1980s

This film is made in three sections, each leading towards the final abstraction, and each resembling a search for meaning and order amidst a plethora of electronic, chemical and mechanistic information. In sky light the layers of imagery are gradually stripped away: Rivers, trees, snow covered rocks and clouds gradually give way to an ominous cobalt blue sky and the rotating blades of the camera shutter. In the final sequence the layers of the photographic emulsion are gradually striped away until only dust and the light of the film projector remains.Read More »

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Best known for his seminal spaghetti westerns, Sergio Corbucci tried his hand at many genres during his long career as a director. Here, late in his career, he makes a nice entry in the commedia sexy all’italiana sub-genre.

The film exists in several versions; one made for television ran a lot longer than this feature film edit, and it played like an omnibus film.

In this theatrical version, the different vignettes are inter-cut. Some segments are naturally more funny than others, but it would be difficult to argue against the sexiness of the ladies involved, even if everything almost remains too tasteful.Read More »

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Through its wildly comic, furiously creative, and intensely moving façade, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil ponders a future made to sustain a draconian past molded by inequality. In this dystopia, the rich, having long knelt at the alter of radical capitalistic tyranny, spend their days having their flesh stretched, sliced, and injected with ultraviolet potions, while the working class types, files, signs, and stamps its way through pointless paperwork. Overrun by communicative ducts, coated wires, cement and metals, and magnified, miniature computer screens, the future conjured up by Gilliam averts the familiar prophecy of an anaesthetized, plastic world overrun by rampantly advancing technology. Indeed, men, who see advancing technology as an affront to their fiscal station and take the pecuniary gain of the morbid, perverse 1% as their modus operandi, unmistakably run the future of Gilliam’s film. New technology is expensive; paper is cheap.Read More »

Macho Dancer is a 1988 Philippine film, directed Lino Brocka, which explores the harsh realities of a young, poor, rural gay man, who after being dumped by his American boyfriend, is forced to make a living for himself in Manila’s seamy red-light district. Based on a true story, the film frank depiction of homosexuality, prostitution, drag queens and crooked cops, porno movie-making and sexual slavery, and drugs and violence caused the Filipino government censors to order extensive edits of the film, forcing an uncensored edition to be smuggled out of the Philippines and shown to a limited number of international film festivals. This print is now part of the permanent collection at The Museum of Modern Art in New York [Images in the Dark: An Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Film and Video. 1994. Raymond Murray]Read More »

Ardiente Paciencia, or El Cartero De Neruda, is a 1983 film directed by Antonio Skármeta. It was remade in 1994 as Il postino. It tells the story of Mario Jiménez, a fictional postman in Allende’s revolutionary-era Chile, who befriends the real-life poet Pablo Neruda in the years before Neruda’s death.Read More »

A young girl growing up in Bergen, Norway just after the 2nd world war, is trying to deal with the father’s adultery and mother’s deep depression, as she befriends a boy.Read More »

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Dorothee, a would-be writer and journalist, leaves Germany for the Oz of San Francisco, searching for her long-lost mother and a cure for the malady of love. Installed in the Tenderloin, she peeps in on neighbors’ bizarre sex rituals as well as does sightseeing of the more traditional kind. But encounters with male impersonator Ramona, charming Hungarian bohemian Dominique, and Susie Sexpert, barker for an all-girl strip show, lead to exploratory adventures of self-discovery and fun. When Dorothy surfaces like a dazzled tourist on the wilder shores of the city’s lesbian community, she has discovered her true sexuality and left some illusions behind. (Written by Monika Treut)Read More »

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Werner Herzog looks at the young soldiers who make up the Miskito Indian rebel army. The Indians are an abused minority who sided with the Sandinistas in the Nicaragua civil war. However once the Sandinistas won the Indians were once more an abused minority and had to fight once more for their rights.Read More »

In this powerful short film, the renowned William Shakespeare play is stripped down to the bare essentials, consisting of two lengthy shots.Read More »