USA

  • Woody Allen – Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (1971)

    1971-1980ComedyPoliticsUSAWoody Allen

    The rarest Woody Allen film can now be seen.

    Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story is a short film directed by Woody Allen in 1971. The film was a satirization of the Richard Nixon administration made in mockumentary style.

    Allen plays Harvey Wallinger, a thinly disguised version of Henry Kissinger. The short was produced as a television special for PBS and was scheduled to air in February 1972, but it was pulled from the schedule shortly before the airdate. Reportedly, PBS officials feared losing its government support and decided not to air it. Allen who previously had sworn off doing television work cited this as an example of why he should “stick to movies”. The special never aired and can now be viewed in The Paley Center for Media.Read More »

  • John Berry – Cross My Heart (1946)

    1941-1950ComedyJohn BerryMusicalUSA

    Synopsis:
    A compulsive liar admits to a killing she didn’t commit so her husband, a lawyer, can clear her and build a reputation for himself.Read More »

  • Charles Chaplin – The Great Dictator (1940)

    1931-1940Charles ChaplinComedyUSAWar

    Quote:
    In his controversial masterpiece The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin offers both a cutting caricature of Adolf Hitler and a sly tweaking of his own comic persona. Chaplin, in his first pure talkie, brings his sublime physicality to two roles: the cruel yet clownish “Tomainian” dictator and the kindly Jewish barber who is mistaken for him. Featuring Jack Oakie and Paulette Goddard in stellar supporting turns, The Great Dictator, boldly going after the fascist leader before the U.S.’s official entry into World War II, is an audacious amalgam of politics and slapstick that culminates in Chaplin’s famously impassioned speech.Read More »

  • William E. Jones – The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998)

    1991-2000Queer Cinema(s)USAVideo ArtWilliam E. Jones

    Quote:
    Every image in The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography comes from gay adult videos produced in Eastern Europe since the introduction of capitalism. The video provides a glimpse of young men responding to the pressures of an unfamiliar world, one in which money, power and sex are now connected.Read More »

  • Mark Rappaport – Exterior Night (1993)

    Mark Rappaport1991-2000ArthouseShort FilmUSA

    Quote:
    Despite its many connotations, black and whte is most frequently used to signify the past––especially the past ihabited by our parents and grandparents, which we can see in old movies but never experience directly. A highly intelligent commentary on this phenomenon is independent filmmaker Mark Rappaport’s EXTERIOR NIGHT, made for high-definition color TV (HDTV) which combines original color imagery with archival footage of sets or backgrounds from THE MALTESE FALCON, THE BIG SLEEP, MILDRED PIERCE, POSSESSED, DARK PASSAGE, THE FOUNTAINHEAD, YOUND MAN WITH A HORN, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, and a score of other black-and-white movies. Using a blue-screen technique, Rappaport and HDTV cameraman Serge Roman frequently pose contemporary actors against studio nightclubs and streets from the 1940s.Read More »

  • Daniel Eisenberg – Something More Than Night (2003)

    2001-2010Daniel EisenbergDocumentaryUSAVideo Art

    Quote:
    Daniel Eisenberg’s quiet, voyeuristic portrait of Chicago shrouded in darkness draws us back to the beginning of cinema: to the Lumieres and Albert Kahn’s “Archives of the Planet” to long takes by a fixed-camera with a fixed-lens to images that unfold in durational time. Confronting one-hundred years worth of cinematic conditioning, accomplished through montage and editing that has accelerated the way we experience time, Eisenberg meticulously edited his footage to avoid the chronological thrust of a narrative while evoking the rhythms of a city at night, long a fascination of filmmakers. Eschewing the conventions of fiction and non-fiction, SOMETHING MORE THAN NIGHT embodies the heightened sensual experience of place, time and memory.Read More »

  • Carolee Schneemann – Kitch’s Last Meal (1976)

    Carolee Schneemann1971-1980DocumentaryExperimentalUSA

    Quote:
    Kitch’s Last Meal is a film project in which the artist documented the quotidian experiences of her life in rural New York with her partner, English filmmaker and artist Anthony McCaIl and, and their cat Kitch. Schneemann explained that the film was “based on the continuous textures of a shared daily life of a couple – both artists – living in the country.Read More »

  • William Rotsler – The Godson (1971)

    USA1971-1980CrimeEroticaWilliam Rotsler

    Marco is the ambitious godson of a crime boss. His attempt to quickly rise to the top leads to his downfall.Read More »

  • April Wright – Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the Movie Palace (2019)

    USA2011-2020April WrightDocumentary

    The evolution of the movie business over the past century, from penny arcades and nickelodeons, to the grand movie palaces built by the studios, and what happened over the years as they were challenged by television and cell-phone cinema.Read More »

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