Arthouse

“Dave Kehr” wrote:

Abel Ferrara’s ”Blackout,” a film featuring sex, drugs and Claudia Schiffer, caused a stampede when it was shown at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. That it is only now receiving a New York theatrical premiere says a lot about what the film promises, and what the film delivers. (It will be shown at the Anthology Film Archives in the East Village for the next two weeks, as the climax of a series of Mr. Ferrara’s films.)

Mr. Ferrara is a Bronx-born filmmaker whose fascination with urban excess and questions of Roman Catholic faith sometimes makes him seem like Martin Scorsese’s self-destructive, insistently undisciplined younger brother. These are qualities that make Mr. Ferrara’s work enormously respected in Europe, where he is taken to be one of the primary interpreters of the contemporary American scene, and virtually unknown in the United States, where it can seem arty, self-indulgent and wholly unreal.Read More »

A Documentary in 10 parts covering the filmmaking of Kurosawa around the theme of making the perfect movie or as he says: A Beautyful Movie.

Kurosawa on filmmaking.

Chapter 1 – The seed of a film
Chapter 2 – Screenplays
Chapter 3 – Storyboards
Chapter 4 – Filming
Chapter 5 – Lighting
Chapter 6 – Production design
Chapter 7 – Costumes
Chapter 8 – Editing
Chapter 9 – Music
Chapter 10 – Directing
Read More »

SYNOPSIS
In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays a contract killer with samurai instincts. A razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture—with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology—maverick director Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece Le Samouraï defines cool.Read More »

Quote:

ECSTASY IN BERLIN, 1926
2004 in b&w and tinted
A film by Maria Beatty
Duration: 45 minutes
Starring: Sonya Sovereign and Paula Rosengarthen
Music by Nick Holmes

THIS DECADENT AND LUMINOUS FILM IS A NEW ACHIEVEMENT IN THE REALM OF EROTICA!

A golden Weimar beauty slips a needle into her creamy thigh, and while in her euphoria slips into erotic fantasy. It begins with a white-gloved hand at her throat, emphasizing her vulnerability and surrender, followed by a lingering, deliciously thorough kiss from a stunning and powerful woman. She drifts through a variety of exotic experiences, all made possible by her dazzling submission and her partner’s absolute command. Her perfect flesh is alternately spanked and caressed, her lips kissed and then forced to worship a fine leather boot. She dreams of being strictly corseted, whipped, and bound, and led to a glowing, graphic climax.

Both delicately sensual and sexually intense, it conveys all the dangerous rewards of passion indulged. To enjoy “Ecstasy in Berlin 1926” is to experience the delirious, consuming, and glorious fever of obsession itself.Read More »

When Arthur Davis, a junior bachelor in the British secret service’s African section, is seen taking a file with him -to meet his girlfriend Cynthia- the brass fears he may be the leak to Moskow, and allows Dr. Percival to terminate the ‘risk factor’ by poisoning to avoid a scandal. In fact Davis’s desk chief, Maurice Castle, is the double agent since the South African communists helped him smuggle out his black lover Sarah M., meanwhile his wife and mother of schoolboy Sam, to force him to cooperate with the Apartheid government. When Cornelius Muller, the South African official who failed to get him in Pretoria’s power, visits London for the anti-communist operation Uncle Remus, he points out Castle still is the natural suspect…Read More »

Synopsis:
This is a documentary film by Chris Marker. It employs Marker’s standard rostrum camera technique, filming historic photographs and paintings of whales and the whaling trade. It also contains real-life footage of whaling and harpooning. Marker sides with the hunted mammals in this film and comments negatively on the clinical instrumental relativism of whaling.Read More »

Plot / Synopsis
In his 2006 obituary, The New York Times called Walerian Borowczyk “the internationally known filmmaker described variously as a genius, a pornographer, and a genius who also happened to be a pornographer.” And for the final film in his ‘Immoral Trilogy’, Borowczyk created one of the most lushly bizarre erotic tales of our time and perhaps the most ambitious work of his entire career. The setting is Rome, 8 A.D., where the poet Ovid watches over an epoch of forbidden seduction and unnatural acts among maidens, centurions, servant girls and the occasional farm animal. Marina Pierro , Laura Betti, Milena Vukotic and Massimo Girotti star in this sumptuous art/smut classic, now fully restored and presented uncensored.Read More »

In Welville, at Battle Creek, eccentric rich Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (a historical figure) runs a stylish health farm for the wealthy, an idea ahead of his time, based on extreme vegetarianism, neither sex, masturbation or even sensual stimulation, but laughing therapy and purging the ‘polluted’ body, mainly by exercises, often in open air, vicious diet, his invention corn flakes, laxatives, anal yogurt cure, enemas and brutal mechanical cleansing. Eleanor Lightbody drags her sickly, incredulous husband Will along to the therapy; the couple is almost immediately separated and getting horny for more available members of the opposite sex. Kellogs stubbornly willful adopted son (among over 30 kids) George is a filthy embarrassment, paid off just to stay away. Charles Ossining panics when arriving in Battle Creek he finds his aunt’s fortune made him partner in the empty shell- health food company Per-fo, not the planned corn-flakes factory; however with a former Welville-employee and George’s name they hope to get rich from their own cornflakes brand. When an electric therapy goes fatally wrong and several other patients die, Will’s incredulous reluctance turns to panic… Written by KGF Vissers (IMDB).Read More »

A playful boy heads for home after buying bread, only to find out the road is blocked by a frightening stray dog. As no passerby stops to offer assistance, it finally occurs to the boy to be friend the dog by throwing it a piece of bread. Kiarostami’s first film is a wordless, bittersweet classic. 1970, b&w, 10 minutes.Read More »