Synopsis:
‘A historian is called to a creepy old castle to help a strange old widow catalogue her erotic antiquities. He then meets her dark, seductive daughter and finds he is falling under her erotic spell. Incapable of forcing himself to leave, he spirals helplessly into their strange supernatural world.’

The.Witch.1966.BDRIP.576p.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 49 min
Size: 	2.76 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x554 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	3 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.221
Audio
#1:  	Italian 1.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s (Italian Dub)
#2:  	English 1.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s (English Dub)
#3:  	English 2.0ch AAC LC @ 161 kb/s (Commentary by author and producer Kat Ellinger)

https://nitro.download/view/CAAA0E558FC18E5/The.Witch.1966.BDRIP.576p.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language(s):Italian, English
Subtitles:English

The post Damiano Damiani – La strega in amore AKA The Witch in Love (1966) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
In the rough years of the revolution in Mexico, the hardened bandit chief, El Chucho, is in need of arms, ammunition, and a much-sought-after machine gun to support the leader of the revolution, the rebel General, Elías. With this in mind, Chucho attacks a government supply train and gets an unforeseen assistance from Bill Tate–the American gringo in the impeccable suit–with whom will soon become friends. Now, Bill is truly indispensable to the gang, however, could he be hiding his true objective behind a boyish and calm face?

3.69GB | 1 h 57 min | 1024×436 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/4858BE37B8CF813/Bullet.for.the.General.1966.576p.BluRay.Dual.Audio.AAC.x264.AquA.mkv

https://rapidgator.net/file/a4ba33726b9f2fb31cb024a68f94a6a1/Bullet.for.the.General.1966.576p.BluRay.Dual.Audio.AAC.x264.AquA.mkv

Language(s):English, Italian (2 audio tracks)
Subtitles:English (muxed)”

The post Damiano Damiani – El chuncho, quien sabe? AKA A Bullet for the General (1967) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
The Man With No Name (Clint Eastwood) enters the Mexican village of San Miguel in the midst of a power struggle among the three Rojo brothers (Antonio Prieto, Benny Reeves, Sieghardt Rupp) and sheriff John Baxter (Wolfgang Lukschy). When a regiment of Mexican soldiers bearing gold intended to pay for new weapons is waylaid by the Rojo brothers, the stranger inserts himself into the middle of the long-simmering battle, selling false information to both sides for his own benefit.

1.94GB | 1h 40mn | 1024×438 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/2905FF507D5EB73/A.Fistful.of.Dollars.1967.576p.BDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Czech, Estonian, Norwegian, Romanian, Turkish (muxed)

The post Sergio Leone – Per un pugno di dollari AKA Fistful of Dollars (1964) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
Master thief Corey (Alain Delon) is fresh out of prison. But instead of toeing the line of law-abiding freedom, he finds his steps leading back to the shadowy world of crime, crossing those of a notorious escapee (Gian Maria Volonté) and alcoholic ex-cop (Yves Montand). As the unlikely trio plots a heist against impossible odds, their trail is pursued by a relentless inspector (Bourvil), and fate seals their destinies. Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le cercle rouge combines honorable anti-heroes, coolly atmospheric cinematography, and breathtaking set pieces to create a masterpiece of crime cinema.

3.44GB | 2h 21mn | 1024×554 | mkv

http://nitroflare.com/view/E8E4DFA4E43B8C9/Le.Cercle.Rouge.AKA.The.Red.Circle.1970.576p.BDRip.x264-HANDJOB.part1.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/64874D884A665D3/Le.Cercle.Rouge.AKA.The.Red.Circle.1970.576p.BDRip.x264-HANDJOB.part2.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/E8C11802A44CB12/Le.Cercle.Rouge.AKA.The.Red.Circle.1970.576p.BDRip.x264-HANDJOB.part3.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/61090AA9665687E/Le.Cercle.Rouge.AKA.The.Red.Circle.1970.576p.BDRip.x264-HANDJOB.part4.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/4340DA3BC9F4D63/Le_Cercle_rouge_Extras.rar

Language:French
Subtitles:English (muxed)

The post Jean-Pierre Melville – Le Cercle Rouge AKA The Red Circle (1970) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

As 1973 winds down, Franco is still governing Spain with an iron hand. Opposition parties are forbidden; labor movements are repressed; and Basque nationalists are mercilessly hunted down. The caudillo [dictator] is aging, though, and the continuity of the régime is in question. One man has the trust of Franco, enough authority and experience to assume the leadership, and an impeccable track record as to dealing with enemies of the State: Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. For the embattled, clandestine Basque organization ETA, Carrero Blanco must be brought down. Daring plans are made, requiring a meticulous execution…
— Eduardo Casais, IMDb

Pontecorvo’s fifth and last feature film is based on the 1974 book by Julen Agirre (pen name of Eva Forest), Operación Ogro: Cómo y por qué ejecutamos a Carrero Blanco (Operation Ogre: How and Why We Have Executed Carrero Blanco), a series of interviews with ETA members involved in the assassination. Carrero Blanco was apparently nicknamed “El Ogro” due in part to his bushy eyebrows.

***

Pontecorvo’s last feature, Ogro (1979), is perhaps the key film in his opus. Ogro was planned as a straight, chronological depiction of the Basque Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) terrorist assassination of Franchist minister Carrero Blanco in 1973 Spain. But Pontecorvo felt obligated to change the narrative of the film to question terrorism after the kidnapping and murder of former Italian premier Aldo Moro by Communist terrorists in 1978. Pontecorvo has admitted that Ogro was actually made with a guilty conscience due to concurrent events in Italy. He attempted to salvage the film by including characterizations that question the legitimacy of terrorism. But these additions make Ogro a film that contradicts itself. The film’s heroic depiction of a terrorist act is enveloped by flashbacks and a coda in which a Basque ETA terrorist on his hospital deathbed admits his fears about meeting his maker in light of the violent life he led. His comrades attempt to comfort him by praising his courage to act on his convictions. But in the final scenes they distance themselves from their hard-line comrade’s belief in violence as a legitimate political tool. The scene is a fitting finale for Pontecorvo’s entire opus, which runs from the enthusiasm of his appearance as a resistance fighter in Outcry, to his vivid depiction of armed struggle in The Battle of Algiers, to the fatalism of Burn!, and finally the retreat from terrorism with the guilty conscience of Ogro.

— Carlo Celli, Gillo Pontecorvo: From Resistance to Terrorism

Carrero Blanco’s Dodge Dart, after being blown five stories high and landing on a balcony on the far side of a Jesuit college

Clneaste: Did you encounter any particular problems in getting Ogro produced?

Glllo Pontecorvo: Yes. In 1976, shortly after we started working on the project, the Americans (United Artists) who were to have produced it got scared. Franco was dead, but the political regime was still half Francoist, and United Artists was afraid that the Spanish government would block the distribution of their other films in Spain. So we stopped for a year and a half. During that time there was a democratic movement in Spain, and the government changed. Since the danger of repercussions was lessened, we were able to renew the project. Following this, however, there was another interruption, apparently because the theme we had selected was too difficult and not very commercial. After four or five months of searching, we finally came up with two producers — an Italian, Franco Cristaldi (and his associate, Nicola Carraro); and a Spaniard, Jose Samano.

Clneaste: The Moro affair occurred during this period. Did it encourage you to make changes in your scenario?

Pontecorvo: Yes. It was during the kidnapping of Moro that we wrote the final version of the script, after hesitating between continuing or dropping the project altogether. The film probably shows the effects of many of these perplexities. We perhaps overstated the fundamental difference, as we see it, between armed struggle under a democratic regime and armed struggle under a dictatorial regime…

…disallowing the speaking of Basque in school is a determining element in the story. Of the four protagonists involved in the assassination, to whom I have spoken at length, two of them told me that the deepest, longest-lasting impression left upon their memories was of being punished with a ruler. One of them, in fact, spoke about it for over two hours. Consequently, this scene synthesizes the mode of fascist repression against all forms of expression of national identity.

— Interview by Corinne Luca for Cineaste

The sinkhole left by the explosion

Q- Everyone asks, why have you directed so few movies?

A- It’s true I make one film every eight or nine years. I am like an impotent man, who can make love only to a woman who is completely right for him. I can only make a movie in which I am totally in love. If you had the list of films I’ve refused – The Mission, Bethune, etc. – you’d have a telephone book.

When I do a film, they pay me very well. I live modestly, and I can live ten years in Rome on what I am paid for a film. My wife agrees to live with me modestly, but to be very free. We are very close. She teaches music aesthetics at a conservatory, and, if I ever changed professions, I’d push to be a composer. I like music more than movies.

I play piano very badly, but enough to write a score. I wrote the music for all my documentaries, and for Kapo and The Battle of Algiers. In my opinion, a film is a synthesis of form and content, but a synthesis based on a counterpoint of sound and image. It’s not always that the visual image is more important than the sound image. In writing my next film, I’ve changed four scenes because of the music.

Q- Few in America have seen your 1979 feature, Ogro, or The Tunnel.

A- It’s the contemporary story of the Basque fight for independence. I don’t consider it a good film. I was telling a story of an act of terrorism against Franco as the same time I was strongly against the 1978 terrorist death of Aldo Moro. You can feel it in the film, that I am contradictory.

Because of European stars Gian Maria Volonte and Angelina Molina, Ogro made money in Italy and I won the prize in Italy that year for Best Direction. Critics were divided. In Spain, right-wing people threw things at the screen, so they had to stop showing it.

— Interview by Gerald Peary

The lovely Ana Torrent

Pontecorvo’s Special Effects man, Emilio Ruiz del Río — a model-maker, painter, and designer — was considered the world master of glass painting and one of the great geniuses in the use of miniatures.

1.26GB | 01:40:16 | 640×480 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/6BA1CE7D44654FA/Operacion_Ogro_(Gillo_Pontecorvo,_1979).avi
https://nitro.download/view/E6163C8FF554C8F/Operacion_Ogro_(Gillo_Pontecorvo,_1979).eng.srt

Language:Spanish
Subtitles:English

The post Gillo Pontecorvo – Operación Ogro [Spanish version] (1979) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
This symbolic film underscores the struggles between a group of visionaries versus the Establishment while wondering about the survival of humankind. A group of young men manage to escape a volcano eruption on their small island. Seeking a new life, they stop at an island between their destroyed island and the mainland. This island is run by Renno, the community leader who offers the men help and a boat to continue their journey. The group conspires to panic the islanders with fear of another volcano eruption in order to take over the abandoned island. Renno has the men jailed for creating a disturbance, but after their terms are served, the men betray Renno by killing off the male population and escaping with the surviving women. The two apparently go off to pursue their utopian ideals where there is one woman for every two men.

Sotto il segno dello scorpione AKA Under the sign of Scorpio - 1969 - Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 26mn
Size: 	1.37 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	718x550 ~> 1017x550
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 058 Kbps
BPP: 	0.208
Audio
#1:  	Italian 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/A8931E634592319/Sotto_il_segno_dello_scorpione_AKA_Under_the_sign_of_Scorpio_-_1969_-_Paolo_Taviani_and_Vittorio_Taviani.mkv

Language:Italian
Subtitles:English

The post Paolo Taviani & Vittorio Taviani – Sotto il segno dello scorpione AKA Under the Sign of Scorpio (1969) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Two voices. One French, one American. A political tract concerning the issues of Communism in the workplace and ideals of freedom and equality, post-May, 1968, is recited back and forth over an obscured image of bodies slumbering in what appears to be a garden. The image is pastoral and idyllic in presentation, suggesting an almost abstract quality devoid of time and place. After a series of static images that simply observe these scenarios – largely with no real movement within the frame – we see a small group of actors preparing themselves for a film. As we continue, these actors, who speak Italian and are dressed in period costume, wander through this idyllic location as the narration goes on to discuss a cinema of revolution and the history of politics in cinema dating as far back as Sergei Eisenstein. Through this, the filmmakers are able to reflect on the notions of politics and history in both a cultural and cinematic sense; creating in the process a film that collapses elements of genuine historical fact, and superimposes them over the struggles and issues of the present day.

Two voices. Both French. The film here is one of a handful of collaborative efforts between the filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, who under the creative banner of The Group Dziga Vertov, would produce a number of essay-based films that looked specifically at contemporary political issues from a Marxist/Leninist perspective. Unlike Godard’s more socially aware films, pre-1967, The Dziga Vertov Group would reject conventional filmmaking practices altogether; focusing instead on a deconstructive approach that relied heavily upon the use found sounds and images that were cut together with the appropriate use of voice over and ironic screen-titles that not only offer some kind of background to the events unfolding, but also worked against the audience, distracting and disarming the viewer from what was happening on screen. This makes the viewing process even more difficult, with the already weighty bombardment of spoken information and the miscommunication of the two voices already alienating those of us unfamiliar with Communist manifestos or the working conditions in Europe in 1969.

Despite the general ideology of the Dziga Vertov Group, which was to reject the claim of authorship that Godard and his generation of critics had previously helped to define, the images of Le vent d’est (The East Wind/The Wind from the East, 1970) are typical of the man who gave us La chinoise (1967), and later Le gai savoir (The Joy of Learning, 1969), with the pastoral settings suggesting elements of the final act of Week End (1967), while the continual punctuation of high-rise apartment buildings and the wheels of industry that feature in the second half of the film call to mind a similar devise used in the earlier 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, 1967). However, whereas those films had used clever visual metaphors and deconstructive film techniques to tell stories as a means of conveying socio-political satire, they did so with a vague semblance of narrative.

Here, the film is mostly a continual stream of thought over some beautifully composed images. Naturally, there are numerous other devises used that are typical of Godard’s work, both before and after his period with “The Group”, such as the use of repeated images (or motifs), looped dialog (so that the same words or phrases are repeated a number of times throughout), inter-titles (here, illegibly scrawled in marker pen), the presentation of the camera as part of the proceedings (the “general assembly”, as Godard puts it) and the natural facade of cinema as presented by print damage, spliced frames and deliberate mistakes (again, the deconstructive notion of cinema as truth).

Without question, the images of the film are simply astounding, and are easily amongst the most beautiful and provocative scenarios that Godard has ever created; with the single image of these ancient, anachronistic figures, Bergman-like in their presentation of white gowns against green hills, wandering through these glorious fields being a particularly astounding sight, eventually giving way to the more aggressive, deconstructive images of mass graves, construction and the general process of film production itself, pushing us back towards the direction of Week End. However, despite the brilliance of Godard’s filmmaking and the range of his ideas, Le vent d’est – like many of these Dziga Vertov Group films – is incredibly difficult to recommend to a potential audience, despite the obvious quality of its production. The continual bombardment of voice-over narration – delivered in a flat, rapid fire Parisian (American?) accent from an unaccredited voice actress – reminds us that this is a visual essay, presented in the form of a radical, experimental film. As a result, most viewers will find the film a complete chore; more so than any other Godard film, all of which require a certain level of cooperation from the audience, but tend to reward our efforts with an element of human concern.

Even when presented in such a way as to be completely obvious to the point of almost agitprop sloganeering, Le vent d’est nonetheless retains some level of ambiguity; drawing parallels between the two winds – the east and the west – and the voices on the soundtrack, with Godard and Gorin again using the film to investigate the present day struggle by way of the past (a past as represented by the cinema itself). The film isn’t to be approached in the conventional sense, but rather digested in two or three single sittings, with any real attempt to interpret the film, or pick up on every single topical reference, really requiring a lot more energy and perception as illustrated in this post. Arguable, the film is dated in the political sense – having now become a period piece that looks at a specific era in twentieth-century existence – however, it is also a truly uncompromising work from a collective of filmmakers attempting to communicate something radical through the medium of film. Even if you disregard the experience, you have to marvel at the presentation of Godard’s images, and the conviction of his ideals. (lightsinthedusk.blogspot.com)

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/D5BBB6582978D3E/le-vent-d-est.avi

Eng srt:
http://artsubs.wz.cz/subs/godard.1970.le.vent.dest.en.zip

Language(s):French
Subtitles:english

The post Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin – Le vent d’est AKA East Wind (1970) first appeared on Cinema of the World.