The idea is simple: A married woman and a single man meet. They love, they argue, fists fly. A dog strays between town and country. The seasons pass. The man and woman meet again. The dog finds itself between them. The other is in one, the one is in the other and they are three. The former husband shatters everything. A second film begins: the same as the first, and yet not. From the human race we pass to metaphor. This ends in barking and a baby’s cries. Read More »
Unsparing candid-camera work and astute juxtaposition of natural sound provide a scathing, angry and wordless comment on modern popular culture as seen at a British amusement park. No attempt is made to poke fun at the people shown; they are portrayed as victims — Orwell’s 1984 “proles”. A visual and aural barrage of cheap pleasures and angry social comment by the later famous director of If and O Lucky Man.
– Amos VogelRead More »
With ABOUT ENDLESSNESS, Roy Andersson adds to his cinematic oeuvre with a reflection on human life in all its beauty and cruelty, its splendour and banality.Read More »
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Stations of the Elevated (1981) is a 45-minute city symphony directed, produced and edited by Manfred Kirchheimer. Shot on lush 16mm color reversal stock, the film weaves together vivid images of graffiti- covered elevated subway trains crisscrossing the gritty urban landscape of 1970s New York, to a commentary-free soundtrack that combines ambient city noise with jazz and gospel by Charles Mingus and Aretha Franklin. Gliding through the South Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan – making a rural detour past a correctional facility upstate – Stations of the Elevated is an impressionistic portrait of and tribute to a New York that has long since disappeared.Read More »
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« Transparences : voir à travers, pouvoir entrevoir le “cinéma” sur pied, ou porté. Œil et main deviennent mouvement, griffes et projection. Sur la décomposition du matériau nitrate, ses transformations (d’un fragment de guerre ayant appartenu à Luca Comerio, tourné par lui en 1916 sur le mont Adamello). Aspect physique en continuelle mutation. Restent les supports déchirés de la pellicule : perforations, collages, fluorescences, couleurs éteintes, jusqu’au total effacement de l’image originale contenue sur le photogramme. Effacement de l’image de la guerre ; parenté entre le nitrate et la poudre à canon. Métamorphoses du cinéma “qui défile” en cinéma de la matière collante, gommeuse, explosive. Dernier état du cinéma : devenir bombe explosive incendiaire de la mémoire. »Read More »
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Dieu sait quoi can be described as a cinematographic essay managing to convey Francis Ponge’s approach to the world, his special relation between silent objects and speech, defining the space of life and knowledge.Read More »
This film was made by Hans Richter for the first Basel habitat exhibition to show the innovative aspects of modern architecture.
The remastering of this film was made by the Fondazione Cineteca Italiana (therefore the titles are in Italian).
The film is originally silent but is here accompanied by a recent soundtrack.Read More »
Epidemic (1987)
Epidemic arose from a challenge between Lars von Trier and Claes Kastholm of the Danish Film Institute, Trier betting – in order to get funding for another film – that he could make a film for less than one million Danish Kroner (about £100,000). The result is an intriguing film, but not a very good one, showing at least what Trier could do under self-imposed limitations, paving the way for The Kingdom and showing roots that would lead to the Dogme Manifesto.Read More »
Satō Makoto discovered documentary film when he visited Minamata (well known as the former site of an environmental disaster) as a student, and worked on Katori Naotaka’s The Innocent Sea. While touring Japan with the film, he met people who lived by the polluted Agano River in Niigata and decided to make a film about them. Living there with seven crew members for three years, Living on the River Agano was completed in 1992 and showed people who live with the river and work in agriculture and fishing, quietly probing the cruelty of nature destroyed. Ten years later, and after attending several funerals of people who appeared in the first feature, the team returned to the area. The resulting film Memories of Agano is a ghostly poem on people, fields, stories, songs and buildings receding into absence, the power of images and the strength of sound to revive the past.Read More »