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Synopsis :
Jean-Jacques Rousseau has just finished his last film, shot in unworthy conditions. He is preparing to show it to the movie critics of a local newspaper. The filmmaker launches the first images but these reveal all the problems that a non-professional filmmaker may encounter.Read More »
He was part of the french underground from the late 60’s to begging 80’s. He was related to directors such as Philipe Bordier, Jean-Pierre Bouyxou, Marcel Hanoun, etc. His early stuff is quite political (maoïst), and then his cinema tends towards psychoanalysis.
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Patrice Enard’s ‘Pourvoir’ is a film mainly comprised of images of women in nature, his style is stark and repetitive, shots are angular, which both hide and reveal. There is though a visual poetry to his work – once the smoke dissipates, a sexual liberation emerges, with subtle flourishes in the staging and editing threaded together by Marxist and Freudian discourses.
Enard was as much an academic and critic as he was a filmmaker, his work is at times highly theoretical, emerging out of his interests in psychoanalysis. Pourvoir is his longest work.Read More »
Includes reels : 01, 02, 03, 09, 22, 23, 26, 31, 40, 47, 80, 81, 83
Anne Charlotte Robertson, born in 1949, was a Massachusetts-based filmmaker who used her Super-8 camera and acute self-awareness to forge a radically intimate mode of first-person cinema. Although she was celebrated as an artist in her lifetime, only today is Robertson finally being acknowledged as an influential pioneer of the first-person diary cinema that has long flourished in the Boston-Cambridge area, perhaps best known in the work of Ed Pincus and Ross McElwee. Gripped by mental illness, Robertson discovered a vital form of self-therapy in the diaristic filmmaking practice invented and refined across her magnum opus, Five Year Diary (1981–1997), whose eighty-one individual chapters, or “reels,” meld bold formal experimentation, self-depreciatory humor, and raw emotion into a charged yet lyrical chronicle of an often painfully difficult life. Cathartic and devastating, rough-edged and poignantly delicate, disarmingly funny and meditative, Robertson’s Five Year Diary offers a remarkably frank and revealing self-portrait of an artist and woman struggling to understand the overwhelming desires and dark shadows that defined her world.Read More »
Plot: The freshly graduated psychiatrist David shall deliver an opinion about young Maddalena, who’s on trial for murdering a hunter. She claims she’s a witch and acted on behalf of the devil. The public health officer tells David, he’s got reason to believe her, that she’d been searching for a man who suits her needs for 300 years. Already after his first meeting with Maddalena, David begins to change: He ignores his beautiful young wife Cristina and loses himself in daydreams and hallucinations in which he participates in Inquisition questioning and erotic witches’ circles.Read More »
Sokurov shows the official manifestation and fireworks on the 1st of May, one of the ritual celebrations of Soviet times, as a gathering of tired participants of a mass scene falling into pieces without the director’s orders and without any aims. Outbursts of joy without reason, mixed here and there with equally unmotivated signs of anxiety are given in brief sketches of a restless and pitiful crowd. A part instead of the whole, individual instead of common, a symbol growing up from details are the postulates of Eisenstein’s representation of the “people’s masses,” both the chorus and the protagonist of the Soviet official culture. Sokurov revises these postulates in the context of our time when the chorus has gone out of action, both in the aesthetic and in the social sense, and the protagonist is absent. However, both chorus and soloist are introduced into the picture of the festivity by the hand of the author: Sokurov puts a church canticle into the soundtrack of the film. It is an evening Orthodox prayer of repentance: “let my prayer be like incense before Thou, like my hands uplifted, an evening sacrifice.”Read More »
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Under the Sun of Satan opens to an inherently solemn ritual as a senior priest, Canon Menou-Segrais (Mauric Pialat) shaves a spot on the top of the head of a pensive young priest named Father Donissan (Gérard Depardieu) who, in turn, uses the occasion to express his feelings of profound estrangement and inutility from the practical concerns of their congregation. Acknowledging both his mediocre scholastic aptitude at the seminary that nearly prevented him from becoming ordained, and his indebtedness to Menou-Segrais for his admission into the parish ministry (despite the young priest’s perceivable disapproval of his superior’s spiritual resignation and complacency), Donissan nevertheless declares his intention to request the archbishop for a re-assignment, preferably to a Trappist monastery where he believes that his temperament and secular detachment would be more conducive to their contemplative, monastic life of humble (and seemingly unobtrusive) service.Read More »
AMG wrote:
Mitsuo Wada (Toshiyuki Nagashima) works at raising tomatoes in a greenhouse, next to a big public housing complex. Because his father has moved out to go live with his girlfriend, Mitsuo lives alone with his mother and grandmother, a situation that does not particularly curb his romantic life. First he becomes involved with Kaede (Rie Yokoyama) a cafe manager, but that is not going to be a very permanent relationship once he discovers she is married. Next, he goes through slightly more formal channels to meet Ayako Hanamura (Eri Ishida) and the two decide that marriage might be the best option for both of them. Unfortunately, his former lover Kaede has run off with his best friend, Hirotsugu Nakamori (Johnny Ogura) — who is in a lot of trouble already because of stealing some money — and the two are not heard from again until the day of Mitsuo’s wedding. Hirotsugu shows up alone at the wedding, bearer of a tragic tale — not the kind of auspicious beginning Mitsuo and his bride would have wanted for their new life together.Read More »
Stockholm, 1914. Having recently escaped Austria, Anna, an impetuous cosmopolitian young photographer, decides to open her own studio in an attic tucked away above the city. When her girlfriend Linnea comes to the city looking for a job, Anna employs the bashful girlish-woman as her partner. Together they fend for themsleves by: posing nude and stealing, as Anna teaches Linnea to relinquish inihibitions. Out of nowhere, Willy, a thin gypsy circus entertainer appears. He and Anna resume a love affair much to Linnea’s dismay. Later, Linnea later learns that Willy helped Anna leave Halling, a sadistic man who kept her in bondage for years. One day Willy suggests the they all leave for America; but Anna resists violently and in a heated argument accidently kills Willy. Now the women struggle to deal with the consequences of Willy’s death.Read More »
Chantal Akerman was 15 years old when she saw the film Pierrot le Fou by Jean-Luc Godard. According to Akerman, who was born in Belgium in 1950, this was the impulse that motivated her to be a filmmaker. Akerman attended the Film Academy in Brussels for four months, but says that she found no inspiration there whatsoever. At the age of 18 she shot the short film Saute Ma Ville and made her first mark in the annals of film history with an explosive master piece that continues to be shown at film schools and is regarded today as one of the central short films of the 20th century.Read More »