1980s

From IMDB:

Faye Hanlon is a community-college professor with an emotionally depressed husband and an abundance of sexual frustration. Her sister drags her to a male strip-club for a girls-night out, where she discovers that one of the dancers is her failing student Rick Monroe, a.k.a. “Ricky the Rocket”. A heated affair between teacher & student ensues, as Faye struggles to reconcile her emotions and make consequential life choices: Continue her lustful sessions with the studly-but-shallow teen stripper? Or break it off with Ricky & work to salvage her marriage to the loving-but-distant husband?Read More »

A woman’s fight for her identity and freedom as a woman.
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A formal 1861 portrait of a Chinese Mandarin and his wife is the starting point for this allegorical investigation of the fantasies spawned in the West about the East, particularly that which associates femininity with the mysterious Orient. ADYNATA presents a series of oppositions-male and female images, past and present sounds-which in and of themselves construct a minimal and fragmentary narrative, an open text of our imaginations, fears and fantasies.

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“Beautiful and beguiling…mixes Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player with The Bride of Frankenstein, a TV cop show and a Betty Boop cartoon-yielding a complex form of signification run riot.” -Jonathan RosenbaumRead More »

from wiki:
Uçurtmayı Vurmasınlar (English title: Don’t Let Them Shoot the Kite) is a 1989 Turkish drama film directed by Tunç Başaran. It tells the story of political prisoners in Turkey from the eyes of a child. It is one of the most remembered works in its genre, along with pre-military coup pieces such as Maden.

It won four Golden Orange awards: best film, best actress (Nur Sürer), best screenplay (Feride Çiçekoğlu) and best cinematography (Erdal Kahraman).Read More »

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A documentary on the history of garlic. Blank interviews chefs, garlic lovers, and historians about the their love of the ‘stinking rose.’

From lesblank.com:
Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)

A zesty paean of praise to the greater glories of garlic. This lip-smacking foray into the history, consumption, cultivation and culinary/curative powers of the stinking rose features chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, and a flavorful musical soundtrack.

The SF Chronicle called this paean to garlic “a joyous, nose-tweaking, ear-tingling, mouth-watering tribute to a Life Force.” Nothing less than a hymn to the stinking rose of the kitchen, this lovingly photographed documentary is an odyssey of garlic feasts alternated with uniquely individual interviews of garlic afficionados. Not only does the film promote garlic as our first line of defense against all forms of blandness; it also titillates the taste buds with shots of garlic dishes sizzling in their pans. Les Blank shows again that he knows how to have a good time and share it on film – especially if it involves food!Read More »

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In his New York City landscape, Cohen finds inspiration in disturbance. Looking to life for rhythm and to architecture for state of mind, he locates simple mysteries. Just Hold Still is comprised of an interconnected series of short works and collaborations that explore the gray area between documentary, narrative, and experimental genres.

The first part concerns a personal, poetic approach to narrative and includes 4:44 (From Her House Home), Never Change (with Blake Nelson), Love Teller (with Ben Katchor), and Light Years. The second part involves hybridized use of verité footage and the confrontation of documentary concerns with the music video format and includes Selected City Films, Glue Man (with Ian MacKaye), and Talk about the Passion (with R.E.M). The work can be considered as a whole, or each piece in the project can be viewed (and rented) as a separate entity.Read More »

R E V I E W B Y D E R E K H I L L
Director Tinto Brass is a man of big passions. His films — excluding Caligula (1980), which doesn’t really fit into his overall body of work — are filled with curvaceous women who are uninhibited and bold enough to freely express their healthy appetites for sex. Brass’ camera lovingly (and intrusively) explores the many facets of a woman’s beauty, be it physical or psychological. Brass also isn’t shy about what he likes most about a woman’s body, either — her ample backside. The bigger the better.
Although Brass would probably chuckle at the idea that his films have a strong feminist slant, Brass’ female leads are strong, independent, and almost heroic in their quests to become emancipated from their roles as housewives, concubines, or mothers. Less cartoonish than his American counterpart Russ Meyer’s heroines, Brass’ ladies actually exude a real humanity with their sensuality.
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The bridge film between his (Sokurov’s) first decade’s essays into historicized metafilm and the subsequent, fame-making fata morganas is Days of the Eclipse(1988), a patience-testing post-apocalyptic dawdle (based on a novel by the Strugatsky brothers) that plays more like aimless third-world doc than science fiction. Concerning a young doctor stuck in the middle of a rocky wasteland (actually, Turkmenistan, though it could easily pass for any post-colonial hunk of Africa), Daysis maddeningly oblique, visually erratic, and utterly disconnective. Angels, earthquakes, talking corpses, Stalinist iconography, and visual disjunctions may figure in, but for the most part Sokurov designed the film as an elusive tissue of non-happenings and mysterious nexuses, all of it sucking the dusty air of Soviet-satellite poverty.Read More »

An interesting documentary on Renoir’s Regle du Jeu. From the series Image Par Image. Told entirely in images from the film, no talking heads. With optional English subtitles.Read More »