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Kertu (Ursula Ratasepp) is a girl who is different to other people in her village. Extremely fearful and shy, she keeps to herself, and so the word around the village is that she is a simpleton. One day, Kertu falls in love with the village drunk, Villu (Mait Malmsten). Villu, being an alcoholic, and Kertu, with her timid personality, are both outcasts of society. When they start talking one night at the village party, they are pleasantly surprised to find comfort in each other’s company. Villu seems to be the only one who sees Kertu as a normal person, while Kertu is the only one who doesn’t see Villu as a mere drunkard. They spend a happy night together, but that is all they get – the next day, Kertu’s family is convinced that Villu took advantage of their daughter, even though the girl refuses to press charges against him. But little attention is paid to Kertu’s opinion. Read More »

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Gilles and Christine a boy and a girl live in the outskirts of Paris, their families are ineffective and distant and they lead a purposeless life. They steal some records in a supermarket but she is caught and sent to a nursing home by force by her parents. She escapes and follows Gilles to a house where some other youths live. They then decide to go south: Christine has been told there is a commune there, where artists live. So they head south sleeping rough…Read More »

An early (1967) film by Dusan Makavejev, the master of the eastern European dirty joke (WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Montenegro). The passionate affair of a telephone operator and a Marxist rodent exterminator is intercut with lectures on criminology and sexology, with occasional cooking lessons. It’s very funny and, with its ragged arrangement of warring styles and ideologies, very original: it’s like a smutty, sticky-fingered Godard. – Dave Kehr, The Chicago ReaderRead More »

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Out of the Past is so perfect a film noir that it is considered practically a textbook example of the genre. In his first starring role (it had previously been offered to John Garfield and Dick Powell), Robert Mitchum plays Jeff Bailey, the friendly but secretive proprietor of a mountain-village gas station. As Jeff’s worshipful deaf-mute attendant (Dick Moore) looks on in curious fascination, an unsavory character named Joe (Paul Valentine) pulls up to the station, obviously looking for the owner. Jeff is all too aware of Joe’s identity; he’s been dreading this moment for quite some time, knowing full well that it will mean the end of his semi-idyllic existence, not to mention his engagement to local girl Ann (Virginia Huston). In a lengthy flashback, the audience is apprised of the reasons behind Jeff’s discomfort – and thus begins a tale of treachery, betrayal and intrigue that extends into the present day and turns Jeff’s life upside down. Out of the Past was remade in 1984 as Against All Odds, with Jane Greer cast as the mother of her original character. Read More »

The first film of the Yugoslav Black Wave.

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Grad is a psychological drama about the thin line that separates depression and melancholy. It gives us the opportunity to understand that the alienation of the modern socialist man is not just a social problem, but also a poetic aestheticization of urban thinking and behaviour. For Pavlovic, Bapca, and especially Rakonjca, self-destruction is not a defence mechanism, but a lifestyle.

Exploring new areas of old sites, Grad is, in a figurative sense, the first Yugoslavian film that deals with the suburb as a metaphor of alternative culture. Through their analysis of public consciousness, the three directors project their secret Bauhaus, seeking its shadow in the hidden areas of obsolete thought, in the everyday of Socialism.Read More »

Set in a detention camp in Hungary 1869, at a time of guerrilla campaigns against the ruling Austrians, Jancsó deliberately avoids conventional heroics to focus on the persecution and dehumanization manifest in a time of conflict. Filmed in Hungary’s desolate and burning landscape, Jancsó uses his formidable technique to create a remarkable and terrifying picture of war and the abuse of power that still speaks to audiences today.Read More »

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A collection of five stories involving cab drivers in five different cities. Los Angeles – A talent agent for the movies discovers her cab driver would be perfect to cast, but the cabbie is reluctant to give up her solid cab driver’s career. New York – An immigrant cab driver is continually lost in a city and culture he doesn’t understand. Paris – A blind girl takes a ride with a cab driver from the Ivory Coast and they talk about life and blindness. Rome – A gregarious cabbie picks up an ailing man and virtually talks him to death. Helsinki – an industrial worker gets laid off and he and his compatriots discuss the bleakness and unfairness of love and life and death.Read More »

Рисунки. Dessins. Drawings.
by Sergei M. Eisenstein

Hardcover: 228 pages
Publisher: Publishing House “Iskustvo” (Art) (May 30, 1961)
Language: Russian, English, French
Product Dimensions: 62 x 94.8

Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was a Soviet Russian film director and film theorist, a pioneer in the theory and practice of montage. He is noted in particular for his silent films Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928), as well as the historical epics Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944, 1958).

Eisenstein’s book presents his drawings and sketches for his films of different years as well as trilingual texts: essays by Y. Pimenov (“The Drawings of Eisenstein”), Olga Aisenstat (“Eisenstein the Graphic Artist”), Gennady Myasnikov (“Director’s View of the Film”) and Eisenstein himself (“How I Learned to Draw” and “A Few Words about My Drawings”).Read More »

In this documentary within a narrative-and vice versa-a grandiose filmmaker (Alex Ross Perry) arrives in the Yucatán to scout locations for his new movie, a production that will involve exposing the last extant celluloid film stock on the eve of the Mayan Apocalypse. Instead, he finds himself waylaid by the formal schizophrenia of the film in which he himself is a character. Simultaneously a tribute to and a critique of The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper’s seminal obliteration of the boundary separating life and cinema), La última película engages with the impending death of celluloid through a veritable cyclone of film and video formats, genres, modes, and methods. Martin and Peranson have created an unclassifiable work that mirrors the contortions and leaps of the medium’s history and present. An Art of the Real 2014 selection. A M’Aidez Films release (C) Lincoln CenterRead More »