rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts

May 17, 2020 / Adventure
May 17, 2020 / Drama

After an actress makes unreasonable contractual demands, the studio president decides to launch a global talent search to replace her. Competing for the role are four women: Maria Antonelli, an Italian with several sugar daddies; Vicki Dauray, a Parisian housewife in a strained marriage; Austrian theater actress and widow Ina Schiller; and an American, Kathy Conway, with a pushy mother. Each becomes involved in romance off the set.

May 17, 2020 / Drama
May 17, 2020 / Arthouse
May 16, 2020 / Documentary

Using interviews and other footage shot especially for this documentary, French director Claude Lanzmann investigates the state of Israel in 1972. This movie concentrates on Israelis going about their business of everyday living. One interview shows the reactions of a concentration camp survivor, now a police chief, to being called a “Nazi” by demonstrators. Another segment follows the experiences of a Russian Jewish immigrant, beginning with his first visit to the Wailing Wall and continuing to his disturbing perception that he is welcomed more by virtue of his being Russian than for the fact that he is Jewish.

May 16, 2020 / Comedy

Maddalena Ciarrapico arrives in New York City from Italy to get married and brings her fiancé a gift of mortadella (large Italian pork sausage) from her co-workers at the sausage factory where she used to work. But she is refused permission to bring the mortadella into the country because of the ban on meat that may contain food-borne diseases. An indignant Maddalena refuses to hand the sausage over, staying in the customs office at the airport, sparking a diplomatic incident in which she attracts widespread sympathy and support.

May 16, 2020 / Experimental

S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED signifies a fairly abrupt shift and departure from Sharits’ previous mandala films; this was his first work in many years that did not employ the flicker technique and used moving images. Paul Sharits’ epic and groundbreaking work is composed of three repeated, fourteen-minute sections of a river current. Each repetition consists of six dissolving layers of a river flowing in a myriad of directions, broken up by horizontal tape splices acting as dams. Deep and precisely executed emulsion scratches—created by custom tools Sharits made—eventually appear in continuous sets of threes throughout the film until the entire screen is nearly covered. The resulting effects represent, in the words of P. Adams Sitney, a “powerful and beautiful act of vandalism.”

May 12, 2020 / Documentary

A very surreal video shot behind the scenes during the production of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet in Wilmington North Carolina in 1985 by Peter Braatz.