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Gilles and Christine a boy and a girl live in the outskirts of Paris, their families are ineffective and distant and they lead a purposeless life. They steal some records in a supermarket but she is caught and sent to a nursing home by force by her parents. She escapes and follows Gilles to a house where some other youths live. They then decide to go south: Christine has been told there is a commune there, where artists live. So they head south sleeping rough…Read More »
An early (1967) film by Dusan Makavejev, the master of the eastern European dirty joke (WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Montenegro). The passionate affair of a telephone operator and a Marxist rodent exterminator is intercut with lectures on criminology and sexology, with occasional cooking lessons. It’s very funny and, with its ragged arrangement of warring styles and ideologies, very original: it’s like a smutty, sticky-fingered Godard. – Dave Kehr, The Chicago ReaderRead More »
The first film of the Yugoslav Black Wave.
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Grad is a psychological drama about the thin line that separates depression and melancholy. It gives us the opportunity to understand that the alienation of the modern socialist man is not just a social problem, but also a poetic aestheticization of urban thinking and behaviour. For Pavlovic, Bapca, and especially Rakonjca, self-destruction is not a defence mechanism, but a lifestyle.
Exploring new areas of old sites, Grad is, in a figurative sense, the first Yugoslavian film that deals with the suburb as a metaphor of alternative culture. Through their analysis of public consciousness, the three directors project their secret Bauhaus, seeking its shadow in the hidden areas of obsolete thought, in the everyday of Socialism.Read More »
Set in a detention camp in Hungary 1869, at a time of guerrilla campaigns against the ruling Austrians, Jancsó deliberately avoids conventional heroics to focus on the persecution and dehumanization manifest in a time of conflict. Filmed in Hungary’s desolate and burning landscape, Jancsó uses his formidable technique to create a remarkable and terrifying picture of war and the abuse of power that still speaks to audiences today.Read More »
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Named for the famous seventeenth-century Roman church Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, which was designed by the legendary architect (and Bernini rival) Francesco Borromini, LA SAPIENZA echoes Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia in its tale of Alexandre Schmid (Fabrizio Rongione), a brilliant architect who, plagued by doubts and loss of inspiration, embarks on a quest of artistic and spiritual renewal guided by his study of Borromini. His wife Aliénor (Christelle Prot), similarly troubled by the crassness of contemporary society – as well as the couple’s lack of communication and passion – decides to accompany him. In Stresa, a chance encounter with adolescent siblings Goffredo (who is about to commence his own architectural studies) and his fragile sister Lavinia upends the couple’s plans. As Borromini’s spirit and the vertiginous splendour of his structures spin a mysterious web among them, within the course of a few days the foursome experiences a series of life-altering revelations. Read More »
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Kira Muratova, the grande dame of Eastern European cinema returns with her richest, most imposing vision of societal decay and personal efflorescence since The Aesthenic Syndrome encapsulated a very different moment in the former Soviet Union’s history in 1989. Set largely in the vast central railway station of Kiev, a casino, a shopping arcade and the snow-blanketed streets between, Melody is a majestically realised pageant of the burgeoning new economy of inequality. Like Dickensian orphans or children in a fairytale, a motherless brother and sister arrive in the city and traipse through festive Christmas streets looking for their respective fathers…Read More »
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When Norwegian scientist Marie attends a seminar in Paris on the actual weight of a kilo, it is her own measurement of disappointment, grief and, not least, love, that ends up on the scale. Finally Marie is forced to come to terms with how much a human life truly weighs and which measurements she intends to live by.
The international prototype kilogram of 1889, the mother of all kilos, is today kept in a vault at Bureau International des Poids et Mesures BIPM in Paris. It is the last physical weight reference still in use and the national prototypes must from time to time be transported from their respective countries to Paris in order to be recalibratedRead More »
Here is an excellent overview of the film that provides a ton of background information that greatly helps in understanding this outstanding film.
from Jump Cut, no. 10-11, 1976, pp. 5-6
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1976, 2004
“In THIASSOS even though we refer to the past, we are talking about the present. The approach is not mythical but dialectical. This comes through in the structure of the film where often two historical times are dialectically juxtaposed in the same shot creating associations leading directly to historical conclusions… Those links do not level the events but bypass the notions of past/present and instead provide a linear developmental interpretation which exists only in the present.”
— Theodoros AngelopoulosRead More »
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Upon moving to Britain to get away from American violence, astrophysicist David Sumner and his wife Amy are bullied and taken advantage of by the locals hired to do construction. When David finally takes a stand it escalates quickly into a bloody battle as the locals assault his house.Read More »