1970s

This is the original version made for the BBC but banned by them and never screened until 15 years later. The BBC said that they banned it because “There was too much incident packed into too short a time and that they doubted the veracity.” So they thought it was pure fiction. But they also said that it “looked too much like a documentary.”

A brutal depiction of life in the borstal system where order is maintained through violence and intimidation. Carlin’s journey up the pecking order from new boy to ‘Daddy’ earns him the respect of inmates and officers alike.Read More »

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The entire point of Peter Watkins’s cinematic career, so he seems to indicate in his interview with himself in the liner notes for New Yorker Video’s Edvard Munch DVD, is to directly challenge the perception deadening (at best) and enslaving (at worst) effects of the hegemony of 20th-century media, the conception of which was arguably the arrival of the moving picture. Strangely enough, two of his most acclaimed films take place decades before the Edison’s kinetoscope, but Watkins seems to use the anachronism of creating a hypothetical “first-person cinema” in the B.C. years to accentuate his impassioned appeal for elevated media consciousness. His recent six-hour millennial masterwork La Commune (Paris, 1871) was blunt about it, framing a rag-tag experimental theater ensemble attempting to reenact a moment of French social resistance with televised coverage from within (two community reporters practically serving as the film’s tour guides) and without (daily reports from the State-suckling network distorting the public’s all-but-assigned opinion).Read More »

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Belson has made reference to the hallucinatory quality of his films, and he associates this form of imagery with interior vision that corresponds to the inward spiritual journey the mind can achieve through meditation. In Belson’s words, “the hallucinatory aspect of imagery is certainly inherent in my work and in the ideas relevant to my work.” In a program note that accompanies Meditation (1971), Belson states, “by diving deep through your spiritual eye you will see into the fourth dimension, aglow with the wonders of the inner world. It is hard to get there, but how beautiful it is!”Read More »

After a cult besieges her convent, a young nun goes with an army of Muslims to destroy the convent and kill who wronged her.

Letterboxd review
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★★★½ Rewatched by Ian West 06 Apr 2021

Nasty little italiano revenge jam—complete with my girl Florinda Bolkan, all the nunsploitation tropes you’d want, and a feminist message. Not as stylized as some other sub genre offerings… but nevertheless, Flavia the Heretic is up there with The Devils, Alucarda, The Transgressor, and Satanico Pandemonium as far as my favorite crazy nun movies go.Read More »

In L’Autre Scène, the images and the sound material try to manifest the mechanism of an advertisement around the blade.Read More »

This drama is adapted from a Japanese television mini-series. In the story, an industrialist learns of a medical condition which will greatly shorten his life. He is on a trip to Europe at the time, and a glimpse of a Japanese woman in that setting causes him to fantasize about her as the personification of his impending death. As his dialogue with his imagined mortality continues, he actually meets the living woman who is the template for his fantasy, and together they tour rural churches. Gradually he comes to some kind of peace about the diagnosis. When he returns to Japan, he is met with a series of challenges which profoundly test the lessons he has learned.Read More »

A hypocritical swinging college student cat raises hell in a satiric vision of various elements on the 1960s.Read More »

Letter to Jane is a 1972 French postscript film to Tout Va Bien directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin and made under the auspices of the Dziga Vertov Group. Narrated in a back-and-forth style by both Godard and Gorin, the film serves as a 52-minute cinematic essay that deconstructs a single news photograph of Jane Fonda in Vietnam. This was Godard and Gorin’s final collaboration.Read More »

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A psychiatrist with intense acrophobia (fear of heights) goes to work for a mental institution run by doctors who appear to be crazier than their patients, and have secrets that they are willing to commit murder to keep.Read More »