1970s

Fifteen year-old Pär and fourteen year-old Annika fall in love…
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Summer with Annika: A Swedish Love Story (1970)
Jean A. Gili
Author of very few works – four films in thirty-seven years, including Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and You, the Living (2007) – Roy Andersson made his first film in 1970, a tale of adolescent love set against the backdrop of a cruel tableau of the petite bourgeoisie wedged between conformity and frustration. Rediscovered now, A Swedish Love Story (En Kärlekshistoria) shows the inauguration of a critical gaze that has never deviated from its just distance.Read More »

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Aesthetic and political rebel, Oshima is one of the most original directors now working in Japan. This is a metaphysical tale of a radical student filmmaker who succumbs to the illusion that he has committed suicide and left a film as his testament. Attempting to
“decipher” this film and the “dead man’s” life, he rapes his own girl (who plays along with the illusion to cure him) and retraces the “other man’s” life by means of the film, only to find himself in his own birthplace. The film testament proves incomprehensible. He therefore refilms it, intending to create a work superior to that of his illusory rival; but his girl, to save him, willfully interrupts and changes each scene.Read More »

What starts out as a beautiful peaceful afternoon in the Caribbean quickly turns ugly when a Cyclone takes down a Jet plane killing most of its passengers. Out at sea about the same time is a group of tourists on a boat who are now lost at sea due to the storm knocking out all their navigation devices. The group of tourist’s on the boat come across the survivors of the jet plane as they drift aimlessly out at sea. Tensions start to build between the survivors of the Cyclone as the supplies dwindle and the days go by with no hope of rescue in site. Will they be rescued before they turn on each other?Read More »

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Director Luigi Scattini had previously worked with the beautiful model-turned-actress Zeudi Araya in “The Sinner” (1972) and in a previous film that I have not had the pleasure of viewing. Even though she was constantly typecast as the beautiful barefoot island girl, it was always obvious that Araya was having a good time. Casting “Il Corpo” with such tried-and true talents as Leonard Mann, Enrico Maria Salerno, Carroll Baker and Ms. Araya, it is equally obvious that Scattini had a good time, and the result is a dramatic, slightly erotic thriller that begs to be seen. Read More »

Shy, introverted eager-beaver young school teacher Melodye Amerson (sweetly played by the adorable Kim Darby of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark fame) takes a job at a remote, quiet rural farming community that’s isolated from the rest of the world. The job proves to be far more difficult and challenging than she initially figured: the students are extremely terse, reserved and uncommunicative, the other townspeople are every bit as reticent, mysterious and unapproachable, and everyone lives by a strict code which leaves Melodye feeling confused and alienated. Read More »

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Colourful ‘optimistic tragedy’ of a poor family in Ukraine, living in the Carpathian mountains near the Romanian border, during the Second World War. Five sons of the family make up the village band, but as the battles between the Nazi-supported Ukranian nationalists and the Soviets go on, their band loses one player after another.

Winner of the Grand prize at the 1971 Moscow Film Festival, White Bird with a Black Mark is set in western Ukraine, in an area that has passed through the control of several nations over the centuries. despairing at the poverty of is family, a boy decides the stork is the cause of all their problems, and sets out to kill it. But soon everyone’s situation will be challenged, as World War II breaks out and the region is carved into warring battle zones, with brother being forced to fight against brother. Yuri Illienko once again brings his dazzling poetic vision to this tale of loyalty to family, to nation, to state—and to oneself. The film is widely considered one of the most important works of the Ukrainian film heritage.Read More »

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Throughout Peter Yates’ masterful The Friends of Eddie Coyle, crooks, thieves and the occasional police officer use terms of complacent endearment — friend, nice guy, good man — but the words never seem to carry any meaning. All of them tend to agree that Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum), a career criminal at 51, is a nice guy, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t willing to put him in the dirt if it makes their lives easier. Coyle can’t really blame them for it; he knows the way of the world.

As its title points out, Friends has a very marginal interest in Eddie himself. In his first scene, Coyle goes about telling a gun dealer (Steven Keats) about how some associates of other associates slammed his fingers after a deal went sour. A low-level hood since God-knows-when, Eddie speaks about the situation congenially before telling the dealer that he needs 30 guns. Coyle has been supplying guns to a pack of bank robbers, the head of which is played by Alex Rocco. The money he’s making is to support his wife and kids before he reports for a two-year stint in a New Hampshire prison; he doesn’t feel his family should be scraping by on welfare.Read More »

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The initial idea for the film came from a specific reference to a cousin Angélica, in a scene from Ana and the wolves (Spanish: Ana y los lobos), director Carlos Saura’s previous work. In Ana and the wolves there is an inconsequential bit of dialogue that occurs in the private conversation between the family matriarch and the title character. The old woman speaks of a certain cousin Angélica who, as a small child, coquettishly played with one of her sons. Building on that allusion, Saura and writer Rafael Azcona developed a script about the childhood memories of a man now in his mid forties and his flirtatious cousin, Angélica, on whom he had a crush when he was ten years old. These memories become the lure for the protagonist’s reencounter of his long suppressed past.Read More »

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) is widely regarded as one of the most influential psychoanalysts of the 20th century, one whose work has refashioned psychiatry both as a theory of the unconscious mind and as a clinical practice. His seminars and writings have also had a widespread influence throughout the humanities and social sciences, especially in education, legal studies, literary and film studies and women’s studies.Read More »