Doctor Glas is told in the form of a journal. The main character is Dr. Glas, a physician. The antagonist is Reverend Gregorius, a morally corrupt clergyman. Gregorius’ beautiful young wife confides in Dr. Glas that her sex life is making her miserable and asks for his help. Glas, in love with her, agrees to help even though she already has another adulterous lover. He attempts to intervene, but the Reverend refuses to give up his “marital rights”- she must have sex with him whether she likes it or not (at the time, a wife was legally the property of her husband, and subsequently had no right to say no). So, in order to make his love happy, he begins to plot her husband’s murder.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
In her brother’s apartment where he died, Yuki finds a vacuum cleaner with its cord still hooked up to the outlet. She discovers that the circumstances surrounding her brother’s supposed suicide are sketchy at best, yet no one has any answers. When she starts having hallucinations involving his ghost, however, she seeks some psychological help, eventually uncovering some things that she may have wished she’d left covered.
Two neighbours live in the same house as the best friends until one of them buys a small harmonica and starts to play in a unbearable way. The other one takes his revenge and answers with some intolerable play on a larger accordeon. They start a competition, using bigger and bigger instruments. Other neighbours join them in a dreadful ear-splitting noise. This infernal sounds provoke some unwanted consequences, all because of a small »Piccolo« accordeon.
A BBC documentary portrait of Peter Sellers, filmed over a period of nine months in 1969 during the filming of his latest film The Magic Christian. Director Tony Palmer interviews Sellers and friends and associates about the actor’s career and life. At age 44, with 38 films already behind him, including Dr. Strangelove and two “Pink Panther” films, Sellers was then at the crest of his career. But his personal life, which included two bad marriages (and two more to come), a near-fatal 1964 heart attack, and increasingly disturbing personality disorders, was in tatters. His distrust of everyone, including Palmer, is evident here on-camera several times.
An insightful illumination of author Paul Bowles’ original and lesser-known career as an avant-garde composer, Owsley Brown’s Night Waltz is an elegant and soulful document of discovery. Interviewed in Morocco during the last months of his life, Bowles journeys back to his early years as a contemporary and occasional collaborator of other such iconic figures as Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Orson Welles. Bowles’ uncut compositions–performed by the Eos Orchestra–are punctuated with stunning visual essays by filmmakers Nathaniel Dorsky and Rudy Burckhardt. Long after retiring from his more well-known profession, Bowles kept music as a vital part of his life, tapping out fresh rhythms on his Tangier table tops until the end of his days.
Filmed in Brooklyn, Image in the Snow is an early underground “trance film” in which “a young man led by despair searches a city for salvation” (director Willard Maas’ own description). He takes the Myrtle Avenue el. and finds his “ideal parents” represented as carved stone figures on a tomb in the old part of Mt. Olivet Cemetary. Although not as highly regarded as Geography of the Body or as ostentatious as Narcissus in its own time, Image in the Snow has become the most frequently revived of Willard Maas’ thematic, non-documentary films.
A surreal piece of cinema, mostly comprised of stark religious and homoerotic imagery, accompanied by increasingly dissonant music (starting with ‘The Unanswered Question’, and getting more jarring as the movie progresses.
This heartwarming British drama is based on Beth the Sheepdog, a novel by Ernest Lewis. Beth is played, quite well indeed, by a magnificent animal named Fleet. The story concerns the efforts of various interested human parties to enter Beth in the All-England Dog Championship. When a farmer is unsuccessful in his efforts to purchase Beth for his own, he spitefully accuses the dog’s owner of sheep stealing. After this mess is straightened out, the plot segues into the Championship, and it is at this point that the film finally comes to life.