Synopsis: A man (Carmelo Bene) can not bear to be part of society. He considers himself a “jerk” and so invents its own philosophy, which involves the destruction of his land of Puglia where all citizens are devoted to the Catholic religion. However, the man can not destroy the belief of the pilgrims of Salento, because a woman would prevent that. It is an unknown “Santa Margherita”, which tries to divert man from his weird and impossible philosophy. Successive scenes of the film show various situations unreal and dream in which the two protagonists try to obtain the best one on the other. After a blasphemous dialogue between monks, the man includes his whole philosophy in a Moorish building. In fact, this seems to have been the scene of the massacre of the famous 800 Martyrs of Otranto, which are considered by the scetic man the absolute death of Christianity.Read More »
This experimental film by the maverick Italian director Carmelo Bene is a free adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome and is even more irreverent than the original. In this film, Bene carries the New Testament story beyond the incident with Herod, and pictures Christ nailing himself to the cross, unable (of course) to finish the task. This film uses many musical and filmic special effects and includes at least one pornographic sequence and a number of sadistic ones. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie GuideRead More »
From IMDb :
Animals/People: Along the rhythm of the changing seasons they watch one another. Bestiary unfolds like a filmed picture book about mutual observation, about peculiar perception. A contemplation of a stable imbalance, and of lose, tranquil and indefinable elements.
From www.berlinale.de (Berlin Film Festival) :
A drawing course, a safari park and a taxidermist’s workshop: three settings in which humans and animals meet. The focus of observation is on relationships of sight and perception, which often reflect unequal power structures at the same time. In the process, the film also seems to be considering the question of how animals can be filmed. Read More »
Made in remembrance of Anne Frank, Solomon’s fragile and haunting film evokes Kristallnacht (“the night of broken glass”) and Gustav Mahler’s Kindertodenlieder (“Songs on the Death of Children”). Stan Brakhage wrote memorably of Solomon’s filmmaking craft that it “utilizes the organic mold and dry crack patterns, the natural decay of the footage, until the original subject matter, its anima, crawls with the textural ‘maggots’ of its own chemical decomposition and dissolves in a beautiful display of multifaceted light.”Read More »
A subjective documentary that explores the numerous theories about the hidden meanings withinStanley Kubrick’s film The Shining (1980). The film may be over 30 years old but it continues to inspire debate, speculation, and mystery. Five very different points of view are illuminated through voice over, film clips, animation and dramatic reenactments. Together they’ll draw the audience into a new maze, one with endless detours and dead ends, many ways in, but no way out.Read More »
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Angelo is an orphan who grew up with a nomad woman. He reacts to his pain over the death of his best friend for overdose, thanks to the encounter with Serena. She survives being a prostitute, but she has not lost hope. Angelo moves along an axis of characters in a desolate and poetic day without end.Read More »
It’s been argued that this frightening and erotic piece of experimental montage from Belgian directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani is all form and no feeling. It’s easy to see why, since its most easy pleasures derive from a cool juxtaposition and stylisation of sound and imagery. But there’s more to it: the film also functions as a knowing, lightly feminist homage to Hitchcock and the chief exponents of the Giallo genre, Dario Argento and Mario Bava. As such, its ‘meanings’ may not be instantly traceable through a cosy linear storyline or densely wrought characterisations.
In immaculate detail and with barely any dialogue, the film depicts three symbolic events in the life of Ana: the first involves a family death and some mid-coitus voyeurism; another shows her first experience of male attraction; and the final, most impressive chapter (a wholesale updating of a key segment from Argento’s ‘Deep Red’) sees our heroine (played by Marie Bos, pictured above) sneaking around an eerie, European mansion, maybe stalked by a razor-wielding maniac.
Cattet and Forzani sculpt with pure mood. They deliver a vivid sense of Ana’s heightened sensitivity towards her surroundings via an array of bravura camera tricks and fine edits. The best way to describe it would be to imagine the shower scene in ‘Psycho’ played over feature length. A large part is shot in extreme close-up, mostly of Ana’s eyes or the silhouette of her crotch underneath a billowy cotton summer dress.
This technique imbues the film with a rich sense of texture, such as in an early scene where Ana runs her fingers over the cracking, mottled skin of (what appears to be) the corpse of an old man, or later when she’s riding in a taxi and the heat makes the leather trim too hot to touch. Some may find the film a mite academic in its glassy deconstruction of genre convention, and it’s perhaps asking a bit much to read it as anything more than a claustrophobic portrait of sexual danger, but it still fulfils that highly specific brief with blood-splashed gusto.
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Chicago Reader wrote:
Chantal Akerman’s haunting 1993 masterpiece documents without commentary or dialogue her several-months-long trip from east Germany to Moscow–a tough and formally rigorous inventory of what the former Soviet bloc looks and feels like today. Akerman’s painterly penchant for finding Edward Hopper wherever she goes has never been more obvious; this travelogue seemingly offers vistas any alert tourist could find yet delivers a series of images and sounds that are impossible to shake later: the countless tracking shots, the sense of people forever waiting, the rare occurrence of a plaintive offscreen violin over an otherwise densely ambient sound track, static glimpses of roadside sites and domestic interiors, the periphery of an outdoor rock concert, a heavy Moscow snowfall, a crowded terminal where weary people and baggage are huddled together like so many dropped handkerchiefs. The only other film I know that imparts such a vivid sense of being somewhere is the Egyptian section of Straub-Huillet’s Too Early, Too Late. Everyone goes to movies in search of events, but the extraordinary events in Akerman’s sorrowful, intractable film are the shots themselves–the everyday recorded by a powerful artist with an acute eye and ear.Read More »
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2003. USA. Directed by Andrew Noren. “Energy pictures; mindful kinesis. Light and shadow vigorously conjoin, conjuring delusion of depth and duration, fiction of space and time. The fool’s paradise of the illusory window … (remember: flutter of phantoms, trick of the light) … is savored and shattered and seen for what it is” (Andrew Noren). Silent. 62 min.Read More »
