Documentary about Toru Takemitsu, composer of the extraordinary scores for such films as Kwaidan, Woman In the Dunes, Ran, and many others. Illustrated with scenes from these films and others, and with interviews with Takemitsu and various directors. Includes studio recording sessions. In English and Japanese, with burnt in English subtitles.Read More »
OMG by by Mark Deming
Blending dramatic situations with a documentary -influenced visual style, S Dnyom rozhdenya / Happy Birthday looks in at a typical day in a Russian maternity hospital. The patients range from a middle aged woman pleased if surprised by her current pregnancy to a Muslim woman whose marriage to a Russian has blighted her relationship with her family. No matter what their situations, the women draw strength and support from each other as they share their common experience. This film was shown at the 1999 Rotterdam Film Festival.Read More »
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Experimental film in which three girls and one boy lead playful lives. Just as a game, in which the course is determined from beginning to end by certain rules, can be played time and again, their lives are also endless repetition. This eventually results in a loss of a sense of time, for past and future. The four are permanently surrounded by cameras and projectors. In this way we see how photos are repeatedly taken of one of the girls and the boy keeps staring at a film screen. Everything which cannot be repeated is the object of their hatred. One day a woman appears in their lives and wants to die. The four try to involve her in their game, but the opposite happens: the fact that the woman is different disrupts their self-made world. Having playacted a funeral for the woman, they become more and more entangled in their own game.Read More »
The third of Daniel Eisenberg’s thematically connected film essays about postwar Europe, PERSISTENCE, an award-winning feature-length experimental documentary in gorgeous color, once again explores the relationships between past, present and future in a complex portrait of the city of Berlin (divided from 1961 to 1989 by the grandiose Berlin Wall). The film was shot through the period of unification in 1991-92 and edited together with films by U.S. Army cameramen (1945-46) obtained from the Department of Defense archives. Read More »
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Written adroitly by Duane Pool, “Shattered Image” has one of those stories about which it is all but impossible to say anything with any degree of certainty. It does seem clear that Parillaud’s Jessie and Baldwin’s Brian are an exceptionally attractive Seattle couple honeymooning at a posh Jamaican resort and that Jessie is deeply disturbed. She apparently has endured a rape and its trauma has been compounded by the death of her wealthy father. She has vivid dreams in which she sees herself as an ultra-cool hired assassin–and her latest assignment is to knock off none other than Brian or a man who is his twin. As for Brian, is he the solicitous husband he seems to be? Or is it the cold-blooded assassin who is real, and Jessie but a figment of her dreams?Read More »
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“This is Peter Watkins (epic) companion-piece to his highly acclaimed “Edvard Munch” (1974). “The Freethinker” examines the life, art, and times of the noted Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, author of Miss Julie, Inferno, and Dance of Death. Strindberg is depicted as a rebel, and idealistic and controversial iconoclast who openly criticized the hypocrisy of 19th century society.” (p. back cover) The film broadly focuses on 3 aspects of Strindberg’s life- the impact of his childhood on his psychology and future work; the meaning of his relationship with his first wife, and the way in which Strindberg, as an author, created works that confronted the social injustices of their time.Read More »
After his father’s death, a Parisian medical researcher returns to a region of Portugal to deal with part of the family legacy – a prosthesis factory owned by an old family friend. He finds the factory owner and his wife “possessed” by the local Marquis and finds himself constantly accosted by all sorts of supernatural manifestations.Read More »
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THE MEDIA PROJECT is an exposé on media coverage of the first Gulf War, directed by Peter Watkins. The film raises debate on the global media coverage of the Gulf War by taking examples from the Australian media coverage of the event and having them discussed by a small group of people from different backgrounds who are having dinner together. Written by Peter Watkins in conjunction with the cast, many of whom are expressing their own feelings and concerns.Read More »
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A lonely hairdresser watches the title sequence of “That Cold Day in the Park” then visits a local park to invite a down-and-out skinhead to his apartment. He draws the silent man a bath and talks to him as he soaks. He locks his guest in a bedroom. Next day, the skinhead leaves through the window and visits his sister, who’s making a film called “Sisters of the SLA.” He helps with a screen-test. The hairdresser has dreams and fantasies involving the skinhead, the skinhead returns to visit him, and then the filmmaker pays a call on the two men, exposing her brother as faking his silence and pretending a lack of sexual interest. Fantasies can come true.Read More »