Mystical, ephemeral and nearly lost to time, alchemy was a “magical theory of nature” widely held in pre-Enlightenment Europe. Author Terence McKenna portrays John Dee, court magician to Queen Elizabeth I, in this history of the discipline. McKenna discusses the role of the science as he travels to key sites in alchemic lore throughout Eastern Europe, including Heidelberg, home to the world’s only contemporary alchemy lab.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
A young boy strays through a wrought-iron gateway into an overgrown garden filled with insects and birds. Amidst the sculptures of Antiquity, he glimpses a mermaid-like woman in a wheelchair and begins to follow her. The film consisting of engraving-like drawings is a surrealistic coming of age tale played out on the boundary of this world and the realm of myths.
The film made for the centenary of the birth of poet Endre Ady is set in the golden age of peace before the outbreak of the First World War. By depicting the silence preceding the suffocating storm at the beginning of the century, the director expresses the public mood of his own time in impactful animated images.
In 1867, with Garibaldi’s forces close to bringing Rome into the Italian kingdom, Monsignor Colombo da Priverno, a world-weary judge on the papal court, wants to resign, disgusted by the violence to which the papacy resorts to hold secular power. That night, three rebels blow up the Zouaves’ barracks. Colombo learns that a brief liaison with a countess 20 years’ before produced a son, one of the rebels arrested for the bombing. He uses his influence to gain the youth’s release, hides him, and then engages in doomed battles of wit with the court and with the Black Pope to free the other two. Can this priest be a father, blunt power, and live out his faith?
A young boy in a town in Portugal steals some money and is therefore to be sent to the borstal. His mother do not want to let this happen and runs away with him, trying to get to the capitol Lisboa for hiding there. After some time being on this odyssey, bad things start to happen.
In the final days of World War II, a German military unit sets out to liquidate the inhabitants of a lunatic asylum. At the last minute, a German officer called Windisch arrives in civilian attire, with altogether different orders. He must find a British spy who is, according to the anonymous letter he has received, hiding amongst the patients.
The film shows the history of the Neapolitan popular revolt against the invading Germans during World War II. During the four days in Naples, the revolt turns over in just a few hours. Neapolitans slung on rifles and guns or armed themselves with stones, house-objects, gasoline-bottles, anything and everything, anonymous and silent. Gennarino Capuozzo, a 10-year-old killed on a barricade while he was fighting against the invaders, is remembered as a hero.
In a small French town, Flora has a six-week fling with a soldier. But this is no passionate affair. Her lover, the cartoonish Charles, ignores her advances, insists she watch as he drinks bowl after bowl of the expensive coffee she prepares for him, and berates her if lunch is not made on time. Increasingly depressed, Flora is drawn to nature, and finds she has a much greater affinity for plants than for people.