“Just tell me one thing frankly. Is this monkey really your lover?”
It is and it isn’t unlikely material for Nagisa Ôshima. The element of transgressive love is here, but this time, it’s in a dry comedy whose centerpiece is a diplomat’s wife’s extramarital affair with a sensitive, somewhat unstable chimpanzee (aren’t they all?). Charlotte Rampling is the woman, Anthony Higgins is the diplomat, and Victoria Abril is the housekeeper who develops a mysterious allergy, probably but not necessarily to the titular Max.
Evidence of the film’s strengths are that it never rises to the hysteria a lesser production might wring from this material — the characters always behave and react within the realm of reason and plausibility — and the fact that the chimp emerges as a pretty sympathetic, perhaps even tragic, figure.
Criterion wrote: In Arnaud Desplechin’s beguiling A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël), Catherine Deneuve brings her legendary poise to the role of Junon, matriarch of the troubled Vuillard family, who come together at Christmas after she learns she needs a bone marrow transplant from a blood relative. That simple family reunion setup, however, can’t begin to describe the unpredictable, emotionally volatile experience of this film, an inventive, magical drama that’s equal parts merriment and melancholy. Unrequited childhood loves and blinding grudges, brutal outbursts and sudden slapstick, music, movies, and poetry, A Christmas Tale ties it all together in a marvelously messy package.
Synopsis Evald Schorm was one of the most politically outspoken of the Czech New Wave filmmakers. This raw psychological drama about an engineer unable to adjust to the world around him following his suicide attempt is at heart a scathing portrait of social alienation and moral compromise. Criterion.com
From MUBI: Four Sisters, a quartet of Lanzmann documentaries that recently premiered at the New York Film Festival, avoids many of the pitfalls of the often-irascible documentarian’s lesser films by dint of its remarkable self-effacement. Devoted to the frequently jaw-dropping stories of four women who survived the Holocaust, the films—The Hippocratic Oath, Baluty, The Merry Flea, and Noah’s Ark— confirm that filmed oral history is Lanzmann’s métier. This seems particularly noteworthy in an era where the macro-historical approach of scholars such as Timothy Snyder has become embraced as the best conceptual tool for defining and explicating the Holocaust. The testimonies in Shoah, however, function superbly as micro-historical artifacts. Lanzmann’s choice to foreground women exclusively in Four Sisters is not addressed directly but could be considered either compensation for primarily featuring men in his cycle of Holocaust films or aligned to an implicit assertion that the women portrayed in the films possess a special brand of courage and perseverance.
Of the hundred ghettos that dotted the Polish countryside, the one in Lodz had existed for the longest. It was ruled with an iron fist by the president of the Jewish council of elders, Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, known as “King Chaim” – a man convinced he could save part of the community by turning them into manpower to serve the Germans.
Her consistently and relentlessly painful account during the shoot of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah makes for an attempt at understanding how one can be part of a convoy which – with Eichmann’s agreement – saved hundreds of Hungarian Jews while at the same time some 450.000 of their kin were either dying in the gas chambers of Birkenau, or burned alive in the open air in order to keep up with the pace the Nazis demanded.
Quote: Alan Clarke first released Scum in 1977 as a BBC TV-film, yet the BBC disapproved of the film due to the amount of raw, harrowing realism which had been packed into a short running-time. Therefore the BBC banned the version, and it was not until fifteen years later that the TV-version was aired on the UK’s Channel 4. Though, to get around not being able to release the TV version of Scum Alan Clarke opted in for developing a remade, feature-length version to be aired at cinemas, this was released in 1979. The film sent shockwaves through cinemas across Britain, causing huge controversy from the media, government and British public. Some people saw the film as a “visceral image of a flawed system”, while others saw the film as “exploitive trash in the form of a documentary”.
Scum is a disturbing look at a British Borstal’s futile attempt at rehabilitating young offenders, the inmates of the Borstal range from adolescent teen to young adult. Most of them (if not all) have little hope in achieving anything in their life, except for just moving from prison to prison for their antisocial crimes. The film focuses of on brutality of a flawed and corrupt system whereby the inmates have no hope of rehabilitation due to the infantile regimes. The film shows how survival through brutality is the only way of getting through the system and even then there is still no sign of release for any of the prisoners. Thankfully in today’s Britain, Borstals are inexistent, since they were (as is quite apparent in Scum) deemed unfit for people, due to the despicable infliction of violence and vicious corruption.
Scum is undoubtedly a film which will prompt viewers to question to entire rehabilitation process used for society’s undesirables. Scum makes you wonder whether it is morally incorrect for even the most disgusting of individuals to get such vile treatment. As the brutal treatment is only prompting the individual to become even more sadistic and inhumane. The film details what men will do to “comply” with a system they loathe and how they will form their own rules and beliefs to suit the system in a way which will benefit them. There is a strong element of wasted talent etched into the film, this is in the respect of intelligent men who have potential, yet do not know how to use it. Scum takes you inside a world where young men have been reduced to their most primitive form; a place where violence breeds violence and respect is shown through class and power, rather than morals. I beg of you to think about what Scum is attempting to say and question through its subtext.
The performances from the entire cast are pulled off with raw, natural intensity. Ray Winstone’s debut performance as –nicknamed “the daddy”- Carlin is one of the most unflinching and uncompromising performances I have ever seen. It is a performance which bursts with adolescent rage and masochism. He is a boy who has been demoralised by the life he has grown up in. It is distressing to see a man of complex capabilities be destroyed by his primitive brutality, which has been forced upon him by the human instinct of survival.
The technical prowess of Scum helps to create and delve inside the bland, grim and unpleasant environment of the Borstal. Making the film feel even more genuine in its atmosphere through its documentary style editing and camera techniques, the use of long-haul, close-ups and tracking-shots add to the film’s aggressive ingenuity. In some of the more violent scenes of the film the camera is held for longer takes, which helps to provoke more emotional power. The camera feels somewhat intrusive, this is because of how Alan Clarke is achieving to shed light on a conformity situation people were afraid to question and examine, yet Alan Clarke is unadulterated when it comes to presenting realism and so tries to make his film-making as tight as possible. There is no use of score either, nor any form of music to accompany scenes, making scenes feel all the more haunting and prolonged.
Scum is an engrossing, convincing and complex example of British film-making at the top of its game. It is a story you will never forget, and remains a film which contains scenes that once viewed will be etched into the depths of your mind. Scum should be compulsory viewing for everyone as it remains a highly affective film of searing emotional intensity.
Quote: «La Région Centrale» was made during five days of shooting on a deserted mountain top in North Quebec. During the shooting, the vertical and horizontal alignment as well as the tracking speed were all determined by the camera’s settings. Anchored to a tripod, the camera turned a complete 360 degrees, craned itself skyward, and circled in all directions. Because of the unconventional camera movement, the result was more than merely a film that documented the film location’s landscape. Surpassing that, this became a film expressing as its themes the cosmic relationships of space and time. Cataloged here were the raw images of a mountain existence, plunged (at that time) in its distance from civilization, embedded in cosmic cycles of light and darkness, warmth and cold.
Quote: La Région Centrale (Quebec, 1971, 180 min., 16mm, color) is arguably the most spectacular experimental film made anywhere in the world, and for John W. Locke, writing in Artforum in 1973, it was “as fine and important a film as I have ever seen.” If ever the term “metaphor on vision” needed to be applied to a film it should be to this one. Following Wavelength, Michael Snow continued to explore camera/frame movement and its relationships with space and time in Standard Time (1967) an eight minute series of pans and tilts in an apartment living room and (Back and Forth) (1968–69), a more extended analysis. But with La Région Centrale, Snow managed to create moving images that heretofore could no possibly be observed by the human eye. For this project he enlisted the help of Pierre Abaloos to design and build a machine which would allow the camera to move smoothly about a number of different axes at various speeds, while supported by a short column, where the lens of the camera could pass within inches of the ground and zoom into the infinity of the sky. Snow placed his device on a peak near Sept Îsles in Quebec’s région centrale and programmed it to provide a series of continuously changing views of the landscape. Initially, the camera pans through 360° passes which map out the terrain, and then it begins to provide progressively stranger views (on its side, upside down) through circular and back-and-forth motions.
The weird soundtrack was constructed from the electronic sounds of the programmed controls which are sometimes in synch with the changing framing on screen and sometimes not. Here, allusions to other films occur, especially science fiction works like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) which similarly reveals a barren, human-less primal landscape (with odd sounds) and spatially disorients the spectator. In La Région Centrale’s second hour, the world is inverted for so long, that when the camera swings vertically through a full circle to restore the horizon line to its rightful position, above the earth, it looks wrong. In the complete absence of human or animal forms, one can imagine the outlines of animals in the silhouetted shapes of rocks at twilight. It is impossible not to notice “camera movement” in this film, and, as Locke notes, one is inclined to observe the frame edge leading the movement (rather than the center) much of the time.
I can only imagine what it would have been like to see La Région Centrale, captivated in the extreme dark and quiet of New York’s Anthology Film Archive theater built specifically for the screening of experimental films in the 1970s. But, in any event, seen under any condition, the last hour offers up an incredible experience, with unbelievably high speed twisting and swirling motions rendering dynamic color and line abstractions. Finally, by rephotography —of the film jumping out of the gate— and flaring out of the image to red and yellow colors, and, closing with the camera apparently motionless on the sun, Snow presents a reflexive impression of the camera as the ultimate transformative, creative apparatus, capable of any magic. La Région Centrale presents a definitive “metaphor on vision.”
Quote: A grizzled thug and his gang head to an island retreat with a haul of 250 kilograms of gold bullion to lay low; however, a bohemian writer, his muse, and a pair of gendarmes further complicate things, as allegiances are put to the test.
Quote: The Mediterranean summer: blue sea, blazing sun….and 250 kg of gold stolen by Rhino and his gang! They had found the perfect hideout: an abandoned and remote hamlet now taken over by a woman artist in search for inspiration. Unfortunately surprise guests and two cops compromise their plan: the heavenly place where wild happenings and orgies used to take place turns into a gruesome battlefield….Relentless and mindblowing.
This is an adaptation of one of the most important novels of Argentine literary modernism, Roberto Arlt’s El juguete rabioso (1926). Similar in many ways to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917), this novel (and the film) chronicles a young man’s journey through a life of poverty on the margins of society in Buenos Aires among anarchists and gangsters during the first years of the 20th century. The novel is essential reading for an understanding of subsequent Argentine literature, yet it is little known outside of Argentina. In El beso de la mujer araña AKA Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), Manuel Puig was very consciously drawing the whole conceit of the homosexual ‘traitor’/’lover’ and the political prisoner directly from this book.
Gary Cooper and George Raft play a couple of seafaring buddies in this moral adventure saga set during the 1840s, when the slave-trade had been outlawed by the British Empire but was still a reality on the high seas. In its depiction of the friendship between two men, one of questionable character, the film bears some similarities to Hathaway’s Spawn of the North, made the following year.
At the end of World War II, Jimmy Picard, a Native American Blackfoot who fought in France, is admitted to Topeka Military Hospital in Kansas – an institution specializing in mental illness. Jimmy suffers from numerous symptoms: dizzy spells, temporary blindness, hearing loss… In the absence of any physiological causes, he is diagnosed as schizophrenic. Nevertheless, the hospital management decides to seek the opinion of Georges Devereux, a French anthropologist, psychoanalyst and specialist in Native American culture.
In 1990s Belarus, a wanderlust young DJ is derailed by a typo in a forged US Visa application, forcing her to a backwater village where she is determined to fake her way to the American dream.
Synopsis: Dora, a dour old woman, works at a Rio de Janeiro central station, writing letters for customers and mailing them. She hates customers and calls them ‘trash’. Josue is a 9-year-old boy who never met his father. His mother is sending letters to his father through Dora. When she dies in a car accident, Dora takes Josue and takes a trip with him to find his father.
Nagisa Oshima’s groundbreaking film opens with young, attractive Mako and her friend hitching a ride from an old man. After her friend leaves, the man tries to rape her, and she is saved only by the handsome Kiyoshi. Later, against the background of the tumultuous 1960 U.S./Japan Security Treaty demonstrations, Kiyoshi and Mako walk along a grungy seaside lumberyard while talking about sex. He attempts to kiss her, she slaps him, and he throws her in the water. She cries out that she can’t swim. When she continues to refuse his advances, he steps on her fingers as she clings to a log. Kiyoshi then saves Mako from a trio of seedy pimps looking to impress her into working for them, but after rescuing her, he forces himself on her again. With this unlikely beginning, Kiyoshi and Mako form a passionate though doomed romance. Soon she stops going to school and moves into his flea-ridden dive of an apartment. Utterly disillusioned with all trappings of societal convention, the two get cash by blackmailing businessmen and by shaking down Kiyoshi’s middle-aged sugarmama. Tension with this Bonnie and Clyde duo builds after Mako has an abortion in a run down clinic, performed by an alcoholic doctor. (Allmovie)
In the film’s chaotically fragmented and disorienting opening sequence, an over-animated, carefree adolescent student named Makoto (Kuwano Miyuki) recklessly runs up alongside a series of randomly selected vehicles caught in traffic and uses her disarming joviality to engage the unsuspecting driver into a polite, subtly flirtatious conversation before to attempting to ingratiate herself into obtaining a free ride home. However, as the anonymous driver soon diverts his automobile from the familiar main roads and onto the obscured, seedier alleys leading to the tawdrily ornamented love motels of the city’s pleasure quarters, complacency turns to anxiety as the instinctually sobered Makoto demands the driver to pull over the side of the road and hurriedly begins to walk away before being captured and overpowered by her unrelenting aggressor. A passerby dressed in a student uniform named Kiyoshi (Kawazu Yusuke) witnesses the violent encounter and immediately comes to the aid of the young woman. Having beaten and effectively subdued the middle-aged driver, Kiyoshi begins to coerce the humiliated offender into accompanying him to the police station in order to report the crime. In a desperate bid to stave off public embarrassment and avoid certain prosecution, the man attempts to buy Makoto and Kiyoshi’s silence with a handful of money, a momentary diversion that allows him to wrest free from Kiyoshi and escape. But Makoto’s circumstances would prove to be equally vulnerable as her rescuer now exploits the opportunity to violate the young woman (in a dysfunctional interrelationship that would be similarly revisited in Oshima’s subsequent film, Violence at Noon).
Traumatized by the incident and conflicted about Kiyoshi’s subsequent behavior, Makoto becomes convinced that she has fallen in love with her savior and, following a disapproving lecture by her sister Yuki (Yoshiko Kuga), impulsively decides to move in with the penniless student whose circumstances, unbeknownst to the naïve young woman, includes receiving continued financial support in exchange for sexual services from a wealthy, older woman and renting his room out to friends for their occasional afternoon trysts. Estranged from the watchful gaze of her concerned and protective – but enabling – family, Makoto soon discovers that liberation, too, has a cost as Kiyoshi, emboldened by the unexpected financial windfall resulting from the driver’s guilt-ridden attempt to buy off his transgression, decides to turn the fateful incident into a profitable scam by reenacting the scenario with other seemingly well-to-do businessmen (with Kiyoshi opportunely following behind on a borrowed motorcycle) as the lovers’ lead a life of desperate, thrill seeking abandon.
Deeply rooted in the dynamic sociopolitical climate of post-occupation Japanese society, Cruel Story of Youth is a stylistically bold, incisive, and provocative examination of hopelessness, victimization, apathy, exploitation, and cultural alienation. From the early image of an international newsreel footage illustrating the April 19, 1960 student uprising in Korea (a contemporary reference and specificity that is also suggested in the newsprint background of the jarring, red painted title sequence) that segues to a shot of the young lovers as literal bystanders at a protest march against the U.S.-Japan Security Pact, Nagisa Oshima draws, not only an implicit contrast between the idealism and impassioned activism of the student protestors and the nihilism and self-gratification of the aimless lovers, but also reflects on the ambivalent (and increasingly invasive) role of the U.S. in Japan’s road to post-occupation self-government. It is interesting to note that the committed (albeit perhaps naïve) ideology and sense of purpose embodied by the student activists is also hinted through the shared history of Makoto’s sensible and emotionally hardened sister Yuki and her former suitor Akimoto (Fumio Watanabe) – now a struggling (and equally disillusioned) physician who subsidizes his income by performing abortions – that serves as a representation of Oshima’s own generation.
Oshima further illustrates the film’s underlying theme of cultural rootlessness through recurring episodes of Makoto’s hitchhiking requests to be driven home (a seemingly elusive destination that invariably ends up in dark, dead-end alleys), the couple’s own absence of generational families (perhaps, from self-imposed exile), and the rotating series of couples who rent Kiyoshi’s room for their indiscreet liaisons that constantly flout the bounds of private home and public space. (Note the indelible image of an eerily tranquil and disconnected, almost surreal floating log “world” as a brash Kiyoshi violates Makoto, visually reflecting her profound isolation and emotional ambivalence towards Kiyoshi’s betrayal). In the end, it is through this collective sentiment of failed idealism, transience, and profound disconnection that Akimoto’s illicit, opportunistic, and reprehensible occupation can be seen, not only as a societal symptom of a lost generation’s aimlessness and moral bankruptcy (and lost innocence), but also as the metaphoric desire of a wounded national psyche to erase the unwanted legacy of a forced, and violative, union: to regain sovereign pride and self-determination after a protracted history of a seemingly benevolent – but ultimately embittering and culturally traumatic – imposed external will.
Germany, 1968: The priest’s daughters Marianna and Juliane both fight for changes in society, like making abortion legal. However their means are totally different: while Juliane’s committed as a reporter, her sister joins a terroristic organization. After she’s caught by the police and put into isolation jail, Juliane remains as her last connection to the rest of the world. Although she doesn’t accept her sister’s arguments and her boyfriend Wolfgang doesn’t want her to, Juliane keeps on helping her sister. She begins to question the way her sister is treated.
The third and definitive film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s fantasy, this musical adventure is a genuine family classic that made Judy Garland a star for her heartfelt performance as Dorothy Gale, an orphaned young girl unhappy with her drab black-and-white existence on her aunt and uncle’s dusty Kansas farm.
Dorothy yearns to travel “over the rainbow” to a different world, and she gets her wish when a tornado whisks her and her little dog, Toto, to the Technicolorful land of Oz. Having offended the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton), Dorothy is protected from the old crone’s wrath by the ruby slippers that she wears.
At the suggestion of Glinda, the Good Witch of the North (Billie Burke), Dorothy heads down the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, where dwells the all-powerful Wizard of Oz, who might be able to help the girl return to Kansas.
En route, she befriends a Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), a Tin Man (Jack Haley), and a Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr). The Scarecrow would like to have some brains, the Tin Man craves a heart, and the Lion wants to attain courage; hoping that the Wizard will help them too, they join Dorothy on her odyssey to the Emerald City.
Garland was MGM’s second choice for Dorothy after Shirley Temple dropped out of the project; and Bolger was to have played the Tin Man but talked co-star Buddy Ebsen into switching roles. When Ebsen proved allergic to the chemicals used in his silver makeup, he was replaced by Haley.
Gale Sondergaard was originally to have played the Wicked Witch of the West in a glamorous fashion, until the decision was made to opt for belligerent ugliness, and the Wizard was written for W.C. Fields, who reportedly turned it down because MGM couldn’t meet his price.
Although Victor Fleming, who also directed Gone With the Wind, was given sole directorial credit, several directors were involved in the shooting, included King Vidor, who shot the opening and closing black-and-white sequences. Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg’s now-classic Oscar-winning song “Over the Rainbow” was nearly chopped from the picture after the first preview because it “slowed down the action.”
The Wizard of Oz was too expensive to post a large profit upon initial release; however, after a disappointing reissue in 1955, it was sold to network television, where its annual showings made it a classic.
Extras: -New Commentary by Historian John Fricke with Cast, Crew and Family -The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Storybook -Prettier Than Ever: The Restoration of Oz -We Haven’t Really Met Properly… Supporting Cast Profile Gallery
Elena and Antonio are not made for each other: they are too different, in terms of character, life choices, worldview and the way they relate to others. They are total opposites. However they are overwhelmed by a mutual attraction that they should avoid. Not only because they are not compatible, but also because Elena is engaged to Giorgio, and Antonio is engaged to Silvia, who is Elena’s best friend. Plus Fabio, the young Elena’s best friend, hates Antonio because he is openly homophobic. Initially, between Elena and Antonio, there is physical attraction and this is the first real turbulence in Elena’s life. Everyone will have to deal with the unexpected in a sudden storm of passion that changes all the rules of the game of their relationships. However this will not be the only turbulence in Elena’s life…
“Blood-red posters featuring portraits of wanted ‘terrorists’ decorated every street wall in occupied France during World War II, and this account of how 23 foreigners working for the Resistance were caught and executed dramatises one of the heroic myths of the Occupation. But Cassenti adopts a radically different perspective from the humanist ‘honesty’ of L’Armée des Ombres or even Lacombe Lucien, and instead attempts a Marxist analysis of the myth and what it means, historically, to re-enact it. As it moves from one level of representation to another with a Brechtian approach to performance, the film occasionally obscures its aims but never fails to challenge the way we receive history in the cinema.” – Time Out Film Guide
“The Red Poster, winner of the prestigious Jean Vigo prize in 1976, is a deliciously complex film. Directed by 31-year-old Frank Cassenti, who worked as an assistant to Costa-Gavras on The Confession, the film offers complex emotions and a welcome plethora of intellectual riches, impenetrable as they first appear. Well before the picture ends, you are looking forward to seeing it again.
The Red Poster is striking because it is at once politically and aesthetically satisfying. Though it exploits the current movement in all the arts toward increased self-reflection, epistemological self-questioning, and the insistent unmasking of the art work, Cassenti avoid climbing the tempting ivory tower to “bliss out aesthetically.” Yet, though he obviously sees himself as a political filmmaker, he feels no need to adhere slavishly to a worn-out “realism” nor to conventional narrative structure to get a message across to the mythical masses. There is something for both formalist and activist in this film.” – Film Quarterly, 1977.
