rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts

June 26, 2023 / Comedy

A professor invents a time sphere which takes a group of 1940s entertainers to Elizabethan London where they encounter Queen Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh and introduce them to jazz culture – They also meet Captain John Smith and a very heavy-drinking Pocahontas. The main female character meets William Shakespeare and feeds him some of his own lines, which he eagerly writes down. A costume-production, (many of which are immaculate), which makes extensive use of the Gainsborough wardrobe.

June 26, 2023 / Short

Three sequences are linked together in this short film by Jean-Marie Straub; the first sequence is a long tracking shot from a car of prostitutes plying their trade on the night-time streets of Germany; the second is a staged play, cut down to 10 minutes by Straub and photographed in a single take; the final sequence covers the marriage of James and Lilith, and Lilith’s subsequent execution of her pimp, played by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

June 26, 2023 / Animation
June 19, 2023 / Theatre
June 19, 2023 / Animation

This animated story of the thrilling adventures of a toy mouse and his child is based on the modern classic of children’s fiction written by Russell Hoban. From their home in the toy shop window, the mouse and his child find themselves cast into a rubbish tip where they become prisoners of the slimy rat, Manny (voiced by Peter Ustinov). Helped by their friends, a fortune-telling rat, an actress parrot, a performing seal and a pink elephant, the mouse and his child plot to escape Manny’s evil clutches and discover how they can become self-winding.

June 19, 2023 / Sci-Fi

Living in their own fictional world devoid of humankind, large anthropomorphic robots, constructed by Survival Research Laboratories (S.R.L.), act out scenarios of perpetual torment, exasperated consumption and tragic recognition.

June 19, 2023 / Animation

In Pieter Bruegel’s painting, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” the fall of the god, Icarus, passes unnoticed on earth. The farmers continue to work the land and the boats sail on. As William Carlos Williams later wrote in his poem of the same name, “a once mighty god becomes a little splash quite unnoticed.” In Chris Sullivan’s version, Icarus becomes Ray, an aging priest whose congregation is dwindling as fast as his sanity. As Ray’s condition deteriorates, society fails to notice or care.

June 19, 2023 / Arthouse

Charles Bremer, a retired, wealthy aesthete, regularly hires Lisa, a young female artist’s model, to strip for him to the soundtrack of a Donizetti aria. Charles writes letters to his dead mother, plays church organ, loves flowers, and attends drawing classes. Lisa meanwhile is having problems with her chauvinist, drug-abusing boyfriend David, a modernistic painter who keeps hitting her for money. As Charles and Lisa form a strong attachment that has nothing to do with sex, it becomes clear that the aggressive David presents a problem that needs to be solved.