Essay Film Festival:
Straschek was among the first cohort to graduate from the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB). He started studying film in 1966, alongside Hartmut Bitomsky, Harun Farocki, Holger Meins, Helke Sander and others. The Director of the DFFB confiscated his student film, A Western for the SDS (Ein Western für den SDS) (1967-1968), which led to an occupation of his office and eventually the dismissal of Straschek and other students in 1968.Read More »
The Selling of the Pentagon, was an important documentary aired in primetime on CBS on 23 February 1971. The aim of this film, produced by Peter Davis, was to examine the increasing utilization and cost to the taxpayers of public relations activities by the military-industrial complex in order to shape public opinion in favor of the military…..Read More »
Review by Ennio Flaiano (L’Espresso, November 14th 1971)
In the scaffolds of Italian cinematography, there’s Augusto Tretti, with his two films, «La legge della tromba» and «Il potere» (two films in two years, the first one barely seen by anyone other than close friends), very hard to place in the landscape. Should be left alone. It will either be an isolated phenomenon, or worse, one that needs to be isolated. He will perhaps, in this country of people who find their ways, copycats, but surely bad ones or just clever ones. Tretti has a gift, his simplicity, which cannot be copied, it implies the superb innocence of the hermit. It’s a simplicity that brings the photographic image to the likes of Nadar, of Daguerre, and also to neo-realism […].Read More »
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Spining tale of a woman, her sister, and the man who completes the triangle. Told through such fertile sources as grand opera, classical painting, and Victorian melodrama.Read More »
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It was a milestone of film as activism, cinema as movement in Japan’s context. Adachi and Wakamatsu went to Beirut on the way back from the Cannes Film Festival. There, in collaboration with the Red Army members and PFLP, they produced this newsreel film depicting the everyday activities of Arab guerrillas as a cinematic narrative on the world revolution. Being a fusion of intense agitation and the ‘landscape theory’ approach inherited from “Aka. Serial Killer,” the film was conceived as a new form of news report, and was discussed in synchronicity with J-L Godard’s Dziga Vertov Group and the revolutionary films of Latin America, transcending geographical distances.Read More »
Synopsis:
In 1976, a young woman in Krakow is making her diploma film, looking behind the scenes at the life of a 1950s bricklayer, Birkut, who was briefly a proletariat hero, at how that heroism was created, and what became of him. She gets hold of outtakes and censored footage and interviews the man’s friends, ex-wife, and the filmmaker who made him a hero. A portrait of Birkut emerges: he believed in the workers’ revolution, in building housing for all, and his very virtues were his undoing. Her hard-driving style and the content of the film unnerve her supervisor, who kills the project with the excuse she’s over budget. Is there any way she can push the film to completion?Read More »
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A woman whose husband has been killed in WWII lives with her father-in-law in the desert. She cannot leave and go back to her family, because that would mean the end of hope that her husband, a heroic pilot, might return one day.
This film from Turkmenistan belongs to an edition of ten films from Central Asia that were shot both during the Soviet times and during the independence epoch. This collection contains 2 films of each country.
This collection was edited in 2006. It was released by the Center of Central Asian Cinematography with the financial support of “Arts and Culture” Network Program of Open Society Institute of Budapest. You will have english subtitles for each film.Read More »
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Billy Wilder’s 1974 remake of the Ben Hecht – Charles MacArthur play The Front Page, famously adapted 34 years before, by Howard Hawks as His Girl Friday, is widely regarded as that point in time when Wilder’s art went into rapid decline, that the picture demonstrated that the director of Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole, and The Apartment had lost his confidence, that he had become out of step with the times and could no longer connect with the tastes of a changing movie-going audience. In fact The Front Page is a reasonably successful adaptation, darkly cynical like most of Wilder’s best work. Wilder and collaborator I.A.L. Read More »
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Katie and Hubbell are students in the same college but with very different lives. She is a communist compromised against the civil war in Spain and the rise of Hitler in Europe, and has to work to pay her studies. He is more interested in sports a and sceptic about politics. However, Katie is impressed by his charm and she still is when they meet some years after.Read More »