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Somewhere in the distant future … the United Nations have decided on a new system of imprisonment as an answer to escalating street violence: VORTEX, a mysterious and completely isolated prison complex that is said to securely keep anyone arriving from ever going back.

Vincent, a constructional engineer in his mid-thirties, is attacked by a man in a dark alleyway. To protect his own life, he shoots the man. Vincent must stand trial for murder. Despite his protest and affirmations that he only acted in self-defense, he is found guilty and sent to VORTEX, where according to the judge, he will have to fulfill a certain “rate” each week.Read More »

Description: – ”The 40 Labor [the manufacturer firm] as a faithful conservative reaches back – his generation only – to the tradition looking like the lost one. To the twentyfold years’ avantgarde, the ones of sixty filmlanguage-his narration revolution, to the seventy ones’ experimentation. And to the postmodern one which recalling was kept always, for which all this fits shakily under the world’s big umbrella, ( everything else – and the contrary of everything – too).
Buharov brothers strong and effective pictures are dreamed onto the linen, their work lasts caught if we understand nothing from him. We do not recognise their world’s rules, we feel it though these rules his strength.” – Báron GyörgyRead More »

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Polish-born Jean Epstein’s Finis Terrae is momentous.

While every film exists on a sliding scale of expression whose opposite poles are documentary and fiction, this film in particular does more than merely combine the two modes; it anticipates generic (as distinct from stylistic) attempts – poetic docudrama; Italian Neorealism – to fuse them. How successful Epstein’s film is remains in dispute; its importance is incontestable.

The initial action is set on Bannec, a Breton islet. It is summer. Two boys, in their teens or, perhaps, early twenties, are on the islet to work. These dear friends are Jean-Marie and Ambroise (played by Jean-Marie Laot and Ambroise Rouzic). They quarrel; Ambroise withdraws from Jean-Marie and another boy in their group as a cut finger causes infection and saps his health. Jean-Marie attempts to row himself to Ouessant, on the mainland, but hasn’t the strength. Braving the elements, which include dense fog, Jean-Marie takes over, attempting to bring Ambroise to a medical doctor; meanwhile, the doctor is heading to Bannec to attend to the sick boy. Will the two vessels miss one another in the fog and tragedy result?
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“De Gérard Blain, on se souvient d’abord de l’acteur qui accompagna les débuts de la Nouvelle-Vague, que ce soit chez Chabrol (le beau Serge , les cousins) ou Truffaut (les mistons). On oublie un peu trop vite qu’il fut également un cinéaste passionnant, laissant une œuvre (huit films) marginale et secrète qu’on aimerait pouvoir découvrir plus facilement.Read More »

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A spiral design spins dizzily. It’s replaced by a spinning disk. These two continue in perfect alternation until the end: a spiral design, a disk. Each disk is labelled and can be read as it rotates. The messages, in French, feature puns and whimsical rhymes and alliteration. The final message comments on the spiral motif itself.Read More »

Synopsis:
With its title taken from Georges Bataille’s journal Acéphale (literally, a headless man, but figuratively expressing the need to go beyond rational ways of thinking), Deval’s film is the most literary of the Zanzibar works. The film opens with an illustrative image: a head in the process of being shaved, in close up. This image is accompanied not by the sound of an electric razor but an electric saw, suggesting the need to achieve a tabula rasa by radical means. The story follows the adventures of a young man and his friends as they wander through a barely recognizable post–May 1968 Paris. In documenting the by-gone expressions and gestures of the ’68 generation in France, Acéphale becomes something of an anthropological film that reveals the rites and beliefs of the ideological novitiates.Read More »

“The small ones get gassed and the bigger ones shot…”

Euthanizer is a violent summer noir. It tells the story of Veijo Haukka, a 50-year-old mechanic, whose second job is to put sick pets to sleep. But what happens when he decides to save the wrong person’s dog? The themes revolve around animal rights, suffering and death. But the real story is not about good or evil – it’s about the stupidity of absolute men.Read More »

Released the same year as Jean Epstein’s “La Chute de la Maison Usher”, this is the American avant-garde version of Poe’s classic short story.

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“The Fall of the House of Usher” combines European influences with something home crafted. James Sibley Watson Jr. had seen the German expressionist film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” more than once during its 1921 New York City run. Not only do USHER’s impossibly angled sets draw from that film, but the top-hatted, cloaked “traveler” (played in expressionist makeup by Melville Webber) seems to echo the figure of Dr. Caligari himself. Less obvious now is the French influence. Whereas CALIGARI expressed a madman’s consciousness through set design and stylized acting alone, French experimental filmmaking of the twenties typically represented disturbed mental states through elaborate camera tricks and optical distortions. Indeed, such a style animates the more celebrated 1928 version of Poe’s story, Jean Epstein’s feature-length “La Chute de la Maison Usher”. Read More »

Plot:
Based on the best selling autobiography by Irish expat Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes follows the experiences of young Frankie and his family as they try against all odds to escape the poverty endemic in the slums of pre-war Limerick. The film opens with the family in Brooklyn, but following the death of one of Frankie’s siblings, they return home, only to find the situation there even worse. Prejudice against Frankie’s Northern Irish father makes his search for employment in the Republic difficult despite his having fought for the IRA, and when he does find money, he spends the money on drink.Read More »