1970s

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Lino Brocka’s adaptation of Mars Ravelo’s “komiks” melodrama about a successful businessman trying to hide his homosexuality.Read More »

An undercover cop infiltrates a gang of smugglers to save the women he loves.Read More »

Dario Argento wanted to do something different after completing the Animal trilogy. He wanted to do a film that got away from the confines of the giallo and was for the Italian viewer only. Dario decided for this kind of film to be a period piece called Le Cinque Giornate/Five Days in Milan(1973). Dario’s work on the excellent Once Upon a Time in the West(1969) played a big part in the making of the movie.Read More »

Countess Edna Luise Von Stein keeps her disturbed sister Milly prisoner. Confined to her bed, Milly suffers from a deep sexual trauma resulting from being raped as a child by a muscular gigolo after she had surprised him and her sister in bed. Is Milly incurable, or is that her sister left out of their father’s will and Molly will be the sole inheritor of his immense fortune on her 21st birthday? Edna and her accomplice Dr. Barrios have hatched a plot to have Milly declared insane. Over the years Barrios has been injecting Milly with a drug that has turned her into a nymphomaniac. Milly’s only hope is Joe, the only one of her numerous lovers to have ever succeeded in pleasuring her, who has fallen in love with her. Will he succeed in rescuing her from Edna and Barrios, and will Milly be able to live a normal life?Read More »

At the end of 1970, the Filmmuseum in the City Museum of Munich showed a small Sirk retrospective (six productions from All That Heaven Allows to Imitation of Life). Fassbinder watched all of the films in this showcase and was deeply moved: “That really breaks you up in the movie theater. You understand something about the world and what it is doing to you.” This cinematic experience must have been a revelation for him. He described his impressions vividly in an extensive essay, and came to the conclusion: “I have seen six films by Douglas Sirk. Among them are the finest films in the world.” The young filmmaker went to visit the Hollywood veteran, who was now living in the Swiss canton of Ticino. And when the almost eighty-year-old director was teaching at the Munich Academy of Television and Film (HFF/M), Fassbinder took on one of the parts in an academic production that Sirk was supervising. (He played in Bourbon Street Blues, the film adaptation of a one-act play by the well-known writer Tennessee Williams). Sirk’s work experienced a renaissance, not least of all thanks to Fassbinder’s essay, but the influence Sirk exerted on him has nevertheless been somewhat exaggerated.Read More »

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[…]The Hunters (1977), a thematic epilogue to the historical trilogy that centers on a group of middle-aged hunters who discover the perfectly preserved, 30 year-old frozen remains of a partisan (bearing an uncoincidental resemblance to the Byzantine image of Jesus Christ) and, compelled to deliberate on its ‘proper’ disposition, spend a haunted, restless evening confronting their past. Set in post-junta era Greece, the film is a contemporary allegory on the nation’s deliberate suppression of painful and unflattering history and collective deflection of personal accountability.Read More »

Encouraged by Fassbinder, with whom he became friendly after the then-enfant terrible of the German cinema visited him in Lugano, Sirk also did some teaching during the late 1970s at the film school in Munich, where he made three short films with his students. Sprich zu mir wie der Regen was the first of these films supervised by Sirk.Read More »

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“Filmed in 1964-1968. Edited in 1978. The material for this film is footage that didn’t find a place in the WALDEN reels. Some of it begins in between LOST, LOST, LOST and WALDEN. It’s mostly New York, and some travel footage. The City friends: Richard Foreman, Amy Taubin, Mel Lyman, Peter Beard, David Wise, Andrew Meyer, Salvador Dali, Jerome Hill, David Stone and Barbara Stone, my brother Adolfas filming DOUBLE BARRELLED DETECTIVE STORY, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Ed Sanders, Gordon Ball, Henry Romney, Jack Smith, Shirley Clarke, Louis Brigante, Jane Holzer, etc. etc. It’s a period piece. The sounds were recorded about the same time. Bits of radio music, bits of records, my own voice, and voices of my friends. Mel Lyman playing playing banjo on the roof on 23rd Street was actually recorded on the roof, with the wind blowing into the mike.” -Jonas MekasRead More »

Felipe Cazals adapted the novel of Jose Revueltas that he Wrote in Lecumberri prison and displayed the corruption model of the Mexican system in jail, with his usual style of show cruelty in its greatest expression Felipe Cazals was supported this time with an extraordinary assembly of actors which intensity make convincing all he tried to show in the film, Manuel Ojeda,which head appear for the only hole in the Apando where they are prisoners,(this scene remind me Steve McQueen in Papillon) Salvador Sanchez and Jose Carlos Ruiz as the prisoners who traffic drug in the jail get in the film one of the best acting I ever seen in Mexican films until those years, Maria Rojo and Delia Casanova transmitted with naturally and freshmen the simplicity of the low-media Mexican class women, both suffer the denigrates methods of auscultation before enter at jail as visitors.Read More »