The first film Epstein made for Albatros stars Ivan Mosjoukine as a Mogul prince in exile. After getting caught up in such vices of the Occident as drinking, movies and women, the prince eventually returns to his Khanate and to his waiting bride.Read More »
Set in Paris on a hot summer day, this joyful and funny two-part film follows five young men and five young women where the boys cause trouble for the girls. In the first part, colleagues Milena and Lucie go Sunday swimming in a public pool. The incessant flirtation of lifeguard Jean disrupts their burgeoning friendship. In the second part, Hanne, a young Norwegian student, just wants to have a nice time with her friend Salomé on the national day, but she has to fend off the attention of three men while not upsetting her friend, who has taken a liking to one of the men.Read More »
Documentarists tend to be an eccentric breed. They need to be, since none of the main film festivals allow their films into competition (an incomprehensible decision), and to get a documentary into a cinema these days is a fraught process. But there is no more highly personal yet elusive film-maker than Chris Marker. His importance lies not in how many audiences have been affected by his films, but in how many of his fellow film-makers regard him as something of a genius.Read More »
Congolese democracy entrepreneur Lebrun takes us on a tangled, tender and cruel adventure to finalise a Chinese T-shirt deal which is turning sour. Between documentary and fiction, this tragicomedy sketches the outlines of a world without the West.Read More »
From Jordi Torrent’s program notes for “Raúl Ruiz: works for and about French TV,” at Exit Art (Nov 1987):
LA PRESENCE REELLE works through four axes of plot which are intercut throughout the film:
1. Adam Shaft, an out-of-work actor who recently worked on an interactive video disk documentary about the Avignon Theatre Festival, and who is now in a studio watching the program with the help of a computer specialist. Through conversations between Shaft and the computer specialist we find out that only 10% of time-space images in the video disk have been recorded from actual footage and the rest of the disk has been created by the computer using the ‘real presence’ of living beings. At one point Shaft complains because in the video disk his images are saying things that he never said. The computer specialist explains to him that his words have been used to create an entity that thinks and talks by itself, but that will not necessarily say things that Shaft would have thought or said.Read More »
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Recently restored (in 2001) by Centrimage for ZZ Productions, Maldone is one of the great achievements of French silent cinema. It was the first genuine masterpiece from Jean Grémillon and is also a very good example of the documentary style of film from this period. It was released in October 1928 but was not a great success, bringing and end to Charles Dullin’s film production ambitions (Dullin also stars in the film as Maldone).Read More »
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Ruiz returned to Portugal, the locale of many of his films, to adapt Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband, and the end product, Fado, Major and Minor, is among the most elliptical and intriguing works in his filmography. Jean-Luc Bideau stars as a tour guide who after blacking out returns to his apartment to find a mysterious intruder (Melvil Poupaud) who holds him accountable for the death of his lover. After premiering at Cannes, the film all but vanished due to rights issues, but it endures for Ruiz’s toggles between tragedy and farce, black and white and color, pop music and the traditional fatalistic sea shanties of its title.Read More »
Michelange Quay’s stunning first feature seductively begs the viewer to abandon the rules of traditional storytelling and instead embrace a poetic,… Michelange Quay’s stunning first feature seductively begs the viewer to abandon the rules of traditional storytelling and instead embrace a poetic, cinematic language. Eat, for This Is My Body tells of the evolution of power in Quay’s native Haiti and the colonial relationship between black boys and white women.Read More »
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What constitutes a deadly sin today? Seven of the world’s best-known women directors produce their own version of celluloid sin in this omnibus film. Helke Sander (THE GERMANS AND THEIR MEN) reverses GLUTTONY with her vision of Eve forcing her apples into the hands of a reluctant Adam. Bette Gordon (VARIETY, EMPTY SUITCASES) finds GREED during a fight in the ladies’ room of a luxury hotel over a lottery ticket. Strangers reply to director Maxi Cohen’s ad in a newspaper to share their litanies in ANGER. Award-winning director, Chantal Akerman, battles to overcome her SLOTH in order to complete her film, while Valie Export (INVISIBLE ADVERSARIES) strips bare notions of the skin trade in LUST. Read More »