A six-part film by Al Razutis (1973-1984)

56 min. color, sound

These six essays on film/image history reconstruct cinema history by ‘re-imagining’ its origins, and its poetries, and use historical films themselves (as ‘text’) to provide the meanings of their creations. Together, these film essays comprise a critical/structural investigation of silent cinema ending with Segei Eisenstein’s works (for Stalin) – from Lumiere and Melies through surrealism and horros, to montage and propaganda, we ‘re-invent’ epochs in cinema that became its language and culture.Read More »

Quote:
Asako lives in Osaka. She falls in love with Baku, a free-spirit. One day, Baku suddenly disappears. Two years later, Asako now lives in Tokyo and meets Ryohei. He looks just like Baku, but has a completely different personality.Read More »

Quote:
Chris Marker’s ethnographic essay-documentary on Siberia, made in 1957, remains fresh and relevant today. Combining fantasy animation (of woolly mammoths and mammoth buildings) and documentary photography shot by Sacha Vierny, Marker displays above all his amazement at the diversity of Siberia, at once almost pre-historic and post-revolutionary. On the film’s revival at the 1982 New York Film Festival, Village Voice critic Carrie Rickey called it “compassionately detached, playful and eclectic…. What still thrills about Letter from Siberia 25 years after it was made is Marker’s sympathetic ethnography, so much against the grain of the partisan American documentaries of the ’50s where the omniscient voice told you how to read each image.” In one hilarious segment, Marker does include that voice – repeating a scene with a Capitalist-propaganda voice-over and then with a Soviet one.Read More »

Quiet Tarkovskian drama about an old man who lives alone on a deserted island which the Soviet fighter planes use for nighttime target practicing. A young mute boy is sent from the mainland to keep him company. Both are haunted by memories, the boy about his mother and the old man about his younger days as a missionary in Africa.Read More »

Synopsis:
Diana is a Roman wife happily married to sympathetic Paolo but she is keen on playing benign games of seduction with other men while resisting the advances of chic lingerie shop owner Silvio. She narrates her adventures to Paolo in order to stimulate their otherwise monotonous sexual life. However, under the influence of her lesbian friend Antonietta and raunchy sister Nadia, Diana starts to move the ongoings further while Paolo is still prone to believing that events narrated by her are merely fantasies.Read More »

Ms. Cambronne, of British origin, to whom much has been said the “word” of her husband, the press questions in order to know the meaning. But the general refused any explanation and continues to be silent. Finally, Adele, a pretty maid, will build Ms. Cambronne uttering the famous words in a moment of awkwardness.Read More »

Ursula Beyne and her sister Dagmar are two Austrian women on a trip through Italy to find their mother who abandoned them as children, so that they can give her news of their father’s recent passing. Ursula has really taken the news of her father’s passing to heart and is reeling from the loss. So much that she has even developed slight psychic intuition. The two sisters wind up at an incredibly fancy hotel that is run by a man named Roberto Delleri, who is in the process of his own internal power dispute with his wife. Read More »

BBC One London, 8 December 1985 21.15

Synopsis A series of stories by Noel Coward
This week: Bon Voyage
Screenplay by STANLEY PRICE starring
Judy Parfitt , Nigel Havers with Helen Horton
Michael Aldridge
Ursula Howells and Doreen Mantle
Cruises bring the most unlikely people together. That is one of their chief attractions and this particular cruise, on board the SS Mara bound across the Pacific from San Francisco, proves to be no exception.Read More »

Albert Pyun’s unofficial sequel to the 1984 rock & roll fable Streets of Fire called Road to Hell. Shot entirely on green screen.

This rare film is a strange thing. Really good and really bad, really pretty and really ugly, art and not art at all. It is entirely its own thing. A truly unique experience.

A soldier who has been fighting a long war is driven mad because he no longer believes in any purpose or righteous truth behind the killing. He comes home to a surreal world looking for his first and only love from his youth, believing she will rescue him from his demons. On the road to Edge City he encounters two seductive spree killers who oppose his efforts to find his love and the redemption he desperately seeks.Read More »