Arthouse

BACKGROUND
Yaadein (“Memories”) is a 1964 B&W Hindi film directed and produced by Sunil Dutt also starring himself. The only other actor in the film is Nargis Dutt, that too as a silhouette in the final scene.

This film is the first of its kind as it features only a single actor and hence has found an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records in the category of “Fewest actors in a narrative film”.

Film narrative progresses through dialogues and background music composed by Vasant Desai, who also gave the song, Dekha hai sapna koi.. (sung by Lata Mangeshkar.)

SYNOPSIS
The film is soliloquy of a man who comes home to find that his wife and son are not at home, he assumes that they have left him and reminiscences his life with them, and scared of his life without them, he regrets his past indiscretions. The suspense is only revealed in the end.Read More »

Quote:
Because Annie Hall and Manhattan, the two highly revered comedies that preceded 1980’s Stardust Memories, concerned themselves with characters whose insecurities led to the demise of their relationships, Woody Allen’s somewhat polarizing 30-year-old homage to 8 1/2 surprised me in its reversal of the old break-up stand-by, “it’s not you, it’s me.” Sandy Bates (Allen), the successful comedic filmmaker in Stardust Memories, could safely say to his chronically depressed lover Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling), “It’s not me, it’s you.” While he bears the bulk of the blame for the setbacks in his current relationships (thanks to a mental breakdown of sorts), Sandy’s most cherished romance wasn’t sabotaged by the self-hatred and neurosis we’ve come to expect from Allen’s stories, but rather by a cloud of melancholy constantly hovering over Dorrie.Read More »

Quote:
Roman, played by Thomas Schubert, is a 19-year-old man who has known little else than prison walls. He is serving time for murder, but is at the end of his sentence. Parole may be offered if he can hold down a job in the real world. He has tried many different vocations, but has never lasted longer than a day. With one last attempt before his hearing Roman takes on a job at an undertakers. Could this be the one that helps him find his place in society?Read More »

Synopsis
O Nosso Homem (Our Man) is a short variation in the line of the trilogy Pedro Costa has devoted to the habitants of the Fontainhas quarter, which has been destroyed in the meantime. It can be considered as a sort of appendix to the third part, Juventude en Marcha (Colossal Youth), in which the hero, Ventura, reappears as one of the four characters of this dialogue of hopelessness. They go their own way, from one setting to another, from the darkest to the brightest, carried by this lavishness of frames and timbres of light that once made Jacques Rancière (writing about Juventude en Marcha) say that “the faith in the art which attests to the greatness of the poor – the greatness of each and every man – shines here more than ever. But it does not assimilate it anymore to an affirmation of a greetingRead More »

A short filme, 5 minutes, part of Visions of Europe.
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Two years after his worldwide hit Closely Watched Trains, Jiří Menzel directed this amusing idyll about three middle-aged men whose mellow summer is interrupted by the arrival of a circus performer and his beautiful assistant. A meditation on aging and sex, shot in warm, sun-dappled color, Capricious Summer is one of the New Wave’s loveliest reveries.Read More »

“The three films—Unmade Beds, The Foreigner and Subway Riders—represent a kind of trilogy. The first is a European film made in New York City, a reinvention of the nouvelle vague in the context of New York. I wanted to start where Godard started, to go back to basics: innocence, romanticism, bohemianism, all the things that made up New York City for me at that time. It is the story of an artist: a medium, an ego, and a changed society. He thinks his camera is a gun, he thinks he is Belmondo, and he thinks New York is Paris. His fate is therefore doomed. So when Godard and his pals at the Cinemateque saw Sirk, Hawks, et cetera, they tried to make films like that—but they failed. Instead they created the New Wave. My attempt created a kind of New Wave in New York.”
Amos Poe, 1982
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Patience (After Sebald) is a multi-layered film essay on landscape, art, history, life and loss by the acclaimed documentary film-maker Grant Gee. It is an exploration of the work and influence of German writer WG Sebald (1944 – 2001), told via a long walk through coastal East Anglia tracking his most famous book The Rings of Saturn. The book mixed history, travelogue, memoir, meditation, fiction and images to explore the personal, public and often overlooked histories of Suffolk.

Sebald has profoundly influenced some of today’s leading writers, thinkers and artists. Some of these – interviewed for the film include Adam Philips, Robert Macfarlane, Rick Moody and Tacita Dean.Read More »

An amazon reviewer writes:

Stranger Than Paradise not only announced the arrival of an original filmmaker with Jim Jarmusch, but also signaled the arrival of a new wave of American independent cinema along with the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple and Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It. Jarmusch’s film came as a response to the impersonal commercial filmmaking of the Hollywood studios. His film was originally nothing more than a 30-minute short film shot from 40 minutes of extraneous film stock donated by German filmmaker Wim Wenders. Eventually, Jarmusch came into a small sum of money — $120,000 worth — and was able to complete the film.Read More »