Nominated for the Golden Lion in 1961 at the venice Film festival

“Samson” is the story of a Jew, Jakub Gold (Serge Merlin), at the polytechnic university in Warsaw imprisoned and sentenced to 10 years for accidentally killing his friend in German- occupied Poland. In prison he makes several contacts that will factor later in the movie. The prisoners are released when Warsaw is bombed. Jakub is sent to the Warsaw ghetto where the Jews are “doomed to death for the crime of existence” and is assigned to picking up corpses from the streets and helping to provide them with a Jewish burial. Along the way he picks up his own mother. After one such burial Jakub and another man escape from the ghetto. After he escapes he desires to go back into the ghetto to share the fate of his kinsmen. Read More »

What is the meaning of military occupation? Through the testimonies of the soldiers who implemented it, director Avi Mograbi provides insights on how a colonialist occupation works and the logic at work behind those practices. Using the 54-year Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip the director draws us a “Manual for Military Occupation”.Read More »

A plot to steal money from gangsters leads to trouble.Read More »

Official announce:
Young and beautiful Silvana (Ornella Muti) has reached an impasse in her life after the
death of her lover. She is approached by a friend of the deceased, Gabriele (Philippe
Noiret), who proposes to keep her in luxury at his manor house, as long as she will keep
him company and listen to his stories of past love affairs. Initially, Silvana is not attracted
to the older man, and only reluctantly, and in stages, accepts his strange offer. What
follows is a very different tale of seduction and awakening for Silvana, as Gabriele’s tales
impress themselves upon her, and even in a way enter her own life. As much of the film
rests on the verbal stories that Gabriele tell Silvana, a real understanding and
appreciation of the film is of course not possible (for me personally) without an English
translation of the dialogue. However, Muti and Noiret are wonderful to watch, and the film
as such looks good (as photographed by Luigi Verga).Read More »

Roger is a 16-year-old who seeks to lose his virginity in this softcore erotic drama. His initial efforts are unsuccessful, but World War I breaks out and men are seen marching off to battle. Roger goes overboard when he is presented with several amorous opportunities.Read More »

1. Et cetera
1997, 16mm, Color, 33 mins

‘Et cetera’ is a tetralogy of four separate films that seek to examine the various levels at which the reality of human existence functions. Shown at Dhaka Short film festival, 1999, and Cinema Nova Brussels, 2005.

Avikunthak’s foray into filmmaking was directly an attempt at playing with time — all the four films in Et cetera, are directly an attempt at engaging with real time, the fact that they are single shot, single take, unedited films. For him, as a temporal experience they are most linear cinematic narrative, most pure. These films, rather than sculpting in time, were slicing time. However video art has been more successful as an engagement with real time, he says, “I look at my films as an attempt at invoking ‘kaal’ as a metaphysical entity, rather than ‘kaal’ as a temporal category; Et cetera and Kalighat Fetish being articulation of such an invocation.”Read More »

Synopsis
Thérèse de Marsanne (Odette Joyeux) kills her lover Pierre as he is an obstacle to her marriage with the wealthy Count of Vetheuil (Jacques Castelot). To get rid of the corpse, she obtains the assistance of Julien (Roger Blin) a poor young boy madly in love with her by promising him ” une nuit d’amour ” (a night of love, title of the film). After his sinister job done, Julien learns from Thérèse herself that he was part of a sordid crime and runs away terrorized, hence becoming the obvious culprit. Hunted down, he will eventually show at at Thérèse’s wedding to get arrested and accept his fate.Read More »

Quote:
Working between text, sound, and moving-image, Hayama crafts profoundly beautiful short films whose obliquely mythopoetic narratives explore what might best be termed “ecological anomie.” Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as the Lumière brothers, medieval Japanese poetry, and proto-scientific treatises by Goethe and Aristotle, Hayama’s works probe the essential loneliness experienced by a human-kind which has been estranged from the unity of nature by our modern systems of perception and knowledge production. While many experimental filmmakers operating in a romantic mode have taken nature as a subject – often seeking to spectacularize her optical presence through the creation of “transcendent” imagery – Hayama’s films are characterized by an uncommon sense of aesthetic restraint, a conscious preservation of critical distance in the face of nature’s inscrutability and our own primordial entanglement within it.Read More »

Plot Synopsis by Hal Erickson
Only faintly related to the old stage play The Argyle Case, The Argyle Secrets is based on a half-hour radio program originally heard on CBS’ Suspense. In the immediate postwar years, several above-suspicion Americans attempt to hide their past collaborations with the Nazis. Reporter William Gargan refuses to let sleeping dogs lie, however, and tracks down some of these fifth columnists. The film’s “Macguffin” is a set of incriminating papers, which are stolen early in the proceedings. The supporting cast of this Film Classics programmer includes future Danny Thomas Show co-star Marjorie Lord and former “Dick Tracy” portrayer Ralph Byrd. The Argyle Secrets was written and directed by one-time MGM film editor Cyril Endfield, later the man behind the megaphone on Zulu (1964).Read More »