1980s

Synopsis
In another indictment of the flaws of our so-called civilization, this satire from the late director (Marco Ferreri) features (Christopher Lambert) as Michel, a miserable man who has failed at love and finds solace in a mechanical key holder. Michel has just been dumped by Barbara (Anemone) because he has not been able to get her pregnant. He is feeling pretty low when he finds a key holder with blue eyes and big red lips that responds to the sound of a whistle with “I Love You.” Michel tacks this gadget up on his TV set and whistles away. He seems happy with this fool-proof declaration of love until one day, the key holder responds to the neighbor’s whistle and Michel goes berserk. After all, if your key ring can’t be faithful, what’s the world coming to? ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie GuideRead More »

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The deconstruction of visual pleasures and the emergence of a new visual poetry.

This experimental film is about the representation and alternative views trelated to the passage of time. The visual syntheses are assembled with the voices of the woman that gives birth and dies, and is torn by the conflicts inhabiting her body. “Topos” (Place) is in dialogue with the paintings of Uccello, Carpaccio, Cranach, De Chirico and Balthus, in an attempt to deconstruct the visual pleasures of traditional cinema, but simultaneously to give birth to an innovative seductive iconography.Read More »

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From its hazily Southwestern skyscraper surfaces to its barren, prickly bush and junk car-pocked bedrock, there’s something slightly off-kilter about the America of Paris, Texas. The central masculine cast is nothing if not indigenous—when the sun-punched Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) first stumbles into frame, his uncultivated, hirsute face and dusty red cap seem like natural geological formations that have been patiently waiting, cragged and craterous, for us to anticlimactically discover them—and the relationship-oriented, plot-shunning dialog by western playwright Sam Shepherd taps into dialectal heartbrokenness without a shred of disassociating local lingo. But there are tellingly alien factors: How did both Henderson brothers wind up with women who drip sophisticated European sex appeal from their ripe lips and honey hair? And why does every truck stop along highway 10 emit the same sickly green aura that glows like a clumsy, wistful metaphor against the ferociously red sunset? And how do aridly panoramic, sneeringly and smokily man-made L.A. skylines upstage the parched siltstone and yucca tree of God’s creation in a film with Texas in the title?Read More »

From tankmagazine
“Fashion, I’ll have nothing of it,” announces Wim Wenders in the opening to his 1990 fashion documentary Notebook on Cities and Clothes. It was the year after the Berlin Wall fell, and there is a sense in his introduction, of the German film-maker defending a subject his critics might view as superficial. In a voiceover, Wenders explains that he had been invited to make a short film about the fashion industry by the Centre Pompidou. And while initially dismissive, he found that the idea grew on him – “After all, why not examine fashion… Maybe fashion and cinema had something in common.”Read More »

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Wim Wender’s deliberately paced, hauntingly realized contemporary masterpiece, Wings of Desire is, all at once: a political allegory for the reunification of Germany, an existential parable on a soul’s search for connection, a metaphor for the conflict between, what Friedrich Nietzsche defines as, the Appolinian intellect and the Dionysian passion, a euphemism for creation. A dispassionate angel stands atop a statue on a winter morning, watching over Berlin. His name is Damiel (Bruno Ganz): a spiritual guide for the desperate, an eternal spectator of life. The world is gray through his eyes, unable to experience the subtlety of the hues and textures of physical being. Read More »

Johan van der Keuken films in India, in Kérala, various situations of teaching or training: courses of a school of dance, songs, martial arts, a vedic school, a scene of theater. In counterpoint, the circulation of the money through the route of a small busy lender of countryside of village in village. It is a filmic movement which collects the gasoline of a civilization, the permanence of certain values of harmony and artistic discipline.

Note: Grand Prix with the Festival of Brussels, 1989.Read More »

New York, Geneva, Hong Kong and Amsterdam are major hubs of the world’s economy. Great amounts of money circulate there, and whereas poverty is ubiquitous in the streets of New York, Geneva carefully protects its wealth behind impeccable facades.
No one is unaffected by the myth of the all-powerful Dollar: the under-privileged struggle to survive talking about their unattainable dreams, while businessmen, from the safe distance of their offices, lay down the tenets of their financial theories.Read More »

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Virtually unknown nowadays, even in its home country of Russia, The Cat Who Walked by Herself is an endearing children’s film directed by Ideya Garanina and produced at the Soyuzmultfilm studio. It is based upon Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Cat that Walked by Himself,” which was first published in 1902. As far as I’ve been able to tell, the film uses a variety of animation techniques, including puppetry, stop motion and traditional animation, blending it all into an interesting tale of the origin of the civilised human and his millenia-long partnership with several species of domesticated animal. The story is narrated by a seemingly omniscient cat, who reminds a young child of an agreement struck long ago by the Cat and the Woman. The voice of the feline (whom, having absolutely no knowledge of Russian, I have been unable to identify) is a brilliant narrator, her voice at once carrying a sense of quiet arrogance, pride, dignity and everlasting knowledge.Read More »

Wolf Gremm’s Kamikaze ‘89 gleefully engages the Eurotrash spirit of liberation from corporate culture. It places Berlin’s rabble-rousing nighthawks in the midst of a terrorist investigation that may-or-may-not implicate a fascistic media conglomerate known as The Combine. Caught in step with music and sex above politics, the libidinous partygoers remain oblivious to the rampant corruption that exists beyond the pulsating speakers.Read More »