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Jacques Chauvry, the new government delegate for a French protectorate in Cambodia, meets the young Soun who, due to a series of circumstances, will become heir to land that houses a large oil field. Tao , an evil mestizo, along with his minions, tries to get hold of these lands, terrorizing the locals by appearing disguised as the “spirit of evil”.Read More »
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Adapted from Émile Zola’s novel of the same name, Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Argent [Money] is an opulent classic of late-silent era cinema. Filmed in part on location at the Paris stock exchange, it reveals a world of intrigue, greed, decadence, and ultimately corruption and scandal when business dealings and amorous deceit combine. Business tycoons Saccard and Gunderman lock horns when the former attempts to raise capital for his faltering bank. To inflate the price of his stock, Saccard concocts a duplicitous publicity stunt involving the unwitting aviator Hamelin and a flight across the Atlantic to drill for oil, much to the dismay of his wife Line.Read More »
PLOT: Ludivine, a lttle tomboy, takes on the too polite Delphin. Being caught, and punished, she wants him and his father to be dead. When the latter dies, she feels guilty and takes Delphin under her wing.Read More »
An acrobatic woman and a man in a skeleton suit are involved in a gypsy plot.
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A little girl seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Fifteen years after, the true reason comes into light. Her cousin Henri makes up his mind and decides it is time for action. In order to help the girl escaping the vigilant gypsy home of ‘Cirque Bartoli’, both get caught and end up being chased by the gypsies. This hot pursuit – crossing sewage channels, roof tops, mountains and rivers – is an excellent piece of the girl’s extraordinary acrobatic skills and Henri’s bravura.Read More »
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This visually magnificent and poetic city symphony of Paris in the late 1920s earned Sauvage the admiration of Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo. Sauvage maps the metropolis through its street life, monuments, ports, and automobile traffic.Read More »
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“Hypnotic” is the best word to describe Favula, the latest work from director Raúl Perrone, which comes with a recommendation from none other than Apichatpong Weerasethakul – though he used the more Joe-like epithet, “bliss.” Somewhat of a secret outside of his native Argentina, Perrone has made more than 30 movies, and in recent years has reinvented his cinema, by looking back to the past, and in doing so pointing to the future. Standing apart from any other film made this year, with its magical handmade aesthetic, Favula recalls Méliès, or silent Fritz Lang, but at the same time evokes recent silent, stage-bound aesthetics like Raya Martin’s Independencia. Loosely based on an African fable, and shot employing rear-projections techniques, Favula’s simple events take place mostly in an isolated house and a nearby jungle: a marginal family’s life is interrupted by the arrival of a teenaged girl. On top of the minimalist, pulsating images, Perrone layers a maximalist soundtrack that encompasses both the sounds of the jungle and non-diegetic music (indelible contemporary songs that appeared in his last work, the cumbia punk opera P3ND3JO5). The result is a wholly unique, mythical universe of danger, passion and magic.Read More »
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Turksib itself, a silent film presented here with a newly commissioned score by Guy Bartell focuses on the problems faced by regional farmers in Turkestan and the creation of the Turkestan-Siberian railway. It is filled with impressionistic images of the land and its people juxtaposed with the inevitable juggernaut of Soviet industrial expansion. I’m not so certain that the new score is always in harmony, no pun intended, with the subject matter here. The electronic instrumentation and trance music seems rather anachronistic and jarring, really a bit out of place, if I may be redundant.Read More »
Filmed in Parisian parks and on a terrace, LE DIVERTISSEMENT foreshadows the labyrinthine walks that would be a part of Rivette’s cinema, in which the characters look for, follow and find each other like in a romantic scavenger hunt.
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Rivette’s three shorts—Au quartre coins (“The Four Corners,” 1948), Le quadrille (1950), and Le divertissement (“The Diversion,” 1952)—were found in 2009 after the filmmaker and his wife, Véronique, discovered the 16 mm films when going through his materials. Describing them as amateur, made when the filmmaker was barely out of his teens, the trio have been dubbed “apprenticeship films.”(MUBI)Read More »
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The ringmaster of an impoverished circus hires Chaplin’s Little Tramp as a clown, when he discovers that he can only be funny unintentionally, not on purpose.Read More »