1970s

Synopsis:
In the town of Thiers, summer of 1976, teachers and parents give their children skills, love, and attention. A teacher has his first child, a single mother hopes to meet Mr. Right, another mom reaches out to Patrick, a motherless lad who is just discovering the opposite sex. Patrick befriends Julien, a new student who lives in poverty with his mother and has a terrible secret. Bruno shows his friends how to chat up girls. Sylvie stages a witty protest against her parents. Brothers give a friend a haircut. A toddler falls from a window and is unhurt. Everybody goes to the cinema. At camp, Martine catches Patrick’s eye. A teacher explains: “Life is hard, but it’s wonderful.”Read More »

Quote:
Paul Schrader’s directorial debut examines the trials of Detroit autoworkers living at the mercy of a heartless corporation and a corrupt union. Surviving from paycheck to paycheck, Checker Cab assembly linemen Zeke (Richard Pryor), Jerry (Harvey Keitel), and Smokey (Yaphet Kotto) scrape by and take pleasure in a few rounds of beer or bowling (and occasional illicit amusements). But when their money troubles pile up, Jerry and Smokey join Zeke in a desperate plan to steal cash from their local union office. Along with a piddling $600, they unexpectedly swipe evidence of union corruption.Read More »

Storyline: A group of friends decide to spend the night at a creepy old rundown house. They hold a seance that unleashes the evil spirit of De Sade. All kinds of debauched carnal activities immediately follow thereafter.Read More »

Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive writes:
Hailed as John Huston’s “comeback” film in 1972, Fat City is a film that deserves to come back more often. Based on a novel by Leonard Gardner, who also wrote the screenplay, and photographed by the excellent Conrad Hall (In Cold Blood), it is a portrait of the seedy, small-time boxing milieu of Stockton, CA. (“Huston is in his element here,” Andrew Sarris wrote, “simply because his realistic affectations have always been merely a cover and an alibi for his romantic affection for the compulsive losers of this world.”) The losers in Fat City are two prizefighters (Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges), a sherry-drinking barfly (Susan Tyrrell), her jailed and released black lover (Curtis Cokes), and assorted fight managers, boxers, lettuce pickers, bartenders and countermen…Read More »

Sweden 1958. In a small provincial town there is a band who plays dance music twice every week. All decisions are made by Sven Klang, the undisputed leader of the band. A new member joins them, saxophone player Lasse. He starts to criticize Sven’s decisions, questions the way they divide the money and he also wants them to be more of a jazz band.

This is a very underrated movie with a strong jazz score. Norwegian cartoon artist Cristopher Nilsen has named this as the main inspiration for his Jazzbasillen book. As people familiar with the cartoon will know, this inspiration should involve the more shady sides of jazz culture.Read More »

“The Manuscript Found in Saragossa collects intertwining stories, all of them set in whole or in part in Spain, with a large and colorful cast of Gypsies, thieves, inquisitors, a cabbalist, a geometer, the cabbalist’s beautiful sister, two Moorish princesses (Emina and Zubeida) and others that the brave, perhaps foolhardy, Walloon Guard Alphonse van Worden meets, imagines or reads about in the Sierra Morena mountains of 18th-century Spain while en route to Madrid. Recounted to the narrator over the course of sixty-six days, the novel’s stories quickly overshadow van Worden’s frame story. Read More »

Quote:
Technical mistakes? This is a Brazil’s specialty, this land without know-how. The documentary which, as Marcio Souza said in his modesty, should be to current Brazilian cinema as Aruanda was to Cinema Novo, will be shown in Brasília – we hope – and should fall like a thorn inside the throat of all idiots who are yet to discover Brazil – by the way, Oswald de Andrade, anthropophagous, language designer, revolutionary and whatever more that could exist in this section of the Third World: Brazil.
– Jairo FerreiraRead More »

Quote:
“…What sounds rather bookish and intimidating, in fact unfolds an enormous sensual stimulus on screen. In more than 20 sequences, based in part on work by Stifter and Camus, Hamburg’s experimental film director and a number of students from Braunschweig and Göttingen demonstrate a higher school of hearing and seeing. With manipulations of sight and sound, which are at times highly complex and mathematically precise, he shows the tension between optical and acoustic elements, inventing ever new combinations from which an abstract poetry issues forth. Nekes works with single frame mechanism and multiple copying of the images, thus defamiliarizing the sound at the same time. The title of the film pertains to Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. Lagado is the name of the academy in which scientists of the most diverse disciplines work at strange projects.” – Hans C. BlumenbergRead More »

IMDB:
Experimental anthology film consisting of nine segments – Contrasts, The Janitor, The Plumber, Another Wet Dream, The Happy Necrophiliacs, On a Sunday Afternoon, A Face, Politfuck, Flames – all focused on 70s sex, love and politics.Read More »