From VILLAGE VOICE:
A shuddering, flickering tribute to two lost compatriots, Ken Jacobs’s Two Wrenching Departures took its original form in 1989 as one of Jacobs’s live “Nervous System” cine-improvisations on dual 16mm projectors. Earlier that year, his former collaborators Bob Fleischner and Jack Smith died within a week of one another—an ironic conjunction, as the pair had been at odds for years, long after Jacobs, Fleischner, and Smith had chaotically joined talents in the late ’50s to create Blonde Cobra, a grimly glamorous rummage through trash-pile transvestism that was one of the most celebrated titles of the pre-Warhol underground scene.Read More »
“Wiki wrote:
Set around the Pont Neuf, Paris’s oldest bridge, while it was closed for repairs, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf depicts a love story between two young vagrants. Alex, a street performer addicted to alcohol and sedatives and Michèle, a painter driven to a life on the streets because of a failed relationship and a disease which is slowly destroying her sight. The film portrays their harsh existence living on the bridge with Hans, an older vagrant. As her vision deteriorates Michèle becomes increasingly dependent on Alex. When a possible treatment becomes available, Michèle’s family use street posters and radio appeals to trace her. Fearing that she will leave him if she receives the treatment, Alex tries to keep Michèle from becoming aware of her family’s attempts to find her. The streets, skies and waterways of Paris are used as a backdrop for the story in a series of set-pieces set during the French Bicentennial celebrations in 1989.Read More »
Synopsis:
Rafa a 13 years old kid concerned with his mother, held in a police station for driving without a license.The director shows a day in the life of a teenager who lives on a problematic area and discovers that her mother was arrested because of an automobile accident.Read More »
SYNOPSIS With Zerkalo (The Mirror), legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky crafts perhaps his most profound and compelling film. What started off for Tarkovsky as a planned series of interviews with his own mother evolved into a lyrical and complex circular meditation on love, loyalty, memory, and history. Time shifts and generations merge as a single extraordinary actress (Margarita Terekhova) plays the narrator’s former wife as well as his mother. Tarkovsky’s memories as well as those of his mother are intermingled as a dark, sumptuous, and dreamlike pre-World War II Russia is evoked, accompanied throughout by the voice of Tarkovsky’s father reading his own elegiac poetry. The spectacle of nature and its ubiquitous and ever-shifting presence is captured by Tarkovsky’s camera as if by magic–the family cabin nestled deep in the verdant woods, a barn on fire in the middle of a gentle rainstorm, a gigantic wind enveloping a man as he walks through a wheat field–all creating indelible images with deep if mysterious emotional resonance. As the timeline shifts between the narrator’s generation and his mother’s, newsreel footage of Russian wars, triumphs, and disasters are juxtaposed with imagined scenes from the past, present, and future, crafting a silently lucid cinematic panopticon of memory, history, and nature. (Rotten Tomatoes)Read More »
Quote: In a competition where no title had won widespread approval, a superb film finally arrived, drawing more than a few tears of emotion from Berlin festival-goers: acclaimed director Semih Kaplanoglu’s German/Turkish co-production Honey. The third instalment in the Yusuf trilogy, closes a journey backwards in time that began with Egg, followed by Milk.Read More »
With an extraordinary artistic and technological talent, Val del Omar was a ”believer in cinema” inspired by new horizons that he formulated in the term PLAT – representing the totalizing concept of a ”Picto-Luminic-Audio-Tactile” art – apart from being a contemporary and a comrade of Lorca, Cernuda, Renau, Zambrano and other figures of a Silver Age of the Spanish culture, interrupted by the Civil War. In 1928 he anticipated various of his most characteristic techniques, including the ”apanoramic overflow of the image” beyond the limits of the screen, and the concept of ”tactile vision”. These techniques. and those of ”diaphonic sound” and other explorations in the field of electro-acoustics, would be applied in his Tríptico Elemental de España [Elementary Tryptich of Spain], begun in 1953 and only finished after his death. His work and tenacious research activity – quite against any tendency of misunderstanding and forgetfulness – did not begin to be rediscovered until shortly before his death, though it has constituted the beginning of a renaissance that continues to draw followers. ”Endless”, as he would put at the end of his films.Read More »
Synopsis
Study of two lonely old people who have been married for many years, their relationship having atrophied into a silent war. This wordless struggle has become their way of life, yet underneath it all there is still tenderness and love between them. Read More »
Synopsis
A completely routine drama involving sexual situations and rough characters, this story directed and written by Catherine Breillat looks at the liaison between Solange (Dominique Laffin) and Bruno (Bertrand Bonvoisin). Solange is the female version of a womanizing film director who is confident about her conquests and her ability to figure out men. Along comes Bruno, and Solange’s faith in her knowledge of men is put to a test and found wanting. In spite of her better judgment, she is undeniably attracted to Bruno though the man is going to be trouble in a big way. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie GuideRead More »
Quote:
Twelve-year-old Anaïs is fat. Her sister, Elena, is a teenage beauty. While on vacation with their parents, Anaïs tags along with Elena as she explores the dreary seaside town. Elena meets Fernando, an Italian law student, who seduces her with promises of love, and the ever-watchful Anaïs bears witness to the corruption of her sister’s innocence. Precise and uncompromising, Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl is a bold dissection of sibling rivalry and female adolescent sexuality from one of contemporary cinema‘s most controversial directors.Read More »
