The first Canadian fiction feature directed by a woman, Sylvia Spring’s Madeleine Is… investigates themes of patriarchy, art, and emancipatory politics in the context of Vancouver’s counterculture. Madeleine, an aspiring painter from Quebec, relocates to Vancouver at the height of the hippie era and has a series of encounters with men—a macho political radical, a fantasy figure-cum-young businessman, an older homeless man—which lead to self-discovery. The city and its paradoxes and politics are vividly evoked, while the era’s emergent feminism informs the film’s perspective.
Tag: 1970s
This hilarious film alternates three kinds of material: footage of barking dogs, shots of streets and other locations, and a ludicrously overdetermined melodramatic story, illustrated chiefly by a series of stills (and occasionally by shots in motion) and narrated off-screen. The net result of its combined strategies is to reveal melodrama itself as a pure formal mechanism, with characters and plot reduced to the status of necessary props.
The grandfather, whose house is guarded by seven flames, sends his three grandsons fishing. An evil witch casts a spell on two older grandsons and turns them into pigs. The youngest grandson calls the flames for help…
The fantasies and dreams of two over-the-hill actresses are intertwined with their realities, as the two roommates struggle to survive their day-to-day lives in the expensive and difficult world of Paris.
In Vakantie Van de Filmer, filmmaker van der Keuken brings together various audio and visual materials: memories of an elderly married couple, personal holiday photos, the saxophonist Ben Webster, poems and a portrait of his grandfather who introduced him to the world of photography. A representation in which the various spaces flow together prompting reflection about the tension between film and photography, time standing still and the moving image. Van der Keuken revises and reformulates, like an alchemist, his own aesthetic principles and shows how these tie in with his own social environment.
Dustin is the leader of a rock band on the brink of super-stardom. Until now they have juggled their music career with cocaine smuggling. The musicians, and their manager Raf, wish to sever ties with organized-crime, leave the drug world behind and concentrate on music. However they are coerced into doing one last job for the Mob. They lose the $2 million of cocaine, and find themselves marked men unless they can fulfill their obligations.
A rundown suburban villa is home to three individuals who live happily together. Fernand and Alexa are fugitives from ill-fated marriages; Louis is a young bisexual musician who couldn’t get on with his parents. The strange ménage attracts the attentions of a police inspector, but he is also drawn into this world of mutual tolerance and free love, becoming their friend when his own wife leaves him. The happy community looks as if it might be falling apart when Fernand falls in love with a young middleclass woman…
A young boy named Max who, after dressing in his wolf costume, wreaks such havoc through his household that he is sent to bed without his supper. Max’s bedroom undergoes a mysterious transformation into a jungle environment, and he winds up sailing to an island inhabited by malicious beasts known as the “Wild Things.”