Hans is symbolically transported away from the familiar life and mundane obligations he has known, in what he later learns to call the flatlands , to the rarefied mountain air and introspective little world of the sanatorium.Read More »

Quote:
A Tokyo student is running full out; we see him in a meadow, at university, then swimming in a river. He reappears in his garden, naked, then at home as he eats with his family, and then as he watches TV. In the school’s sports field as he doodles with some chalk. After a violent quarrel at home with his mother, he starts running through the city again, as he traces his path, sometimes with thread, sometimes with chalk.Read More »

Marilyn Jordan (Susan Anspach) is a bored, depressed American housewife, married to a rich Swedish businessman with two seemingly perfect children. She tries to “spice up” her existence by surprising the family when she eats their entire dinner, setting the bedclothes on fire and poisoning the pet dog’s milk and then advising it not to drink (the dog does not drink). Eventually Martin, Marilyn’s husband, decides to show her to a psychiatrist, but that only serves to further her frustration.Read More »

Quote:
For his career-long excavation of the American national character, James Benning found two of his most striking case studies in a pair of murderers whose crimes took place 30 years and more than half the country apart. Landscape Suicide, like many of Benning’s films, consists largely of footage of places, landscapes, and roads accompanied by—or paired with—speech. The speech, in this case, comes from the court testimonies of Bernadette Protti, who stabbed one of her California high-school classmates to death in 1984 over an insult, and Ed Gein, the infamous Plainfield, Wisconsin, killer who made trophies out of his victim’s bodies, read aloud by actors directly to the camera. Benning’s America is a country terrified equally by the wilderness to which it’s in thrall and the civilization it’s set up to keep that wilderness at bay—and nowhere in his work does that tension become more chillingly clear.Read More »

A surrealistic film in which a strangely assorted group of people come together in the Russian Arctic at the height of the revolution and World War One.

“At once perplexing and joyous, Maddin has crafted a film that, for all the confusion inherent in the tale, unfolds on its own unique terms.” [Austin Chronicle]Read More »

In 1986 Paul Lacombe live out one’s remaining days in Sainte-Eulalie-de-Cernon, Aveyron. During 3 last years he wrote his memoirs. Claudine Nougaret films the meeting with her grandfather.Read More »

Synopsis:
Teens in a Turkish prison struggle to survive under hideous conditions. Made by dying Yilmaz Guney in France, after he escaped from a Turkish prison, enabling him to accept his award at Cannes for Yol (The Road). When the Turkish superstar leading man turned human rights activist, Guney was convicted for pro-Kurdish political activity and murder, by the Turkish military regime. Director/writer Guney’s last film, Duvar (The Wall), was banned in Turkey for 17 years. The incarcerated teens organize and fight back, brutalize each other, exult over the smallest triumph, while joking, suffering and learning from the inhumanity they wallow in. The prison also separately houses men and women, many played by other Turkish expatriates.Read More »

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This is the film that left the strongest impression on me. I have been lucky to engage it 3 times on 35mm.

Mani Kaul’s films create a sensory construct around their use of a selection of sounds to create a specific sensorial effect and images to create volume instead of (as in Hollywood) their denotative element of space. His films usually attempt to create an aesthetic where language is used beyond its denotative aspect, into its suggestive and rhythmic tonalities based on Anandvardhan’s 4th century text Dhwanyaloka about haiku like poetry forms and the aesthetic of suggestion they create known as ‘Dhwani’ which means ‘suggestive sound.’Read More »

synopsis
Dorothee, a would-be writer and journalist, leaves Germany for the Oz of San Francisco, searching for her long-lost mother and a cure for the malady of love. Installed in the Tenderloin, she peeps in on neighbors’ bizarre sex rituals as well as does sightseeing of the more traditional kind. But encounters with male impersonator Ramona, charming Hungarian bohemian Dominique, and Susie Sexpert, barker for an all-girl strip show, lead to exploratory adventures of self-discovery and fun. When Dorothy surfaces like a dazzled tourist on the wilder shores of the city’s lesbian community, she has discovered her true sexuality. . . . and left some illusions behind.Read More »