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…the “crypto-documentary” by Gianfranco Angelucci amd Liliana Betti E il Casanova di Fellini? (And Fellini’s Casanova?) made for the RAI, in which Federico submits some friends to a screen test for the part of Casanova: Mastroianni, Tognazzi, Gassman, Alain Cuny and an exhilarating Alberto Sordi deeply involved in the part.Read More »
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Another mammoth-project with the “chronologist of our time” Alexander Kluge. With 12 hours film, Gelpke and Kluge try to get a better understanding of the new human, which arouse from the internet, artificial intelligence…. Like his last projects, this films are complilations of many fragments, shorts, fiction-interviews, opera, theatre etc.Read More »
new york times review (january 1995)
If “Tsahal,” opening today at the Walter Reade Theater, initially seems to admire that toughness unquestioningly, it eventually grows into a thoughtful exegesis of a troubling, complex subject. This film provoked a tear-gas bombing at a Paris movie theater last November, but it isn’t inflammatory on its own merits. Mr. Lanzmann, whose background in philosophy shapes his film making in palpable ways, is more pensive than judgmental. He seeks the essence of Israel’s embattled existence during “46 years of perpetual alarm.” Slowly, doggedly, he arrives at a profound understanding of it by the time “Tsahal” is over.Read More »
Includes reels : 01, 02, 03, 09, 22, 23, 26, 31, 40, 47, 80, 81, 83
Anne Charlotte Robertson, born in 1949, was a Massachusetts-based filmmaker who used her Super-8 camera and acute self-awareness to forge a radically intimate mode of first-person cinema. Although she was celebrated as an artist in her lifetime, only today is Robertson finally being acknowledged as an influential pioneer of the first-person diary cinema that has long flourished in the Boston-Cambridge area, perhaps best known in the work of Ed Pincus and Ross McElwee. Gripped by mental illness, Robertson discovered a vital form of self-therapy in the diaristic filmmaking practice invented and refined across her magnum opus, Five Year Diary (1981–1997), whose eighty-one individual chapters, or “reels,” meld bold formal experimentation, self-depreciatory humor, and raw emotion into a charged yet lyrical chronicle of an often painfully difficult life. Cathartic and devastating, rough-edged and poignantly delicate, disarmingly funny and meditative, Robertson’s Five Year Diary offers a remarkably frank and revealing self-portrait of an artist and woman struggling to understand the overwhelming desires and dark shadows that defined her world.Read More »
Sean Axmaker, Keyframe wrote:
When handed the raw materials from an unfinished documentary about Elmyr de Hory, an art forger whose life was being written up by biographer Clifford Irving, Orson Welles took the opportunity to make something far beyond the concept of the traditional documentary. F for Fake has been called the Orson Welles’ first essay film, a true enough statement if you limit the accounting to feature films, but he had been doing short-form non-fiction since 1955, when he made Around the World with Orson Welles (a.k.a. Around the World) for British television.Read More »
An experimental and haunting collection of vignettes, Deborah Stratman’s O’er the Land weaves several picturesque and arresting strands into an evocative essay on freedom as defined by The American Way. At once contemplative and jarring, the film quietly ricochets from one emblem of patriotism and of the American experience to the next: football, recreational vehicles, Civil War re-enactments, and war stories, to name a few. A recurring motif in the film is the story of Colonel William Rankin, a Marine pilot who in 1959 ejected from his F8-U fighter jet and parachuted into a thunderstorm 48,000 feet above Virginia. Incredibly, Col. Rankin remained aloft for nearly an hour, tossed by air pockets and electrical fields, before crashing to the ground and, miraculously, surviving. One might say O’er the Land keeps the viewer aloft for a turbulent and rapturous hour as well. TMRead More »
Directed by Martin Scorsese, George Harrison – Living in the Material World is a stunning double-feature-length film tribute to one of music’s greatest icons.
Scorsese uses never-before-seen footage from George Harrison’s childhood, throughout his years with The Beatles, through the ups and downs of his solo career, and through the joys and pain of his private life, to trace the arc of George’s journey from his birth in 1943 to his passing in 2001. Living in the Material World features private home videos, photos and never before heard tracks to chronicle the incredible story of the extraordinary man.Read More »
Sokurov shows the official manifestation and fireworks on the 1st of May, one of the ritual celebrations of Soviet times, as a gathering of tired participants of a mass scene falling into pieces without the director’s orders and without any aims. Outbursts of joy without reason, mixed here and there with equally unmotivated signs of anxiety are given in brief sketches of a restless and pitiful crowd. A part instead of the whole, individual instead of common, a symbol growing up from details are the postulates of Eisenstein’s representation of the “people’s masses,” both the chorus and the protagonist of the Soviet official culture. Sokurov revises these postulates in the context of our time when the chorus has gone out of action, both in the aesthetic and in the social sense, and the protagonist is absent. However, both chorus and soloist are introduced into the picture of the festivity by the hand of the author: Sokurov puts a church canticle into the soundtrack of the film. It is an evening Orthodox prayer of repentance: “let my prayer be like incense before Thou, like my hands uplifted, an evening sacrifice.”Read More »
Ο Ηρακλής, ο Αχελώος και η γιαγιά μου
Dimitra Koutsiabassakos is 88 years old and lives alone in the village of Armatoliko in the Pindos mountain range, on the banks of the ancient river Acheloos, named after the mythical river god who fought Heracles for the favors of a woman and who could take on many forms. Dimitra’s home is located near the place where a great dam is being built and lies right in the middle of the area destined to become a lake after construction is completed. By a strange quirk of fate, the materials used in the construction of the dam are a product of a cement company named “Heracles”, so that it seems that the age-old contest between Acheloos and Heracles continues to the present day! Dimitris, Costas and Petros decide to pay their grandmother a visit and make a documentary.