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This docudrama, filmed in the frozen northern reaches of Canada and Russia, depicts some of the technical difficulties that filmmaker Robert Flaherty encountered when he staged scenes for his 1922 silent film Nanook of the north. It shows how he initially clashes with the Inuit culture, but eventually a friendship develops with the protagonist, Nanook, and the rest of the community.Read More »
Scatterbrained Polly gets a job as a secretary in Gabrielle’s art gallery. Polly aspires to be a professional photographer, and idolizes Gabrielle for her artistic ability. When Gabrielle rekindles an old romantic relationship with the younger painter Mary, Polly becomes jealous, and discovers Gabrielle is not who she claims to be.Read More »
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Teenager Peter Mark has it all: supportive parents, a loving girlfriend, and a comfortable middle-class existence. But on the brink of finishing high school, he feels emboldened by his impending freedom, and decides to pursue a rebellious new path. After his parents make their disapproval known, Peter decides to move out on his own, confident he’ll conquer the working world with his insight and sophistication. When the reality turns out to be far less glamorous, he settles for a shady new job – that continues his criminal evolution.Read More »
Noah Piugattuk’s nomadic Inuit band live and hunt by dog team, just as his ancestors did. When the white man known as Boss arrives in camp, what appears as a chance meeting soon opens up the prospect of momentous change.Read More »
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“This neat, finely tuned, hypersensitive film examines the outside and inside of a banal prefab classroom, stares at an asymmetrical space so undistinguished that it’s hard to believe the whole movie is confined to it, and has this neck-jerking camera gimmick that hits a wooden stop arm at each end of its swing. Basically it’s a perpetual motion film that ingeniously builds a sculptural effect by insisting on time-motion to the point where the camera’s swinging arcs and white wall field assume the hardness, the dimensions of a concrete beam. “In such a hard, drilling work, the wooden clap sounds are a terrific invention, and, as much as any single element, create the sculpture. Seeming to thrust the image outward off the screen, these clap effects are timed like a metronome, sometimes occurring with torrential frequency.” – Manny Farber, Artforum, 1970Read More »
The apparent vertical scratch in celluloid that opens Presents literally opens into a film within the film. When its figure awakens into a woman in a ‘real’ unreal set, the slapstick satire of structural film begins. It is not the camera that moves, but the whole set, in this first of three material ‘investigations’ of camera movement. In the second, the camera literally invades the set; a plexiglass sheet in front of the dolly crushes everything in its sight as it zooms through space. Finally, this monster of formalism pushes through the wall of the set and the film cuts to a series of rapidly edited shots as the camera zigzags over lines of force and moving fields of vision in an approximation of the eye in nature. Snow pushes us into acceptance of present moments of vision, but the single drum beat that coincides with each edit in this elegaic section announces each moment of life’s irreversible disappearance.Read More »
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Arthur Lipsett’s first film is an avant-garde blend of photography and sound. It looks behind the business-as-usual face we put on life and shows anxieties we want to forget. It is made of dozens of pictures that seem familiar, with fragments of speech heard in passing and, between times, a voice saying, “Very nice, very nice.” The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.Read More »
Jeweller Phillippe Golden purchases one of the largest diamonds ever from an auction. Diamond thief Rick Dunne is released from prison to consult in constructing safety precautions. However, Inspector Outlaw suspects that Rick may be up to his old wiles.Read More »
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A drug dealer finds an unlikely traveling companion in a runaway kid trying to dodge social services.Read More »