Kobayashi Masaki’s 1968 Toho film about a man beaten to the point of deafness by his superior officer during WWII. He meets him again through his work as an inventor, and struggles through the challenge of his son’s romantic interest in the Officer’s daughter.Read More »
A powerful and utterly brutal Soviet propaganda broadside levelled at the Catholic church.
Compelling in its prolific use of facial close-up shots.
Cast note:
Krest I Mauzer marks the first film appearance of; Nikolay Kutuzov, who would later appear in Tarkovskys Andrei Rublev (1966) and in the film Viy (1967) and Alexei Pirogov, who would go on to become a Bolshoi soloist (1931-48).Read More »
Quote:
The moving camera shapes the screen image with great purposefulness, using the frame of a window as fulcrum upon which to wheel about the exterior scene. The zoom lens rips, pulling depth planes apart and slapping them together, contracting and expanding in concurrence with camera movements to impart a terrific apparent-motion to the complex of the object-forms pictured on the horizontal-vertical screen, its axis steadied by the audience’s sense of gravity. The camera’s movements in being transferred to objects tend also to be greatly magnified (instead of the camera the adjacent building turns). About four years of studying the window-complex preceded the afternoon of actual shooting (a true instance of cinematic action-painting). The film exists as it came out of the camera barring one mechanically necessary mid-reel splice. –K. J.Read More »
ELECTRIC EDWARDIANS: THE FILMS OF MITCHELL & KENYON
Probably the most exciting film discovery of recent times, the films of Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon were commissioned by travelling exhibitors at the dawn of the twentieth century for screening in town halls, at village fetes or local fairs. Advertised as ‘local films for local people’, the audience paid to see their neighbours, children, family and themselves on the screen, glimpsed at local football matches, leaving work, marching in civic processions or enjoying the annual works holidays.Read More »
This movie is part of Alpha Blue Archive’s Satanic Sickies series.
(description from ABA):
Wacky early 70’s account of Count Dracula loose in Hollywood.Read More »
The life of human beings, seen from birth to old age. Only that this generic life is not represented with humans, but with the artefacts that we the humans have created for our children (or should we say ‘cubs’?), in order to prepare them for life: the toys. So, the film is a collage of scenes in which the toys help us understand better a possible essence of our life.Read More »
Year 1945. The second World War is over and the soldiers from the sisbanded army are returning home. Yet there is still no sign of Joze Malek. His wife Mimika and their children Tincek and olga know only that he had deserted the German army and gone over to the Soviet Red Army. Mimika works a a hired hand for the farmer, Medved, who givesher bread and milk for her child instead of regular wages. This is not at all to the liking of her relative Vanc. One fine day, father Malek comes home and the family is happilly reunited. Vanc tells Jozeabout the agrarian reform, through which the Maleks even get their own plot of land. In exchange of this, they have to remove all the religious symbols from their home.Read More »
Review from The Montreal Gazette – Jan 10, 1970
BEAST ALLEY – directed by Eizo Sugawa; original Japanese version with English subtitles; at the Art Cinema
The only real beast in Beast Alley is a black and white Great Dane, who is incidental to the plot. There are, however, a lot of humans who behave in a rather beastly manner.
There’s a frustrated wife who burns her decrepit husband; an evil old man who preys on unhappy young women; a sinister villain who plays with gasoline and matches; and a host of unscrupulous, corrupt politicians and police detectives.Read More »
Beautiful young Oriko (Mariko Okada) has an unhappy marriage. Her husband Takashi (Tadahiko Sugano), owner of a securities company, has been having an affair and comes home only once in a week at most. In a poetry party, Oriko meets sculptor Mitsuharu (Isao Kimura), who was one of the lovers of Oriko’s deceased poetess mother…Read More »