1970s

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An erotic drama about complicated love affairs and blackmailing. Dina, the young wife of elderly manager Gantar meets attractive student Luka and falls in love with him. All her further activity is submitted to one and only goal: to get Luka for herself.

Banned for over a decade because of its explicit sexual situations, when this film was released in Yugoslavia in 1983 the explicit scenes had become tame. Other than the notoriety it obtained through censorship, the film has an undistinguished story about the forbidden love affair between the older wife of a sports director and a young athlete.
~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie GuideRead More »

Synopsis (possible spoilers):
“Middle-aged businessman, Simon Leotard finds his future in jeopardy when his partner Julien commits suicide after having accumulated a mass of debts. Simon’s unscrupulous business rival Lepidon offers to save him from bankruptcy by buying his company, at a discount rate. Reluctant to fall into Lepidon’s trap, Simon decides to resolve the crisis himself. A prostitute, Mado, provides him with the solution to his problems…”
– IMDbRead More »

Description: Soviet documentary “defending the Chinese people from their enemies, the Maoists”. NB: The film clearly documents the activities of the Red Guards although it never mentions them by name. This has been reflected in the cataloguing. Also, ‘Peking’ has been used instead of ‘Beijing’, again to reflect the content of the film.Read More »

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One of Kuchar’s few feature-length works is this ribald pastiche to postwar Hollywood melodrama, that period when the studios were trying very hard to be adult. The intricate, overheated plot involves a nurse trapped in an unhappy marriage who escapes the big city in search of greener pastures in Blessed Prairie, Oklahoma. Swerving from earnest homage to dark satire, Kuchar simultaneously imitates and savages the legacy of Sirk, Preminger and Minnelli that inspired him, gleefully intertwining the suggestive and the scatological, while also pointing towards the later postmodern parodies of Cindy Sherman. The Devil’s Cleavage is also a rich time capsule of 1970s San Francisco, replete with cameos from Curt McDowell and Art Spiegelman.
– The Harvard Film ArchiveRead More »

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A distillation not of Jacques Tati per se, but of communal spectacle and creation — cinema. The circus is the setting, abstracted into blank spotlights but with the audience always present, always as much a part of the show as the jugglers, acrobats, contortionists, drummers, and assorted pratfall artisans. At the center is Tati, silver-haired in a turtleneck, miming taking punches in the ring, riding a horse, directing traffic, swinging a tennis racket in slow-mo. Playtime and Traffic exhausted the French producers, so the auteur staged his swansong as a Swedish TV-special, a casual affair, a slender recording of dance-hall whimsy and a profound summarization of a man’s life and art.Read More »

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Between 1957 and his death in 1976, Marcel Broodthaers made approximately fifty films. The exact number is difficult to determine: Several no longer exist; some are multipart “programs” assembled from groups of short films (many appropriated from industrial or otherwise “authorless” sources); and others are subtle variations on previous works. A recent exhibition at pioneering curator and collector Thomas Solomon’s new gallery, Solo Projects, paired a 16-mm silent film, Un Voyage en Mer du Nord (A Voyage on the North Sea), 1973-74, with a thirty-eight-page, French-bound book that shares its title and ostensible subject matter: the pairing of a late-nineteenth-century amateur painting of an archetypal European ship and a twentieth-century photograph of a pleasure boat against a modern urban backdrop. The roughly four-minute film is projected on a retractable home-movie screen–a Broodthaers motif–and the book displayed on a simple wooden shelf, lit by a single spotlight.Read More »

Review Summary
The British/Canadian Full Circle is better known by its American title, The Haunting of Julia. The eponymous Julia, played by Mia Farrow, is driven to near-madness by the death of her daughter. Things don’t get much better when Julia and her husband move into a forbidding old mansion. The events leading up to her daughter’s horrible death threaten to repeat themselves, thereby explaining the film’s original title. Based on a Peter Straub story, Full Circle covers familiar ground, but fans of Gothic horror will be generously served. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideRead More »

This tiresome comedy features pop singer Enzo Jannacci as Amedeo, a country rube who comes to Vatican City seeking a personal audience with the Pope. Detailing Amedeo’s battle with officious Vatican bureaucrats and bungling attempts to catch the Pope off-guard, the film rarely rises to the level of director Marco Ferreri’s more subversive farces and resembles nothing more than a 1970s Neapolitan-style Pauly Shore vehicle. Italian film buffs will still appreciate the cast, which includes Ugo Tognazzi and Michel Piccoli of La Cage aux Folles as well as Claudia Cardinale, Vittorio Gassman, and Alain Cuny. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie GuideRead More »

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The intertwined lives of 2 women in 1970’s France, set against the progress of the women’s movement in which Agnes Varda was involved. Pomme and Suzanne meet when Pomme helps Suzanne obtain an abortion after a third pregnancy which she cannot afford. They lose contact but meet again ten years later. Pomme has become an unconventional singer, Suzanne a serious community worker – despite the contrast they remain friends and share in the various dramas of each others’ lives, in the process affirming their different female identities.Read More »