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This visually magnificent and poetic city symphony of Paris in the late 1920s earned Sauvage the admiration of Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo. Sauvage maps the metropolis through its street life, monuments, ports, and automobile traffic.Read More »
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“Hypnotic” is the best word to describe Favula, the latest work from director Raúl Perrone, which comes with a recommendation from none other than Apichatpong Weerasethakul – though he used the more Joe-like epithet, “bliss.” Somewhat of a secret outside of his native Argentina, Perrone has made more than 30 movies, and in recent years has reinvented his cinema, by looking back to the past, and in doing so pointing to the future. Standing apart from any other film made this year, with its magical handmade aesthetic, Favula recalls Méliès, or silent Fritz Lang, but at the same time evokes recent silent, stage-bound aesthetics like Raya Martin’s Independencia. Loosely based on an African fable, and shot employing rear-projections techniques, Favula’s simple events take place mostly in an isolated house and a nearby jungle: a marginal family’s life is interrupted by the arrival of a teenaged girl. On top of the minimalist, pulsating images, Perrone layers a maximalist soundtrack that encompasses both the sounds of the jungle and non-diegetic music (indelible contemporary songs that appeared in his last work, the cumbia punk opera P3ND3JO5). The result is a wholly unique, mythical universe of danger, passion and magic.Read More »
Filmed in Parisian parks and on a terrace, LE DIVERTISSEMENT foreshadows the labyrinthine walks that would be a part of Rivette’s cinema, in which the characters look for, follow and find each other like in a romantic scavenger hunt.
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Rivette’s three shorts—Au quartre coins (“The Four Corners,” 1948), Le quadrille (1950), and Le divertissement (“The Diversion,” 1952)—were found in 2009 after the filmmaker and his wife, Véronique, discovered the 16 mm films when going through his materials. Describing them as amateur, made when the filmmaker was barely out of his teens, the trio have been dubbed “apprenticeship films.”(MUBI)Read More »
Synopsis: This crime story centres around Anna, the prisoner, who was drawn into stealing by her lover and that’s what got her in prison. The girl would like to meet Jenő, her sweetheart again. She begs the prison physician until she lets her out for one night. She visits the man, but the womaniser hotel waiter has long forgotten her. He has already coaxed the naive do-all girl, Birdie, courted the chambermaid, and is now planning to rob the cash-register with his new lover, an acrobat. The acrobat falls on the run with an elevator out of order and dies. Anna forgives the disloyal Jenőnek, whom she still loves, but when she learns of Birdie expecting a child from him, she convinces Jenő to marry the girl and then returns to the prison.Read More »
A young man, the night watchman on the iconic Eiffel Tower, wakes to find he is alone in the world. Descending from his iron eyrie, all is eerily frozen, apart from a few souls who have escaped a mad scientist’s immobilising ray. The streets of Paris briefly become a Garden of Eden to play in, as the friends indulge in their new-found liberty. Like Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, this is a film to be carried in the heart.Read More »
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Made at the height of Anna May Wong’s fame in Europe, Pavement Butterfly was a coproduction between Germany and Britain and filmed on location in Nice, France. In this silent film, Wong plays a dancer in the French Riviera who, after her act takes a deadly turn, finds refuge in the arms of a young painter.Read More »
A series of newsreel films from Dziga Vertov, Elizaveta Svilova, and Mikhail Kaufman which document Russian Life in the early 1920s.Read More »
A major silent by Shimizu, Seven Seas was originally released in two parts, the first in 1931 and the second in 1932. The full work is over 2 hours long.Read More »
A major silent by Shimizu, Seven Seas was originally released in two parts, the first in 1931 and the second in 1932. The full work is over 2 hours long.Read More »