1980s

  • Walter Lima Jr. – Ele, o Boto AKA He, the Dolphin (1987)

    1981-1990BrazilDramaFantasyWalter Lima Jr.


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    “Ele, o Boto” is based on an old legend of a water spirit who takes on form of Amazon river dolphin. He only takes on his humanoid form when he wants a mate. However, the village men hate the water sprite and want him dead. All he wanted was some mates, due to his loneliness…Read More »

  • Raoul Ruiz – L’éveillé du pont de l’Alma AKA The Insomniac on the Bridge (1985)

    1981-1990ArthouseFranceRaoul Ruiz

    Quote:
    A peeping-tom academic (Michael Lonsdale) and a hunchbacked prizefighter (Jean-Bernard Guillard) find nocturnal rapprochement in their shared inability to sleep. Bottomless philosophical discussions take the men further afield of reality, and they eventually decide to rape a pregnant woman named Violette (Olimpia Carlisi), who then throws herself into the Seine—only to return time and again in new, horrifying forms, including the spectral visage of her son (Ruiz’s child alter ego Melvil Poupaud). One of the director’s most confrontational visions, The Insomniac on the Bridge is a barbed avant-garde meditation on trauma, rationalization, and delirium—an underside that Ruiz, as always, reminds us is clinging to the crust of day-to-day reality.Read More »

  • Ömer Kavur – Gece yolculugu AKA Night Journey (1987)

    Drama1981-1990ArthouseÖmer KavurTurkey

    Gece yolculugu is a 1987 Turkish film directed by Ömer Kavur. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival.

    NIGHT JOURNEY
    In this enigmatic work, a director settles in a ghost town to rewrite his script, and the audience enters into the mystical realm of his past and imagination. Kavur’s film is a seamless collage of thought, memory, and landscape reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico’s psychic terrains. By the film’s ambiguous end we can not help wondering how much Night Journey is about Kavur himself and, like Fellini in 8 1/2 before him, how much he is embracing it all.Read More »

  • István Dárday & Györgyi Szalai – A dokumentátor (1988)

    Drama1981-1990Györgyi SzalaiHungaryIstván Dárday

    IMDB says:
    Raffael is the rich owner of a video store. His girlfriend, the attractive Chip works there. They make some extra by making illegal copies of pornographic and horror movies. It is Rambo’s duty to deliver the video cassettes to the customers. Raffael doesn’t know Chip and Rambo are lovers.Read More »

  • Edgardo Cozarinsky – Guerriers et captives AKA Guerreros y cautivas (1990)

    Drama1981-1990Edgardo CozarinskyEuro WesternsFranceWestern

    In 1880, a colonel and his French wife live in a fort in the Patagonian desert. The colonel takes an Amerindian as captive, with the intent to civilize her. A “southern” movie (in opposition to “western”, as it was shot in the deep Argentinean south

    Quote:
    Dos caras de una misma moneda. Uno viene de lo salvaje hacia la civilización; la otra, desde la civilización hacia la barbarie. Se realiza un cambio de identidad. El guerrero queda impresionado con la civilización romana, y siente que pertenece a aquella. La abuela de Borges quiere rescatar a la india, pero ella la rechaza. Se espanta, no puede creerlo; pero cuando su marido muere, ella se siente identificada. Cuando la india toma la sangre caliente del caballo que acababa de degollar, es cuando termina de demostrar que nunca dejará de ser india, más allá de su lugar de nacimiento.Read More »

  • Werner Schroeter – Die Generalprobe AKA Dress Rehearsal (1980)

    1971-1980DocumentaryExperimentalGermanyQueer Cinema(s)Werner Schroeter

    The first of Schroeter’s series of documentaries about theatrical performers, Dress Rehearsal began as a commission by German television for a short report on the 1980 edition of the World Theatre Festival in Nancy, France. Inspired by a number of the performers at the festival, Schroeter created instead a feature-length film essay. In particular, he focuses on Pina Bausch and her troupe from the Wuppertal Tanztheater, the Japanese butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno and the American performance artist Pat Olesko. Out of an engrossing and entertaining collage of various impressions from the festival, including rehearsals, performances, interviews, readings and encounters onstage and off, Schroeter develops a meditation on the relationship between art and politics and presents an early formulation of his ideas about performance as a form of love.Read More »

  • Erden Kiral – Ayna AKA Der Spiegel AKA The Mirror (1984)

    1981-1990DramaErden KiralTurkey

    Quote:
    Der Spiegel reflects the sad existence of a village couple, Necmetting and Zelihan, whose lives are regulated by nature and the all-powerful feudal lord. When the lord’s good-looking brother tries to seduce beautiful Zelihan, her husband has no choice but take up arms to restore his lost honor.Read More »

  • Alejandro Jodorowsky – Santa sangre [+Commentary] (1989)

    1981-1990Alejandro JodorowskyArchitectureArthouseCultMexico

    Quote:
    Does the prolonged gestation period account for the bulging-valise feel of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s seething, gore-drenched carnivale? Not really — all of his pictures seem deliberately shaped to let the fantasies spill over once poured in, and this lushly scabrous murkfest, made after nearly a decade of inactivity, is true to the molten-lava of Jodorowsky’s imagination. As in his ’70s freakouts, the movie follows the trajectory of the subconscious, namely Fenix’s (as in “rising from the ashes,” and played at different ages by the filmmaker’s sons, Axel and Adan), first spotted perched nekkid atop a tree in the asylum. Cue flashback, and the parade of candy-colored melodrama surging out of the “Circo del Gringo,” traumas piling up on little Fenix’s innocence via his bloated, randy cowboy dad (Guy Stockwell) and his fervid-eyed mom (Blanca Guerra), who, when not dangling from a trapeze by her hair, presides over an order of fanatics worshipping an armless martyr. Read More »

  • Richard Kerr – Last Days of Contrition (1986)

    1981-1990CanadaDocumentaryExperimentalRichard Kerr

    Richard was coming back into town and we set up a gig for him at the local co-op. He was bringing along his new, tough, beautiful, hard-won movie called The Last Days of Contrition. It showed just about everywhere that tough movies were being shown. But for this night we brought dad’s pull-down screen and a couple of boxes of beer and the crowd spilled out into the hallway. We sat around the projector and marveled at how he’d managed to go into America and find it so emptied and cruel. There were how many military vehicles shuttling across the desert in shots he’d waited all day for, so by the time he finally turned the camera on, all that anger had become something else. He really had a knack for the silver light.Read More »

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