Maani Petgar‘s CINEMA CINEMA deals with the controversial and popular Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and the making of SALAAM CINEMA. The filmmaker placed an ad in the paper, with the opening words: ‘Wanted: one hundred common people who want to become actors.’ Around five thousand people reacted and fought for a role. In the following eight days, Makhmalbaf filmed thousands of applicants. During the auditions he tried to find out why they would love to act and to which extremes they would go to achieve their aim. In CINEMA CINEMA Petgar shows how the filmmaker works, manipulates and brings about effects, but also how Makhmalbaf himself is manipulated.
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No one knows better than Mohsen Makhmalbaf that Iranians are movie mad, so when he placed a casting call for one hundred actors for a new film, he expected a crowd; what he got was a crush—five thousand people. After genially announcing, “You are both the subject and the actors in the film,” he begins auditions. What unfolds is a parade of individuals who, for love of cinema, are by turns brash, crafty, shy, touchingly open, unwittingly hilarious.
Little Gennarino, orphan of his parents, performs on the streets of Naples as a street musician together with his adoptive mother Angela. Unfortunately one day the woman falls ill and she has to be hospitalized, so the child, needing to find money for treatment, joins a group of petty thieves.
Budd Boetticher’s final release is an independently produced documentary about legendary bullfighter Carlos Arruza, narrated by Anthony Quinn. A film he spent much time, effort and money on and was to be his masterpiece, perhaps his most personal. Boetticher himself had been a bullfighter before going into movies. Tragically, a car accident on May 20th, 1966 took the lives of Carlos Arruza and some of Boetticher’s filming crew.
In the light of the moon, a young torero leaves his village to go and fight the “Toro”. An accomplice, dreamlike confrontation, where the interplay of shadows and silhouettes brings back the splendor of bullfighting mythology.
Marshal Rocky Lane learns of a plan to obstruct the promotion of natural gas in his town. Bud Galloway, head of Jeff Chadwick’s ranch, who has just been released from prison, is the ringleader of the gang that fights against the gas company, led by Joanne Collier. Galloway tampers with the gas line and kills an old man, with Chadwick being blamed.
An old barber finds himself at a loss when called upon to shave an unusually jittery customer. When all attempts at idle everyday chatter fail to calm the man, the barber desperately falls back on his last resort: to tell the only secret he knows.
A flower vendor, Jack, brings his mentally challenged nephew, Joey, to the ten-lane Chicago Lakeshore roadway to help him sell flowers to motorists. In the course of their first day working together, Joey manages to prove himself in difficult and confusing circumstances and gains the loving respect of his uncle.