Confessions of a Sociopath is a 60-minute autobiographical film on digital video and Super 8 film, conceived as a real-life version of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. In this film, Joe Gibbons plays a fictionalized version of himself as he discovers a roomful of Super 8 footage from his own life, detailing events he can no longer recall. This footage shows his earlier film experiments, his descent into destructive behavior, and his “bottoming out” on drugs and alcohol. At a certain point, the films are replaced by random photos, police records, and psychiatric hospital records. In the role of the narrator, Gibbons uses psychiatric terminology to describe his past exploits, as a way of poking fun at both his own misfortune and at psychiatry’s ability to medicalize non-conformity. Through Confessions of a Sociopath, the now-reformed narrator seeks to understand his life, and make amends.Read More »

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
A bizarre, yet mild version of “Sunset Boulevard” a la Warhol, with a bevy of voracious females of varying proportions vying for the casual favors of a passive Joe Dallesandro. The dialogue is fresh, simple, funny, as is the relaxed, improvised acting. Fellatio and demythologized sex make their usual appearance, though – for Morrisey – in a curiously reserved manner. While these desperate people and their always-interrupted sex acts are perhaps too small really to engage one’s concern, Morrisey’s talent for a new, weird kind of naturalism (as in his Trash) now seems fully established. Most notably, sex is both ubiquitous and joyless, an almost inevitable chore that can neither be avoided nor really enjoyed.Read More »

A young woman leaves a state orphanage to find her mother in this interesting examination of
how the overt repression of women in the older pattern of village life has been replaced by
the more subtle sexual and economic exploitation inherent in the apparently freer existence
of young girls in the contemporary city. A key film from Marta Meszaros.Read More »

A newly hired maid for a rich countryside family befriends a post-office clerk who encourages her to rebel against her employers.Read More »

Hans Schnier has earned his living as a clown, though he is in fact a very covert sort of social critic. After enduring a difficult childhood in Bonn during the Second World War, including his mother’s fanatic Nazism, he is appalled to discover many of the people he knows and loves swept deeply into involvement in the Catholic Church.Read More »

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
A high-camp “love story” of an outrageously handsome heroin junkie and his trash-scavenging girlfriend (played by a female impersonator), this film skips from fellatio to seduction to foot fetishism in its attacks on soap opera myths and Hollywood. A playful perversity, an acceptance of the soft underbelly of bourgeois society, a strange poignancy informs this fable of impotence, drugs, and sex. In the climactic love scene, the hero — remaining impotent — suggests to the lusting “girl” — reclining on a rumpled bed among objects gathered from garbage cans — that she use a beer bottle instead; she does, while he solicitously inquires whether she is coming, then holds her hand and promises to do better next time. In a second scene, she accuses him, in rage, of not even letting her “suck” him off. What with an antiwar Welfare worker revealed as a malignant foot fetishist, assorted females as sexual aggressors against the forever innocent male, drug-fixes or penises casually displayed, the mounting intrusions upon the viewers’ value system mark this as a truly seditious work.Read More »

Sara, the daughter of a Jehovah’s Witness, is forced to choose between religion and love when she falls for someone outside her faith.

This film is based on a true story. It is one of the finest films I have seen on the Jehovah’s Witnesses and social control. In the last scene, the girl in the train who looks up and smiles at Sara is the “real life-Sara”. The director got the inspiration for the film from reading her story in a national Danish newspaper in 2006.Read More »

In this autobiographical documentary, filmmaker Naomi Kawase seeks to reach her mother and father who abandoned her at birth.Read More »

A man who has devoted his life to tending roses finally confronts his love objects, castigating them for their preening self-regard and disregard of his own feelings, resulting in a violent catharsis.Read More »