A black-and-white short without any words that shows how seven different people spend a Sunday. Karpo Godina’s first professional short and his last black-and-white film.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
Arguably Larry Gottheim’s most exuberant experiment in the single-shot, single-roll format (and his first with a soundtrack), HARMONICA trains the camera on a friend improvising a tune in the backseat of a moving car. Held out the window, the harmonica becomes a musical conduit for the wind, while Gottheim’s film transforms before our eyes into a playful meditation on wrangling the natural elements into art.
Documentary on history and culture of the gypsy communities worldwide. Part One takes us on a search for the lost gypsy tribes of Egypt, up the Nile to the ancient town of Luxor in the shadow of the great Pharaoh’s tombs. Along the way, we meet dancing girls and acrobats, magicians, fortune-tellers and even mystics performing an exorcism. Part Two is a penetrating, provocative tour of a fabled people’s existence. It reveals the prejudice they still face daily and which they combat with the lyrics and music they have carried and adapted on their long migrations.
A retrospective look at the film-making movement in Carlton during the 1960s/1970s, the filmmakers and the influences that inspired and motivated them. Includes an examination of the life and work of neo-realist Giorgio Mangiamele, and the French new wave styles of Brian Davies, Peter Carmody, Antony I. Ginnane, Peter Elliot, James Clayden, Nigel Buesst, David Minter. An assembly of extracts from several of the Carlton films are juxtaposed with pieces of Godard’s early films revealing much about a fascinating period of Melbourne filmmaking.
The followers of religious leader Jacob Hutter live in farm communities, devoutly holding to the rules their founder laid down four centuries ago. Through the kindness of a Hutterite colony in Alberta, this film, in black and white, was made inside the community and shows all aspects of the Hutterites’ daily life.
Botto, a world-famous circus clown, is negative towards females, because a beautiful woman he once loved laughed at him for his job at the circus. André, a young artist, is Botto’s opposite. He loves women. His current love is Hanna, who also works in the circus. That’s when Botto meets Blanche, a middle-class girl.
Between October 11 and November 5 of 1968, teenager Norio Nagayama murdered four people in a killing spree across Japan with a shotgun stolen from a U.S. Army base. Adachi Masao, together with cultural theorist Matsuda Masao, scriptwriter Sasaki Mamoru and other collaborators, set out to trace the young man’s footsteps with a camera in hand. The result is an experimental documentary comprised purely of landscape shots, each of which shows scenery that Nagayama may or may not have seen during his upbringing and journey. Seeking an alternative to the sensationalism found in the media’s depiction of serial killers (which continues to this day), Adachi’s sparse voice-over provides only the hard facts while the increasing number of billboards in the landscapes slowly reveal the hegemony of capitalism in contemporary Japan.
This television essay from 1985 was written by Leonard Bernstein to commemorate the 125th anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s birth. Recorded in Israel, Vienna and later in London, it is punctuated by biographical interludes and illustrated by musical examples drawn from the cycle of Mahler’s works recorded by Bernstein. Bernstein talks, plays and conducts various orchestras (Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Wiener Philharmoniker) and soloists (Janet Baker, Christa Ludwig, Edith Mathis, Lucia Popp, Walton Groenroos) in performances spanning 17 years.