Quote:
A young man is balancing on a rope. A young woman with a pistol appers. In the middle of war noise, they won’t to bury him, when he suddenly awakes… A very early short from Murer and a key study for his later (and phantastic!!!) film “Pazifik – oder die Zufriedenen”. It’s a poetic aproach, which mixes up passion, love and fear of war.Read More »
Kobayashi Masaki’s 1968 Toho film about a man beaten to the point of deafness by his superior officer during WWII. He meets him again through his work as an inventor, and struggles through the challenge of his son’s romantic interest in the Officer’s daughter.Read More »
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The moving camera shapes the screen image with great purposefulness, using the frame of a window as fulcrum upon which to wheel about the exterior scene. The zoom lens rips, pulling depth planes apart and slapping them together, contracting and expanding in concurrence with camera movements to impart a terrific apparent-motion to the complex of the object-forms pictured on the horizontal-vertical screen, its axis steadied by the audience’s sense of gravity. The camera’s movements in being transferred to objects tend also to be greatly magnified (instead of the camera the adjacent building turns). About four years of studying the window-complex preceded the afternoon of actual shooting (a true instance of cinematic action-painting). The film exists as it came out of the camera barring one mechanically necessary mid-reel splice. –K. J.Read More »
Review from The Montreal Gazette – Jan 10, 1970
BEAST ALLEY – directed by Eizo Sugawa; original Japanese version with English subtitles; at the Art Cinema
The only real beast in Beast Alley is a black and white Great Dane, who is incidental to the plot. There are, however, a lot of humans who behave in a rather beastly manner.
There’s a frustrated wife who burns her decrepit husband; an evil old man who preys on unhappy young women; a sinister villain who plays with gasoline and matches; and a host of unscrupulous, corrupt politicians and police detectives.Read More »
Beautiful young Oriko (Mariko Okada) has an unhappy marriage. Her husband Takashi (Tadahiko Sugano), owner of a securities company, has been having an affair and comes home only once in a week at most. In a poetry party, Oriko meets sculptor Mitsuharu (Isao Kimura), who was one of the lovers of Oriko’s deceased poetess mother…Read More »
Synopsis
Single frame exposures of words, color.(imdb)
Cinema of the signifier
When we watch films we see and hear representations of things, sights and sounds not present at the moment of viewing. However, we choose to take part in the illusion of cinema limited by its rules and technical deficiencies. Word Movie is just a little joke of a film that makes us aware of this.
On the screen you see words, another type of signifier, flashing and on the soundtrack you hear those same words read out loud. The only point this film makes is that there really is no difference between the photographic signifier, or in other words the image on the screen, and words flashing.(imdb)Read More »
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While trying to push away a little boy who keeps coming near his cottage at the river, a whimsical mayor meets boy’s mother. These people find hard to make contacts because of their own trouble marks from the past, even though they know that the common effort is needed for the future and survival.Read More »
A girl is attempting to seduce the beholder : the camera. A visual conveyance through material – film and paint – as the seduction progresses she becomes more covered in paint – representative of the beholder.Read More »
An archeological finding and the stories it may contain. Made with great humor.
From Wikepedia:
Parviz Kimiavi (Persian:پرويز کيمياوی; Born 1939, Tehran) is an internationally acclaimed Iranian (Persian) film director, screenwriter, editor and one of the most prominent figures of Persian cinema of the 20th century.
Kimiavi studied photography and film at l’École Louis Lumière (Louis Lumiere School of Cinematography) and IDHEC. His works gained critical success and won several prizes in important international events such as Berlin and Cannes.Read More »