In late 1944, as the end of World War II approaches, the Wehrmacht’s high command determines to withdraw General Alexander Lohr’s Army Group ‘E’ from the Balkans back to Germany. They plan to supply the tank columns with fuel from a depot in Sarajevo. The Yugoslav partisans’ leader in the city, a mysterious man known as Walter, presents a grave danger to the operation’s success, and the Germans dispatch Standartenfuhrer von Dietrich of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) to deal with him.
Tag: 1970s
An unusual but affectionate story of a man’s longing for his ideal of peace and serenity. A postman and part-time poet is inspired by the Greek legend of the two elderly guards at Jupiter’s temple who are transformed into beautiful trees. His wife has him committed when he stands in his backyard awaiting the same metamorphosis to take place. With the help of a friendly librarian, he escapes in a milk truck during a violent storm.
At the beginning of the Second World War, in an Essex fishing village, Fritha, a young orphan, finds a snow goose wounded by shotgun. At the same time, she gets to know Philip Rhayadar, a hunched back artist who lives a solitary life in an abandoned lighthouse in the marshlands. With his help Fritha manages to nurse the bird back to flight. A fairy tale into which tragedy smuggles the day Philip decides to come to the rescue of British soldiers caught in the trap of the Dunkirk battle…
Gengobe Satsuma, an exiled samurai cast out as an Asano clan retainer is given a second chance to join his brothers in arms to become the 48th Ronin against the Shogunate. His faithful servant gathers the 100 ryo required for his acceptance. Gengobe is also in love with a greedy geisha named Koman. About to be sold to another man, Gengobe learns that for him to keep her, her debt is exactly 100 ryo.
Directed by Cannes-award winner Sándor Reisenbüchler, Holdmese is a psychedelic animated short that mixes pulp sci-fi, Tibetan mysticism and Slavic folklore. Two scientists propose that the moon is an ancient, derelict spaceship, and go on a journey through deep space to discover its origins. The influence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 is clear, but Reisenbüchler’s collage technique is distinctively- and irreverently- his own. Holdmese stands as a brilliant forgotten work of Communist animation.
An almost psychedelically luminous invocation of the Battle of Borodino set to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (1880). As Reisenbüchler put it: the film deals with “self-destruction in the power struggle for the conquest of empires”.
The son of computer graphics pioneer John Whitney, Sr., Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps and worked as animator for Hollywood films like Westworld and The Last Starfighter. He also made this experimental short in 1972, with abstract and swirling color patterns familiar from the visual music tradition of animation. These patterns gradually reveal themselves as a human face, derived from long exposure photography of a nude model.
The human eye, a well-known motif of psychedelic culture, is multiplied and intensified in Tanaami Keiichi’s cinematic trip 4 Eyes. Drawing from his experiences designing discotheques, Tanaami presents two prints of the same film in double-projection with a time delay to suggest the mind slipping out of consciousness.