Filmed in Brooklyn, Image in the Snow is an early underground “trance film” in which “a young man led by despair searches a city for salvation” (director Willard Maas’ own description). He takes the Myrtle Avenue el. and finds his “ideal parents” represented as carved stone figures on a tomb in the old part of Mt. Olivet Cemetary. Although not as highly regarded as Geography of the Body or as ostentatious as Narcissus in its own time, Image in the Snow has become the most frequently revived of Willard Maas’ thematic, non-documentary films.
Category: Short
A surreal piece of cinema, mostly comprised of stark religious and homoerotic imagery, accompanied by increasingly dissonant music (starting with ‘The Unanswered Question’, and getting more jarring as the movie progresses.
Fast-moving impressions of the Big Sur, the water, the ocean, and the Ladies, as part of the landscape, swimming, or running nude, against the sun or part of the sun.
A man sentenced to death reflects on his arrest, interrogations, torture… and a bit on the time before, long gone, swallowed up by pain and numbness.
Eerie, erotic and touching, Soulmate is a complex study of alienation and obsession. Told from the perspective of a middle-aged woman, the film explores longing and objectification through the story of a landlady and her young male tenant.
Péter Szoboszlay’s strongly socially critical film is permeated by the stylistic motifs of psychedelic pop-art and hippy Art Nouveau. The hero is a typical figure of the soft dictatorship, the tyrannical janitor, in the character of which one can almost see the spectre of fascist ideology. The pseudo-documentary (albeit with sociographic authenticity) interview with the janitor is be performed by actor–director Péter Halász.
This 30-minute Soviet biographical documentary shows the selfless work of Anna Ivanovna Zelenova, the director of the Pavlovsky Palace Museum, who devoted her entire life to the palace and survived with it years of occupation and rebirth from the ashes.
Lena Horne’s famous song “Now!”, which was banned in the U.S. in the 1960s, was an angry call for struggle against racism. This film uses Horne’s song as the vehicle for a montage of film and photographic images from the U.S. civil rights movement. These images of racial struggle and oppression in the United States convey the heroism and pathos of the black protagonists of the Civil Rights movement, and the brutality of white police and Klansmen and the system they represent. Santiago Alvarez responds to the song’s escalating rhythm by moving between images to evoke the violence with which American society was being torn apart by white supremacy, and the intensity of the African-American struggle to right these injustices.