Cinema of the World

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With Cocksucker Blues, Frank bids a final adieu to the utopia of the Beat generation. What did the Rolling Stones expect when they hired him to make a film about their 1972 North American tour? There are scenes of groupie sex in private jets, cocaine snorting, and even a masturbation scene in which Jagger reveals himself to be the cameraman in a reflected image.

But ultimately Frank focuses on the lonely spaces that permeate the rock and roll machine. This is the ultimate direct cinema. The camera movement infects the images with an unbelievable filmic energy, and Frank ignores all orientation guidelines. Populated by the living dead, Cocksucker Blues is a zombie film with no refuge.

Cameramen and women discuss the craft and art of cinematography and of the director of photography, illustrating their points with clips from 100 films, from Birth of a Nation to Do the Right Thing. Themes: the DP tells people where to look; changes in movies (the arrival of sound, color, and wide screens) required creative responses from DPs; and, these artisans constantly invent new equipment and try new things, with wonderful results. The narration takes us through the identifiable studio styles of the 30s, the emergence of noir, the New York look, and the impact of Europeans. Citizen Kane, The Conformist, and Gordon Willis get special attention.

'Bobby Fischer Against the World' is the first documentary feature to explore the tragic and bizarre life of the late chess master Bobby Fischer. The drama of Bobby Fischer's career was undeniable, from his troubled childhood, to his rock star status as World Champion and Cold War icon, to his life as a fugitive on the run. This film explores one of the most infamous and mysterious characters of the 20th century.

The 1965 Tour de France was won by a young Italian called Felice Gimondi, riding only as a late inclusion. The French had hoped that the winner would be Raymond Poulidor relieved for once of riding against Jacques Anquetil who had always beaten him. By the Chartreuse, however, Gimondi was unbeatable and even attacked Poulidor and left him behind "just to show Raymond that I could go faster and that I was the better man."

Documentary – described as a cinematic tribute – about the 1965 Tour de France.

April 1978
european cup final : Bastia-Eindhoven. Jacques Tati was there, filming mainly before & after match

An early melodrama of the Thaw period in the Soviet Union, the film follows the uneasy but blossoming love between a teacher and her pupil. Tanya Levchenko (played by Inna Ivanova), a product of the Soviet Intelligentsia, and a fresh literature graduate, leaves her comfortable and safe life, travelling to a provincial and industrial city to take up a teaching post, at a night school for the young workers of a nearby metal works. But, with the feelings of insecurity created by her new surroundings, and the subsequent clinging to a cold and professional dignity in lieu of any real understanding of the people she lives among , she eventually ends up learning from them instead. It is at the school that she meets stoker Sasha Savchenko (played by Nikolai Riibnikov), who has his eyes opened by the educated Tanya, and appreciates the avenues his mind can travel down with the help of the classes he attends at the night school, but at the same time refuses to be moulded like a piece of clay.

Review by Christopher Null at filmcritic.com

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So what if Don Juan were a woman? I'm not sure if she would behave something like Brigitte Bardot's 1973 rendition of the famed lover, but it's considerably fun to watch her strut her stuff.

In Roger Vadim's interpretation of the Latin lover, Jeanne (Bardot) eats men for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She takes a married politician and immediately ruins him by having him photographed at one of her orgies. She uses a hapless folk singer for sex and then leaves, prompting him to slice his wrists and bleed to death while strumming his guitar. She even extends her wiles to corrupting women, luring the innocent wife of a grotesquely self-absorbed businessman into the sack, then turning the tables on both members of the couple.

Travel back to 1969 and uncover fascinating trends, people and events that forever changed the way Americans think about and have sex. Viewers will travel from the Playboy Penthouse in Los Angeles to San Francisco’s Hippie crash pads, the boardwalk in Atlantic City, a court room in Miami, and other spots across America to meet some of the women and men who found themselves caught between old values and new desires in 1969, and decided to do something about it. Some of them, like Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, actor Jim Brown, and Ray Manzarek of The Doors, will be famous. Others will be average Americans whose lives were transformed by the sexual tides coursing through the nation as the Sixties came to a close. But they will all have one thing in common–they will all have fascinating stories to tell.

Emptiness Forever: Le Départ (1967) by Michael Walker (Rouge)

With Le Départ, Jerzy Skolimowski moved out of Poland for the first time; he filmed it in Belgium, with an added complication that he didn’t understand any French. (His answer to a question about the transition is instructive: he finds the problem of putting the camera in the right place before shooting so difficult, that it does not matter to him at all whether the filming takes place in Poland, Belgium or Hollywood.) Skolimowski, not surprisingly, does not have as much to say about Belgium as Poland. He may look at the city of Brussels with a fresh eye: the architecture of roadways; the gleaming opulence of the motor show; the ritualistic presentation of the female form at a swimsuit display; but these reveal little more than his fascination (as an East European) with their appearance.

Two meteorologists stationed in the Arctic desert discover that the weather isn't the only thing that can be petrifying in Russian helmer Alexei Popogrebsky's majestic drama "How I Ended This Summer." Popogrebsky's second solo outing starts off at near-glacial pace and then rolls to a suspenseful boil without ever resorting to cheap thriller tricks. Even better, there's none of the faux-spiritual claptrap or obscurantist symbolism that undermines too many Russian art films; pic just works as a terrific exploration of human fragility. Nevertheless, given auds' usual permafrost of indifference to Slavic fare, "Summer" will be a tough sell offshore.

"Me and My Gal" is an ingratiating pre-Code comedy-drama enhanced by spirited banter between Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett who play two young people feeling each other out as potential mates. Bennett is surprisingly good as a wise-cracking, down-to-earth waitress who speaks her mind and can easily hold her own against Tracy's New York City cop. The pre-Code era's lack of pretense about sexuality makes their impassioned kiss in the diner -- as the two knock over items on the lunch counter -- all the more humorous. Bennett, both impressed and amused by Tracy's kiss, responds: "If you're gonna kiss me like that, you're gonna have to marry me." It's a magical little moment that caused the passage of time since 1932 to drop away and left me there with them to enjoy the fun.

EXCERPTS FROM REVIEW BY Derek Elley:

A mix of dreams, nightmares, fears and sexuality, filtered through a mordant Belgian sensibility, "Black Night" envelops rather than illuminates the viewer. First feature by writer-academic Olivier Smolders, whose occasional shorts the past 20 years have been in a similarly Expressionist vein, is perfectly tailored for fantasy festivals and other specialist events but, despite its visual merits, won't travel far beyond Euro arthouse niches.

Introducing the film at South Korea's PiFan fest -- where it won Best Film -- Smolders urged the audience not to concentrate on understanding all the pieces but to treat the whole "like a dream." It's the kind of movie that, like Peter Greenaway's oeuvre, looks as if the footnotes have fallen off the page. (Coincidentally, Greenaway's longtime producer, Kees Kasander, is credited as Dutch co-producer.)

Framed as a theater piece, complete with old style proscenium arch, film starts with key images -- black night, falling snowflakes, traumatic childhood memories. They're the recollections of a grown man, Oscar (Fabrice Rodriguez), who's trying to get to grips with his past (and especially his maybe dead sister) in seshes with a doctor.

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The first film I found as a collector was a Douglas Fairbanks, made for Fine Arts-Triangle, American Aristocracy (1916), directed by Lloyd Ingraham, and the second was Manhattan Madness (1916), directed by Allan Dwan. Even in its abridged form on the home movie gauge of 9,5mm, it had panache and an exhilarating pace. But I never realised how clever it was until I saw the whole film. Its editing style was as innovative as if Dick Lester had worked for Thomas Edison. Not that I am criticising the editing of other early silents—they were invariably well cut. But Manhattan Madness did things that no one else dared do until years later. It is the story of a cattleman (Doug) who arrives in New York and finds the place deadly dull after Nebraska. Dwan cut back and forth between the West and the East, bravura editing of the kind historians think only Griffith capable of. Kevin Brownlow, Allan Dwan, The Name beneath the Title, 2002

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Art after Auschwitz, 15 May 2003
10/10
Author: Osip

Alexander Kluge's "Artisten unter der Zirkuskuppel, ratlos" has often been criticized as inaccessible. I've heard that at the time of the film's first release some cinemas allowed viewers to see the film twice while having them pay for only one ticket, acknowledging that more than one viewing was needed to digest this complex film. Clearly, the film's montage technique and its use of quotes from Hegel, Nietzsche and others in often rather rapid succession doesn't help and may leave some viewers almost as clueless ("ratlos") as the artists of the title. I've nevertheless experienced the film as a deeply moving attempt to deal with the question of the role of art in the face of historical catastrophe - the question of how art after Auschwitz is possible as asked by Theodor Adorno and other intellectuals and artists in post-war Germany.

Ironically, Leni Peickert, the film's hopeful circus director, and her production team, is confronted with the same questions Kluge may have asked himself before making the film. After having solved the problem of producing art for the market, which had caused the first artistic setback (a deus ex machina solution all of a sudden provides Leni Peickert with money), the team is pondering difficult artistic questions. Should we try to reach a mass audience, popularize and simplify matters? Should the circus produce politically engaged, "tendential" art - our would this reduce the issues at hand to mere slogans?

Plot Summary :
Simon (Richard Crenna) is an ace criminal with no respect for the law, he feels he can overcome it at will and so far, he has been able to. He leads three other men in a bank robbery in a small town and of course, Simon has it planned to the second. Even when one of the men is wounded, the plan unfolds on time and the four men escape with ease, as well as a whole lot of cash, of course. The men then bury the stash of money in a remote location, as it is just part of a larger plan, with a much larger payoff.

Simon has great skills to be sure, but he still has to keep an eye out for the authorities, including his good friend Coleman (Alain Delon). Coleman happens to be a detective as well as Simon's friend, so of course, it makes for a most unusual friendship, to say the least. As Simon prepares his grandest scheme ever and Coleman tries to remain true to his oath as a police officer, a woman (Catherine Denueve) comes into the picture and of course, both men fall head over heels for her. As time closes in on the massive operation, what will happen to this most odd collection of people?

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When Mekas?s Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania opened in October 1972, the mainstream press, as was to be expected, failed to understand the film, because they judged it by the standards of Hollywood film product, rather than as a work of the avant-garde. My own take as a twenty-one year old was that the film was only a failure if judged by the standards of Hollywood film criticism, given its jerky and nervous camera, its over- and under-exposed images, and its rapid editing; I deemed it successful as a consciously constructed work of art. I understood that Mekas? narration and utilization of folk and classical music took the film out of the realm of purely formal experiment and into a highly personal form of cinema. In particular, I was struck by Mekas? attachment to the natural environment of his native Lithuania: ?The shots are loving, because, coming from peasant stock, Mekas? roots were totally entrenched in the land. All the more traumatic was his exile because he was exiled not only from his homeland, but from the land, the soil.? I specifically comment on the scenes taking place in Vienna, which are marked by a sense of stability and permanence symbolized by Peter Kubelka (a lifelong resident of Vienna), the monastery with its centuries old library, etc. However, even that sense of permanence, in contrast to the transitory nature of the exile experience, is ironically undercut by the final scene of the fire, destroying Vienna?s old fruit market.

The extraordinary, heart-breaking official record of Captain Scott's legendary final expedition to the South Pole, has been fully restored by the BFI National Archive, with a new musical score by Simon Fisher Turner.

Captain Robert Scott described Herbert Ponting as 'an artist in love with his work', and, after the Antarctic expedition's tragic outcome, Ponting devoted the rest of his life to ensuring that the grandeur of the Antarctic and of the expedition's heroism would not be forgotten. The images that he captured have fired imaginations ever since.

Ponting's footage begins in 1910 with the departure of the Terra Nova from New Zealand's south island, for the Antarctic – a perilous journey during which animals and stores were lost overboard in a gale and the ship had to break through unusual amounts of pack ice for 400 miles to reach the Great Ice Barrier. Ponting took some of his most impressive footage – showing the ship breaking through the ice – from a makeshift platform over the side of the ship. Once arrived on Ross Island, Ponting filmed almost every aspect of the expedition the scientific work, life in camp and the local wildlife – including killer whales, seals, Antarctic skuas and the characterful Adélie penguins. What he was unable to film, he boldly recreated back home. Most importantly, Ponting recorded the preparations for the assault on the Pole – from the trials of the caterpillar-track sledges to clothing and cooking equipment – giving us a real sense of the challenges faced by the expedition

A story set in the former Yugoslavia and centered on a guy who returns to Herzegovina from Germany with plenty of cash and hopes for a good new life. (IMDb)

Generally thought of as a monster movie (not difficult to understand when your title character is a 50-foot-tall gorilla with a habit of killing people who get in his way), King Kong is actually an old-fashioned adventure story on the grand scale, complete with fearless hunters in search of uncharted islands, angry natives appeasing their god, damsels in distress, and a dashing hero on hand to save said damsel. Much of this story probably seemed a bit cliché even when King Kong was first released in 1933, but directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack tell their tale with two-fisted gusto, leavened with a genuine sense of wonder, and the result captures the imagination from the start and never lets go. It also helps that they had a cast capable of handling the heroics in grand form while knowing how to play the abundant comic relief in appropriate style; Robert Armstrong's Carl Denham is ham at its tastiest, Bruce Cabot's Jack Driscoll is a hero with his feet planted solidly on the ground (and his tongue just entering his cheek), and has any screen heroine ever screamed more eloquently than Fay Wray? Willis H. O'Brien's stop-motion effects animation was legendary in its day, and it retains its magic today; while technology has progressed considerably since King Kong, O'Brien was able to give his great ape a personality, and Kong's moments of fear, curiosity, pain, and occasional goofiness gave him a sympathetic, ultimately tragic dimension that adds immeasurably to the picture's effectiveness. And Max Steiner's bombastic score is always there to cheer the picture along when its energy starts to flag. While the 1976 remake already seems hopelessly dated, the original King Kong remains rousing entertainment with brains, brawn, and a heart. — Mark Deming

Plot / Synopsis

A cash strapped college student goes to work as an escort in order to make ends meet, only to realize that her education has taken a back seat to her budding career in the pleasure industry. In her struggle to stay financially stable during her first year at the university, 19 year old Laura discovers that a part-time job just won't pay the bills. Then, just when Laura is at her most desperate, she sees an internet ad from a man who's willing to pay £100 an hour to spend an intimate evening with a willing student. Compelled by the lure of some easy money, Laura answers the ad. Later, despite a promise to herself that this will be a once time occurrence, Laura finds herself falling into a new bed every night, and making more money than she ever thought possible. By the time Laura realizes she has stumbled into the downward spiral of prostitution, she begins to doubt her ability to break free from temptation, and finish her education. ~ Jason Buchanan, Allrovi

Completed in 1960, “Colorful stockings” consists of two novellas, linked by a common theme. The film tells about the problems of unfulfilled hopes and dreams of children, often unknowingly wronged. Heroine of the first, entitled “Matilda” is the daughter of an impecunious clerks, dreaming of colorful stockings. Unfortunately, her mother could not afford such a large expense. Title character is Jadźka second story, nine-year-old girl, also coming from a poor family. Her outlandish clothes and mind become too volatile to cause malicious jokes in the new school. Derogative remarks from colleagues make sensitive high unpleasantness.

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A tragicomic film about people from the social periphery. Director Dušan Hanák portrayed his characters with a sensitive understanding, without romanticizing. That was also why the film, similarly to Hanák's previous works 322 and Pictures of the Old World, ended up on a shelf until 1988. Impressive performances are given by Czech actress Iva Janžurová, Polish actor Roman Klosowski and Serbian actor Milan Jelic. In 1989 the film won a Silver Bear for best directing from IFF Berlin.

The Rebel was Tony Hancock’s only truly successful film after years of popularity with his Hancock’s Half Hour TV series. Simpson and Galton wrote the screenplay, the director was Robert Day, and Frank Cordell wrote an attractive musical score. The story concerns an office worker with artistic leanings who goes to Paris and becomes the centre of the art world, more by accident than design. The cast was impressive - George Sanders, Paul Massie, Dennis Price, Irene Handl, John Le-Mesurier, Nanette Newman and Gregoire Aslan.
Frustrated by office routine and his landlady's lack of sympathy for his painting and sculpting, Tony Hancock moves to Paris, and falls in with an artistic set. His dreadful paintings are acclaimed by a collection of weird bogus intellectuals, and his room-mate, Paul, a genuinely good painter, returns to England in despair. Paul's paintings are mistaken for Hancock's by Sir Charles Brouard, an art critic and dealer, and Hancock finds himself acclaimed as a great painter on the strength of them. Commissioned to produce a statue of a rich patron's apparently nymphomaniac wife, Hancock presents another version of the monstrosity he had been working on in London. It is not appreciated. In London, Hancock finds himself having to produce a set of paintings in a hurry for a show arranged by Sir Charles. He calls in Paul - who is now painting in Hancock's infantile style. In Paul's hands, however, the results are once again acclaimed. Hancock abandons the pretence, introduces Paul to Sir Charles, and defiantly returns to his old rooms to resume his sculpting.

Five people are sitting in a New York bar with a mysterious Mr. Ohman, when they hear the news that the godless Communists are invading the good ol' U.S. of A. The five rush off to various sections of the country to do their part to stop the invasion, when an A-bomb crashes down upon Manhattan.

01 - Lukas Moodysson - Bara prata lite (Talk) (1997)
02 - Patrice Leconte - Batteur du boléro, Le (1992)
03 - Jean-Luc Godard - Charlotte et Véronique, ou Tous les garçons s'appellent Patrick (1959)
04 - Virgil Widrich - Copy Shop (2001)
05 - Tom Tykwer - Epilog (1992)
06 - Peter Mullan - Fridge (1996)
07 - Nanni Moretti - Giorno della prima di Close Up, Il (Opening Day of Close-Up) (1996)
08 - Jan Kounen - Gisele Kerozene (1989)
09 - Roy Andersson - Härlig är jorden (World Of Glory) (1991)
10 - Juan DiegoSolanas - Homme sans tete, L' (2003)
11 - Krzysztof Kieslowski - Koncert zyczen (Concert) (1967)
12 - Jan Svankmajer - Zvahlav aneb Saticky Slameného Huberta (Jabberwocky) (1971)
13 - Christopher Morris - My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117 (2002)
14 - Lars von Trier - Nocturne (1980)
15 - Javier Fesser - El Secdleto De La Tlompeta (1995)
16 - Anders Thomas Jensen - Valgaften (ElectionNight) (1998)

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The inventor of a ground-breaking glue, Sanada, becomes thanks to his discovery a high executive in his company. Because of this promotion, his world is changing completely : his wife behaves like never before, considering she's now rich and has the right to do whatever she wants, even having an affair.