♦♦ Amos Vogel’s “Film as a Subversive Art“♦♦
Loosely based on William A. Seiter’s 1948 film One Touch of Venus, Steven Arnold’s first film is a macabre, decadent work presenting mannequins and models that travel through strange universes.
Author: Jon W.
As part of a television series devoted to Europe’s major cities, Angelopoulos was commissioned to make this film about Athens. Although much of Angelopoulos’ cinema is set among the villages of the northern countryside, he was born and raised in the city, so this film finds the director musing on an Athenian past that is variously ancient, national and personal, as well as clips from the “history” films The Travelling Players, The Hunters and Alexander the Great.
This children’s adventure is set in South Africa and chronicles the bond between a boy and his cheetah. The two have been pals for a long time, so when the cat is taken and placed in a traveling circus, the boy does all he can to free it.
A lawman on the brink of retirement resolves to bring a gang of outlaws to justice first – but the bandits are led by his adoptive father. The townsfolk he protects question where his loyalties lie, and turn to a hired gun to make sure he goes through with the job.
Death of Yazdgerd, is a poetic and political work exploring the cruel and tragic dynamics of a class-based society. War is raging. King Yazdgerd’s body is discovered in a run-down mill in the Iranian desert. Charged with murder, the miller, his wife and his sickly daughter must tell their story to the commanders to escape torture and death. Who killed the King? Was Yazdgerd indeed the revered God-King, or a puny, immoral man caught in the destructive whirlwind of his times?
In the village of Tankuy, farmers are roused to revolutionary action against US based imperialism after one of them, an indigenous man, is brutalized by a landowner. Native non professionals contributed to and helped direct this example of radical, collective oriented Latin American filmmaking.
Assemblage is an experimental film that shows Merce Cunningham’s dance company performing in a public square in the San Francisco bay. Through special effects, the bodies of the dancers appear superimposed against the architecture of the plaza. Colorized by artist Charles Atlas and with a soundtrack created by John Cage, David Tudor, and Gordon Mumma, Assemblage is a psychedelic collage of movement, time, and space.
British farmer Mark Warrow and his hot-tempered wife, Martha, have a loveless marriage that reaches its breaking point when Martha shoots Mark’s beloved dog. In a rage, Mark murders Martha. On the run following his crime, Mark meets Jo Trent, a seemingly naïve woman who offers him a lift; in fact, she recognizes Mark as the man the police are chasing and is gathering material for a book called “I Met A Murderer” about their time together.