Non-narrated treatment of the activities carried out in an abattoir. An unlikely subject for a documentary, but the filmmaker captures the strength and terrible beauty in the daily preparation for slaughter. The sound track echoes with hard metallic knives being ground, tested and sharpened. No beast is actually shown being killed but the slaughter is mirrored in the blood-red faces of the men and the scenes of water flushing away the blood to a river – thus water purges but never really cleans the walls of the slaughter house. A powerful film – almost abstract at times. Perhaps even more effective because of what it leaves unsaid and unshown.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
Sial IV is a French TV miniseries by Greek filmmaker and writer Adonis Kyrou, adapted from the speculative fiction novel Deadly Image (AKA The Uncertain Midnight) by British author Edmund Cooper. It tells the story of Denis Lange, a fallout shelter engineer who is accidentally trapped in suspended animation as war breaks out in 1970, only to awaken in the early 2100s in Sial IV, an underground city in which humankind lives a life of leisure, having discharged all responsibility to androids. Assigned the android Diana as his personal assistant, Denis ventures through this unsettling idyll, eventually finding a small but tenacious group of resistors who seek to uncover the truth about the compound and its ruler, the mysterious Machiavelli.
Who Was Edgar Allan? is a television adaptation of Peter Rosei’s post-modern thriller of the same name in which a student travels to Venice to study against the wishes of his father and meets a mysterious figure who calls himself Edgar Allan. Mysterious deaths, all-seeing eyes, strange misunderstandings, and odd father figures are elements which structure Michael Haneke’s television-thriller. The director’s later concerns with media, invisibility, surveillance, and the bourgeois family are already present here.
There can never be Too Much Harmony in a Bing Crosby picture, not even in a bucolic backstage musical like this. Crosby plays Eddie Bronson, a big-time singing star stranded in a one-horse town. Refusing to let any grass grow under his feet, Eddie combs through the local talent, discovering comedians Benny Day and Johnny Dixon and aspiring actress Ruth Brown. He brings his new protegees with him to Broadway, where Ruth becomes a huge success in spite of the machinations of prima donna Lucille Watson.
Guy, film critic for magazine Cahiers du Cinéma and terminal cinephile, plans to write about the Vittorio Cottafavi retrospective at the Alcazar, his local cinema. One day he notices that Jeanne, film critic of Postif, the rival magazine, seems to be following him. He is intrigued– is she interested in him, or planning to poach his praise for Cottafavi in her own article?
Yusuf, released from prison after having served a ten-year sentence, goes to Izmir to visit his sister. Facing past family troubles and having no other place to go, he settles down in a cheap, run-down hotel. Soon, his path crosses with that of a strange family. In Yusuf’s struggle to survive, Bekir, Ugur and their daughter, Cilem, are initially a glimpse of hope, which, later on, turns into a devastating destiny.
The Tin Woodman, framed by light bulbs, does a little dance, leaps and retrieves his axe from outside the frame, chops down a tree that turns into various objects, grabs a heart emblem from the corner, and goes to the Emerald City at night with Toto. He goes to the edge of a cliff, where he meats an Asian spirit who gives him a heart shape that becomes a kite that hooks to him with a cane. This is followed by approximately ten minutes of kaleidoscopic images, including a man’s hands, a dancing girl, and a cutout of Krishna.
Pixillation was one of the first collaborations between Lillian Schwartz and Ken Knowlton during their stint at Bell Labs using Knowlton’s self written computer animation language EXPLOR. Made in 1970 this 4 minute film crams in a spectacular amount of visual information, cutting from geometric sequences reminiscent of Cellular Automata to analogue sequences of organic forms – immersions of liquids and oils so favoured by the West Coast light show fanatacists around the same time.