In the movie La valigia dei sogni (The Suitcase of Dreams, Italy, 1953) directed by Luigi Comencini, some sequences from Cenere are inserted. The protagonist is a former silent film actor who has saved old movies of his time from destruction, and uses them to set up recreational performances at schools. After an accidental fire and the risk of prison, he meets a rich producer who helps him to build a film museum.Read More »
Plot
Der Sieg des Glaubens (English: The Victory of Faith) is the first documentary directed by Leni Riefenstahl, who was hired despite opposition from Nazi officials that resented employing a woman — and a non-Party member too. Her film recounts the Fifth Party Rally of the Nazi Party, which occurred in Nuremberg from August 30 to September 3 in 1933.Read More »
Plot
Two-part profile of actor-director Orson Welles, looking at his life and career in theatre, radio and particularly film.Read More »
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Originally shot in the mid-’70s, Agnès Varda’s vérité documentary Daguerréotypes has aged splendidly, acquiring flavors that would’ve been inconceivable at the time it was made. Back then, Varda hauled her camera around her Paris neighborhood on the Rue Daguerre, intending to capture what went on in the little shops in what was at the time one of the city’s most bustling commercial districts. As Varda explains early on in her voiceover narration, she wasn’t looking for esoterica. She filmed butchers, bakers, tailors, grocers, hairstylists, driving-school instructors… people she saw every day. And her vignettes are short: just a transaction or two, cut together with interviews about the merchants’ pasts, and portrait-style shots of them puttering about their businesses.Read More »
Summary
A promise, an old, destroyed horse head violin and a song believed lost lead the singer Urna back to Outer Mongolia. Her grandmother was forced to destroy her once loved violin in the tumult of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The ancient song of the Mongols, “The Two Horses of Genghis Khan”, was engraved on the violin’s neck. Only the violin’s neck and head survived the cultural storm. Now it is time to fulfill the promise that Urna made to her grandmother. Arrived in Ulan Bator, Urna brings the still intact parts of the violin – head and neck – to Hicheengui, a renowned maker of horse head violins, who will build a new body for the old instrument in the coming weeks. Then, Urna leaves for the interior to look there for the song’s missing verses. But she will be disappointed. None of the people whom she meets on the way appears to still know the old melody of the Mongols. Written by silkeRead More »
Plot
This film documents the coal miners’ strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in June, 1973. Eastovers refusal to sign a contract (when the miners joined with the United Mine Workers of America) led to the strike, which lasted more than a year and included violent battles between gun-toting company thugs/scabs and the picketing miners and their supportive women-folk.Read More »
[google translate]
“I was a star waiting to be born.” Anna Sten, actress in Russian silent films and early German sound films. She should become a star like Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. Sam Goldwyn had that in mind with a lot of money and publicity. In 1934 Anna Sten has a leading role as Nana, the starting signal for a Hollywood career that never happened. ANNA / NANA / NANA / ANNA: actor name, role, film title, novel. How many nanas did we see on the screen? And with what meaning is the name Nana now charged? From Anna Stens Nana to Anna Karinas Nana S. in Godard’s VIVRE SA VIE – things are going badly for all Nanas.
(Martina Müller)Read More »
A speck of dust is just about perceptible to the naked eye. It’s the smallest visible subject a film can be about – it’s a medium of disappearance and a criteria of perception. Wherever we go, it has already beaten us; wherever we turn, it follows us. It is our past, our present and our future. It is universal and has a name in every language. It keeps housewives busy, as well as scientists, inventors, artists and entire industrial branches. It is blamed for feeding vermin and causing illness. It takes ownership of our possessions, it penetrates laboratories, it creates planets and galaxies. We’re surrounded by it, it gets inside us, we shed it… It nestles right into the despair of its own existence.Read More »
