♦♦ Amos Vogel’s “Film as a Subversive Art” ♦♦
In a Refugee Reception Center for migrants in Eisenach, the director gets to know 21-year-old Doris S., who moved to West Germany and returned. When her mother died in 1961, Doris went live with her father. Driven by her desire to see the world, she ended up working as a hostess at the “Pa-pa-Club” at an American army training ground in Baumholder. This film interview tells the story of one person’s fate in a divided Germany.
Surrealist film based on a nightmare. Arsène, a lonely and restless young man suffering from persecution mania, tries to protect himself from thieves – and from himself – by setting traps in his home. Helplessly he assists in the robbery and looting of his house by a couple of kleptomaniac girls, whom he has deliberately taken to his house. Fascinated by them, during the night he becomes his own executioner and the plaything of destructive childhood fantasies. Thus the prediction of the traps seller who had diagnosed his “fear of being robbed” is fulfilled.
Oliveira’s fourth feature, adapted from a play by his close friend José Régio, was one of his major breakthroughs as a filmmaker: a fable about a deeply sheltered young woman who tells her wealthy, religious parents that she’s been impregnated in the wake of an angelic visitation. It’s possible to take Benilde, or the Virgin Mother as a scathing denouncement of religious hypocrisy, a veiled response to the abuses of the Salazar regime, or a set of obsessive, carefully staged formal exercises—or some combination of the three.
Extremely controlled and somewhat austere, Akerman’s contribution to the landmark television series Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge holds true to its title as it hews closely to its moody protagonist, Michèle, a headstrong high schooler and aspiring writer who confesses that her exterior “joie de vivre” masks her inner suffering. Deciding to abandon her studies and her family, she naturally heads to the cinema, where she meets a handsome French deserter from a hoity family. For the rest of the day they meander through the streets of Brussels, oscillating between desire and despair.
When new, smart and sweet Tokyo girl, Rumiko, starts at a rural elementary school, Akira finds himself smitten, like every other male pupil. Newcomer’s popularity is contrasted with the less-tolerant treatment of scruffy Hideko, who, thanks to the arrival of a carnival freak-show in town, is nicknamed the Wolf Girl. Teachers and parents snootily consider the carny off-limits, but Akira is determined to find out whether Hideko really is a wolf girl.
October 5, 1974, on Santa Fe Street, in the suburbs of Santiago de Chile, Carmen Castillo is wounded and her partner, Miguel Enríquez, head of the MIR, dies in combat. Calle Santa Fe is the journey that Carmen undertakes for her history, for the history of the country and the MIR. A painful but restorative search, traversed by the obsession of knowing whether or not the acts of resistance of his colleagues from the MIR were worth it, whether or not Miguel’s death was felt.
Gambling syndicate sets out to invade the stock car racing field. Publicity man tries to cause a feud between two racing friends for the sake of the publicity.
Take a Chance was based on the hit Broadway musical of the same name, though only one of the original songs, Eadie Was a Lady, has been retained. The thinnish plot involves the misadventures of a pair of pickpockets, played on Broadway by Jack Haley and Sid Silvers and on film by James Dunn and Cliff “Ukelele Ike” Edwards. Tired of fleecing the suckers in a travelling carnival, our heroes head to Broadway, where they get mixed up with gangsters.
