Synopsis :
When her husband is taken hostage by his striking employees, a trophy wife (Deneuve) takes the reins of the family business and proves to be a remarkably effective leader. Business and personal complications arrive in the form of her ex-lover (Depardieu), a former union leader.Read More »
Description: Everett McGill stars as a 19th Century sailor whose bizarre facial deformity earns him the name “Iguana.” Beaten and tortured by his shipmates, he escapes to a deserted island where he declares war on all of mankind. Soon, a group of shipwrecked sailors and one kidnapped young maiden are made prisoners of Iguana’s brutal slave empire. In a kingdom ruled by savagery and lust, can these survivors face the greatest evil of all?Read More »
The movies of Rustam Khamdamov are impossible to find in the West, and for the most part in his native Russia as well.
Vokaldy paralelder [Vocal Parallels] , which happily has reached its audience, but only after nine years of production due to numerous obstacles and stoppages. What is THIS film about? Again, no definite plot, but a kind of a concert-film. You most probably exclaim in astonishment, absolutely disappointed: What?! A concert? Yes, it’s a surreal, impressionistic concert of classical opera pieces performed by several retired Soviet opera divas: Roza Dzhamanova, Araksiia Davtian, Bibigul’ Tulegenova, and the late Erik Salim-Meriuert (Kurmangaliev), a fantastic countertenor.Read More »
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Before he got all famous with movies like Rosemary’s Baby and The Pianist, Roman Polanski created Knife in the Water, his first feature film.
Water is a small but incredibly engaging movie, taking place during a day trip on a Polish lake. In the film, upscale couple Andrzej and Krystyna (Leon Niemczyk and Jolanta Umecka) drive out to the marina to take a little ride on the water, picking up a tenacious, beefcake hitchhiker (Zygmunt Malanowicz, whose character is unnamed in the film) and letting him go along on the trip. Andrzej goes to outrageous lengths to belittle his passenger, as the two men obliquely battle for the attention of Krystyna. It all comes to a head with Andrzej pushing the non-swimming blonde kid into the water, right after tossing his beloved knife into the drink. And there’s more to come after that.Read More »
This short film is only still-image restoration of an unfinished film.
What is one to make of Bezhin Meadow? What is one to make of Sergei Eisenstein? The questions are in many ways the same as this film maudit and its maker are in much the same boat these days – lost to history both artistic and political. Filmed between 1936 and 1937 Bezhin Meadow was to signal Eisenstein’s return to the Soviet fold after his sojourn in America and the debacle of Que Viva Mexico. What resulted was an even greater debacle in that no sooner had the film neared completion than it was attacked and banned from view – with Eisenstein contributing to the banning by penning an essay in which he ‘confessed’ to the ‘mistakes’ of Bezhin Meadow. Finally adding injury to insult, the sole surviving print of Bezhin Meadow was destroyed – supposedly in a bombing raid during World War II, but just as likely burned outright. Then around 1968 a ‘reconstruction’ of the film was engineered when splices from the editing table, saved by Eisenstein’s wife, Pera Attasheva, were discovered. Cobbled together with a track of Prokoviev music, intertitles fashioned from the original script and cutting continuity and a brief spoken introduction, it exists today as a 35-minute silent film-cum-slide show. Of obvious interest to film scholars, and doubtless pleasing to those who share Roland Barthes’ preference for still images over moving ones, Bezhin Meadow once again begs the question of Eisenstein’s actual value – once the myth of the Great-Individual-Artist-Suffering-at-the-Hands-of-Stalin is scraped away. For all the ups and downs of his career Eisenstein was always Stalin’s favorite filmmaker, never meeting the fate of his teacher Vsevolod Meyerhold. Internationally celebrated, a linchpin of Soviet propaganda, photographed more than any other director in the history of the cinema, Eisenstein was a Movie Star – first, last and always.Read More »
Plot Synopsis: A brilliant pianist, a Polish Jew, witnesses the restrictions Nazis place on Jews in the Polish capital, from restricted access to the building of the Warsaw ghetto. As his family is rounded up to be shipped off to the Nazi labor camps, he escapes deportation and eludes capture by living in the ruins of Warsaw.Read More »
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A young couple move into an apartment, only to be surrounded by peculiar neighbors and occurrences. When the wife becomes mysteriously pregnant, paranoia over the safety of her unborn child begins to control her life.Read More »
14 pages about Sergei Eisenstein and Montage.
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‘Watson and Scotland Yard always work along the line of direct
logic, Sherlock Holmes works not by logic, but by dialectics’. This
dialectics, in its turn, draws on ‘the whole fund of prelogical,
sensuous thought’ that ‘serves as a fund of the language of form’ that
Eisenstein defines as ‘readable expressiveness’. Eisenstein’s
elaborate study of a method of art rooted in ‘the twilight stage of
primitive thought’ moves from folk tales to Shakespeare, Balzac,
Gogol, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Mayakovsky, to come eventually to
the detective story, ‘the most effective genre of literature’ and ‘the
most naked expression of bourgeois society’s fundamental ideas on
property’, as it is told by Poe, Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery
Queen, and Hitchcock in Spellbound.
Writing while he was making Ivan, Eisenstein opens up, in his
characteristic manner, a whole area of thinking on ‘the psychology
of composition’. Published in English for the first time, these lectures
and lecture notes have been assembled and translated by Jay Leyda
and Alan Upchurch.Read More »