1970s

David Kehr, Chicago Reader wrote:
Robert Altman’s would-be American art film (1977) is murky, snide, and sloppy, but the director’s off the hook because he dreamed it all. Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall are two Texas girls who meet while working in a California sanatorium (courtesy of 81/2) and exchange identities while Altman struggles with feminism and the American dream. As usual, the director plainly despises his characters but offers no alternative to their pettiness, although his sneaky jokes at their expense give the film its only glimmer of style.Read More »

Quote:
The demands of her family and the stress of daily life drive the mind of a woman into permanent fantasy as a way to cope. Normande St. Onge works as a clerk in a pharmacy and takes dance classes with the dream of being a cabaret dancer. Her mother, Berthe, has been confined to a mental institution by Normande’s uncle. But Normande, who does not believe her mother is insane, kidnaps her from the institution and brings her home.Read More »

Synopsis:

In São Paulo, the greedy Bárbara is not happy with her work in a loan and investment company. When her boss Ricardo invites Bárbara for a meeting at his apartment, he harasses her first and then he fires her. When Bárbara is walking on the sidewalk, a stranger offers a ride to downtown for her. While driving, the driver Rose offers a job in a brothel to Bárbara promising a very high income to her. When Bárbara arrives home, she tells the offer she had to her friends Mariazinha and Ana Lúcia. The trio decides to visit the place but they do not like the situation of being treated like objects. They decide to steal the database of the wealthy clients of Ricardo and offer their services in the own apartment. Sooner Bárbara invests a large amount improving the location that is known as “The Palace of the Angels”. Along the days they raise lots of money satisfying the fantasies of their clients but Mariazinha can’t stand the situation and returns to her hometown. Now Bárbara and Ana Lúcia
— Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (IMDb).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 »

A Hungarian masterpiece from Sándor Pál.

The film’s story take place in Budapest, in 1944 in the very end of the 2nd WW. The film’s photographer, Elemér Ragályi won prize in Montreal in 1979. Montreal, 1979.

PLOT DESCRIPTION
In this very dark comedy, the loss of a coat from a dance hall cloakroom sets off a frantic search which results in widespread death and mayhem. It is 1944, and the loss of the coat represents the family’s loss of social standing, even during a time when everyone is suffering from the Nazi occupation. The whole family is called in to search for it, and a cross-section of the social chaos of the times is exposed during their search, which involves murders and more. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie GuideRead More »

Quote:
In an Academy Award -nominated performance for Best Actor, Jack Nicholson is outstanding in Five Easy Pieces, the acclaimed drama from director Bob Rafelson. Although a brilliant, classical pianist from an intellectual, well-to-do family – Robert Dupea has made a career out of running from job to job and woman to woman. Presently working in an oil field, Dupea spends most of his free time downing beers,playing poker and being noncommittal with his sexy but witless girlfriend Rayette. But when he is summoned to his father’s deathbed, Dupea returns home with Raette, where he meets and falls for a sophisticated woman. Now caught between his conflicting lifestyles, the gifted but troubled Dupea must face issues that will change his life forever. Deceptively simple, but one of the most complex and interesting films of its time – Five Easy Pieces garnered a 1970 Academy Award nomination for Best Picture – with Black receiving the 1970 New York Film Critics award for her excellent performance.Read More »

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In the small town of Minamata in Kyushu, far from the metropolitan center, the fertilizer company Chisso built a factory to take advantage of cheap labor and commenced dumping mercury-filled wastewater into the nearby sea. Soon residents began exhibiting symptoms of a mysterious illness, a happening that would eventually develop into the worst case of environmental pollution in postwar Japan. Noriaki Tsuchimoto visits the patients and their families who sued Chisso and listens to their voices. His camera gently lifts the veil that had obscured them and reveals their reality. MINAMATA: THE VICTIMS AND THEIR WORLD is impressive in how it stands on the side of the patients, not only providing a collage of individual portraits, but also an understanding of the their everyday lives.

One of the monuments of Japanese documentary, MINAMATA: THE VICTIMS AND THEIR WORLD played at many international festivals, winning an award at Locarno.Read More »

Quote:
What a perfect film…..short and simple, Ono takes a camera and a boom mike onto a hot air balloon, kicks the rope, and starts the camera and lets us watch as it goes above the clouds for a 17 minute shot. Key things to notice: A roll of 16mm film films only 14 minutes yet the film runs for 17, meaning somewhere in the clouds Ono had another camera loaded and started when the first one ran out, yet somehow the splice is not noticeable and there weren’t any computers at the time to fix this sort of thing…..all i can say is optical printing tricks at its best. The last shot, as the balloon rises above the clouds, the wind silences, and the sun becomes visible, is alone worth checking out this timeless classic of experimental film.Read More »

Synopsis:

A gentle, bittersweet tragicomedy, Autumn Marathon is about a middle-aged translator, Andrei Buzykin (Oleg Basilashvili), whose almost pathological niceness has trapped him in a seemingly endless series of awkward situations: his inability to turn anyone down has left him juggling a wife and mistress, on top of vast amounts of additional work usually done as unpaid favours for friends and students that’s constantly interfering with his own projects to the point where his career is put at risk.

And because he can’t bear to hurt anyone, he’s always taking the easy way out – which invariably means constructing a vast edifice of lies that he can’t possibly keep track of, which has the equally inevitable side-effect of turning a fundamentally decent if weak-willed man into what looks like the epitome of a philandering boor. Half the time, his excuses are entirely genuine – he really did help his Danish friend Bill Hansen (Norbert Kuchinke) at a drying-out clinic, and stayed up all night with his less talented colleague Varvara (Galina Volchek) to help her on a difficult translation, but this counts for little when he’s so widely disbelieved. The title refers to his regular early morning jogging sessions with Bill – again, he’d much rather be doing something else, like staying in bed, but how can he possibly say no?Read More »