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Boris Karloff is Valder, the creepy looking but trusted French refugee butler of British cabinet minister Arthur Bennett (Holmes Herbert). Valder might be a German spy, but is posing as a British spy. Also sent to the Bennett household as a guest is Frances Hautry (Margaret Lindsay), who is posing as a German spy but might be a British spy. She was previously seen as nurse Helene von Lorbeer, working in a French hospital to treat Frank Bennett (Bruce Lester).Read More »
Before carving out a niche as one of the most distinct voices in nineties American cinema , Allison Anders made her debut, alongside codirectors and fellow UCLA film school students Kurt Voss and Dean Lent, with 1987’s Border Radio. A low-key, semi-improvised postpunk diary that took four years to complete, Border Radio features legendary rocker Chris D., of the Flesh Eaters, as a singer/songwriter who has stolen loot from a club and gone missing, leaving his wife (Luanna Anders), a no-nonsense rock journalist, to track him down with the help of his friends (John Doe of the band X; Chris Shearer). With its sprawling Southern Californian and Mexican landscapes, captured in evocative 16mm black and white, Border Radio is a singular, DIY memento of the indie film explosion in America.Read More »
In a hospital on the outskirts of 1920s Los Angeles, an injured stuntman begins to tell a fellow patient, a little girl with a broken arm, a fantastic story of five mythical heroes. Thanks to his fractured state of mind and her vivid imagination, the line between fiction and reality blurs as the tale advances.Read More »
In 1854 Mississippi, honest riverboat card gambler Mark Fallon wins young Laurent Dureau’s diamond necklace, a family heirloom which, in the end, will bring him happiness and tragedy alike.Read More »
Bette Gordon explores the cinematic representation of women in this feminist experimental work, which, in the words of the filmmaker, centers on “women’s inability to place and define themselves in language and politics, the location of radical struggle.”Read More »
This is the new restoration of Yvonne Rainer’s Kristina Talking Pictures. Namechecking both Virginia Woolf and Jean-Luc Godard in the film’s opening segment, Rainer continues to experiment in her elegiac, hybrid third feature with unshackling narrative from conventional representation, using the paradoxical feminine figure of a lion tamer, Kristina (played by several women, including Rainer herself), and a disjunctive audiovisual syntax that pushes avant-garde film grammar into thrillingly novel, expressive realms. Kristina arrives from Budapest to 1970s New York City, harboring hopes of becoming a dance choreographer, as well as romantic affections for an elusive sailor named Raoul.Read More »
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The documentary feature ARAKIMENTARI explores the work of popular and controversial Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki in a style designed to match Araki’s own. Araki’s fame and the debate around his photography derive mostly from his work with nudes, which blur the lines normally established between art, erotica, and pornography. The photographs have often been credited with reversing the Japanese ban on the visual representation of pubic hair, and Araki has been seen by his supporters as one of the artistic champions of free speech and social criticism in Japan. Some of Araki’s celebrity fans–Bjork, Takeshi Kitano, Richard Kern and others–are interviewed to explain the appeal and importance of his photography. Liberally peppered with images of the photography and presented in a manner designed to imitate the combination of titillation and estrangement Araki’s work engenders, ARAKIMENTARI goes beyond the biographical documentary to the realm of artistic portrait.Read More »
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A corrupt small town sheriff manipulates local candidates to the state legislature but he eventually comes into conflict with a visiting carnival dancer.Read More »
This is the new restoration of Yvonne Rainer’s Lives of Performers. Rainer’s debut feature film announced both her shift from the world of dance towards avant-garde cinema, and what would become a career-long interest in “women’s stories” and the teasing machinations of melodrama. The familiar tale of a man who can’t choose between two women and makes everyone suffer is reworked by Rainer as a jolting and radically austere, anti-illusionist spectacle, comprising dance rehearsals, photography, tableaux, and a flurry of fragments of text, both onscreen and not. Off-camera, multiple voices can be heard—including that of cinematographer Babette Mangolte, who was at the time just beginning work with a young Chantal Akerman.Read More »