• Jean-Jacques Jauffret – Après le sud AKA Heat Wave (2011)

    2011-2020DramaFranceJean-Jacques Jauffret


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    A modern drama freely based on real events. One sweltering afternoon in the south of France, four lives intersect: those of Stéphane and Luigi, two cousins barely out of adolescence, Georges, a retired worker, Amelie, Luigi’s girlfriend, and Anne, Amelie’s mother. Four mundane lives full of hurts, humiliations, fears and fatigue which converge on a tragedy.Read More »

  • Claude Lanzmann – Un vivant qui passe AKA A Visitor from the Living (1997)

    1991-2000Claude LanzmannDocumentaryFrancePolitics

    http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/3128/unvivantquipasse2589648.jpg

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    In 1979, while making his epochal Holocaust film, “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann filmed this interview with Maurice Rossel, a Red Cross doctor from Switzerland who, having visited Auschwitz and Theresienstadt in 1944, gave the latter a highly favorable report. Lanzmann questions Rossel insistently about the deceptions that the Germans forced the Jewish inmates of Theresienstadt to perpetrate for Rossel’s benefit—which fooled the doctor completely. Lanzmann culminates his interview by reading a speech with which the Jewish “mayor” of the concentration camp had welcomed Rossel, which, though vague enough to pass unnoticed by the German captors, resounds unambiguously as a thinly veiled cry for help—and an exhortation to Rossel to not be deceived by appearances. Rossel is easy to despise and easier to mock, but the cold light of his detachment serves as a reminder of the tyrannical deceits that, even now, conceal atrocities. Released in 1997.Read More »

  • Radu Mihaileanu – La source des femmes (2011)

    Drama2011-2020FranceRadu Mihaileanu

    A comedy/drama set in a village and centered on a battle of the sexes, where women threaten to withhold sexual favors if their men refuse to fetch water from a remote well.Read More »

  • Aldo Fabrizi – La famiglia Passaguai AKA The Passaguai Family (1951)

    Comedy1951-1960Aldo FabriziClassicsItaly

    PLOT SYNOPSIS:
    From the comedy “Cabin 27”, by Anton Germano Rossi.
    One Sunday at the beach of Ostia of cavalier Peppe Passaguai with his wife and three children.
    A machine of Roman comicality that has its ascendency in the repertory of dialectal theater, of variety show, and in the humor of the Weekly Travaso of the ’30s, enriched by more cinematic gags and costume notations on the small bourgeoisie. Especially in the first half, there is no lack of good gags and colorful caricatures.
    (Morandini)Read More »

  • Alexander Kluge – News From Ideological Antiquity Marx-Eisenstein-Capital [Theatrical Cut] (2010)

    Documentary2001-2010Alexander KlugeGermany

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    Quote:
    It’s settled: we’re going to film CAPITAL on Marx’s scenario–the only logical solution.
    –Sergei Eisenstein, Oct 12, 1927.

    This is an English subtitled copy of the ‘theatrical’ or ‘cinema’ version of Alexander Kluge’s Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike: Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital or News From Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Capital. The original work made for broadcast or DVD was finished in 2008 and ran 570 minutes long. This 84 minute cut prepared by Kluge for exhibition condenses this mammoth project into something like a digestible greatest hits or highlight reel. Kluge’s film is a discursive essay about and around Eisenstein’s notes on a film of Marx’s Capital–written shortly after the release of OCTOBER in 1927 and connected to his ideas for conceiving a film of Joyce’s ULYSSES. According to Helmet Merker writing on the 570 minute version, “Eighty years on, Alexander Kluge joins the party and takes up where Eisenstein failed, because neither Hollywood’s capitalists nor Moscow’s Communists were prepared to send the necessary funds his way… Scholarly stuff, wide and deep in scope, yet bold and playful. But even if your own study of Marx is no more than a faded memory, it is hugely enjoyable to watch and listen to these experts… Alexander Kluge is a great manipulator, an industrious loom, who weaves the most far-flung observations into his system. He is not filming “Das Kapital” but researching how one might find images to make Marx’s book filmable. The quest is the way is the destination… In Kluge’s hands this becomes a collage of documentary, essayistic and fictional scenes, interviews and still photos, archive images of smoking factory chimneys, time-lapse footage of pounding machines and mountains of products, diary entries and blackboards scribbled with quotes referencing constructivism and concrete poetry… Unlike Eisenstein, who was driven to desperation by the herculean task of cutting the 29 hours of “October” into a 90-minute film version and turned to drugs into the process which left him temporarily blind, Kluge cooly sticks to his guns and his nine hours. And it’s not a minute too long.”
    Kluge may have stuck to his guns but he also offered another option.

    Embedded in this film is a short film by Tom Tykwer called THE INSIDE OF THINGS
    Read More »

  • Éléonore Faucher – Gamines AKA Sisters (2009)

    2001-2010DramaÉléonore FaucherFrance

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    Lyon, France in 1970s, Sibylle, Corinne, and Georgette are sisters who share everything, as they live with their Italian mother. Sibylle is the only blonde in the family, except for their father who abandoned them, and she feels isolated. She dreams of meeting her French father one day.

    Based on the novel of the same name by Sylvie Testud, who is also in the film.
    Read More »

  • Émile Cohl – Fantasmagorie (1908)

    1901-1910AnimationÉmile CohlExperimentalFranceSilentThe Birth of Cinema

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    Description: Cohl made “Fantasmagorie” from February to May or June 1908. This is considered the first fully animated film ever made. It was made up of 700 drawings, each of which was double-exposed, leading to a running time of almost two minutes. Despite the short running time, the piece was packed with material devised in a “stream of consciousness” style. It borrowed from Blackton in using a “chalk-line effect” (filming black lines on white paper, then reversing the negative to make it look like white chalk on a black chalkboard), having the main character drawn by the artist’s hand on camera, and the main characters of a clown and a gentleman (this taken from Blackton’s “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces”). The film, in all of its wild transformations, is a direct tribute to the by-then forgotten Incoherent movement. The title is a reference to the “fantasmograph”, a mid-Nineteenth Century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images that floated across the walls.Read More »

  • Kaspar Jancis, Ülo Pikkov & Priit Tender – Frank and Wendy (2005)

    2001-2010AnimationEstoniaKaspar Jancis

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    Two American secret agents – Frank and Wendy – are sent to the world’s hotbed of danger, known as Estonia. Estonia is a silly place, perhaps even sillier than the agents themselves. Frank and Wendy, for whom saving the world is their daily work, achieve both mental and manual feats with the greatest of ease. It appears that nothing can prevent their ultimate victory, but go figure. The axis of evil does not wither and attacks the super-agents from where they can least expect it…Read More »

  • Rouben Mamoulian – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [+Commentary] (1931)

    1931-1940ClassicsHorrorRouben MamoulianUSA

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    The film, made prior to the full enforcement of the Hays code, is remembered today for its strong sexual content, embodied mostly in the character of the prostitute, Ivy, played by Miriam Hopkins.

    The secret of the astonishing transformation scenes was not revealed until decades later (Mamoulian himself revealed it in a volume of interviews with Hollywood directors published under the title The Celluloid Muse).
    Hyde enjoys the rain.
    Hyde enjoys the rain.

    A series of rotating filters matching the make-up was used on the lenses, enabling the make-up to be gradually exposed or made invisible, depending upon the scene.

    Wally Westmore’s make-up for Hyde, simian and hairy with tusks influenced greatly the popular image of Hyde in media and comic books (the American Classics Illustrated edition of Jekyll and Hyde clearly based its design of Hyde on the Fredric March movie, although it is more toned down); in part this reflected the novella’s implication of Hyde as embodying repressed evil and hence being semi-evolved or simian in appearance.Read More »

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