Made in remembrance of Anne Frank, Solomon’s fragile and haunting film evokes Kristallnacht (“the night of broken glass”) and Gustav Mahler’s Kindertodenlieder (“Songs on the Death of Children”). Stan Brakhage wrote memorably of Solomon’s filmmaking craft that it “utilizes the organic mold and dry crack patterns, the natural decay of the footage, until the original subject matter, its anima, crawls with the textural ‘maggots’ of its own chemical decomposition and dissolves in a beautiful display of multifaceted light.”Read More »
Synopsis
It’s summer and a young foreigner saunters through the streets of this city of street cars and canals.
A lone wanderer, the hypotheses surrounding him will be changing: An artist, at leisure, a simple tourist, a parasite, paranoid, in love…?
Lodged at an old, family-run hotel, he walks through the city, observing, writing and drawing –sketching gestures and expressions caught at random on the street.
In the evenings he haunts a night club called “Les Aviateurs”.
He peers through the open windows of certain façades.
He revisits one of them at different times of day, here and there making out minor domestic contents, more insinuated than seen.
A certain mystery floats over the nature of his intentions, with attitudes reminiscent of those of a voyeur or even a psycho-killer…Read More »
Synopsis from AMG:
In this episodic animated fantasy from France, an art teacher interprets a series of six fairy tales (each involving a prince or princess) with the help of two precocious students. Princes et Princesses was created using a special style of cutout animation, with black silhouetted characters performing the action against backlit backdrops in striking colors. Produced in 1989, Princes et Princesses was first released in Europe in 2000 and received its first screening in North America at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival. — Mark DemingRead More »
It’s been argued that this frightening and erotic piece of experimental montage from Belgian directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani is all form and no feeling. It’s easy to see why, since its most easy pleasures derive from a cool juxtaposition and stylisation of sound and imagery. But there’s more to it: the film also functions as a knowing, lightly feminist homage to Hitchcock and the chief exponents of the Giallo genre, Dario Argento and Mario Bava. As such, its ‘meanings’ may not be instantly traceable through a cosy linear storyline or densely wrought characterisations.
In immaculate detail and with barely any dialogue, the film depicts three symbolic events in the life of Ana: the first involves a family death and some mid-coitus voyeurism; another shows her first experience of male attraction; and the final, most impressive chapter (a wholesale updating of a key segment from Argento’s ‘Deep Red’) sees our heroine (played by Marie Bos, pictured above) sneaking around an eerie, European mansion, maybe stalked by a razor-wielding maniac.
Cattet and Forzani sculpt with pure mood. They deliver a vivid sense of Ana’s heightened sensitivity towards her surroundings via an array of bravura camera tricks and fine edits. The best way to describe it would be to imagine the shower scene in ‘Psycho’ played over feature length. A large part is shot in extreme close-up, mostly of Ana’s eyes or the silhouette of her crotch underneath a billowy cotton summer dress.
This technique imbues the film with a rich sense of texture, such as in an early scene where Ana runs her fingers over the cracking, mottled skin of (what appears to be) the corpse of an old man, or later when she’s riding in a taxi and the heat makes the leather trim too hot to touch. Some may find the film a mite academic in its glassy deconstruction of genre convention, and it’s perhaps asking a bit much to read it as anything more than a claustrophobic portrait of sexual danger, but it still fulfils that highly specific brief with blood-splashed gusto.
Amer.2009.1080p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv
General Container: Matroska Runtime: 1 h 30 min Size: 7.92 GiB Video Codec: x264 Resolution: 1916x816 Aspect ratio: 2.35:1 Frame rate: 23.976 fps Bit rate: 11.9 Mb/s BPP: 0.317 Audio #1: French 5.1ch AC-3 @ 640 kb/s
On the 15th of August 2005, Israel began the Disengagement of the Gaza Strip. In a unilateral move decided on by the Israeli government, the Jewish settlers were removed from their homes and villages.
After years of confrontation with the Palestinians, the Israeli army has earned a reputation for firmness. For the first time, it is being forced to turn its iron fist against a Jewish population. This film tracks the key events of the Disengagement over the course of five days.
This human mosaic will tell the story of the Disengagement from very different perspectives; they provide the narrative of an Israeli society in all its complexity, confronting a unique historical moment.Read More »
Quote:
2003. USA. Directed by Andrew Noren. “Energy pictures; mindful kinesis. Light and shadow vigorously conjoin, conjuring delusion of depth and duration, fiction of space and time. The fool’s paradise of the illusory window … (remember: flutter of phantoms, trick of the light) … is savored and shattered and seen for what it is” (Andrew Noren). Silent. 62 min.Read More »
A girl asks her father: “Daddy, why don’t you make films for children?” The filmic answer is a playful, free and personal film in the form of a letter, a film interwoven with a thousand stories, knit together with different textures, a book of images allowing a filmmaker to elaborate his view on cinema and to show the images and the stories he wants to share.Read More »
The film traces the growth and friendship of two very different high-school ping-pong players. “Peco” Hoshino is a brash, arrogant player, determined to turn pro. He taught his quiet, nerdy childhood friend “Smile” Tsukimoto. Smile frustrates his coach and rivals, who recognize his talent for the game since it is just a game to him. To teach him, his high-school coach learns that coaching is more than just training the students to be good ping-pong players. Ironically, as Smile begins to develop his game, Peco undergoes a severe crisis after his defeat by rival players and is unable to play well until he rediscovers the original reasons why he plays ping-pong. Written by nakataohana Read More »
