Japanese soldier Tôsuke Kosugi deserts his position and travels to a small town on the Sea of Japan to start over in this melodrama from director Masahiro Shinoda. When a young maid falls for him, he talks her into sleeping with an older man for money. The woman is told by a geisha that she gave up her virginity cheaply. The resort town begins to feel the influence of the modern world as the sabre-rattling that preceded World War II begins to change their lives forever.
Tag: 1960s
Film based on W.F. Hermans’ novella Paranoia (1953), about a young man traumatised by war. Arnold Clever becomes convinced he is a wanted war criminal whose description is all over the newspapers. This delusion leads to his downfall.
General Rehearsal for Suicide is an attack on the emerging pop culture and the spectacle of art events. During a happening at the Museum of Modern Art, musician K.E. Wohlin puts a saw to his leg and is likened to a victim of the ‘carousel of Art-formisms and Art-formgasms’.
In the final days of World War II, a German military unit sets out to liquidate the inhabitants of a lunatic asylum. At the last minute, a German officer called Windisch arrives in civilian attire, with altogether different orders. He must find a British spy who is, according to the anonymous letter he has received, hiding amongst the patients.
The film shows the history of the Neapolitan popular revolt against the invading Germans during World War II. During the four days in Naples, the revolt turns over in just a few hours. Neapolitans slung on rifles and guns or armed themselves with stones, house-objects, gasoline-bottles, anything and everything, anonymous and silent. Gennarino Capuozzo, a 10-year-old killed on a barricade while he was fighting against the invaders, is remembered as a hero.
In a small French town, Flora has a six-week fling with a soldier. But this is no passionate affair. Her lover, the cartoonish Charles, ignores her advances, insists she watch as he drinks bowl after bowl of the expensive coffee she prepares for him, and berates her if lunch is not made on time. Increasingly depressed, Flora is drawn to nature, and finds she has a much greater affinity for plants than for people.
“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.
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.