With a playful associative montage, Parajanov offers an overview of portrait paintings by Hakob Hovnatanyan, the “Raphael of Tiflis.” Combining sights and sounds from both Hovnatanyan’s paintings and 19th century Tbilisi, Parajanov’s short documentary can be seen as a direct precursor to The Color of Pomegranates (1969).
Tag: 1960s
Featuring pop stars Karel Gott and Marta Kubišová (who later became the director’s second wife) in lead roles, with cameos by the two girls from Chytilová’s Daisies and director Lindsay Anderson as traffic policeman, Martyrs of Love is the most perfect embodiment of Němec’s vision of a film world independent of reality. The nearly dialogue-free music comedy about three timid lovers, which combines aesthetics of 1920s silent slapstick cinema with romantic music of the 1960s, cemented the director’s reputation as the kind of unrestrained nonconformist the Communist establishment considered the most dangerous to their ideology.
Amir, desperate to earn enough money to marry his fiancée Maryam, becomes involved in the illegal operations of a gang run by a man named Afshar. Complications arise when Afshar’s wife develops feelings for Amir—feelings he does not return. But when Afshar finds the two of them alone one day, suspicion and danger begin to close in.
A gang of smalltime criminals is sent to an experimental prison where inmates are to be reformed, not punished. The leader of the gang plans to use this to his advantage and take control of the place through manipulation.
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.
Maldoror’s short debut film Monangambééé encapsulates the director’s artistic and political vision: this is not militant grandstanding, but a deeply human and lyrical portrayal of colonial inequality and injustice. Based on the short story “O fato completo de Lucas Matesso” (1962) by José Luandino Vieira, it shows how an Angolan activist arrested by the Portuguese occupiers becomes the victim of an absurd linguistic mix-up.
What do painters’ models dream of during their breaks? The fantasy world of a young girl preoccupied with her own beauty… A mix of live action, animation, and video effects.
Eveil is, in a way, the story of humanity transposed through the dreamlike universe of Peter Foldes, who conceived, created and designed this original work. In an absurd and formless world, in continual mutation, a girl wakes up, naked as on the first day. Drawn into a mad dance, she is finally absorbed by computers and reproduced in thousands of living and identical copies that encounter war, cruelty, death, brutality, old age, physical love, and futility.