• António-Pedro Vasconcelos – Os Imortais AKA The Imortals (2003)

    2001-2010António-Pedro VasconcelosDramaPortugalThriller

    Quote:
    Antonio-Pedro Vasconcelos’ Os Imortais (The Immortals) ironically opens with a funeral. The last of the immortals is present among the crowd, the others having died or disappeared over the years. The man being buried, however, is the policeman who found out about the criminal secrets of the immortals. This is an intriguing start for a mediocre film, in which this tongue-in-cheek sort of cleverness is reserved for the opening scene only. The “immortals” are a group of Portuguese war veterans who earned their title in the colonial wars in Africa in the early 1970s. When Portuguese East Africa became Mozambique, they returned to their fatherland only to feel left out and misunderstood. Read More »

  • Valérie Donzelli – Marguerite et Julien AKA Marguerite & Julien (2015)

    2011-2020DramaFranceRomanceValérie Donzelli

    Quote:
    Julien and Marguerite de Ravalet, son and daughter of the Lord of Tourlaville, have loved each other since childhood. But as they grow up, their affection veers toward voracious passion. Scandalized by their affair, society hounds them until, unable to resist their feelings, they flee. A contemporary fairytale about desire, passion, hope, love and death.Read More »

  • Patrice Chéreau – La Reine Margot AKA Queen Margot [169 min.] (1994)

    Patrice Chéreau1991-2000DramaEpicFrance

    Synopsis:
    Young Queen Margot finds herself trapped in an arranged marriage amidst a religious war between Catholics and Protestants. She hopes to escape with a new lover, but finds herself imprisoned by her powerful and ruthless family.Read More »

  • Tabea Blumenschein & Ulrike Ottinger – Die Betörung der blauen Matrosen AKA The Enchantment of the Blue Sailors (1975)

    Tabea Blumenschein1971-1980ExperimentalGermanyUlrike Ottinger

    Quote:
    In THE BETRUCTION OF THE BLUE SAILORS, Tabea Blumenschein “plays four different roles in changing appearances and in fantastic costumes that structure the film: a mythical figure that permeates the film on desert sand with siren song; a bird that is killed; a Hawaiian girl and a Sailors. While the siren, accompanied by Asian music, strides along the desert, sailors and birds become the victims of perverted naturalness in the form of the wild Hawaiian girl.” (Claudia Hoff) In the collage principle, areas and quotations from commercialized everyday life and the music, which ranges from noises, sacred gongs, Hawaiian music, Schuricke melodies, musette waltzes to Burmese songs and cultic Ketchak rhythms, and the language – literary texts by Apollinaire, which already use the quotation method, phrases from the world of American show business (Hollywood veteran star), lamentations of a Russian silent film mother […], come satire, the grotesque, the caricature, the clown and the doll up; and it is the deep meaning of these forms of expression, through the demonstration of the marionette-ness, the mechanization of life, through the apparent and real torpor, to let us imagine a different life. (Raoul Hausman). (From the conversation between Ulrike Ottinger/ Tabea Blumenschein and Hanne Bergius)Read More »

  • José Cottinelli Telmo – A Canção de Lisboa AKA A Song of Lisbon (1933)

    1931-1940ClassicsComedyJosé Cottinelli TelmoPortugal

    Quote:
    How happy and proud they are those two ladies back in their Tras-os-Montes region! Thanks to them, their bright nephew can study medicine in Lisbon and may already have become a physician. Little do they know. Not only has Vasco wasted his time drinking, dancing and picking up girls but he has just failed his examination. To crown it all, his two aunts announce their visit. Totally distraught, Vasco tries to make them believe he is already a doctor, but they are not taken in and decide to cut off their support from him…Read More »

  • Laurence Harvey – Welcome to Arrow Beach (1974)

    1971-1980HorrorLaurence HarveyThrillerUSA

    A hippie girl wandering on a California beach is taken in by a Korean War veteran who lives in a nearby mansion with his sister. The girl soon begins to suspect that the mansion is home to some very strange goings-on….Read More »

  • Bruce Baillie – Quixote (1965)

    1961-1970Bruce BaillieExperimentalUSA

    Bruce Baillie’s (…) Quixote (1965) stands alongside other synoptic 60s masterpieces such as Stan Brakhage’s The Art of Vision and Peter Kubelka’s Unsere Afrikareise, which use dense collages of diverse images in an attempt to make sense of a troubling world. In Quixote wild horses and a basketball game are part of a cross-country trip that ends with an antiwar demonstration in Manhattan. Baillie says he’s depicting our culture as one of conquest, but his film’s greatness lies not in its social analysis, which can seem as simpleminded as equating businessmen with pigs. Rather it’s in the way his superimposed and intercut images float almost weightlessly in space, creating a hypnotic sense of displacement that lets us see beyond aggression.Read More »

  • Florent-Emilio Siri – Cloclo (2012)

    2011-2020DramaFlorent-Emilio SiriFrance

    A biopic of French pop star Claude Francois, most famous for co-writing the song ‘My Way’. Tracing his life from his childhood in Egypt through his success in France to his untimely death in Paris in 1978.Read More »

  • Dan Graham – Performer/Audience/Mirror (1975)

    1971-1980Dan GrahamExperimentalPerformanceUSA

    Quote:
    A performer faces a seated audience. Behind the performer, covering the back wall (parallel to the frontal view of the seated audience), is a mirror reflecting the audience.Read More »

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