Cited by many as the most “personal” effort of Swedish filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff, The Great Adventure is also one of his few films to tie together its magnificent images with a dramatic narrative. “Adventure” means “life” to Sucksdorff, and that life is experienced by a group of Swedish farm children, two of whom are played by the director’s own sons. The kids save a wild otter from a hunter, then attempt to tame the animal. When spring comes, the children realize without remorse that the otter will be happier roaming free in the wilderness.
Category: Documentary
Jean Benoit-Lévy’s silent documentary detailing chronologically Pasteur’s life, directed by Jean Epstein and based on a screenplay by Edmond Epardaud, with most of the story taken from “La Vie de Pasteur” by René Vallery Radot, adapted by Edmond Floury. Intertitles tell us of his discovery of microbes. Scenes filmed on location where he lived and reconstructed sets alternate between informational intertitles.
The life of the famed Mexican bullfighter Luis Procuna, from his boyhood through his training and the triumphs that followed as Procuna rose to the peak of his profession.
The Soviet General Vlasov remains one of the most intriguing, yet least known figures of World War II. In 1942, the German war machine had come to a halt near the Russian city of Leningrad. The Russian Second Assault Army, led by General Vlasov, fights itself to death in an effort to break the German siege. Their general is captured and later defects to the Germans. In ANGELS OF DEATH we experience the fate of General Vlasov’s army as we hear the personal accounts of those who died in the massacre through their poems, letters and photographs.
In the late Spring of 1970, nationwide protests against the war in Vietnam focused in the Wall Street area of New York City and ultimately in a major anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C. A group of New York University film students documented the demonstrations as they happened in both cities. The extended final scene is a spontaneous conversation among Martin Scorsese, Harvey Keitel, Jay Cocks and Verna Bloom who, along with a large group of NYU students, found themselves frustrated and perplexed by the events and hopeful that the protests would result in change.
Everyday the children of the neighborhood known as “Tire Dié”, in the city of Santa Fe, wait for the train to ask for money, shouting “Tire dié!” (toss me a dime!) to the passengers. Considered the first survey-on-film in Latin America.
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For one week, Eduardo Coutinho and his team talked to 27 residents in an enormous building in Copacabana. Amongst these are a middle-aged couple who met through the classified ads in a newspaper, a call-girl who keeps her daughter and her sister, a retired actor, an ex-football player, and a janitor who suspects that his adopted father, whom he dreams about every night, is his real father. The subject of this documentary is private life in the big city, apartments as a last stronghold of individuality, in addition to emphasizing the fact that to live together in one and the same place does not ensure that a community will be formed.