TV

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This year, the 65th edition of the Venice International Film Festival screened and restored this movie in a Golden Age retrospective. It’s a 36′ interview in 16mm with Salvador Allende, the socialist politician who had became President of Chile at that time, filmed at Allende’s villa in Santiago. Two years after the interview, Allende was overthrow and murdered by the general Augusto Pinochet, in a coup d’état which involved active C.I.A. collaboration. Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it. Rossellini’s title became prophetic and as it often happened in the History, the brute force killed the reason. This is just a Tvrip from RAI3, not the restored copy.Read More »

The Yellow Scarf is a film by Janusz Morgenstern from 2000. Janusz Gajos plays its protaganist, a man fighting with alcoholism, and is proof that television productions do not have to be worse than feature films.

The protagonist – a middle-aged man at the top of his career – does not have a name, nor a surname; he is a universal character, an everyman that everyone can identify with. On the Christmas Eve he consecutively meets with his employees, his ex-wife, his son and his present partner. His persistently prolonged rambling is meant to postpone the inevitable Christmas visit to his mother.Read More »

Synopsis

Dr. Bronowski’s magnificent BBC television series The Ascent of Man traces our rise both as a species and as moulders of our own environment and future. It covers the history of science, but of science in the broadest terms. Invention from the flint tool to geometry, from the arch to the theory of relativity, are shown to be expressions of man’s specific ability to understand nature, to control it, not to be controlled by it.Read More »

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Series of programs broadcast on RAI TV in Italy showing footage shot by Roberto Rossellini in India. The series was also broadcast on ORTF TV in France under the title ‘J’AI FAIT UN BEAU VOYAGE PAR ROBERTO ROSSELLINI’. The footage shown in the individual episodes seems to have been the same in the Italian and French series.

Rossellini stayed in India for almost 9 months, refusing to look at famous monuments and rather preferring to take a non-exotic view of India, by looking at lives of common persons.Read More »

A writer and his wife have their house invaded by a young man sheltering from a storm. The woman panics and asks her husband to see the stranger off. A shot is fired. What the hell is going on? King, Queen, Jack… Trouble brewing in the palace.Read More »

An Ideal Husband (BBC1, 1969, dir. Rudolph Cartier)

Rudolph Cartier’s Play of the Month version of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1895) shares the same aesthetic of visual pleasure realised through detail as Cedric Messina’s Pygmalion (BBC1 16 December 1973), as well as many common features of setting and dressing; ballrooms, studies, morning rooms, elegant dresses and eveningwear. However, Cartier’s directorial technique demonstrates a greater awareness of the possibilities of studio technique to comment upon the action of a play, and is an exemplary production in its use of finely realised period detail to achieve dramatic effects, as an interpretation that works on deeper levels than surface aesthetic visual pleasure. Read More »

Synopsis:
‘Married couple Kate and Deeley are joined by Kate’s friend, Anna and talk of the past ensues. Although it is a past they have shared, their memories of it are not always the same.
An intimate three-character play about the capriciousness of memory and the jealousy of our beloved’s intangible past.’
– BFIRead More »

L’Uomo della sabbia (The Sandman) is the first episode of the 1981 RAI horror anthology series I Giochi del Diavolo (The Devil’s Games). It is based on the short story Der Sandmann (1816) by E.T.A. Hoffmann.

Hotheaded, romantic student Nathaniel conceives a passion for the professor’s daughter, Olympia. Others, though, say she has no soul, even that her singing and dancing are mechanical. When he stumbles on the professor and his assistant fighting over the automaton’s disassembled body, Nathaniel becomes even more unhinged.Read More »

To modern audiences, this interpretation of a segment of Jan Patocki’s The Manuscript Found In Saragossa is the hokiest thing they’ll ever see with over the top acting and its sheer ludicrousness but that’s part of the charm. Vecchiali’s mastery of light and colour work wonders as is his grasp of spontaneity. It is overt in its homoeroticism and there are shades of an incestuous relationship going on but Marika Green’s coquettish bashfulness is later transformed in a dance scene that while it may not have the same razzmatazz as a Ginger Rogers/Fred Astaire routine is effective nevertheless. (Malvad, letterboxd)Read More »