1980s

Synopsis
NOCTURNE strongly evokes one of Brakhage’s most exquisite films, FIRE OF WATERS (1965). Its setting is a suburban neighborhood populated by kids at play and indistinct but ominous parental figures. A submerged narrative rehearses a type of young boy’s nighttime game in which a flashlight is wielded in a darkened room to produce effects of aerial combat and bombardment. A sense of hostility tinged with terror seeps into commonplace movements… Fantasy merges with nightmare, a war of dimly suppressed emotions rages beneath a veneer of household calm… In NOCTURNE, found footage is worked so subtly into the fabric of threat that its apperception comes as a shock ploughed from the unconscious. –Paul ArthurRead More »

Synopsis:
High school student Hoshi Izumi (Yakushimaru Hiroko) is just a normal teenaged schoolgirl, except for the fact that her father is a yakuza boss. When her father suddenly dies, Izumi inherits his position as the clan head. Pulled into the wheeling, dealing, and fighting of the mob world, Izumi slowly comes into her own as she leads the gang in search of her father’s murderer.Read More »

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Mutters Maske aka Mother’s Mask is a free adaptation of the film Opfergang (1944) aka The Great Sacrifice of Veit Harlan.

Schlingensief exposes his source material’s dangerous proximity to kitsch and camp by reducing the genre conventions known from Harlan, Sirk, Fassbinder & Co to the level of a daily soap: set within a noble family from the German Ruhr, Schlingensief’s story revolving about Willy von Mühlenbeck’s tragic love to terminally ill neighbor girl Äls (Susanne Bredehöft) and the inheritance intrigues by his evil brother Martin von Mühlenbeck (Helge Schneider) creaks with melodramatic devices and self-conscious dialogues. Rather than being a mere spoof, “Mother’s Mask” is perhaps Schlingensief’s purest black comedy.Read More »

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In Love Is the Beginning of All Terror the paradoxical politics of emotion are parodied when two liberated, though jealous, women vie for the same man and perform for his gaze. The film addresses the oppressive structures that shape interpersonal relations as well as collective histories commented on in a voice-over.Read More »

This film had a deep influence upon China in the 1980s, as it was beginning to come to terms with the Cultural Revolution.

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Evening Rain, a feature film co-directed by Wu Yonggang and Wu Yigong, is about the years of the Cultural Revolution. Qiu Shi, a well-known poet, is wronged during that political movement. He is aboard a passenger ship bound for Chongqing from Wuhan under the guard of a young man and a young woman. In the third-class cabin, there is a village girl who has sold herself to repay her family debt, a woman teacher who speaks out from a sense of justice, an old actor who has had a full taste of suffering, an old woman who is on her way to commemorate her son killed in the violent factional struggle, and a righteous young worker. Read More »

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Among those who made interesting women’s films in the 1980s, and in the centre of the controversy about a feminist cinema, was Atıf Yılmaz. “A Divorced Woman” is one of those films about a woman who in the past had no other role but being a pretty ornament and sex object. She discovers her new sexuality with another woman. And adaptation of Necati Cumalı´s story by the same name (note: his play “bir sabah gülerek uyan”), about a woman who frees herself from male-dominated conventions.Read More »

Synopsis:
Jacques Darnay (Delon) is released after having served ten years in prison for robbing a jewelry store. Much about that crime remained a mystery: the stolen diamonds were never recovered, and no one knows exactly how Charby the jeweler died. At his trial it was declared that Darnay acted alone, yet the size and complexity of the heist make that seem highly unlikely. Darnay’s release is anxiously awaited, by both the police, who hope he’ll reveal more information about the crime, and by some of Darnay’s former friends, who have a few ideas as to what might have happened to the diamonds. Having, perhaps, played in his years enough of both, Delon is the perfect point man in this duel between cops and crooks, capitalizing on each side’s strengths and weaknesses while decidedly pursuing his own agenda.Read More »

The Sacrifice, director Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, begins in Bergmanesque fashion on a small, remote island, where friends and family gather for drama critic Alexander’s (Erland Josephson) birthday celebration.

The revelry is interrupted by a radio announcement: World War III has begun, and Mankind is only hours away from utter annihilation. Each of the guests reacts differently to the news: the most dramatic response is Alexander’s, who promises God that he’ll give up everything he holds dear – including his beloved 6-year-old son – if war is averted. Allan Edwall, a local mailman with purported mystical powers, offers to intervene with the Creator on Josephson’s behalf.Read More »

Paranormal novelist Gideon Harlax is drawn into a battle between the forces of good, represented by alien angel Helith, and the forces of evil, represented by Helith’s evil brother Asrael. Ranging from Oxford to Denmark, a North Sea ferry to an alien planet, Harlax unwittingly becomes part of an ancient plot that may result in the destruction of Earth…Read More »