1981-1990

Commissioned by the French television channel Antenne 2, Yorktown covers the bicentennial commemoration of the Siege of Yorktown, near the end of the American Revolutionary War, where the Americans and their French allies defeated the English. The festivities celebrating Franco-American friendship give Ophuls some amusement, as he takes a gleefully ironic look at the formally “friendly” meeting between Mitterand and Reagan, or exposes the absurdity of patriotic folklore. Much to the viewer’s delight, he is not at all reluctant to ask disruptive questions.Read More »

A modified review by Roger Ebert

Quote:
“The Tree of Knowledge” is the truest and most moving film I have ever seen about the experience of puberty, about the little joys and great heartbreaks of the crucial first years of adolescence. It is also one of this year’s best films on any subject – a creative act of memory about exactly what it was like to be 13 in 1953.

The movie comes from Denmark, and yet it didn’t feel “foreign” to me. At first I was aware that I was watching a Danish picture, and then the universal insights of the story began to reach me so directly that I was just watching a movie about kids anywhere – it could have been made about an American suburb.Read More »

Synopsis:
During the dictatorship, a young man goes to Paris, where he seeks help from a solitary and almost misanthropic distant relative who works as a furrier. The young man carries with him the photograph of a singer whom he presents as his sister, thus causing a series of misunderstandings which trap him in a vicious circle of lies and fantasies. An allegory in the form of a modern-day tragedy of the “misunderstandings” and deceits of modern Greek History, as seen through the eyes of a Greek of the Diaspora.Read More »

Quote:
In this classically surreal fantasy, a sailor, known for telling tales, sees a student killing his teacher and decides to spin a few yarns for him. He tells the boy of his many adventures in exotic South American ports where he visited opium dens and stayed in cathouses. In such dark, dreamlike places, the sailor meets many strange, mystical characters.” — Sandra Brennan, All Movie GuideRead More »

Synopsis
The conflict in question is World War II; even though hostilities have all but ceased, the Germans and the French are not precisely reconciled. German soldier Richard Bohringer, absent without leave, is befriended by a couple of pre-teen boys. Despite the fact that they seem to have found a lasting peace, the adult world doesn’t see things the boys’ way…Read More »

From PT’s website:
The target of Tabula Rasa is the heart of cinema. Voyeuristic desire as the pre-condition for all cinema pleasure is at stake here. What Christian Metz and Jacques Lacan have established in theory is rendered as film in Tabula Rasa. At the beginning we can recognize only shadows from which the picture of a woman undressing herself hesitantly emerges. But exactly at the point when one believes one can make out what it is, the camera is located in front of the object. Tabula Rasa takes distance, the fundamental principle of voyeurism, in so far literally, as it shows us the object of desire but continually removes it from our gaze.Read More »

Quote:
Both a romantic-triangle tale and a philosophical take on violence in times of revolution, The Home and the World, set in early twentieth-century Bengal, concerns an aristocratic but progressive man who, in insisting on broadening his more traditional wife’s political horizons, drives her into the arms of his radical school chum. Satyajit Ray had wanted to adapt Rabindranath Tagore’s classic novel to the screen for decades. When he finally did in 1984, he fashioned a personal, exquisite film that stands as a testament to his lifelong love for the great writer.Read More »

Drama. Dressed in dominatrix leather fetish wear, the director pictures herself tying up her consenting girlfriend in frozen black and white images cut to the sound of high-heels clattering down a never-ending corridor.

“The German Swiss artist Cleo Uebelmann created a myth called “Mano Destra“ when she was only 22 years of age. This tough, black and white movie was first screened 1985 at the first SM Conference for Women „Secret Minds“ in Cologne and initiated a debate about SM. The movie displays a bondage session of dominatrix and her playmate, which demands absolute attention and awareness for both of them. The music, played by the female new wave band Vinyl is as cultic as the movie is a historical document of the SM movement.” (PorYes)Read More »

Quote:
Beth (Judith Godreche) is nearly an adult and has lived a fairly grim and unenchanting life. This is mirrored in her attraction to the similarly grim life and morose works of Arthur Rimbaud, about which she has become a quite noteworthy student. She lives at home with her mother and a younger brother. Her mother is the mistress of a wealthy man they have been taught to call “uncle,” and he has paid for their apartment all these years. Now that Beth is a lovely woman in her own right, “uncle” has indicated that he would like to transfer his attentions to her, which it not something that is agreeable to her. Meanwhile, her teen-aged boyfriend has begun making unreasonable demands on her, and she is trying to break up with him. In the three days covered by this drama, Beth’s life is transformed.Read More »