Classics

PLOT SYNOPSIS:
Desperate because abandoned by his lover (V. Alexandrescu), orchestra conductor hesitates: to kill himself, or kill her? He simply shoots the portrait of the lover and returns to conducting, helped in his “resurrection”, by a cute girl (L. Franca), who restores his will to live.
Second film by Blasetti, after the silent “Sun” (1929), and the only one for which he signs the script himself. Produced by Cines, it is the first Italian sound film but, deemed not commercial enough, was released after La canzone dell’amore (1930) by Righelli.
It is interesting at stylistic level, for the ambitious mixage of dialogs, music (Amedeo Escobar) and noises in parallel with experimental visual inventions.Read More »

Miss Elisa teaches commercial correspondence in a girls’ school, where, customarily, all the letters are sent to a certain Mr. Hartmann of Vienna, who actually does not exist, at an address just as non-existent. But Elisa is a true romantic, and she entrusts her dreams to the letters she writes to the phantasmal Hartman. And one of them is found by Maddalena Lenci, whose girlfriend, thinking to do well, mails it. But Carlo Hartman, who really exists at this address and so receives the letter, leaves for Rome to meet this Elisa…
But in Rome there is also his cousin, who falls for Maddalena mistaking her for Elisa…Read More »

A Hungarian masterpiece from Sándor Pál.

The film’s story take place in Budapest, in 1944 in the very end of the 2nd WW. The film’s photographer, Elemér Ragályi won prize in Montreal in 1979. Montreal, 1979.

PLOT DESCRIPTION
In this very dark comedy, the loss of a coat from a dance hall cloakroom sets off a frantic search which results in widespread death and mayhem. It is 1944, and the loss of the coat represents the family’s loss of social standing, even during a time when everyone is suffering from the Nazi occupation. The whole family is called in to search for it, and a cross-section of the social chaos of the times is exposed during their search, which involves murders and more. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie GuideRead More »

At a track near Rome, shoeshine boys are watching horses run. Two of the boys Pasquale, an orphan, and Giuseppe, his younger friend are riding. The pair have been saving to buy a horse of their own to ride… The boys meet Attilio, Giuse’s much older brother, and his shady friend at a boat on the Tiber. In return for a commission, the boys agree to deliver black market goods to a fortune-teller. Once the woman has paid, Attilio’s gang suddenly arrives. Pretending to be cops, they shake the woman down. With a payoff from Attilio, the boys are able to make the final payment and stable their horse in Trastevere over the river… The fortune-teller identifies Pasqua and Giuse. Held at an overcrowded boys’ prison, they are separated. Giuse falls under the influence of an older lad in his cell, Arcangeli. During interrogation, Pasqua is tricked into betraying Giuse’s brother to the police. With their trial still in the future, the two friends are driven further apart…Read More »

Hamlet is now female and so are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Instead of taking place in England, this version takes at the beach where everyone plays volleyball in bikinis. An expressionist and surrealist adaptation of Hamlet from director Metin Erksan.Read More »

Quote:
In the small town of Minamata in Kyushu, far from the metropolitan center, the fertilizer company Chisso built a factory to take advantage of cheap labor and commenced dumping mercury-filled wastewater into the nearby sea. Soon residents began exhibiting symptoms of a mysterious illness, a happening that would eventually develop into the worst case of environmental pollution in postwar Japan. Noriaki Tsuchimoto visits the patients and their families who sued Chisso and listens to their voices. His camera gently lifts the veil that had obscured them and reveals their reality. MINAMATA: THE VICTIMS AND THEIR WORLD is impressive in how it stands on the side of the patients, not only providing a collage of individual portraits, but also an understanding of the their everyday lives.

One of the monuments of Japanese documentary, MINAMATA: THE VICTIMS AND THEIR WORLD played at many international festivals, winning an award at Locarno.Read More »

Jumpei Niki, a Tokyo based entomologist and educator, is in a poor seaside village collecting specimens of sand insects. As it is late in the day and as he has missed the last bus back to the city, some of the local villagers suggest that he spend the night there, they offering to find him a place to stay. That place is the home of a young woman, whose house is located at the bottom of a sand pit accessible only by ladder. He later learns that the woman’s husband and child died in a sandstorm, their undiscovered bodies buried somewhere near the house. The next morning as he tries to leave, he finds that the ladder is gone – he realizing that the ladder he climbed down was a rope ladder which is anchored above the pit – meaning that he is trapped with the young woman as the walls of the pit are sand with no grip. He also realizes that this entrapment was the villagers and the young woman’s plan for him to stay there permanently to be her helper in the never-ending task of digging out the sand, which if not done will swallow them alive.Read More »

Free Radicals

Directed by Len Lye
US 1958, revised 1979, 16mm, b/w, 4 min.

Quote:
In arguably his greatest film, Lye reduces the medium to its most basic elements by scratching designs on black film. He used a variety of scribers ranging from dental tools to an ancient Native American arrowhead, and synchronized the images to traditional African music (a field tape of the Bagirmi tribe). The film won second prize in the International Experimental Film Competition, which was judged by Man Ray, Norman McLaren, Alexander Alexeiff and others at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. In 1979 Lye further condensed the film by dropping a minute of footage. Stan Brakhage described the final version as “an almost unbelievably immense masterpiece (a brief epic).”Read More »

Plot:
Washington DC in the war. The machinery of government is a hive of endless if not seamless activity. Arnament production is the name of the game, by fair means or foul. Ed Browne, more used to making cars in Detroit, is having to try and get planes made in this maelstrom. Luckily or unluckily, he finds he has a secretary who knows the political ropes – and her own mind.Read More »