Arthouse

Synopsis:
‘Two men, arty though somewhat staid, are drawn to the spirited and quixotic Rosemonde, a young working-class woman whom they meet because they’re writing a teleplay about a minor but curious event in which either her uncle was wounded while cleaning his rifle or she shot him. Pierre is a free-lance journalist hired to write the script; he’s short of time so he asks a Bohemian novelist friend, Paul, to help. Pierre wants facts and tracks down Rosemonde for interviews that lead to other explorations; Paul only wants to imagine her and needs little more than her name to do so. But he does meet her, and she entangles him, too. Did she cause the shooting? Is she venomous or innocent?’Read More »

Quote:
Made for the American Film Institute while Eraserhead was in financial limbo. The AFI was testing two different stocks of black and white video and enlisted Frederick Elmes to test each one. Lynch asked Elmes if he could shoot something with this stock and so he and Catherine Coulson stayed up all night writing script. The result was a one shot scene with Catherine Coulson about a woman attempting to write a letter while a female nurse (played by Lynch) tends to her leg stumps. (Two versions, 5 minutes/4 minutes)Read More »

Quote:
A leading member of the French cinema’s avant-garde movement and the director of the Impressionist classic Coeur fidèle (1923), Jean Epstein broke with his more modernist colleagues in the late 1920s to make documentaries and fiction films grounded in the realities of everyday life. Before that evolution, however, Epstein filmed this adaptation of two Edgar Allan Poe stories: “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Oval Portrait” (1850). The film’s significance lies not so much in its fidelity to Poe’s stories as in its atmospheric evocation of the author’s gothic sensibility. Read More »

Two men meet in downtown Bogotá; one is missing a leg, the other is a “silletero,” a man who carries people around for money. Each character bears the burden of a bitter past life.Read More »

Neurosia is the autobiography of the director Rosa von Praunheim. The movie begins with Rosa presenting his autobiography in a movie theater. Before the film begins, he is shot. But – his body gets lost. A female journalist from a TV station begins researching the life of Rosa. In the course of the movie she speaks to lots of aquaintances, shows short clips from Rosas old movies. Her main aim is to provide sensational and shocking details from Rosas life. It turns out that nearly everybody had some reason to kill Rosa. At the end of the movie, she discovers Rosa at a boat where he is kept prisoner by some of his old enemies. She frees him, and the movie ends.Read More »

*** BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM – Oscar winner, 1972 ***

Plot
The film is set in Ferrara, northern Italy, between 1938-1943, and shows the lives of the Jewish Finzi-Contini family and their friends as they struggle against Mussolini’s fascism and anti-Semitism in wartime Italy. The Finzi-Contini family is one of the leading families in the town. The adult children, Micòl and Alberto, gather friends for tennis at their villa with its lovely grounds, keeping the rest of the world at bay. Into the circle steps Giorgio, a Jew from the middle class who falls in love with Micòl.Read More »

In a cloistered village in the country, time seems to have stopped. When a photographer named Rita arrives from outside, the initially reticent townsfolk open up to her. Only the village priest continues to find Rita’s presence worrisome, especially when she begins asking about the locked cemetery.Read More »

Quote:
In the old days it was called hypochrondria, or black melancholia. Now, apparently, it’s termed the Asthenic Syndrome. Whatever it is, Nikolai, a teacher has got it, and it’s not much fun.Read More »

The gunfighter El Topo (“The Mole”) and his young son ride through a desert to a village, whose inhabitants have been massacred. Bandits are nearby, torturing and killing the survivors. El Topo rescues a woman (Mara), who leads him on a mission to find and defeat the four master gunmen of the desert. Leaving his son with a group of monks, El Topo and Mara complete the mission, accompanied by a mysterious woman in black. The women leave El Topo wounded in the desert, where he is found by a clan of deformed people who take him to the remote cavern where they live. Awakening years later, he goes with a dwarf woman to a nearby town, promising to dig a tunnel through which the cave-dwellers can escape. They find the town run by a vicious sheriff and home to a bizarre religious cult. El Topo’s son, now a man, is a monk in the town. The completion of the tunnel leads El Topo, the townspeople, and the cave-dwellers to a bloody and tragic end.Read More »