1990s

Synopsis
The Tavianis’ adaptation of Goethe’s novel may seem strangely restrained compared to their other fables, but it’s still a work of exquisite elegance and precision. Set in Tuscany during the Napoleonic era, it charts the forces of attraction and repulsion that shape the complex relationships between a happily married baron and his wife (Anglade, Huppert), the baron’s architect friend (Bentivoglio) and the wife’s goddaughter (Gillain). If the story itself (engrossing enough) never seems very much more than an unusually formal period romance, the immaculate performances and the Tavianis’ masterly control of colour, composition and music (a poignant but unexpectedly modernist score from Carlo Crivelli) make for absorbing viewing.Read More »

A collection of three short ‘haiku videos’ by Chris Marker.

The first haiku, ‘Yanka / Tchaika’, shows the river Seine passing under a bridge. A bird in flight stays motionless in the air.

The second haiku, ‘Owl Gets in Your Eyes’, shows Catherine Belkhodja smoking a cigarette while a superimposed shot of an owl in flight fades in and out over her face.Read More »

Synopsis:
“My little son, it’s me, your father…” The narrator tries to communicate with his unborn son and takes off on a journey were you see faces of apparitions of those outcasts, who find their solace of living only in the shadows; outside, but beside, the political and economical system; system that kills the individual and creates masses instead. These outcasts are bums, cripples, madmen, lunatics. They, in the eyes of the narrator, are the only ones, that know what it means to be human. They are not corrupt by the masses or the system; they are so overwhelmed by their madness or dreams, that they have lost the relationship with the world. They live in a world of their own, thus enabling freedom from the system. What they do, is wait. They quietly wait for the day the kingdom of God will descend upon earth.
— DrStrangelife (IMDb)Read More »

Quote:
Harun Farocki plunders 40 years of advertising films, which he orchestrates to constitute an ironic 24 hours in the life of typical consumers. Mixing different colours, periods, various “ideologies of well being” to hold up a mirror up to our times, values, worries, hopes.

This collage of “beautiful images”, gleeful and chaotic, deconstructs not only the domestic reference points which punctuate our daily life, but also gives full rein to an off-beat humour in the tradition of Brechtian distanciation.
(Andrei Ujica)Read More »

Dolores Del Rio plays the indigenous daughter of a prostitute, and nobody in her village will buy the flowers she sells because of her family’s sordid history. The corrupt racist local merchant whose lecherous advances she keeps turning down demands that she pay her debts in full by tomorrow or else he’ll take her beloved little piglet! It is one of two Mexican films ever to win the Palme d’Or (the other being Buñuel’s Viridiana).Read More »

The Series –
Animals
Drugs
Science
Sex
Crime
Decline

2001 Special – PaedogeddonRead More »

Quote:

Scottish playwright John Byrne’s follow-up to the great Tutti Frutti of 1987, was another distinctive, music-themed series. But, whereas Tutti Frutti was about rock ‘n’ roll, 1990’s Your Cheatin’ Heart revolved around the country music and rockabilly scene. The tale contains all the traditional ingredients of the archetypal Western: a defiant woman alone with her husband in gaol, a guileless stranger who finds the courage enough to help save the day, murders, and a series of down and dirty bad men. There’s just one thing…it’s set in modern day Glasgow. But don’t forget it was Celtic music played by the Scottish and Irish immigrants in the frontier towns of the new world that helped shape American country music.Read More »

Quote:
This documentary is the third in a trilogy about a group of Swedish nonconformists. It tells the stories of two young men, Kenta and Stoffe.Read More »

Quote:
Jacques Audiard made his directorial debut in a spectacular fashion with Regarde les hommes tomber, one of the most visually striking and disturbing French thrillers of the 1990s. The son of the acclaimed French screenwriter Michel Audiard, he had scripted several films (going back to the mid-1970s) before he gravitated to the role of director and pretty well redefined the French film noir with this and his subsequent thriller offerings – Sur mes lèvres (2001), De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (2005) and, of course, the stunning Un prophète (2009). Those aspects which most characterise Audiard’s distinctive brand of cinema – the nihilistic bleakness, the fragmented narrative, the assortment of fragile outcasts living on the abyss – are present in his first film, an idiosyncratic study in solitude and friendship.Read More »