A man wearing a mask of King Kong walks through a maze unrolling a ball of thread. Franco Brocani renewes his interest in the dens of perdition providing a free vision of the classic myth of the Minotaur. Shot in an art gallery in Rome and adapted from a story by Jorge L. Borges.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
Sándor Sára’s short experimental film juxtaposes pitiful war memorials against actual footage from the First World War. Thus, by exploiting the power of montage, the absurdity of celebrating war is brought to the fore along with the tragedy of how ordinary people are manipulated by ideologies and then despatched to the slaughterhouse. Pro Patria can be viewed as the overture in Sára’s film series on war, in which he does not yet apply the medium of the ‘talking heads’ documentary but instead the montage art form in order to dig deep into the subject: the tragic truth of the individual sent off to battle.
This documentary focuses on AIDS activist, novelist and film writer and National Book Award winner Paul Monette’s life, from his childhood in Massachusetts up to his life in Hollywood and diagnosis and death from AIDS. His story is told in readings from his memoirs and by those who knew him. Narrated by Linda Hunt.
Award-winning director Jia Zhangke’s documentary Useless weaves a three-part tale about the Chinese clothing industry. The documentary opens in the textile factories of Guangdong, where workers hunch over massive machines day in day out for low pay, before moving to Paris where fashion designer Ma Ke is unveiling her new collection of organic, avant-garde, haute couture designs. Running counter to the clothing industry’s culture of mass production and reproduction, her new line “Wu Yong”, meaning “Useless”, lends the film its title, and forms the heart of the documentary. The third act of the film travels to a tailor shop in a dusty mining town in Shanxi. Using a down-to-earth montage of people and places, Useless brings out the significance of clothing, and the different faces and sectors of modern China.
Unconvinced by the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy, lawyer Mark Lane begins his own investigation. In this documentary, Lane travels to Dallas to interview witnesses, friends of Oswald’s and other people connected with the assassination. Archival footage of the immediate aftermath, an FBI recreation and visits to the scene of the crime are used to argue that the Warren Commission’s report is fundamentally flawed.
Kaoru, a wealthy woman whose youth is fading, abandons the hustle and bustle of the city to live a peaceful life in a house on the coast. There she takes care of an old deaf, dumb and blind man as if he were an insect, a child or a pet. He can’t do anything for himself, so she feeds him and accompanies him on his walks. This strong mutual dependency offers Kaoru an escape from society and allows her to free herself from restrictions imposed by common sense.
Virgil Bliss is a man obsessed with living a normal life, finding a good job, marrying a decent woman and building a family of his own. The only problem is that he is a recently paroled career thief. After his release from prison after nearly a decade he meets Manny Alvarez who takes naive Virgil under his wing and initiates him in the ways of the world. He introduces him to Ruby, a junkie prostitute, with whom Virgil immediately falls in love. Together they form a kind of damaged family, dogged by mistrust, chemical dependency and the weight of their wasted lives. Everything gets even shakier when the psychotic Manny reappears.
Maledetti vi amerò is a bleak but also bitingly-humorous look at what happened to Italy during the absence of one young rebel. Svitol has been hiding out in South America. Then one day he gives up on his life in exile and decides to head back home. Everything has changed. The radical left is now in business or shooting up drugs, and Svitol finds he has no “home” left. Terrorists seem to set the stage for near anarchy and nothing is as he had imagined.