Jan is a young assistant professor in chemistry and a workaholic, whose entire life is dedicated to study and advancement to full professorship. Anna is an unsuccesful science writer who turns to Jan for advice and human compassion in a critical moment of mental confusion and nervous exhaustion. Jan, absorbed with his career, remains immune to Anna’s clumsy efforts to pierce his defences. Affrayed by her ultimate plea for an embrace, he escapes to his own quarters. In the end Anna makes an unsuccesful suicide attempt and he visits her in the hospital.
Year: 2020
A no-nonsense black politician runs for mayor in a racially torn town. His campaign team comes up with a brilliant idea of hiring blacks to cause havoc in town and force the scared white citizens to vote for him as the only one who can stop the violence!
In this melodrama a mother tries to compensate for her feelings of inadequacy and failure as a parent to her own children by taking in a troubled foster child. As she struggles to make up for her past mistakes, her jealous daughters mistreat the girl.
Marcel Duchamp kept a secret for over 20 years: while the art world had wrongly assumed that one of the 20th century’s most important artists had given up creating art, Duchamp was building his final masterpiece, Etant Donnes (“given”). Duchamp didn’t allow the piece to be viewed by the public until after his death in 1968. This left him shielded from the questions that developed after the piece debuted. Simply described, it is a peepshow. Through an old wooden façade, one looks through to see a sculpted open-legged nude lying in a field. The critics were stumped. What did Duchamp leave us with? This BBC documentary from 1997 dissects and examines the pieces of this assemblage.
Vera thinks she’s witnessed a man decapitating his wife. Actually, she’s only seen magician Bluebeard the Great rehearsing his act. Still convinced that the magician is a killer, Vera goes through all sorts of comic agony when she is forced to share the same train compartment with Bluebeard (who doesn’t help matters when he offers her a sandwich consisting of “scrambled brains and tongue”).
A woman buys an antique doll at a thrift store and does not realize that it is cursed. The doll uses its powers to seduce her while she is asleep and then escape back to the store. She starts to lose interest in sexual activities with her partners as the doll is able to give her a much better satisfaction, so she sets out to find it, but with deadly consequences.
This documentary respectfully interviews a number of important American directors who have in one way or another bucked the system. It also explores the life and work of earlier American mavericks through the tributes, reflections, and recollections of the first group. Prominent among the living directors interviewed are Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Schrader, and David Lynch. Among the directors who are discussed are Orson Welles, D.W. Griffith and Samuel Fuller. Clips from the films of these men, and interviews with important actors who have worked with them (e.g. Robert DeNiro) are another feature of this documentary, commissioned by Japanese public television corporation NHK.