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The Tramp meets a poor blind girl selling flowers on the streets and falls in love with her. The blind girl mistakes him for a millionaire. Since he wants to help her and doesn’t want to disappoint her, he keeps up the charade. He befriends a drunk millionaire, works small jobs like street sweeping, and enters a boxing contest, all to raise money for an operation to restore her sight.

CHAPLIN HILARIOUS IN HIS ‘CITY LIGHTS’; Tramp’s Antics in Non-Dialogue Film Bring Roars of Laughter at Cohan Theatre. TAKES FLING AT “TALKIES” Pathos Is Mingled With Mirth in a Production of Admirable Artistry.

Charlie Chaplin, master of screen mirth and pathos, presented at the George M. Cohan last night before a brilliant gathering his long-awaited non-dialogue picture, “City Lights,” and proved so far as he is concerned the eloquence of silence. Many of the spectators either rocking in their seats with mirth, mumbling as their sides ached, “Oh, dear, oh, dear,” or they were stilled with sighs and furtive tears. And during a closing episode, when the Little Tramp sees through the window of a flower shop the girl who has recovered her sight through his persistence, one woman could not restrain a cry.Read More »

A film unearthed from the buried landscape of the American nightmare, TRASH HUMPERS follows a small group of elderly Peeping Toms through the shadows and margins of an unfamiliar world. Crudely documented by the participants themselves, we follow the debased and shocking actions of a group of true sociopaths the likes of which have never been seen before.Read More »

One of the most distinguished filmmakers working today, David Lynch is a director whose vision of cinema is firmly rooted in fine art. He was motivated to make his first film as a student because he wanted a painting that ‘would really be able to move’. Most existing studies of Lynch, however, fail to engage fully with the complexities of his films’ relationship to other art forms. “The Film Paintings of David Lynch” fills this void, arguing that Lynch’s cinematic output needs to be considered within a broad range of cultural references. Aimed at both Lynch fans and film studies specialists, Allister Mactaggart addresses Lynch’s films from the perspective of the relationship between commercial film, avant-garde art, and cultural theory. Individual Lynch works – “The Elephant Man”, “Blue Velvet”, “Twin Peaks”, “Lost Highway”, “The Straight Story”, “Mulholland Drive”, and “Inland Empire” – are discussed in relation to other films and directors, illustrating that the solitary, or seemingly isolated, experience of film is itself socially, culturally, and politically important. “The Film Paintings of David Lynch” offers a unique perspective on an influential director, weaving together a range of theoretical approaches to Lynch’s films to make exciting new connections among film theory, art history, psychoanalysis, and cinema.Read More »

Interesting doc about Dylan and the Band’s collaboration from 65 through 76. Interviews with Garth Hudson, John Simon, Barney Hoskyns, Syd Griffin etc. Rare footage from IOW 69, Tour 66. Sound excerpts from unreleased Basement Tapes.Read More »

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Cinema feeds on stories of love and death, but how often do filmmakers really offer new or challenging perspectives on either? Michael Haneke’s ‘Amour’ is devastatingly original and unflinching in the way it examines the effect of love on death, and vice versa. It’s a staggering, intensely moving look at old age and life’s end, which at its heart offers two performances of incredible skill and wisdom from French veteran actors Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva.

The Austrian director of ‘Hidden’ and ‘The White Ribbon’ offers an intimate, brave and devastating portrait of an elderly Parisian couple, Anne (Riva) and Georges (Trintignant), facing up to a sudden turn in their lives. Haneke erects four walls to keep out the rest of the world, containing his drama almost entirely within one apartment over some weeks and months. The only place we see this couple outside their flat, right at the start, is at the theatre, framed from the stage. Haneke reverses the perspective for the rest of the film. The couple’s flat becomes a theatre for their stories: past, present and future.Read More »

A forest glade. A flickering. A cutting sound accompanies and dissects the simplicity of the image immediately, while the camera simultaneously moves backwards – we are distancing ourselves, entering into something new. The journey begins. A child on a path. It remains in the blackness, its hand, its face. The forest. Two universes encountering one another.
With a steady touch and a great sensitivity for movement and rhythm, for form and the fluidity of colours, Sylvia Schedelbauer tells of a search and a discovery. In the reverse motion of objects, time and memory are laid bare and speak of the beauty of the search and the uncovered treasure.Read More »

Neo-Liberalism: An Accounting is UMass Crotty Hall Inaugural Lecture by Noam Chomsky. It was recorded April, 2017.Read More »

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Photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark offers another look at the inner workings of urban youth culture in this comedy drama. Jonathan (Jonathan Velasquez) is a teenaged El Salvadorian refugee living in a primarily Mexican-American and African-American neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. Jonathan and a handful of fellow Salvadorian émigrés who are his best friends stand out like sore thumbs on the block, due less to their national origin than because they’ve rejected the hip-hop music and fashion around them in favor of old-school punk, as favored by the Ramones and latter-day Latino bands such as Suicidal Tendencies. Jonathan and his pals Kiko (Francisco Pedrasa), Eddie (Eddie Velasquez), Porky (Usvaldo Panameno), and Spermball (Milton Velasquez) have a group of their own, and Jonathan, a sweet but streetwise kid who has a way with the girls, is the lead singer. Read More »

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A group of inhabitants of a correctional colony for people of small stature raises a riot against the local order. Tired of adhering to the many rules that require good behavior from them, they decide to become bad. Their immediate leader (also a dwarf) is forced to take refuge in one of the premises while waiting for the police to arrive. Meanwhile, the rioters are having fun: they beat dishes and glasses, start a car and eventually break it, kill a big pig, scoff at blind dwarfs living next door, arrange cockfights, set fire to flowerpots with their favorite colors, and so on.Read More »