Documentary

Un metteur en ordre: Robert Bresson (62 min.) is from a 1966 French television broadcast of Pour le plaisir, a cultural television program. This episode concentrates on Au Hasard Balthazar and includes interviews with Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Marguerite Duras and members of the film’s cast. Bresson explains the origin of the film’s title, while his contemporaries describe their reactions to the film. Several extensive clips from the film are presented, after which Bresson and his cast members offer their opinions of the meaning or consequences of those scenes.Read More »

Synopsis:
A visit to the Louvre in Paris commentated by an actor reading Cézanne.

Review:
Une Visite au Louvre (2004) is a companion film to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Cézanne (1989). The opening title of the later work indicates that it was inspired by Dominique Païni, then film programmer at the Louvre, in 1990. Like the earlier film, Une Visite au Louvre is also based on Joachim Gasquet’s book, Cézanne, specifically on the chapter entitled “Le Louvre,” which recounts Cézanne’s visit to the Louvre, accompanied by the young Gasquet.Read More »

The documentary details the life and work of the celebrated Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.” Rabindranath Tagore was the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore, born in Calcutta. He was educated at home. At seventeen he was sent to England for formal schooling, which he did not complete. Tagore was knighted by the ruling British Government in 1915, but within a few years he resigned the honor as a protest against British policies in India.Read More »

The film is a commemoration of the lost livelihood of the earth, the lost lives of the War and to the work of two of the cinema’s greatest artists.Read More »

Description: Narrated by Tom Cruise, “Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures” goes through each one of his movies and talks to various participants about their memories of working with Kubrick. For those who know very little about Kubrick, the documentary is an excellent career overview.Read More »

According to this documentary, East Germans have twice as much sex, start much younger, have more partners, are more experimental and are more satisfied then their capitalist counterparts. When the Iron Curtain came down, 40 years of division left its mark in many places – including the beds of the German people. At the end of World War II, the starting point was the same on both sides of the wall. Germans shared the same culture, the same lifestyle, the same morals, but four decades on everything has changed. Why? Was it the lack of church and easy availability of divorce and abortion? Filmmaker André Meier uses archive material such as state education films, locally produced porn magazines and East German home videos to compare both systems based on their dealings with sex. Meier discovers which Germans are cooler, more advanced, less inhibited and less prudish in the bedroom.Read More »

Patience (After Sebald) is a multi-layered film essay on landscape, art, history, life and loss by the acclaimed documentary film-maker Grant Gee. It is an exploration of the work and influence of German writer WG Sebald (1944 – 2001), told via a long walk through coastal East Anglia tracking his most famous book The Rings of Saturn. The book mixed history, travelogue, memoir, meditation, fiction and images to explore the personal, public and often overlooked histories of Suffolk.

Sebald has profoundly influenced some of today’s leading writers, thinkers and artists. Some of these – interviewed for the film include Adam Philips, Robert Macfarlane, Rick Moody and Tacita Dean.Read More »

This film documents Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s 1996 concert tour. Jim Jarmusch interviews the band about their long history, and we see backstage footage from the 1970s and 1980s.

If you’re a Neil Young fan, you will love this movie. The music is outstanding, almost mind-altering in it’s depth and beauty. Yes, I call it beautiful even though it’s raw and riotous, even though it’s crude and vulgar, even though it sometimes feels like the harrowing of hell, it’s beautiful music. Young’s music is incomparable and his live performance shows you what an artist looks like when he’s under the influence of his muse. He gives a succinct insight into his vision of true rock music: it never gets comfortable, it never gets tame, it never gets easy. Neil Young is in a class with Bob Dylan and Keith Jarrett: artists completely dedicated to their work. I highly recommend this movie. Jarmusch does an incredible job of combining 3 decades worth of footage into this 1996 tour. The interview with Jim Jarmusch and Young is very interesting: two artists talking about what they do.Read More »

Quote:
From the impenetrably euphemistic to the breathtakingly explicit, this intriguing anthology takes us through 60 yearsof sex education in Britain from the 1910s to the 1970s.All ‘unmentionable matters’ pertaining to sex are dealt with, from the WW1 warning to soldiers about the dangers of cavorting with loose women in London’s West End, Whatsoever a Man Soweth (1917), to puberty pep-talks for girls on how to avoid pregnancy in Don’t Be Like Brenda (1973).Read More »