SYNOPSIS:
Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman’s experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.Read More »
When the idea of a film about the tango was proposed to director Carlos Saura by a producer, the director spent several months hammering out a scenario that used dance to propel the story about a dancer, Mario Suárez (Miguel Ángel Solá), injured in a recent car accident and freshly divorced, using a film about the tango to heal some deep personal wounds.
Woven into the dances-within-a-film-within-a-film are pieces evoking the tango as the social glue of Argentinian culture, as well as the music’s function during the dark years under Juan Peron, when tango music was played loud by the secret service to smother the cries of torture sessions.Read More »
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Brass-balled, Bronx-born auteur Abel Ferrara is one of those two-fisted screen bards that always follows through on each sucker punch, his heart beating with Sam Fuller’s blood. His scorching morality plays and tainted-psyche humanizations are raw nerves exposed and chewed through, like a naked tornado called Hyde to Scorsese’s more calculated risk-taker Jekyll. However, what makes an Abel Ferrara film for me isn’t plot or casts of meaty, dilemma-torn characters. It’s in the gritty city itself, a filmmaking toybox for tones, textures, sounds, music and aesthetic. When Ferrara looks at New York City, he knows its tourist-trap beauty is bullshit and the lurid truth is in the blackened gum on the bottom of the postcard rack. He’s the director who would probably kick my pasty ass all the way to Chinatown if he heard this flowery praise.Read More »
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Legendary director Ingmar Bergman rarely gives interviews, but in 1999 he made an exception for journalist Malou von Sivers of TV4 International Sweden. Together with his best friend and frequent collaborator, the renowned Swedish actor Erland Josephson, Bergman discusses life, death, and love in this charged and highly candid interview.Read More »
After his wife, Alice, tells him about her sexual fantasies, William Harford sets out for a night of sexual adventure. After several less than successful encounters, he meets an old friend, Nick Nightingale – now a musician – who tells him of strange sex parties when he is required to play the piano blindfolded. All the men at the party are costumed and wear masks while the women are all young and beautiful. Harford manages to find an appropriate costume and heads out to the party. Once there, however, he is warned by someone who recognizes him, despite the mask, that he is in great danger. He manages to extricate himself but the threats prove to be quite real and sinister.Read More »
“Dave Kehr” wrote:
Abel Ferrara’s ”Blackout,” a film featuring sex, drugs and Claudia Schiffer, caused a stampede when it was shown at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. That it is only now receiving a New York theatrical premiere says a lot about what the film promises, and what the film delivers. (It will be shown at the Anthology Film Archives in the East Village for the next two weeks, as the climax of a series of Mr. Ferrara’s films.)
Mr. Ferrara is a Bronx-born filmmaker whose fascination with urban excess and questions of Roman Catholic faith sometimes makes him seem like Martin Scorsese’s self-destructive, insistently undisciplined younger brother. These are qualities that make Mr. Ferrara’s work enormously respected in Europe, where he is taken to be one of the primary interpreters of the contemporary American scene, and virtually unknown in the United States, where it can seem arty, self-indulgent and wholly unreal.Read More »
Description: Based on a true story. The story is set on the sweeping French countryside where Serge Duval, a veterinarian, lives with his wife, Elisabeth and their two young children. One day, their beloved son Olivier vanishes mystically, without a trace. Unable to accept the loss of her favourite child, the mother, Elizabeth, redirects her anguish and guilt at everyone. Little by little the fragile family falls apart. Six years later Olivier suddenly appears again, now as a teenage boy living on the streets of Paris, but is he really their missing son?Read More »
In Welville, at Battle Creek, eccentric rich Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (a historical figure) runs a stylish health farm for the wealthy, an idea ahead of his time, based on extreme vegetarianism, neither sex, masturbation or even sensual stimulation, but laughing therapy and purging the ‘polluted’ body, mainly by exercises, often in open air, vicious diet, his invention corn flakes, laxatives, anal yogurt cure, enemas and brutal mechanical cleansing. Eleanor Lightbody drags her sickly, incredulous husband Will along to the therapy; the couple is almost immediately separated and getting horny for more available members of the opposite sex. Kellogs stubbornly willful adopted son (among over 30 kids) George is a filthy embarrassment, paid off just to stay away. Charles Ossining panics when arriving in Battle Creek he finds his aunt’s fortune made him partner in the empty shell- health food company Per-fo, not the planned corn-flakes factory; however with a former Welville-employee and George’s name they hope to get rich from their own cornflakes brand. When an electric therapy goes fatally wrong and several other patients die, Will’s incredulous reluctance turns to panic… Written by KGF Vissers (IMDB).Read More »
Kieslowski on Kieslowski
Edited by Danusia Stock
Published by Faber and Faber, 1993 (268p.)
Quote:
From Danusia Stok on the genesis of the book:
This book is largely based on interviews recorded with Kieslowski in Paris in December 1991 and May 1992 when he was working on the scripts of the triptych Three Colours. A third set of interviews, covering the triptych, was recorded in Paris in the summer of 1993 once Three Colours had been shot.
Excerpts from Kieslowski’s reflections written for the monthly cultural magazine Du (Zurich, Switzerland) have been worked into the text. The passages are my own direct translation of Kieslowski’s original words.Read More »