Murder, madness and delirious sexual jealousy in Papua New Guinea. The Proposition director John Hillcoat’s lost 1996 psychodrama, featuring a soundtrack by Nick Cave and Scott Walker

Synopsis
“Jack (Karyo) is a Parisian living in Papua New Guinea, where he runs a ramshackle outdoor cinema. Two years ago his wife Rose (Finsterer) died in mysterious circumstances. Now he’s self-medicated with booze and dope and obsessed with the memory of his wife, whose flickering, drunken image he revisits nightly on the TV screens in his rickety editing suite.

On a trip to Melbourne to stock up on films for his cinema, Jack encounters writer Kate (Griffiths), and immediately he’s in love. Jack persuades Kate to join him in Papua New Guinea, but the past – and the clues to his wife’s death – remain present in the island’s two other whites: sleazy bar owner Sal (Jacobs), and whiskey-drenched missionary Stevie (Field), who ended up not converting but being converted by the pantheistic Papuans.

The narrative is fractured, reality shifts, and memories rear up out of Jack’s fevered subconscious as he teeters on sanity’s brink. Yet this is also a Douglas Sirk-style melodrama about enduring – in both senses – love. Writer Gene Conkie scripted Hillcoat’s Civil Dead, and To Have And To Hold displays that first film’s fascination with men at the very edge of their capacity to cope. What it lacks, and this probably accounts for the film’s failure to receive a proper theatrical release in 1996, is the sense of purpose that drives Hillcoat’s other films, or their harsh moral tone.

Jack drifts into a booze-fuelled nightmare of his own creation, the past replayed on his own video equipment, but the cinematic references – to The Harder They Come, among others – reflect a fascination with film as a form, rather than with the reality which film seeks to convey, and that same schematic approach is evident throughout the film’s second half.

Cave and Bargeld’s soundtrack is like Ennio Morricone conducting Popol Vuh; the sense of delirium, delusion, isolation and insanity is persistently intriguing; Tchéky Karyo and Rachel Griffiths sweat it out convincingly in the wetly oppressive jungle. But despite the allure of madness and whiskey in exotic climes, whatever it is that To Have And To Hold is grasping towards remains tantalisingly out of reach.”

File Name .........................................: To Have And To Hold (John Hillcoat).avi
File Size (in bytes) ............................: 733,601,792 bytes
Runtime ............................................: 1:35:32

Video Codec ...................................: XviD ISO MPEG-4
Frame Size ......................................: 640x352 (AR: 1.818)
FPS .................................................: 25.000
Video Bitrate ...................................: 891 kb/s
Bits per Pixel ...................................: 0.158 bpp
B-VOP, N-VOP, QPel, GMC.............: [B-VOP], [], [], []

Audio Codec ...................................: 0x0055 MPEG-1 Layer 3
Sample Rate ...................................: 48000 Hz
Audio Bitrate ...................................: 119 kb/s [2 channel(s)] VBR
No. of audio streams .......................: 1

https://nitro.download/view/19199631D11FD6D/To_Have_And_To_Hold_(John_Hillcoat).avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post John Hillcoat – To Have and to Hold (1996) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Central Industrial Prison is set in the middle of the desert. It’s the future of maximum-security containment and it’s been “locked down” after an explosion of violence. A Committee’s been appointed to report on the events that led to the violence but their findings are in stark contrast to the reality we see with our own eyes.. “Ghosts.. of the Civil Dead” is a powerful drama on modern methods of social control.

Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead is set entirely within the confines of a modern Maximum Security prison – a “New Generation” Prison painted in play school yellows, bathroom violets and resembling your modern Shopping Mall. Central Industrial Prison is located in the middle of the desert. It has been “locked down” – the confinement of all inmates to their cells, 23 hors a day, indefintely – following an outbreak of violence and a Committee has been appointed to report..

GHOSTS_OF_THE_CIVIL_DEAD.avi

General
Container:  	AVI
Runtime: 	1h 29mn
Size: 	1.09 GiB
Video
Codec: 	XviD
Resolution: 	640x480 
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1565 Kbps
BPP: 	
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch MPEG Audio @ 179 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/7BC05C260272D0C/GHOSTS_OF_THE_CIVIL_DEAD.avi
https://nitro.download/view/37383987329D1F7/interviews.rar

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post John Hillcoat – Ghosts… of the Civil Dead (1988) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A lawman apprehends a notorious outlaw and gives him nine days to kill his older brother, or else they’ll execute his younger brother.

The.Proposition.2005.576p.BluRay.x264.AC3.5.1.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 44mn
Size: 	1.71 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x428 
Aspect ratio:  	2.40:1
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	1 670 Kbps
BPP: 	0.159
Audio
#1:  	English 5.1ch AC-3 @ 448 Kbps
#2:  	English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps (Commentary)

https://nitro.download/view/AAA89BE673AC903/The.Proposition.2005.576p.BluRay.x264.AC3.5.1.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles: English, Spanish, French, Czech, Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Polish

The post John Hillcoat – The Proposition (2005) first appeared on Cinema of the World.