Along with The Baby Carriage and A Slope in the Sun, He and I is one of a long list of youth films to be based on the novels of ISHISAKA Yojiro. A portrait of youth grappling with new forms of love and sexual ethics at the height of the ANPO struggle of 1960, the film was marketed as ISHIHARA Yujiro’s comeback picture after he injured himself in a skiing accident, and went on to break box office records in 1961. (quote from qianqian-san’s post)Read More »
PLOT:
For her feature film directing debut, actress Mai Zetterling turned to Agnes von Krusenstjerna’s controversial masterpiece of Swedish feminist literature, “The Misses von Pahlen,” an intense and personal seven-part novel that has been likened to the great works of D.H. Lawrence. As three pregnant women from different backgrounds wait to have their babies in a hospital in Stockholm at the outbreak of the Great War, they relive their childhood and youthful experiences via individual flashbacks. Drawing on the classic Ingmar Bergman style of Swedish filmmaking and collaborating with many of his favorite actors as well as the great cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Zetterling had produced a powerful fusion of personal emotional drama and a commentary on the role of women in a society in moral decline.Read More »
Publisher’s description:
The satirical documentary Contras’ City (which stands for Contrast City) was shot on 16mm in 1968. It is one of the earliest African comic movie and an urban planning analysis of the “two Dakars”. It is considered the first African comedy. It is a satire on Dakar – a city in which styles and cultures are blended in a cosmopolitan small area. Mambety manipulates the classic documentary apparatus with the object of exploring social conflicts of the capital city.Read More »
This rare documentary, simply called “John Cage”, was made in 1966 for the German TV station NDR and is one of the earliest films devoted entirely to the work of Cage and his collaborators. It was made on the occasion of the Cage and Cunningham European tour in that year, and instead of fully explaining the music and philosophy of the composer, we get a fascinating glimpse at the work process of the dance troupe and of Cage himself. Most of the film is concerned with showing us how they set up a performance for the Nuits de la Fondation Maeght, and there is a lot of interview and everyday material with Cage, Merce Cunningham, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma and Carolyn Brown, to name just the best known artists here. It’s also nice to see a rather youthful looking Cage (though he was 54 at the time!), still wearing the famous tie that had been cut off by Nam June Paik a few years earlier. There’s also some archival footage from Tudor’s and Cage’s very first German performance in Darmstadt in 1954.Read More »
A theater company rehearses Aristophanes play “Lysistrata” in which the Athenian women revolt to force the men to suspend the war and make peace. The three leading female actresses, Liz, Marianne and Gunilla, all live in humiliating circumstances to their men.Read More »
Comedian Tony Hancock stars, in this BBC situation comedy TV series, as Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock, a down-at-heel comedian living in East Cheam.Read More »
In 1914, Germany is arming itself for war. Karl Liebknecht, left-wing revolutionary Social Democrat and workers’ leader, a virulent antimilitarist, is one among 110 SPD members of Parliament who vote against approving war loans. From then on, he is considered un-German and a traitor to the fatherland, and his own party’s leadership turns against him. Despite threats, Liebknecht speaks up against the war and writes the manifesto “The Main Enemy Is at Home.” Even when he is arrested and charged with treason, he does not surrender.Read More »
Peppino, a slow-witted local villager of the Italian resort town of Amalfi, is bribed to impersonate famed rock and roll star Adriano Celentano for autographs and personal appearances. While Celentano tries to romance Emanuela Mazzolani, the daughter of a well-to-do resident who dissaproves of the union between his daughter and the man he thinks of as a “punk”, Peppino, unaware of the true nature of his job to impersonate Celentano, tries to deal with his girlfriend’s newborn baby which gets switched around between him and Celentano.Read More »
Set on a mysterious island, this adaptation of Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious…Read More »