Tag: 1960s

March 4, 2024 / Horror

Excellent adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s provocative short story, still has impact. Unsettling depiction of the banality of evil. Like the short story, the film begins casually with the start of the annual ritual lottery and grows more intense as we slowly realize the lottery’s purpose. Its main character, Tessie Hutchinson, learns too late the dangers of not speaking up, and of blindly following and supporting tradition. Tradition is symbolized by lucky “Old Man Warner”(77 years in the lottery). Like the short story, the film is shocking because of its matter-of-fact tone: the lottery is depicted as just another mundane yearly event. Spare, powerful, and thought-provoking.

March 4, 2024 / Experimental

A bilaterally symmetrical (west to east) fusion of human, biomorphic and mechanical shapes in motion. Has to do with the spontaneous generation of electrical energy. A fairly rare demonstration of the Sabattier effect in motion. Numbered after the film stock of the same name.

March 4, 2024 / Documentary

The daily life in the primary school of Taillères, in the La Brévine valley, is filmed over the course of an entire school year, from 1959 to 1960. Henry Brandt’s film, which won the Vela d’argento in Locarno in 1961, is a unique testimony to pedagogical processes, with a tender observation of the relationship between the young protagonists, their place of birth and the adult world.

March 3, 2024 / Short

A railway controller and his sweetheart live in peace next to the railway tracks. Out of nowhere, an umbrella flies into their life. They try to catch it, and finally do manage to grasp it for a short moment, but it slips away and then disappears.

March 3, 2024 / Animation
March 3, 2024 / Short
March 3, 2024 / Documentary

The followers of religious leader Jacob Hutter live in farm communities, devoutly holding to the rules their founder laid down four centuries ago. Through the kindness of a Hutterite colony in Alberta, this film, in black and white, was made inside the community and shows all aspects of the Hutterites’ daily life.

February 11, 2024 / Biography

Between October 11 and November 5 of 1968, teenager Norio Nagayama murdered four people in a killing spree across Japan with a shotgun stolen from a U.S. Army base. Adachi Masao, together with cultural theorist Matsuda Masao, scriptwriter Sasaki Mamoru and other collaborators, set out to trace the young man’s footsteps with a camera in hand. The result is an experimental documentary comprised purely of landscape shots, each of which shows scenery that Nagayama may or may not have seen during his upbringing and journey. Seeking an alternative to the sensationalism found in the media’s depiction of serial killers (which continues to this day), Adachi’s sparse voice-over provides only the hard facts while the increasing number of billboards in the landscapes slowly reveal the hegemony of capitalism in contemporary Japan.