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It is the story of Mugur Calinescu, a Romanian teenager who wrote graffiti messages of protest against the regime of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and was subsequently apprehended, interrogated, and ultimately crushed by the secret police.Read More »
Shows the surveillance of a woman by overseers who have judged her to be mad. What is most provocative about this film is that it proposes multiple credible points of view even as the woman is being certified insane by the Censors. We voyage into the skull of a woman and peer out to a monumentally static cold waste with planetary slow motion. It is the bunker-eye view.
‘A Cold Draft is drawn from (a drawing of) the conditions produced by ‘liberal’ economics in the UK in the 1980’s. Truth is reckless, certainty a sham, but such is faith in repetition that line by line certainty is drawn. The account may be fictitious, a representation, but the events are the result of the imposition of private ownership.’ – Lis Rhodes 2008Read More »
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December 1989. Jan Wysocki (Wojciech Wysocki), a former Wrocław oppositionist, becomes a member of the Senate committee to settle the activities of the communist secret service. In order to stop him, a group of Escorts hit his family. As a result, Marek (Jan Frycz), Wysocki’s younger brother, is severely beaten to a rubbish dump. Here, fate will meet him with the eccentric “Frenchwoman” (Krystyna Janda). Together they will create a pair of outsiders: he doesn’t know who she is, she lives in her own Paris – they both need each other.Read More »
At the end of 1970, the Filmmuseum in the City Museum of Munich showed a small Sirk retrospective (six productions from All That Heaven Allows to Imitation of Life). Fassbinder watched all of the films in this showcase and was deeply moved: “That really breaks you up in the movie theater. You understand something about the world and what it is doing to you.” This cinematic experience must have been a revelation for him. He described his impressions vividly in an extensive essay, and came to the conclusion: “I have seen six films by Douglas Sirk. Among them are the finest films in the world.” The young filmmaker went to visit the Hollywood veteran, who was now living in the Swiss canton of Ticino. And when the almost eighty-year-old director was teaching at the Munich Academy of Television and Film (HFF/M), Fassbinder took on one of the parts in an academic production that Sirk was supervising. (He played in Bourbon Street Blues, the film adaptation of a one-act play by the well-known writer Tennessee Williams). Sirk’s work experienced a renaissance, not least of all thanks to Fassbinder’s essay, but the influence Sirk exerted on him has nevertheless been somewhat exaggerated.Read More »
A passive mother who dedicates her life to her husband and children. Stuck in daily, repetitive, mundane chores, she has made herself as little as she possibly could. When a magic trick goes wrong at her 4-year-old son’s birthday party, an avalanche of coincidental absurdities befalls the family. The magician turns her husband, the authoritarian father, into a chicken. The mother is now forced to come to the fore and take care of the family while moving heaven and earth to bring her husband back. As she tries to survive, she goes through a rough and absurd transformation.Read More »
This is one of the worst Columbia science fiction serials. That said, it does have a couple of interesting qualities. First, it has some very unusual cliff hangers, but there’s no set up that allows you to guess ‘How do they get out of it?’ Almost every one is a cheat, with Captain Video pulling out a new secret gadget to neutralize the terror, or Gallagher (Don C. Harvey, usually a ‘henchman’ in other serials and movies) in the Control Room twirling dials and flipping switches to save our heroes. When a fire in a well fails to burn them, Captain Video explains that it’s because human bodies from Earth react differently to the atmosphere of Theros. But there’s only one ‘jump out of the car before it explodes / goes over the cliff’ cliff hanger! As usual, it’s the stirring narration by Knox Manning at the end of each episode that teases you into wanting to watch the next chapter.Read More »
Saturday evening, in the suburbs of Paris. Le Relais, a small café-restaurant has just opened. Martine is waiting for customers at the bar. The first to come are regulars: Jeannot, boastful, bitter, aggressive; Guy, joking, playful; Robert, strong, boor. These three have known each other for years, and meet at the Relais every Saturday to deceive their loneliness: Johnny’s wife left with their son; Robert’s one is talking about divorce; Guy is hosted by three old ladies. Everyone goes on about its problems, encouraged by the whisky flowing like water. Talks about horses, games, politics, sex. Happy racists, especially Jeannot. This little world is already well warmed when arrive David, a shy travelling salesman, and Christiane, another regular, familiar with the trio. Christiane and David sat at a table, and talk about their past, the routine of a wasted lives. David is soon drunk, an easy prey for Jeannot. It will be a long night…Read More »
Berlin, the Prenzlauer Berg district. When this summer day is over, nothing will ever be the same again. Only Daniel doesn’t know that yet. The protagonist of this tragicomic scenario is as unsuspecting as he is accustomed to success. His loft apartment is stylish and so is his wife, and nanny has the children under control. Everything is tip-top, bilingual and ready for him to jet off to an audition where a role in a superhero film awaits the celebrated German-Spanish actor. Popping into the bar on the corner, he finds Bruno sitting there. As transpires by the minute, Bruno has been waiting for this moment for a long time. And so this eternally overlooked man – one of reunification’s losers and a victim of the gentrification of what was once East Berlin – takes his revenge. With Daniel as his target.Read More »
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[…]The Hunters (1977), a thematic epilogue to the historical trilogy that centers on a group of middle-aged hunters who discover the perfectly preserved, 30 year-old frozen remains of a partisan (bearing an uncoincidental resemblance to the Byzantine image of Jesus Christ) and, compelled to deliberate on its ‘proper’ disposition, spend a haunted, restless evening confronting their past. Set in post-junta era Greece, the film is a contemporary allegory on the nation’s deliberate suppression of painful and unflattering history and collective deflection of personal accountability.Read More »