Based on an English academic’s memoir on stalking and being stalked, Unrequited Love is a dazzling digital film essay on cinema and absence, on Hitchcock and Antonioni, on cinema and cities. It is a story of waiting, self-delusion, panic, fear of violence, and of modern technologies which define the urban stalker as they do the new terrorist. Their methods duplicate: both are irrational and targeted.Read More »
Synopsis:
Surprising film about an ordinary subject: a description in Moullet’s inimitably comic style of the French town of Foix. Moullet manages to put over several humorous facts about the town that you won’t find in the usual travel guides. (IFFR)Read More »
Quote:
The fifth directorial effort of German film star Maximillian Schell, Marlene is an unorthodox documentary of the legendary Marlene Dietrich. After years of resisting Schell’s entreaties, Dietrich finally agreed to participate in this project-but refused to appear on camera. Thus, a tape recording of a Dietrich-Schell interview is heard throughout, while the screen is filled with images of Marlene culled from stills, dramatic films (The Blue Angel, Shanghai Express et. al.) and newsreel footage.Read More »
That’s all I’ll ‘spoil’ if you haven’t seen this before :
…how and why the CIA and the NASA hired Stanley Kubrick in 1969 just before Apollo hits the moon…
IMDB:
This hard-hitting mockumentary exposes how Stanley Kubrick faked the 1969 moon landing, with seeming-endorsements from many key players in NASA and the US government.Read More »
Vladimir Nabokov, widely considered one of the world’s greatest writers for such works as _Lolita_, was also a remarkable professor at Cornell University. Here, Plummer portrays the witty Nabokov, providing an entertaining and insightful lecture upon “Metamorphosis,” Kafka’s bizarre story about a man who wakes up one morning to discover he has turned into a giant bug.Read More »
The only documentary to focus solely on the life and career of Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer tells the captivating story of one of America’s most important artists. In 1962, as a founding member of Judson Dance Theater, Rainer revolutionized modern dance by introducing everyday movements like walking and running into the dance lexicon. Abandoning choreography in the ‘70s, Rainer introduced narrative techniques into American avant-garde film, turning that genre on its head, too. In Feelings Are Facts, we follow Rainer, now in her 80s and returned to choreography, as she continues to create vibrant, courageous, unpredictable dances that invite audiences to question basic assumptions about art and performance.Read More »
Traffic on the roads of São Paulo, old family photographs, and the voice-over tale of Arthur Alvaro de Noronha, a doctor coming back from Paris after finishing his Medicine studies in Europe. Arthur with his family, Arthur in Paris… The voice tells us of the doctor’s adventures with friends André Breton, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, and Pablo Picasso. This is how Omar announces the surrealist biography he weaves in Triste Trópico around the figure of an imaginary doctor who ends up as indigenous messiah. Described as a “anthropological mock documentary,” Triste Trópico is a film whose title alludes to Levi-Strauss’s ethnographic memoirs of Brazil and triggers a chain of evocative references to the carnival-cannibal avant-garde of Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto.Read More »
The famous geologist Haroun Tazieff films the craters of active volcanoes in Europe, Indonesia, Japan, Central America and South America.
Quote:
Les Rendez-vous du Diable is a most unusual documentary that quickly reveals it is not a horror story at all, but a round-the-world look at volcanoes. Some of our planet’s most spectacular volcanoes — whether active or extinct — provide the unusual footage. Haroun Terzieff, also the director, and a team of three other men are responsible for the photography, as the crew traveled around the globe filming even on the edge of some active craters. The majesty of an erupting volcano is captured both on film and in the excellent narrative.Read More »
After an accident that leaves him bedridden for two months, the filmmaker retrieves discard images he’s been collecting for eight years on his computer’s hard drive. With them he develops an intimate and poetic film, consisting of portraits of friends, walks through Barcelona and a trip to his native country, Venezuela, where chaos imposes its aesthetic appeal. A complex and fragmented film that shows the world of the filmmaker that sometimes happens to be as absurd and miraculous as a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.Read More »