Arthouse

The third collaboration between the Swiss director Tanner and the English writer John Berger follows a group of young people in Geneva who are searching for new directions in their lives after the failure of the revolutionary hopes of the 1960s. A former labor activist takes a job as a gardener and handyman with some free-spirited farmers, setting up a school in a greenhouse for the neighborhood kids, while his wife continues to work in a factory. A disillusioned radical turns to gambling, while having interesting conversations with his girlfriend, an adventurous student of Tantrism. A history teacher uses radical methods in the classroom to foster socialist ideas in his students. He hooks up with a grocery store cashier who undercharges poor people and steals food from the store to help her aging friend, a veteran of the Resistance.Read More »

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The enigmatically titled Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana [Pidä huivista kiinni, Tatjana] is Kaurismäki’s take on the road movie. It represents something of a contradiction for non-Finnish viewers, being one of the director’s most accessible films but also one whose subtleties are unlikely to be fully understood by a foreign audience, and I’m including myself in that sweeping suggestion.Read More »

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Lisa Heredia, la veuve et la monteuse de Jean-Claude Brisseau, nous a confié ces films. Ce sont ses tout premiers essais, qu’il a montrés quelques années plus tard à Eric Rohmer, qui en fut enthousiasmé et qu’il l’a introduit auprès [de la maison de production] des Films du Losange. Comme il est pour l’instant peu probable que la société nous permette de reprogrammer la rétrospective qui aurait dû lui être consacrée, nous avons jugé de notre devoir de montrer ces films sur notre plate-forme pour compléter la connaissance qui est due à tout grand cinéaste. (Frédéric Bonnaud, Le Monde) .Read More »

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Poem is the last film in Jissoji’s Art Theatre Guild trilogy and deals with the traditional stem-family system on the verge of collapse allegorically. Not very satisfied with the optimistic last scene of Mujo, Jissoji approaches a similar subject matter from a different perspective. And the film is more in line with his concern about the radical change in the society which prompted him to make the trilogy. It appears that the script was written through intense discussions between Jissoji and Ishido, this time too.Read More »

A law student regularly visits a Paris bakery to flirt with a brunette employee.Read More »

The international breakthrough of acclaimed filmmaker Claire Denis, Chocolat is set in a remote town in Cameroon during the last days of France’s colonies in Africa.

Claire Denis’s award-winning autobiographical film traces a young white woman’s return to her youth in pre-independence French Cameroon, haunted by strong memories of black African Protee, the family’s “houseboy” and a man of great nobility, intelligence and beauty. Chocolat is a stirring & subtle examination of intricate relationships in a racist society and the human damage exacted on both the colonized and colonizer.Read More »

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Released in English-speaking countries as The Rose King, the German Der Rosenkonig is another of director Wern Schroeter’s self-indulgent studies of intense, artistically expressed human passion. The scene is a large Portuguese estate. Still-beauteous widow Magdalene Montezuma lives in empty luxury on the estate with her son. This close familial relationship is shaken up, but ultimately strengthened, by the arrival of a low-born laborer. Director Schroeter unfolds his tale with the slightly surreal logic of a midsummer daydream.Read More »

An uptight and conservative woman, working on tenure as a literacy professor at a large urban university, finds herself strangely attracted to a free-spirited, liberal woman whom works at a local carnival which comes to town.Read More »

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Fresh from the tangled dramas of two temporarily halted film productions—including his collaboration with Coppola—Wenders used the cinematic quagmires as fodder for a film about filmmaking. Patrick Bauchau, a Wenders-like German arthouse director, is in the midst of making a black-and-white existential science-fiction feature called The Survivors in Portugal when his funding from a US studio is suddenly cut. The lull in production allows the cast and crew—which features Viva, Robert Kramer and Samuel Fuller—to ponder their relationships to the film and indulge in philosophical rambles and wandering detours, biding their time as needs, both creative and practical, float to the surface. Austerely zooming in and out of narrative focus, with an eye on both Hollywood noir and European arthouse, The State of Things meditatively and wryly captures little truths of cinema’s strange dimension. As Fuller’s cinematographer states, “Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic.”Read More »