“The Chair” by Daniel Szczechura is a brilliant animated political satire depicting the timeless mechanism of the struggle for power. In a monumental hall, a meeting is underway – one seat at the presidential table remains empty. The candidates, shown from a bird’s-eye view as abstract, moving figures, compete ruthlessly, using tricks and underhanded tactics to win the titular chair. The film, made using cutout animation techniques, suggestively employs graphic simplicity, irony, and distance.
Tag: 1960s
The long and flamboyant career of the French filmmaker is depicted in Abel Gance: The Charm of Dynamite, a documentary created for the BBC by film historian and Abel Gance scholar Kevin Brownlow. A Blue Ribbon winner at the American Film Festival of 1976, this documentary, along with Brownlow’s history of silent film The Parade’s Gone By and his restoration of Gance’s 1927 Napoleon, was instrumental in bringing Gance’s cinematic genius to a new generation of film enthusiasts.
György Kovásznai transposes this Jules and Jim-inspired love triangle into his own world, centering it on a circle of young intellectuals who drift through the streets of Budapest and gather in cafés. The film imitates the personal tone of the diaries with the use of painted black and white photo retouching.
The line between genuine love and violent obsession is blurred when a man falls for a girl and proceeds to tie her up with rope to him, making her follow him around and bend to his whims until tragedy ultimately befalls them both.
Rock Hudson narrates a compilation of clips from Marilyn Monroe’s 20th Century-Fox movies. The documentary traces Monroe’s early studio beginnings as a bit player in “A Ticket to Tomahawk” to her final screen moments in the unfinished “Something’s Got to Give.”
This insightful documentary features some of the major and most beautiful actresses to grace the silver screen. It shows how the movie industry changed its depiction of sex and actresses’ portrayal of sex from the silent-movie era to the present. Classic scenes are shown from the silent movie “True Heart Susie,” starring Lillian Gish, to “Love Me Tonight” (1932), blending sex and sophistication, starring Jeanette MacDonald (pre-Nelson Eddy) and to Elizabeth Taylor in “A Place in the Sun” (1951), plus many, many more.
After wandering into a cemetery, a young man named Shusei is led by the mysterious Madame Enjoji to a secluded mansion. There, he is introduced to Aido, an ethereal woman who seems to be the living embodiment of his most surreal erotic fantasies. Caught between the real world and a haunting dreamscape, Shusei becomes obsessed with Aido.
The first film of Latvian cinema’s “new era”, that of the Riga School of Poetic Documentary Cinema. The story of a little girl in a white dress wandering the streets of Riga in search of the flowers she has seen in a shop window was originally conceived and shot as a short film, but its documentary character is so abundant and artistically valuable that this little film became a turning point in cinema history and the beginning of a new era.