from Hans-Bernhard Moeller and George Lellis, “Volker Schlöndorff’s Cinema”

Volker Schlöndorff based his film “Die Moral der Ruth Halbfass” on a rather spectacular murder case that involved a rich Düsseldorff industrialist’s wife, Minouche Schubert. The case was the stuff of tabloid newspaper exposés, and to some extent “The Morals of Ruth Halbfass” was a calculated attempt by Schlöndorff to win over a popular audience.Read More »

For Nina, her husband Frieder, and their daughter Charlotte, a new house in a new town could mean the beginning of a phase of domestic bliss. But Nina is having her doubts; she stands about in the half-empty rooms, feeling thoroughly alienated. Suddenly, without saying a word, she decides to leave.Read More »

With both Don Camillo and his communist archenemy Peppone away in Rome, the little Italian village of Brescello is at last a haven of peace. But this happy state of affairs doesn’t last long… The news that the villagers plan to demolish an ancient chapel and build a House of the People in its place soon reaches the ears of Don Camillo, now comfortably ensconced in the Vatican. Appalled by this proposed act of desecration, the priest hurries back to his former village and is soon caught up in yet another blood-and-guts tussle with the troublesome Peppone.Read More »

Sohrab, a provincial young writer, is lost in the desert on the way to Tehran to get a publication license for his book on old Persian poetry, but the trip involves some bizarre events.Read More »

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“I am filming the outside in order to look inside,” Robert Frank once said about his aesthetics. In Keep Busy his chosen home of Nova Scotia serves for the first time as the “outside” in an examination of the “inside.” The protagonists’ astounding verbal gymnastics and often incomprehensible interactions tend to descend into nonsense, and with the syncopated rhythm of its action and dialogue, this film is reminiscent of the playful and parodying elements of the Beat fantasy Pull My Daisy. The interweaving of documentary and fiction with the syncopated rhythm of its action and dialogue presents an absurd buzz of activity reminiscent of Beckett’s abstract comic grotesque.Read More »

It’s firstly the portrait of an area, France’s north coast between Dunkirk and Calais, where Olivier Derousseau lives and works: ransacked landscapes, port installations, plumes of smoke from the chimneys of petrochemical facilities, blown by the wind… It’s also a musical suite in five parts, a kind of minimalist blues lovingly composed in memory of time and people that have disappeared: the constant bass of juggernauts on the motorway, the percussion of the wind in the microphones, all the world’s sounds blending into a repetitive guitar thread. And it’s a melancholy meditation on the stuff of days, the flesh of the future, on irretrievable erasure and the traces waiting and hoping to be saved.Read More »

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The long way around the barn never looked so good. Larry Gottheim composed BARN RUSHES from eight tracking shots tracing the same arc around a barn in different conditions. The fact that nothing changes makes it all the much more apparent that everything does: a meditative approach that Tony Conrad described as “a textbook of atmosphere, camera vision and lighting, as they relate personal concept to purely visual relationships.” The simplicity of the film’s structure echoes the functional design of the barn while simultaneously suggesting a distinctly cinematic equivalent to Claude Monet’s serial views of Rouen Cathedral. – Max GoldbergRead More »

Rome, 1968: at the pinnacle of his artistic career, Pino Pascali died in an accident. 50 years later the Pascali Museum in Apulia—where Pino was born—buys and exhibits one of his works. This is the story of a work of art returning to its origins told through Pino Musi and Pino Pascali’s photographs.Read More »

A would-be movie producer (Griffin Dunne) strives to convince a self-help guru (Dennis Hopper) to let him film his book. As the guru is only interested in money, the producer solicits the help of a shady businessman (Christopher Walken) and the guru’s own secretary (Ileana Douglas), who wants to write movie scripts (a horror story about brain-scraping monsters). -John SackstederRead More »