1981-1990

Boyfriends & Girlfriends is the sixth of French director Eric Rohmer’s “Comedies et Proverbes” cycle. The sterility of the “new”, prefabricated Parisian suburb of Cergy-Pontoise is used as the backdrop for the colorful activities of the film’s five principals (literally colorful, in that each character is represented by a different hue). The dramatis personae includes Ministry of Cultural Affairs worker Blanche (Emmanuelle Chaulet); Blanche’s friend, computer school student Lea (Sophie Renoir); Lea’s beau (Eric Viellard); unregenerate “wolf” (Francois-Eric Gendron); and his lady friend, iconoclastic art student Adrienne (Anne-Laure Meury). A windsurfing weekend is the scene for an elongated shakeup and reassessment of everyone’s relationships.
@Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideRead More »

This undeservedly obscure film directed by Agnieszka Holland was her second feature, coming between the better-known Aktorzy Prowincyonalni (Provincial Actors) that launched her career and Kobieta Samotna (A Woman Alone). All three were made in her homeland before the Communist government’s crackdown on Solidarity that led to her going into exile in France.Read More »

No. 5 Reversal (1989, 16mm, sound, b/w, 8:00)
The film opens with a pair of lovers sharing their stories and hilarity in bed while Ruth Brown’s Teardrops From My Eyes pleads on the track, lamenting a lost love. This protracted domestic scene dissolves into a series of rapturous nature portraits. A voice-over speaks of ruinous slaughter during the war as the camera combs through the ruins. The artist appears in a brief cameo, carefully posed and lit in a studio, the camera covering half her face as if she had been delivered to the machines of seeing. She appears between shots of another abandoned house, another broken window that we are looking through so that the work of putting the world back together can begin again.Read More »

One Woman Waiting (1984, 16mm, sound, colour, 9:00)
“One Woman Waiting” evokes questions of subjectivity in the mirrored performance of two women. The single take, tableau composition forms the structure for catalytic change between the characters. The sensuous desert environment accentuates the poetic and ephemeral quality of this film. “Massarella uses the fixed camera shot in her enigmatic film of a symbolic encounter between two women in a beautifully shot desert location. Its cryptic form is a good example of how an idea can be treated most effectively by simple means, for instance in the use of the frame as a point of entry and exit for characters and as a perspectival space which uses foreground and interior for dramatic and emotional ends.”
– Michael O’Pray, Independent Means, Canadian Experimental Films at the London Filmmaker’s Co-opRead More »

The film consists of four stories plus epilogue, set in 19th-century Sicily. THE OTHER SON – A mother spends her life waiting for news from her two sons (emigrated to America) while ignoring her third, because he is the reincarnation of the bandit who raped her. MOON SICKNESS – a newly-wed peasant girl discovers that her husband goes mad every full moon. She arranges for a male friend to protect her, but they end up in bed together just as the moon emerges from behind a cloud. THE JAR – a rich landowner hires a master craftsman to repair a giant olive jar, but the craftsman gets trapped inside. REQUIEM – villagers band together in an attempt to force their landlord to let them bury their dead. CONVERSATIONS WITH MOTHER – the writer Luigi Pirandello talks with his aged mother about a story he always wanted to write, but which he never managed to capture in words.Read More »

Quote:
The lives of anonymous strangers become intricately intertwined in this 1986 effort by late Taiwanese auteur Edward Yang. Following the sudden death of his superior, a doctor frames his colleague in order to succeed as the clinic’s director. The doctor’s writer wife, meanwhile, is experiencing a mid-life crisis, struggling to finish her next novel while surrendering to the advances of an ex-boyfriend. Elsewhere, a hippie photographer randomly snaps a delinquent girl escaping from a crime scene and becomes obsessed with her. The girl is locked up at home by her mother, and begins making random prank calls, which in turn affect the lives of the doctor and his wife.Read More »

Quote:
Thought of by some as the last truly great film of Jean Rollin’s career, the 1982 feature La Morte Vivante (The Living Dead Girl) is a fascinating but flawed feature graced with two of the most unforgettable performances in all of Rollin’s canon. A frustrating work brought to life by some of the most iconic imagery seen in a Rollin film, The Living Dead Girl is a simultaneously ferocious and poetic work deserving of its reputation as one of Rollin’s most important films…Read More »

The film takes place before, during and immediately after the engagement party of Dr.Henry Jekyll and Miss Fanny Osborne, attended by numerous highly respectable guests (a general, a doctor, a priest, a lawyer), the last of which informs the company that a child has been murdered in the street outside. While the others watch a young dancer perform, Dr.Jekyll instructs the lawyer to alter his will, leaving everything to a certain Mr.Hyde. Shortly afterwards, the dancer is found murdered, and the guests realise that one of their number must be a maniac with a prodigious sexual appetite… Read More »

Synopsis:
At the deathbed of his used-to-be militant mother an older man looks back at his childhood, when he was in love with his sensual aunt Coleta. Read More »