Hiroshi Kobayashi is on the run, both away from the police who want him for the murder of his girlfriend Naomi, and towards the yakuza Kimura, from whom he wants to exact revenge for getting her hooked on drugs. The whole film is one long chase scene, shot in wild, semi-abstract patterns so that you’re never quite sure what you’re seeing.
Category: Short
During the ’50s Makavejev began making short films and documentaries in the Zagreb and Belgrade studios, as in Kino Klub Beograd, the center of avant-garde film and amateur activities during the ’60s in Serbia. The experimental and documentary impulse remains powerful in Makavejev’s work, as does the tendency to intercut undigested segments from other films into longer works. At the same time, those early works would be the first of many run-ins with the censors that would plague his career and, arguably, keep him from being recognized as a major postwar film artist.
Shot on 35mm, “Arabesques on the Pirosmani Theme” is an original view of the naive work of the Georgian painter Niko Pirosmanichvili, commonly called Pirosmani. By a series of short scenes, played and composed on his paintings, the Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov (originally: Sargis Hovsepi Paradjanian) glorifies the life and work of the most famous Georgian artist.
Lexie lives with his lively daughter, Laura, who now wants to learn to dance. He has just about managed as a one-parent family so far. The story of one man’s lonely life is transformed by the simple wisdom of his daughter.
This black-and-white cartoon captures the last few moments of a prisoner arriving at the place of execution before the weapons roll. The darkness before death is preceded by the darkness of a blindfold that allows only two bands of light into the world. This is the last time the prisoner can see the nose of his shoes on the pavement.