USA

Serendipity began as a book, published on the occasion of Prune Nourry’s solo show at the Guimet National Asian Art Museum in Paris in 2017. The French-born, New York-based artist has spent the majority of her artistic career creating work that deals with women’s bodies and female fertility. A recent breast cancer diagnosis led Nourry to create Serendipity-now in the form of a stunning first-person documentary-which captures the subsequent evolution of her body, her work, her soul, and her mind. This impassioned, beautiful film embodies the artist’s belief that everything is connected, coincidence is an illusion, and “the essentials to life really are health, love, and art.”Read More »

Ballet is a 1995 American documentary film directed by Frederick Wiseman. It portrays rehearsals, choreography, performances, business transactions, and other day-to-day life of the American Ballet Theatre. Much of the footage dates from the 1992 season. It also includes scenes from the company’s European tour, namely in Greece and Copenhagen.Read More »

“Zorn’s Lemma stands for – Every non-empty partially ordered set in which every chain (i.e. totally ordered subset) has an upper bound contains at least one maximal element.

It is named after the mathematician Max Zorn.

The terms are defined as follows. Suppose (P,≤) is the partially ordered set. A subset T is totally ordered if for any s, t ∈ T we have either s ≤ t or t ≤ s. Such a set T has an upper bound u ∈ P if t ≤ u for all t ∈ T. Note that u is an element of P but need not be an element of T. A maximal element of P is an element m ∈ P such that the only element x ∈ P with m ≥ x is x = m itself.Read More »

THE BIG BIRD CAGE/ FACTS Director Jack Hill followed up his genre-defining women-in-prison film THE BIG DOLL HOUSE with this action-packed sequel, also starring Pam Grier and set in the Philippines. Grier plays Blossom, the machine gun-toting girlfriend of revolutionary leader Django (Sid Haig). His fellow revolutionaries want girlfriends too, so Django and Blossom make plans to liberate the nearby women’s prison, a grueling sugar mill work camp run by the high-strung Warden Zappa (Andy Centera). Slender babe Anitra Ford co-stars as Torry, a free-spirited nymphomaniac whose bedding of important political figures has landed her in the prison, and who together with Blossom makes plans for the big, explosion-packed breakout. Grier and Ford are both dynamite with their bad attitudes and skimpy prison attire, and there’s plenty of catfights–both in and out of the mud, and showers. Aside from some dated gay-stereotype humor involving the male guards of the camp, this is still pretty rock-solid entertainment, replete with suspense, sex, bloodsoaked veangance, and captivating outdoor cinematography by Phillip Sandalan. Hill and Grier would follow up this success with the blaxploitation classic COFFY the following year. *Cast* Pam Grier , Anitra Ford , Sid Haig , Vic Diaz , Carol Speed , Andy CenteneraRead More »

A dark domestic melodrama/satire about the ties that bind and the ties that really bind.Read More »

Released both as a 15-chapter serial and as a condensed feature version (for theatres that didn’t use serials) which means that all of the cast and crew would one day be credited in some sources with a misleading extra film appearance added to their filmographies even though they only worked on (and got paid) for one performance or job. The story (serial and/or feature) deals with the plotting of a European importing firm to put Chinese trade competition in a west coast Chinatown – city unnamed, but it’s by the bay and it isn’t Oakland – out of business. Their representative, Sonya Rokoff/The Dragon Lady (Luana Walters), a beautiful Eurasian girl, hires Victor Poten (Bela Lugosi), a mad Eurasian chemist and inventor and an equal-opportunity racist who hates both Chinese and White races, to aid her. Read More »

Quote:
“FOREGROUNDS, like SAUGUS SERIES, is devoted almost entirely to carefully constructed spatial ambiguities. The most visceral of these prints a rotating boulder, occupying half of the screen, over a slow lateral pan across the desert (painted by Neon Park). A faint superimposition of leaves on top of the landscape has the effect of pushing its vista farther back in space. Correspondingly, the boulder bulges out of the picture-plane like a Cezanne apple. The effect is so strong that even when O’Neill begins to animate ‘scratches’ over the image, one’s eye refuses to surrender the illusion of volume.” – J. Hoberman, The Village VoiceRead More »

Quote:
To explain to his students the atmosphere in the 1930’s Nazi-Germany, history teacher Burt Ross initiates a daring experiment. He declares himself leader of a new movement, called ‘The Wave’. Inspired, he proclaims ideas about Power, Discipline and Superiority. His students are strikingly willing to follow him. Soon the entire school is under the spell of ‘The Wave’. Anyone who refuses to be a part of the Movement, faces threats or worse. Ross himself gets carried away by his own experiment. Or has it turned into something more than an experiment? A climax is unavoidable, resulting in a hard lesson for both Ross and his students…Read More »

A pitcher on a major-league baseball team finds out that his catcher is desperately trying to hide something, he is dying of a terminal disease and he doesn’t want the owner to find out and fire him.Read More »