From Charles Tesson, Cahiers du cinema 333 (March 1982):
Raul Ruiz filmed the gardens of the Château de Versailles. The first one, French, focuses on the King’s Square (a space where everything is arranged in order to be seen). The other one, English, is the exact opposite, because from any point within it, one falls out of view. Within these two constructions, the labyrinth and the concentric circles, Ruiz conceives a ‘photo-roman’ plot: a husband and his mistress rendez-vous in the English garden (one understands why) and, through a series of accidents and afraid of being seen, he relocates to the other garden. There he runs into his wife who is with her own lover, into the ex-husband of his wife who is with his new mistress, and into the new lover of his ex-wife…. We never see this husband. It’s the camera that creates the fiction. It oscillates between the desire of being at the center of the scene, well in view and filming (viewing) without being seen. In Ruiz, when the camera “marries” the point of view of a character many “divorces” come into perspective. Between the two elements (‘les deux lieux (communs)’), between the picture (the gardens of Versailles) and the plot (the voice-over), the camera is the object and the subject of continuous quarrels.

From the translation in the special issue of Rouge devoted to Ruiz of Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s “The Baroque Eye of the Camera,” which originally appeared in French in Raoul Ruiz, pp. 12-13:
In the cinema of Raúl Ruiz, effects – technical artifices, hyperbolic exaggerations of seeing, filmic citations refilmed – permanently generate affects and ambiguous beings, to the point where the spectator-in-exile slides from narrative to narrative and into the resulting form of an archipelago, maze or spiral, where a cinema lives, practising as its own visual syntax the great baroque rhetorical figures derived from Gracián or Tesauro. For this baroque eye of the camera, a mechanical and artificia1 eye, always places us in the redundant, deceitful perplexity of a multi-faceted vision that is multiple, double, anamorphic, reflective. Like the two intercut stories in Suspended Vocation, each with their own method of filming (alternately black and white then colour), which end up as only one story – but which one? …

Or like, conversely, the prosaic tale of a young cuckolded husband, unfolding in two places and two different cinemas, arousing a veritable Quarrel of Gardens. The Versailles of the woman and the lover, in its cold operatic pomposity, its noble contemplative style, its large frontal shots of clearly arranged gardens à la française. And then the other garden, the husband’s, this time an English garden, with its secrets and shadowy areas, its exploratory camera, its slow and then fast panning shots. A story, a voice-off, but two cinematic styles, in a game of hiding and revealing which reconstructs the love quarrel.

Querelle de jardins.mpeg

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Container:	MPEG-PS
Runtime:	13mn 53s
Size:	115 MiB
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Codec:	MPEG-2
Resolution:	352x288
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Frame rate:	25.000 fps
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https://nitro.download/view/7A8386C5A008800/Querelle_de_jardins.mpeg
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https://nitro.download/view/B94A4C7197A32DA/Querelle_de_jardins.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, Spanish

The post Raoul Ruiz – Querelle de jardins (1982)  first appeared on Cinema of the World.

The latest entry in Heinz Emigholz’s (Slaughterhouses of Modernity, NYFF60) incisive, decades-long inquiry into the cinematic representation of space contrasts two Turin landmarks designed by Italian neoclassical architect Alessandro Antonelli: the narrow Casa Scaccabarozzi and the towering Mole Antonelliana, now home to the Museo Nazionale del Cinema. With Emigholz’s signature metrical cutting and oblique framings, Ecce Mole explores cinema’s own spatial and symbolic dimensions through the buildings’ opposing scales and functions—interior and exterior, domestic and civic, modest and monumental.

Ecce Mole.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	27 min 30 s
Size: 	494 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
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https://nitro.download/view/2522274F245AB88/Ecce_Mole.mkv

Language(s):No dialogue
Subtitles:No dialogue

The post Heinz Emigholz – Ecce Mole (2025) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

The great French filmmaker René Clair crafted this elegant sepia-toned profile of Paris’s iconic landmark almost forty years after the Eiffel Tower took its first bow (at the 1889 Exposition Universelle). It clearly still fascinates and awes in this loving and playful tribute. LA TOUR takes the viewer first up and then down the mighty structure while also acting as a tribute to its eponymous designer, Gustave Eiffel. The film initially burrows into blueprints and photographs of the earliest stages of its construction ahead of the opening of the World’s Fair but Clair’s film revels in the completed structure itself, reverently scaling its heights and accompanying tourists on up through the various levels toward the topmost landing. Clair also makes strategic use of double exposures and dissolves in capturing the mechanical exuberance of the tower lifts (which help make the great swooping steel latticework edifice a bounding symbol of the modern age). – Robert Avila

« A poem in images, that’s what I tried to make. In “Paris qui dort” (Paris Asleep), I was not free of exploring all the aspects of the Eiffel Tower due to the script I had to follow. Every time I was passing close by, I was tempted to get back up there with a camera. Albatros (studio company) allowed me to fullfill this desire and I shot “La Tour” for my own pleasure, as an homage to the glory of this tall iron girl that I’d always been in love with. The Tower remains an incomparable model of modern architecture today as it was yesterday. There is no skyscraper of a bolder and more elegant shape. » (René Clair, translated from French)

Originally released in 1928, this is a documentary about the famous tower which was built for the 1889 World Fair and should have been destroyed afterward but the people in Paris were wise enough to change their minds. It was made between two movies and the music was composed and added in 2003 by Arnaud Gauthier for the DVD release.

La Cinémathèque française restored the film in 1995 and temporarily released it for free on their online streaming platform Henri as part of an initiative to support culture and entertain people during the Covid-19 2020 lockdown.

La Tour AKA The Tower - René Clair (1928 - Restauration Cinémathèque francaise 1995) 1080p WEB-DL.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	14mn 20s
Size: 	453 MiB
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Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
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https://nitro.download/view/EFFB4E37844E965/La_Tour_AKA_The_Tower_(1928_-_Restauration_Cinematheque_francaise_1995)_1080p_WEB-DL.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:None

The post René Clair – La tour (1928) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Visionary documentary that contrasts the conditions of life in small towns and in the industrialized cities, starting with a brief portrait of pre-industrial United States, then moving into the modern chaotic, industrial and commercial city to reflect on the effects of this environment on family life and the raising of children, and finally proposing a return to a simpler life, in an idyllic “new city” in Maryland, constructed as a New Deal project, to promote proper upbringing of children, as well as a stable family life.

The.City.1939.DVDRip-HANDJOB.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	43mn 40s
Size: 	910 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	718x480 ~> 718x538
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
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Bit rate: 	2 599 Kbps
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#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/8F5F086E4C74589/The.City.1939.DVDRip-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Ralph Steiner & Willard Van Dyke – The City (1939) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

From the IMDB:
26 Bathrooms is a witty, light little film that must be seen by those who appreciate Greenaway’s darker, more allegorical works. Simultaneously satiric and celebratory, the lighter side of his humanism washes through this quirky quasi-documentary of our most fundamental bodily needs and the spaces we create to fulfil them.

Inside.Rooms.26.Bathrooms.London.and.Oxfordshire.1985.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

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Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	31mn 13s
Size:	559 MiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
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Codec:	x264
Resolution:	692x474 ~> 692x533
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Frame rate:	29.970 fps
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Audio
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https://nitro.download/view/F598FE96C36E45E/Inside.Rooms.26.Bathrooms.London.and.Oxfordshire.1985.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Peter Greenaway – Inside Rooms: 26 Bathrooms, London and Oxfordshire, 1985 (1985) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

“Heinz Emigholz opens his latest, Slaughterhouses of Modernity, with a voice. This would have normally been shocking as Emigholz’s austere “Photography and Beyond” series of films lack any sort of voiceover, preferring the subjects (always architecture) to do the talking themselves. Oftentimes, this means an overview of an architect’s career (Perret in France and Algeria or Maillart’s Bridges) or an attempt to compare and contrast the details of certain works (Two Museums or Two Basilicas). Just like with Frederick Wiseman, if you’ve seen a few, you know what you’re going to get with the new, and with Emigholz, that means looking at buildings. But, his most recent fare has departed this system: actors grace the screen and talk in Streetscapes [Dialogue] (2017) and The Last City (2020), often in architectural spaces such that Emigholz can continue the spirit of the “Photography and Beyond” project.

But, a deviation does still appear in this new film. Never before has Emigholz quite editorialized his architectural tours. Title cards with names of cities and dates of the works usually give the only context to his series of shots, allowing the viewer to infer any meaning themselves. Perhaps a dilapidated building in the countryside followed by a pristine building in the city, both made in the same year by the same architect, is a commentary on how and what the government funds. Perhaps an empty auditorium shows how much community life has dwindled. Film studies professors typically label this as “structuralist,” and the process can be just as fun as it is quintessentially snobbish. This is not the case for Slaughterhouses, as Emigholz conducts lectures about the politics and history of each work and lays out the connections explicitly. One can still play the structuralist game, but there is a point to these works that is too important to be left out.

The initial lecture, read by Stefan Kolosko, laments the political elites’ theft of words like “modernism” and “tradition” such that they are robbed of meaning for the general population, yet their aesthetic will continue to dominate the landscape (a process that has also stolen the language of identity politics in the United States as wonderfully outlined in Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s recent Elite Capture). This explains the Art Deco approach to architect Francisco Salamone’s municipal buildings in Argentina, the very first modernist works in the country that often stick out and announce themselves as European land claims. Many were made during Argentina’s Infamous Decade, a time of political malfeasance and a sunken economy, to show the grandeur of industrial life, especially as farmers left the pampas for work in the cities. If this sounds like Italian futurism at work in Argentina, that’s because it is. Emigholz’s shots of municipal buildings then take a detour to post offices commissioned by none other than Benito Mussolini, then veer to cemetery portals with almost Brutalist crosses and a gigantic Art Deco Jesus. Finally, the titular slaughterhouses that “rise up like monuments or churches” in the pampas take the frame, each dominating the grassy plains around it. Some have been abandoned (one with an on-the-nose graffito: “Tell me baby, what’s your story?”), while others have been converted to museums or have at least been preserved. But the slaughterhouses merely serve as the central metaphor in Emigholz’s journey: afterwards, he shoots the flooded village of Villa Epecuén, the restoration of the Berlin Palace (which architect Arno Brandlhuber jumps in to editorialize as “one of the most disgusting buildings in the world”), and the antipode to these projects in Freddy Mamani Sylvestre’s utopian buildings of El Alto.

Kolosko even appears in-frame through his tours of Epecuén and the Humboldt Museum (attached to the Berlin Palace), acting as tour guide to what has been destroyed and what should have been destroyed, respectively. Thankfully, this is anything but literal as he mostly recounts a Borges story (”Deutsches Requiem”) that complements both locations. Indeed, this voiceover itself works to transform Emigholz’s art gallery-style into edifying essay film, allowing the members of the audience who do not have architecture doctorates to learn something. That “something” is best expressed in a signature Emigholz Dutch angle shot from this film: a brand-new window, unadorned, frames our view of the slaughterhouse ceiling where the rusty hooks still hang, just hang. A then-fascist, now-capitalist version of modernism can divorce these hooks from their meat, just as fascist thinking can divorce the Nazis’ train timetables from their purpose. When Emigholz ends on Sylvestre’s bright Neo-Andean cholets, parodies (yet reclamations) of European modernist opulence, the colors and shapes seem to find a way out of the fascist, colonial cityscapes of these South American cities. But, he notes, they too can be claimed as BMW showrooms or Berghain II. It’s just a bit harder, even comical, to imagine.”

Slaughterhouses of Modernity (Heinz Emigholz 2022).mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 19 min
Size: 	1.09 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
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https://nitro.download/view/E8A6B63E7CE271E/Slaughterhouses_of_Modernity_(Heinz_Emigholz_2022).mkv

Language(s):German, English
Subtitles:English

The post Heinz Emigholz – Slaughterhouses of Modernity (2022) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
In stark contrast to the colourful, “swinging” imagery of 1960’s London we are all too familiar with, The London Nobody Knows, displays the dying, decaying underbelly of old Victorian values, practices and architecture. We are shown proto-delboy’s hawking goods in now-dead street markets. Bizarre buskers and street performers act out their defunct acts to grey, bewildered onlookers. Old forgotten men pay 6 shillings a week for bed and breakfast in Salvation Army hostels, the memories of the war lingering in their haggard faces.

Written by Bolton-born artist and art critic, Geoffrey Fletcher, based on his own book of the same name, he illustrates a world that is fundamentally changing. A mournful tome to the decrepit, and disappearing 19th century city. James Mason narrates; he informs of historical anecdotes, and guides us through the multitude of eccentrics, losers, and hopeless characters cluttering the streets, and displays their almost archaic interests and habits.

The London Nobody Knows is a perfect artifact of a Britain before the almost complete Americanisation of its streets, industries and culture, that as to come in the late 1980’s and throughout the 1990’s. Like the Free Cinema movement of the ’50’s (headed by the likes of Lindsay Anderson), and the British transport film, and GPO documentaries, this represents a view of a very different, almost alien Britain to the one we live in now. Beautiful, horrifying, insightful, strange, and even emotional. A film that should be seen by anyone interested in the Britain of the past.

The London Nobody Knows.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	45 min 56 s
Size: 	788 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	700x576 ~> 745x576
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#1:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/5CE8BC7E317CA48/The_London_Nobody_Knows.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Norman Cohen – The London Nobody Knows (1968) first appeared on Cinema of the World.