1970s

50 year old house wife Ingrid is unsuccessful in her first job after the kids have grown up. Her husband sends her to stay at a summer hotel, where she returns to spirit and goes back home only to find him in bed with a lover.Read More »

Bridge High is an evocative passage across a suspension bridge. Moving from the country to the city, the film expands the half minute it takes a car to cross, into a nine-and-a-half minute trip, choreographing cables, girders and arches into an exuberant dance.Read More »

In the words of the director, a movie about ‘the colonizers in the view of the colonized’, the movie presents a series of disconnected happenings throughout Europe and Brazil emphasizing the perception of human life as trance-like experiences and thus offering a view of the human history as a connection of symbolic behavior.Read More »

In the countryside, somewhere in the Bavarian Nowhere. Kirchenwirt Alois is financially up to his neck. His restaurant runs extremely bad, and only the bailiff regularly looks at him.Read More »

In a deserted mining town at the end of nowhere three desperate men fight over a suitcase full of cash.Read More »

Synopsis:
An attempt to illuminate the basic relationship between man and woman. A series of individual examples show how they get to know each other, how they fall in love, how they have their first arguments, how they discover difficulties in communication, and how they end up living together. The snapshots from everyday life are ciphers for the entire lack of contact of those who are closest to each other, whose only desired goal is to remain silent together. Because words destroy feeling, sensation, relationship, substance. The phrase has become the real, it replaces the lost ego. Understanding without understanding, routine instead of togetherness. What still takes place is the monologue, the soliloquy, the idiom. The anxious question will be: and what comes after that? Probably the same thing, over and over again.Read More »

Philippe advocates total sexual freedom and strongly encourages his partner Esther to do the same. But when the young woman decides to take him at his word, Philippe finds it intolerable. And that’s when all their problems begin…Read More »

Short documentary with varied footage from Iran. The Shah’s regime commissioned several soft-propaganda films of this nature from European filmmakers during the 1970s. Its existence and production is more remarkable than the film itself.Read More »

Quote:
Made after THE DAMNED, but before 1900, this operatic-style melodrama, about the industrial revolution in Lodz ca. 1895, is far better than either. Like the other two films, it takes an extreme situation in history and makes it more extreme, piling on the excess. Two examples here: a garden party that’s like a Roman orgy, with naked women, tigers in cages, etc., and a scene where a worker grapples with his boss and they fall into a giant machine which instantly spews out their bodies as huge chunks of raw meat. But whereas Visconti, and, particularly, Bertolucci, ultimately drown under their excesses, Wajda maintains total control over his narrative. Read More »