This ecologically-minded film builds on the contrasts of idyllic, untouched nature and small communities versus the world of rigid, faceless, gigantic machine monstrosities. This film that was created at the time of mass demonstrations against the levelling of Transylvanian villages and the barrage system on the Danube in the late 1980s was inspired by the novel Farewell to Matyora by Valentin Rasputin about a Siberian village flooded because of the construction of a hydroelectric power station.
Author: Jon W.
A young boy and girl, dressed in costumes based on Dutch traditional clothes, find their idyllic, windmill-laden countryside is being over-run by unfeeling, unthinking mechanical men that lay waste to everything in their path. The cartoon (note the title) was a very thinly veiled propaganda film in support of the Netherlands resistance fighters during Nazi occupation in World War 2 (The film was completed when Nazi Germany had completely occupied the Netherlands).
This movie tells the story of the early life and rise to fame and fortune of French fashion designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, beginning with her upbringing in an orphanage and training as a milliner, but concentrating on her relationship with Etienne de Balsan and her tempestuous love affair with his friend Boy Capel, and the role the two men played in setting her up as an independent business woman.
In Wales during WW2, a German airman crash-lands in a wood and is found by 12-year-old Elenya. Elenya decides to keep him a secret and does so for as long as she can until finally the village learns the truth, with tragic consequences.
In the 1940 Olympics, prisoners of a German stalag organized sports games in the underground. Had it not been for the war, they probably would have met the camp supervisors in the sports arena. Meanwhile, the SS men try to break them with punitive gymnastics.
A young boy is locked into his apartment when his mother goes out and must care for his baby brother and cope with various domestic catastrophes while his grandmother and a neighbor try to locate his mother or the key to the apartment.
Bette Gordon explores the cinematic representation of women in this feminist experimental work, which, in the words of the filmmaker, centers on “women’s inability to place and define themselves in language and politics, the location of radical struggle.”
Algernon is an old man who lives alone, having conversations with a porcelain cat and enjoys making things out of bones. He boils a neighbour’s dead dog for the bones. He is visited by an old friend who is dying but who commits suicide first – leaving a million dollars in a suitcase. A woman claiming to be interested in Algernon’s Egyptologist great-grandfather pretends to be in love with Algernon…