In the late 1950s and early 1960s, while French Left Bank Cinema flourished, parallel movements flowered in other countries; in Norway, the trend enabled director Erik Løchen’s career to flourish.
Løchen had made The Hunt in 1959, a fascinating, modernist work that paralleled the better-known experiments with cinematic storytelling of Resnais, Godard, Antonioni and others. Løchen returned to feature films in 1972 with an even more radical cinematic experience.
The story of a film crew trying to make a political film, Remonstrance brilliantly captures the posing and grandstanding that sometimes accompanies political discussions around correct form in art, but Løchen goes his characters one better. He designed Remonstrance so that its five reels could be shown in any order, rendering 120 possible versions of the film.
Film Society of Lincoln CenterRead More »

One of the treasures of African cinema, Senegalese master Mambéty’s long-delayed follow-up to his canonical Touki Bouki is a hallucinatory comic adaptation of Swiss avant-garde writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit, which in Mambéty’s imagining follows a now-rich woman returning to her poor desert hometown to propose a deal to the populace: her fortune, in exchange for the death of the man who years earlier abandoned her and left her with his child. Per its title, Hyenas is a film of sinister, mocking laughter, and a biting satire of a contemporary Senegal whose post-colonial dreams are faced with erosion by western materialism.Read More »

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A Chinese girl named Xingxi travels alone to Alor Setar, a town in Northern Malaysia. As the result of a blown tire, she experiences three variant adventures. She introduces herself to people as different identities with mysterious secrets. Brooke claims herself a traveler in the first adventure, but an anthropologist in the second adventure. In the third adventure, Brooke is a disheartened woman who comes across French writer Pierre. Two lonely travelers become intimate friends. They share their respective insights into life, death, and love. As the enigmatic story of Alor Setar begins to unfold, Brooke tells Pierre the true reason why she has come. Nature divulges her sought for love with the magical Blue Tears.Read More »

In this adaptation made during the the London Blitz of George Bernard Shaw’s edgy comedy of the same name, Wendy Hiller as the idealistic title character is running a Salvation Army shelter in the East End that aims to save the souls of the destitute while preserving their physical well-being. She becomes engaged to the sceptical, unworldly Adolphus Cusins (Rex Harrison), a professor of Ancient Greek who discards his agnosticism and joins the Salvation Army to be near his fiancee. Cusins is then startled to learn that Major Barbara in fact comes from a privileged background – she is the grand-daughter of an earl on her mother’s side, and her long-absent estranged father Andrew Undershaft (a young Robert Morley) is a multi-millionaire arms manufacturer.Read More »

TCM Review :
The story behind Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) is as exciting as the film. A masterpiece adventure originally running nearly seven hours, it breaks new ground with practically every shot, was filmed with techniques twenty-five years ahead of its time, and was rescued from oblivion by an obsessed teenager.Read More »

Dr David Sorell (Louis Jourdan), a psychiatrist specializing in the occult, becomes involved in the case of a man possessed by a spirit in an antique mirror. The man’s fiancée discovers that the mirror is able to bring back her former boyfriend, who had been killed in a car accident.Read More »

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Completed a year after his death in 1983, this program presents the definitive biography of Spain’s renowned Surrealist film maker and iconoclast, Luis Buñuel. Using photographs, film excerpts, and numerous interviews with Bunuel, the video chronicles his early friendships with Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca, the stormy reactions to many of his groundbreaking films, and the influence he has had on international cinema. Among those interviewed are directors Federico Fellini, John Huston, and Jose L. Saenz De Heredia; Buñuel’s wife, Jeanne Rucar, and son Juan; actor Francisco Rabal; and Octavio Paz.Read More »

Continuing its exploration of the weirdest moments of cinema, Cult Epics brings us Vintage Erotica anno 1940 (aka Les Archives d’Eden), a collection of French porn vignettes covering the early years of celluloid sex from 1900 to 1940.Read More »

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A private investigator in Chile hires someone to work as a mole at a retirement home where a client of his suspects the caretakers of elder abuse.Read More »