In southern France, in a quaint little town, the mayor, who also owns a castle with some cattle, is in the wine cellar with some other people–the pharmacist, the veterinary, and some of his employees. As they are drinking wine, they hear a terrible noise and the heat’s getting higher and higher. They don’t realize what’s happening: when they come out of the cellar, they realize that everything has burned, and all the buildings are destroyed.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
In German-occupied Poland in 1943, a writer and a mysterious new acquaintance travel to a country estate, hoping to escape the hardships of wartime Warsaw. Amid the seemingly peaceful surroundings, the two men become absorbed in a disturbing game of manipulation, attempting to bring two young people together while the violence and moral uncertainties of the war linger just beyond their secluded refuge.
The world is a blazing atomic hell. Civilisation is dying in agony… What do you do? …THROW A PARTY! The Third World War has happened. Bombs are dropping everywhere, even Elwood, Melbourne, Australia. In the ruins that follow, three survivors find a bomb shelter. Only to find that the survivors in there are having a party.
Fictionalized portrait of one of history’s great literary couples: Stein & Toklas. Summer 1930s France, Alice tends to ailing Gertrude; they visit Fernande Olivier, Guillaume Apollinaire, others; and Hemingway pops in.
Tokyo Melody offers a rare, mosaic‑like portrait of Ryuichi Sakamoto at a defining early moment in his career. Filmed over one intense week in 1984, Elizabeth Lennard follows him through recording sessions for Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia and across Tokyo’s parks, studios, and neon avenues, capturing him as musician, tinkerer, thinker, and cultural observer. Sakamoto reflects on technology, society, and the fluidity of time — echoing his wish to create “things that will only be understood by the grandchildren of the 20th century.” Blending staged scenes, Yellow Magic Orchestra concert fragments, and everyday city soundscapes, the film reveals an artist shaping the future in real time.
Film director, theatre director, and opera director. The multi-talented Luchino Visconti is interviewed on this special to reflect upon his views on each of those art forms and he approaches each of them. Also features interviews with collaborators such as Vittorio de Sica, Leonardo Bernstein and Maria Callas.
The protagonist of this Kafkaesque tale receives a telegram ordering him to appear at his own execution at dawn on the following day. His acquaintances try to reassure him that it is all probably just an administrative error, but the Complaints Office has already closed for the day and it is impossible to discover the truth. The man finally decides that, after all, it is perhaps best if he does actually appear at the scaffold the following day. This final film by Miklós Erdély examines a most vexing subject using his inimitable experimental cinematic solutions.
Miklós Erdély, a leading exponent of Hungarian Neo-Avant-garde, made a major contribution to the burgeoning in Hungary of experimental filmmaking in the 1970s and 80s through his works created in the Balázs Béla Studio. In this film he asked people to recount dreams and then an attempt was made at playing out and reconstructing these dreams. The situations that arise in front of the lens pose questions for both psychology and epistemology.