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Surrealist type comedy: The Players are managing a film studio which was once in the hands of The Fallen Angels. The Angels make some nocturnal raids and they get ready to reconquer the place but they fail, because they are bad, and goodness shown in the light of the Players always wins instead.Read More »
Film adaptation of W.G. Sebald’s novel “Austerlitz”, directed by the Czech-born French director Stan Neumann and starring Denis Lavant as Jacques Austerlitz, the film is described as “not so much a filmed book as it is a film about a book, breaking down the walls that divide documentary and fiction, just as Sebald blurred the lines between the two in his writing”.Read More »
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For his directing début, Oleg Kovalov chose a very extravagant experiment. As a basis he took a propaganda film from the fifties, The Case of Corporal Kochetkov, dissected this as it were and gave the naked structure a new substance and new accents by re-cutting the shots and adding documentary material from the fifties, such as newsreel footage of Khrushchev’s visit to America and pictures of the visit by Yves Montand and Simone Signoret to Moscow. The film about corporal Kochetkov called on the Soviet citizens to be on their guard and showed how sly the enemy was: for instance it could pose as an innocent girl. Kovalov creams off the emotional froth from this melodrama, deconstructs its codes and subjects it to a thoughtful analysis. For instance he reveals paranoia and spy-phobia, complexes in the ‘collective Soviet unconscious’ that is still active even in relatively enlightened periods.Read More »
Tehran is a large village near the city of Rey, full of gardens and fruit trees. Its inhabitants live in anthill-like underground holes. The village’s several districts are constantly at war. Tehranis’ main occupations are theft and crime, though the king pretends they are subject to him. They grow excellent fruits, notably an excellent pomegranate, which is found only in Tehran.
– Asar-o-Lblab, 1241 A.D
Tehran Has No More Pomegranates! is a postmodern documentary that is as witty and engaging as it is informative. The style of the film is fun and very visual, with the director, Massoud Bakhshi, using incredible archival footage, an original visual approach and terrific soundtrack that takes us through 150 years of Tehran’s history. Onscreen, Bakhshi may fail to complete his film, but he succeeds in both documenting Tehran’s history and entertaining us with its poignant contradictions.Read More »
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“He came to read. He opened two or three books; by historians and poets. But he read for barely ten minutes, and then gave up.” C. Cavafy
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A postcard, a souvenir from Athens: sitting on a comfortable rock, a young man is bent over in his thoughts, then straightens up a little to project them on to the landscape; in the background, a ruin; between the two, a few tiny passers-by, two or three stray dogs that break into the frame; and in the air, a record with worn-out grooves, a popular Greek song in which we make out the words: “postcard”, “souvenir from Athens”. Are the films of Jean-Claude Rousseau postcards? Yes, basically: a certain eternity in the stark present of an image, brought back from a place the eye has visited. Read More »
A joy for the eyes and ears, this high-point of the Brazilian trilogy Operation Sonia Silk. A dreamy making-of about the two other episodes and also a cinematographic essay (in picture, text, sound and music) about cinema and filmmaking and, above all, about love. ‘What is this thing called love? This funny thing called love? Just who can solve its mystery? Why should it make a fool of me?’ So goes the short, poetic synopsis provided by the filmmakers Bruno Safadi and Ricardo Pretti for this third part of their trilogy Operation Sonia Silk. In this ‘operation’, shot in three weeks, the directors each separately made one part (Harmonica’s Howl and Rio Belongs to Us, both shown at IFFR 2012), and then this joint third part, which grew into a surprising high-point.Read More »
People often want to hear what the artist has to say, what lies “behind” the work, yet at the same time it’s taken as a performance.
But Seth Price’s Redistribution (2007 – ) isn’t an artist talk. It uses the artist’s talk as a form and turns it into a video: the artist is at a lectern, giving an overview of his practice, but his explanations are called into question by the constructed nature of all the graphic effects, repeated sequences, voice-overs, or background music. After all, a video is just material in a chain.
When an image is filtered, you’re mostly seeing the filter.Read More »
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It doesn’t look spectacular at first. Two boys each talk separately about their experiences. In the end also on the sexual level. In the end they are also in the room together. In the end they don’t leave it at talking. Remember that homosexuality on film is banned in Thailand and so this film maker has been very daring.
Europeans on sex holidays to Thailand and transvestites who work in tourist areas may give a different impression, but this country is far from liberal in regard to homosexuality. A candid film maker like Thunska Pansittivorakul is therefore sure to come into contact with censorship sooner or later. So anyone who wonders why the two kids in this film keep their pants on right up to the end now knows the answer.Read More »
PLOT: HANDS UP! is a Polish drama film directed by Jerzy Skolimowski. It is the fourth of a series of semi-autobiographical films in which Skolimowski himself plays his alter ego, Andrzej Leszczyc. The film was originally made in 1967 in monochrome. In a twenty minute section (filmed in colour) added by Skolimowski in 1981 he explains how the original was withheld by Polish censors of the time, and that this was a principal cause of his leaving his country; however following liberalisation in Poland, he was invited to resuscitate it. The introduction includes, apart from some fictional apocalyptic passages, shots of Beirut ruined by the civil wars of the 1970s, where Skolimowski is working as an actor on Volker Schloendorff’s German film CIRCLE OF DECEIT, and also shots of London featuring demonstrations in favour of Solidarnosc, Speaker’s Corner, and an exhibition of Skolimowski’s own paintings. These sections include cameo roles by Bruno Ganz, David Essex, Mike Sarne and others. Some of the music in this introduction is from the 1970 choral work « Kosmogonia » by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki.Read More »