With little or no embellishment, filmmaker Marguerite Duras offers a simple, often wordless chronicle of a woman’s day. She and her friend are seen doing yard work, talking about their families and receiving the occasional visitor.
Seven-year-old Fabio Spada is narrated into our awareness with pedestrian, bureaucratic details: the name of his parents, the exact location of his family’s cramped living situation in a tower block in the Roman suburbs, and this suburb’s transport connections.
This urban fantasia interweaves recollections of the director’s young adulthood in the era of Mussolini with an impressionistic portrait of contemporary Rome, where he and his film crew are gathering footage of the bustling cityscape.
Frédéric’s perfectly ordered life passes by pleasantly enough. He’s married to the woman he loves, is the father of an adorable little girl, and has set up a prosperous business with a colleague. He even has free time to enjoy the pleasures of Parisian life.
The destructive downward spiral of a man who returns from the French Foreign Legion to his suffocating life back home. Hans Epp is a self-destructive man who lives a dissatisfied life.
Bill Douglas’s films My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home are three of the most compelling and critically acclaimed films about childhood ever made.
A psychologist is sent to a station orbiting a distant planet in order to discover what has caused the crew to go insane.
A film diary divided into three episodes. In the first part Jonas Mekas tells about his time as emigrant in New York in 1950s, after leaving the home country of Lithuania.
“[...] That millions of people every day pay huge sums of money and go to great hardship merely to enjoy fear seems paradoxical. Yet it is no exaggeration. Any carnival man will tell you the rides that attract the greatest clientele are those that inspire the greatest fear.
“Jancsó developed the mise en scène in his strenuously physical way, pacing the terrain back and forth in all directions to work out the movements of the performers and those of the camera.
“The best explanation of this film is that, from the standpoint of pure reason, there is no explanation.”
Luis Buñuel1
In 1972, newly radicalized Hollywood star Jane Fonda joined forces with cinematic innovator Jean-Luc Godard and collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin in an unholy artistic alliance that resulted in Tout va bien.
The story of the repression of a member of the Angolan liberation movement and his endless search for his wife with his son, revealing of how the bureaucratic logic of colonialism works.
It’s 1560; the Spanish Empire’s reach has come across South America. Now leading an expedition on the Amazon River, a group of Conquistadors are now looking for the legendary city of gold: El Dorado.
“Despite all the writings, and they are voluminous, by Pasolini and about Pasolini, there is little reference to the fact that his work is an outstanding example of artistic Modernism. Perhaps the silence is due to his fierce dislike and rejection of Modern society.
Panning shots describe the space of a room as a succession of still lives: a chair, some fruit on a table, a collection of solitary, waiting objects. Sitting on the bed there is the presence of a young woman: the filmmaker herself, eating an apple.
“More than Reconstruction, Angelopoulos’s direct indictment of the Junta came in 1972 with his film Days of ’36 [Meres tou ’36].
“In the second of her 1972 experiments, Akerman again wanted to draw viewers’ eyes to elements in the frame that they might not otherwise have considered. Similarly focused on architecture and interior spaces, Hotel Mônterey is grander in scope than La chambre.
Petra von Kant, a successful fashion designer, enjoys a fairly satisfactory sado-masochistic relationship with her female assistant Marlene. Things get more complicated when she falls in love with the beautiful young Karin.