1960s

This film is a typical representative of the Serbian 60s Black Wave film. It attacks some social aspects of Tito’s communist regime, depicting two practically indigenous brothers that came from a small highland village and joined the communist partisans in WWII. After the war, they return to their village, revealing to each other that each has stolen a submachine gun from the army. It’s social critique is quite obvious, according to the film trend in Yugoslavia of that time. It’s plot line is blurred by some surreal inserted symbolical shots. Whereas some of these are brilliant , some of these are quite hard to explain and comprehend. A great film to be seen, (quite hefty cinematography) with some extraordinary choices in visual composition of the contents of particular shots. However, some parts are bit confusing, even more so, I assume, to the non-Yugoslavian audience.Read More »

Volodymyr Denysenko’s searing partisan drama is a neglected masterpiece of Soviet Ukrainian cinema. Recounting a partisan attack on a Nazi officer and the brutal recriminations that follow, Vasyl Zemliak’s quasi-autobiographical script draws on his own experiences in occupied rural Ukraine during World War Two. Denysenko renders Zemliak’s existentialist drama of conviction and sacrifice in starkly poetic visuals, accompanied by the discordant score of Krzysztof Penderecki. Conscience was shot as a diploma project in an effort to evade the censors, but was still denied a release and only screened in 1989. Reminiscent of Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent, it is less celebrated than its contemporaries in the Ukrainian “poetic cinema” movement, but remains a clarion call of anti-war filmmaking.Read More »

Young slacker couple accidentally kills a friend. They burn his body and hang out on a beach.Read More »

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A morally-suspect and self-serving retainer rashly baits her high-ranking employer, a regional governor, with a salacious story of a former acquaintance and catastrophe ensues.Read More »

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A doctor, gynaecologist, discover the corpse of his wife. His nurse advises to him to declare her death a simple heart attack, to clear himself without the slightest doubt. He refuses and calls the police force there. The interrogation of the doctor, then other witnesses, slowly reveals the truth of her demise..Read More »

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In the year 3978A.D. a spaceship with a crew of 4 crashes down on a distant planet. One of the crew members had died in space and the other 3 head out to explore the planet. They soon learn that the planet is much like their own. They then find the planet is inhabited by intelligent apes. One of the men is shot and killed and the others are taken to the apes’ city. There, one undergoes brain surgery and is put into a state of living death. The other befriends some of the apes but is feared by most. After being put through ape trial he escapes with a female human native to the planet. After helping his ape friends escape a religious heresy trial he escapes out into the wilderness with the female. There he learns the planet might not be so distant after all…Read More »

The ’60s for Italian cinema were the decade of the film a episodi, with 3-4 segments that may almost reach the feature-film length and were directed by celebrated directors such as Fellini, Visconti, Pasolini, Monicelli.

Nanni Loy’s Made in Italy is composed instead by many microepisodes, which give him way to depict several facets of Italian society and, not unimportantly, to cast several stars: Manfredi, Sordi, Spaak, Chiari, Fabrizi, Magnani, Lisi, Koscina, P. de Filippo…Read More »

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Vagabond of Sex (性の放浪 Sei no Hōrō?, 1967) was a parody of Imamura’s A Man Vanishes (1967). In Wakamatsu’s film, a man leaves his family in Tokyo to travel and engage in various sexual escapades. When he returns home he finds out that his wife is starring in Imamura’s documentary about her search for her missing husband.Read More »

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A gritty but essential documentary charting social turbulence in late 1960’s Chicago. American Revolution 2 includes footage of the 1968 Democratic Convention protest and riot, a critique of the events by working class African-Americans in Chicago, and attempts by the Black Panther Party to organize poor, southern white youths on the city’s north side.Read More »