Quote:
Against the hard and gritty background of a mine workers’ strike in a New Mexican town – a background bristling with resentment against the working and living conditions imposed by the operators of the mine – a rugged and starkly poignant story of a Mexican-American miner and his wife is told in “Salt of the Earth,” a union-sponsored film drama, which opened last night at the Grande Theatre on East Eighty-sixth Street.Read More »
In his landmark 1948 essay Birth of a New Avant-Garde, filmmaker Alexandre Astruc advanced the notion of le caméra-stylo (camera pen) which imagined the cinema eventually breaking free of the concrete demands of narrative, where images become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language. Greatly influenced by Astruc’s theory, it was only a few years later that in 1954 Francois Truffaut spoke of the director as an auteur, the cinematic equivalent of a novelist, cap able of expressing themselves through recurring thematic elements, distinctive ways of building characters, and, above all, through the deployment and movement of actors and objects within the time and space of the shot.Read More »
Set in Viareggio an Italian famous tourist place, this movie is a gentle comedy where we admire a beautiful and remarkable debutant, Jacqueline Sassard supported by a good group of actors – Raf Vallone, Sylva Koscina and the young Raf Mattioli – directed with steady hand by Alberto Lattuada. Based on a subject by Valerio Zurlini, this well scripted movie tells the transformation of a young and spoilt rich girl who discovers the substance of sentiments while living the drama of her parents divorce and the delights of love. The love story is showed in a very delicate way and it is carried out with crescendo untill the nostalgic finale.Read More »
On a winter’s day, a woman stretches near a window then sits in a bathtub of water. She’s happy. Her lover is nearby; there are close ups of her face, her pregnant belly, and his hands caressing her. She gives birth: we see the crowning of the baby’s head, then the birth itself; we watch a pair of hands tie off and cut the umbilical cord. With the help of the attending hands, the mother expels the placenta. The infant, a baby girl, nurses. We return from time to time to the bath scene. By the end, dad’s excited; mother and daughter rest.Read More »
Autotranslated from Russian:
On the formation of the character of a young man, a participant in the struggle for bread in the virgin lands.
Color film. A group of Komsomol members founded the May-Balyk state farm on the virgin lands of Kazakhstan. Among the young men and women, future grain growers, the frivolous, dashing guy Zhenya Omega stands out. In the very first days of his stay on the virgin lands, Zhenya accomplished a number of “feats”: he exchanged rubber boots for a guitar, tried to evade work, and left the tractor driver courses. The management of the state farm and comrades understand that Omega cannot be entrusted with a tractor, and despite the boy’s indignation, he is appointed a water carrier.Read More »
Quote:
The Finnish national tendency toward alcoholism lurks behind Teuvo Tulio’s association of destruction with drinking—downing the first shot marks the beginning of dissipation in all of his films. Alcohol is inextricably intertwined with sex, corruption of innocence demonstrated by a woman accepting a glass of wine from a man, lost virginity symbolized by a tipped over or broken champagne flute. Regina Linnanheimo’s final collaboration with Tulio addressed alcoholism head on in You Have Gone Into My Blood (1956). Since his career was on its final downturn in the mid-50s, the film was made under the auspices of alcohol prevention education to ensure funding. In a project she scripted herself, Linnanheimo plays Rea, a sheltered plain-jane who is driven to drink after two worldly men seduce her into a romantic triangle.Read More »
Synopsis:
THE SADNESS OF THE FIGHT IS THE SADNESS OF LOVE. THE JOY AND DECLINE OF LIFE THAT ONLY COUPLES KNOW.
A husband and wife’s pet peeves and minor irritations escalate into major rifts and animosity.Read More »
Synopsis
Kanazawa in the Taisho era. A former junior high school student, Ichiro’s family used to be a large landowner, but now they are living in poverty with his mother. His mother works hard to get her son through school. Under such circumstances, Ichiro meets Wakako, the daughter of a wealthy man, and they fall in love with each other, but they are opposed by those around them because of their different social status.Read More »
A dangerous love triangle develops among brothers and an immigrant woman hired to work the fields.Read More »