1970s

Roman Polanski wrote the screenplay for this decidedly offbeat drama. Bernie (Mark Burns) plays a rootless wanderer with a fondness for alcohol and no clear goals in life. Bernie stumbles into a seaside resort community with Winnie (Beatrice Edney), a young girl in leg braces, in tow. As Bernie starts hitting the bottle, his physical and emotional stability starts to crumble, and Winnie begins to worry for his safety, until he finally collapses and Winnie panics, with no one left to look after her. Peter Sellers makes a brief cameo appearance as a gay shopkeeper who sets up a booth to take advantage of the beach traffic. While Polanski originally intended to direct A Day At The Beach, he later turned over the reigns to filmmaker Simon Hesera; it was his first dramatic feature, and his last.Read More »

In this personal documentary, Jane Giese, a working class woman in Newark, comes to realize that she has to take control of her own life after years of physical and mental abuse.

One of the most moving documentaries of the era, Newsreel’s Janie’s Janie breaks with their usual format for a more personal approach, following one woman’s journey to self-determination, or as Janie says, “First I was my father’s Janie, then I was my Charlie’s Janie, now I’m Janie’s Janie.”Read More »

Taped on July 25, 1977. In Mrs. Thatcher’s second appearance on Firing Line, two years before she would take up the reins of government, the conversation turns to the state of democracy in present-day Britain. We get even more of a feel than in her first appearance (S0199) of why she would become so admired, and so reviled: “For years now in British politics you have needed to use the word ‘consensus.’… It’s a word you didn’t use when I first came into politics. We had convictions, and we tried to persuade people that our convictions were the right ones, and it’s no earthly good having convictions unless you have the will to translate those convictions into action. Read More »

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Bouche sans fond ouverte sur les horizons (1971, 26′)
In 1971 Thierry Zéno creates a fascinating portrait of artist Georges Moinet in the form of a 16 mm medium-length film. A schizophrenic who lives in a psychiatric hospital near Namur, Moinet paints. After being mute for 24 years he chooses this cinematic encounter to explain his artist approach, revealing what lies behind his personal cosmogony. But this long logorrhoea proves disturbing and fails to provide possible clues to understanding his work, gradually becoming a form of music that blends in with the sounds and distant, invisible hubbub of the hospital. With Alessandro Ussai behind the camera and Roger Cambier responsible for the sound, Zéno gets up close to Moinet to better capture him in all his demiurgical excessiveness, his existence on the fringes but also his humanity, deconstructing in a series of very tight shots the man and his canvasses.Read More »

Jean Rouch’s camera follows his friend, filmmaker/actor/critic Farrokh Ghaffari, as he walks and talks us through the famous Shah Mosque in Esfehan. While guiding him and answering his questions, Ghaffari makes Rouch discover the beauties of the architecture of the mosque and its impact on the city. Throughout the tour, they discuss Islam’s complex relationship with death, sex and cinema.Read More »

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Arguably an outgrowth of Soleil Ô, Les Bicots-nègres analyses the living conditions of African migrant workers in France in the mid-1970s. The film has the potential to be a classic case study of cinematic over-determination. It comprises seven sequences exploring, respectively, the conditions of possibility of cinematic representation in Africa (the opening sequence), historical dissonance through the dialectic of past and present (the post-credit sequence), a flashback to the eve of African independence (the imaginary garden party sequence), the predicaments of the post-colony, an assessment of the living condition of migrant workers and the actions taken to transform these conditions, and a final sequence in a circular mode, which returns to the new cinema.
In Les Bicots-nègres, Med Hondo engages the dual front of cinema and history through the production of what might be referred to as an indocile image. In the cinema of Med Hondo, the indocile image purports to do, undo and sometimes outdo both cinema and history.Read More »

A yakuza film epic about a man and a woman establishing a family of longshoreman, centering on their love and struggle.Read More »

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Les Gazolines est un groupe issu du Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire (FHAR) formé à Paris en 1972 et dissous en 1974. Leur nom proviendrait de la chanson Gasoline Alley de Rod Stewart. Le mouvement est fondé par Maud Molyneux, Patrick Bertaux et Paquita Paquin comme une «sorte de continuation du FHAR». Parmi ses figures les plus connues, on compte Marie France — en quelque sorte la « mascotte » du groupe, même si elle n’en faisait pas partie, une sorte d’«égérie» —, Hélène Hazera, Jenny Bel’Air. Constitué de travestis3 et de femmes déguisées3, le petit groupe se signale par sa provocation esthétique, idéologique, et ses jeux sur le genre. Read More »

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In 1976 Kieslowski produced Hospital, the 1977 winner of the Festival of Short
Films in Krakow. The film deals with Warsaw orthopaedic surgeons who are portrayed working long, 32-hour shifts. The camera follows them in the operating theatre, admittance room and smoky offices. They are portrayed as struggling with faulty equipment and overcoming fatigue. The film focuses on everyday hospital situations without any voice-over comments, with the passage of time carefully indicated every hour. The surgeons are portrayed as skilled workers in this, to use Kieslowski’s words, ‘film about some brotherhood’.
– Marek Haltof, The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski – Variations on Destiny and Chance, 2006Read More »