Nuit noire, Calcutta, a film commissioned by the pharmaceutical industry and hijacked by Marin Karmitz, unfolds as an intense, nocturnal meandering, with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras. Marin Karmitz rapidly abandons the informative intent of the project, adopting a much freer narrative. Although the film’s purpose is to promote a drug claiming to cure alcoholism, it transforms into a black-and-white mirage, starring Maurice Garrel as a drunken writer, a vice-consul in Calcutta, who is rendered creatively impotent.
Category: Arthouse
Inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Terayama’s final and elaborate opus takes place on a remote Okinawan island, where a mythical time law rules and shapes memories, life and even death. Sutekichi and his cousin Su-e love each other, attracting the attention and insults of the superstitious inhabitants of an isolated village beyond time. When Sutekichi murders his rival Daisaku, the couple decides to flee from the village, but Sutekichi is haunted by Daisaku’s ghost and increasingly affected by the unforgiving course of time.
Petro is a modest farmhand living in an impoverished village in some unspecified long-ago era. He wants to marry the lovely Pidorka, but her stern father won’t hear of it. The mischievous demon Basavriuk, offers a deal, enticing Petro into crime for the sake of fortune. Based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story “The Eve of Ivan Kupala” (“St John’s Eve”) and Ukrainian folk tales.
Fake, follows three young men—Ber, Po, and Soong—roommates in Bangkok who are each at different stages of navigating love and relationships. Ber is consumed by the pain of a breakup, Po hides his vulnerability behind his womanizing ways, and Soong dreams of finding “the right one” without knowing what that really means. Their lives take an unexpected turn when all three become infatuated with the same woman, unaware of each other’s pursuit. As their stories overlap, the film paints a portrait of youthful longing, heartbreak, and the fragile line between friendship and rivalry.
Two eccentrics who have ended up in jail due to their inability to conform build a fantastical flying machine to flee their grey reality. At once a bizarre comedy with bite about two outsiders in some indeterminate place at some indeterminate time, a plea for the power of dream and a concealed critique of the system.
Teenage siblings Nenette and Boni were raised apart as a result of their parents’ divorce. Their mother, who doted on her son Boni, has died. He works for an interesting couple as a pizza baker, and is surprised and enraged when his younger sister, having run away from boarding school, suddenly turns up. There’s a problem that they must confront.
In her second feature (and her first solo feature), the multidisciplinary artist Niki de Saint Phalle pursues her own take on the fairy tale, and the result is a visionary exploration of female desire that unfurls according to the logic of dreams and poetry. The film follows a princess (played by Saint Phalle’s daughter, Laura Duke Condominas) who, following a series of encounters with fantastical beings, is magically transformed into an adult, and finds herself navigating a frightening and surreal new world. A work suffused with ideas and strong ties to Saint Phalle’s work in other media (sculpture, painting, assemblage, etc.), Un rêve plus long que la nuit is both an exemplary artist’s film and an underseen gem of 1970s French avant-garde cinema.
Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the “forest.” There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York “underground scene” who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.