Anthony Stern’s San Francisco, could be described as a city film and allied with Jean Vigo’s A Propos de Nice (France, 1930) and Walther Ruttman’s Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a City, Germany, 1927). It could also be described as a film of visible and invisible journeys. It moves between day and night, the city centre and its outskirts, the shops and the counter-culture. The invisible journey travels between the two 1960s psychedelic capitals of the world, San Francisco and London; Stern shot the film in the city of its namesake but returned to edit it in London, firstly at the BFI Production Board’s facilities at Waterloo and then at the Arts Lab at Drury Lane.Read More »

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This historic 1974 recording of King Lear brings to audiences today both a great production of Shakespeare’s classic, but also a performance of towering brilliance from the formidable James Earl Jones. This recording, made at Joseph Papp’s legendary open air New York Shakespeare Festival, also captures the brilliant performances from the late Raul Julia, alongside a great cast that includes Paul Sovrino, Ellen Holly, Rosalind Cash, and Lee Chamberlain.Read More »

Sain (The Closed Vagina) 57min, 16mm

The Nihon University Cinema Club (Nichidai Eiken) was an organization formed in 1957 by Hirano Katsumi, Kanbara Hiroshi, Ko Hiro, and Jonouchi Motoharu. Employing a collective production method that eschewed the name of the author, the group mixed documentary and surrealist tendencies to confront the increasing political tensions
arising in Japan. Sparked by the security treaty with the US (Anpo) the group reformed and Wan (1961) was the first work by the newly formed collective. Read More »

After killing a man that raped one of his students, teacher Wakizaka finds himself embroiled in a plot being blackmailed into looking after a huge amount of cash. With tensions mounting and anxiety setting in, Wakizaka decides to spend the money, knowing the consequences of his actions will be of the most dire kind.Read More »

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For his career-long excavation of the American national character, James Benning found two of his most striking case studies in a pair of murderers whose crimes took place 30 years and more than half the country apart. Landscape Suicide, like many of Benning’s films, consists largely of footage of places, landscapes, and roads accompanied by—or paired with—speech. The speech, in this case, comes from the court testimonies of Bernadette Protti, who stabbed one of her California high-school classmates to death in 1984 over an insult, and Ed Gein, the infamous Plainfield, Wisconsin, killer who made trophies out of his victim’s bodies, read aloud by actors directly to the camera. Benning’s America is a country terrified equally by the wilderness to which it’s in thrall and the civilization it’s set up to keep that wilderness at bay—and nowhere in his work does that tension become more chillingly clear.Read More »

In 2010, Godard’s Film Socialisme explores the sinking of political ideals in Europe. In 2012, the Costa Concordia, which had served as an allegorical platform for Godard, sank in front of the cameras of passengers and the world. In 2018, Paul Grivas Film Catastrophe, looks at images of the disaster to revisit the film factoryRead More »

A woman, a child, a man and another child, the noise of bombs falling and of planes passing by, in a urban landscape destroyed by war.
A man dies before he had time to write on the back of La liberté guidant le peuple de Delacroix: that could be the plot, just the enigma consisting of a missing word. A question opened before death, resolved by a child, the shadow and spirit of Gavroche.Read More »

Aspiring to be admitted to a good university and to become a lawyer, Tasiro Yuusuke, a tenth-grader from Kyushu, enrols in a prestigious high school in Tokyo. Plans are made for him to live in his uncle’s house, part of which is rented out while his uncle is abroad on business. A realtor’s mistakes leaves Tasiro sharing the house with Kei Yamaba, the most beautiful girl in the school, who is also his classmate. There is the risk that their unexpected ‘co-habitation’ will be discovered by the school authorities. While he grows increasingly attracted to her, he is often irritated by her innocent and nonchalant attitude towards their predicament. They each develop other romantic attachments, but end up turning to each other.Read More »

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French colonists in Africa, several months behind in the news, find themselves at war with their German neighbors. Deciding that they must do their proper duty and fight the Germans, they promptly conscript the local native population. Issuing them boots and rifles, the French attempt to make “proper” soldiers out of the Africans. A young, idealistic French geographer seems to be the only rational person in the town, and he takes over control of the “war” after several bungles on the part of the others. (IMDb)Read More »