Synopsis
Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Company” opened on Broadway in the Spring of 1970, and tradition dictates that the cast recording is done on the first Sunday after opening night. D.A. Pennebaker, the now-legendary documentarian, filmed the production of the original cast recording, the back and forth between Sondheim and the performers, and the dynamic of trying to record live performance. The film climaxes with Elaine Stritch’s performance of “The Ladies Who Lunch”. The show won 6 Tony Awards including “Best Musical” and ran for two years on Broadway.Read More »
Quote: (…) Ferreira finest and most political film is Horror Palace Hotel. This forty-minute piece does many things at once: it is an essay about the state of Brazilian cinema, which unfortunately has not yet dated enough; a spot-on look at how film functions within a film festival; a haunted house movie; and a contagious narrative. It was shot during the 1978 Brasilia Film Festival, where a small horror sidebar is going on, in the hotel where everyone that works around the festival (filmmakers, journalists) is staying. This most angry of Ferreira’s films, it is his most focused on achieving, through close observation and a perfect structure, both physical precision and an ambitious allegorical tendency. Using Rogério Sganzerla as a guide and José Mojica Marins as a main object, Horror Palace Hotel slowly arrives at its central targets by transgressing all borders. The horror sidebar becomes something much larger, thanks to Ferreira’s camera: it becomes whole repressed history of Brazilian cinema. Horror, we learn, is not just a genre there anymore, but everything that does not fit into official history; the film thus restages an invasion of the official event by those who represent the repressed. A new history of cinematic forms takes over.Read More »
Detective Beauty undertakes an investigation into reality. He tries to understand a world he cannot grasp, to capture the things that escape him.Read More »
Shot in 1972, this remarkable documentary was released ten years later and had its first Western film festival screenings last year. “Gyula Gazdag is an outstanding Hungarian talent who seems to specialize in getting into trouble. This film, which he made with Judit Ember, another alert and sensitive director, was banned for ten years. In it, a rural community is in financial trouble and an expert from Budapest is sent to advise and reorganize. He is successful but his manner angers the local committee. Despite their own management failure, they feel his arrogance should be the subject of a reprimand at least.Read More »
Set in Istanbul, the film opens with a surprisingly candid scene of Baldwin leisurely awakening in his bedroom. Sedat Pakay, a Turkish filmmaker who studied with Walker Evans, is known for his photographic portraits of famous artists and writers, Baldwin among them. Here in Istanbul, Baldwin seems relatively relaxed, walking among crowds in a public park or on the city’s streets. His focus is personal, even intimate: “The life I live is very different from what people imagine. I love a few men. I love a few women. Love comes in many strange packages; it never comes to you as you think it will. I think the trick is to say yes to life.” He speaks of how difficult it is concentrate and to write in the United States and says that “American men are paranoiac on the subject of homosexuality.” The film offers us a self-reflective James Baldwin, one who fearlessly examines his most private thoughts and feelings.Read More »
The city of Marseille, close to the estuary of the Rhône River, has long been recognized as an important transit port for all of Europe. Nestler’s film is set against the backdrop of the industrialization at Fos-sur-Mer, some 32 kilometers northwest of Marseille. It gives an account of the port’s development since the late 1960s. In addition, Fos-sur-Mer recalls the living conditions of some 7.000 laborers working on this industrial site.Read More »
Quote: Eleven-year old Jason and his companions, including Hercules and Orpheus, go with the ship “Argo” in the search for the Golden Fleece. With wit and cunning to overcome various obstacles until they reach the destination of their fantastic journey. The experiment is not only due to the popularization or naive glorification of a myth, but the search space occupied by fact that the heroes of antiquity were actually very young.Read More »
