In just 14 minutes, Avraham Heffner’s short film successfully refines the confession of a quarrel and reconciliation between an ageing couple in late 1960s Tel Aviv. The heroine’s omnipresent, stream-of-consciousness narration provides a harsh account of life together. And though it is a short film, Slow Down was nonetheless hailed a harbinger of a new style of Israeli filmmaking and storytelling, while director Avraham Heffner himself admitted it was his favourite film. Based on a short story by Simone de Beauvoir (L’âge de discretion).
Tag: 1960s
This colourful short animation traces the insecure protagonist’s path to tobacco addiction after he discovers, as a teengaer, that smoking can make him “cool”. His addiction follows him well into adulthood, until the scare of lung cancer forces him to face his demons. This funny yet cautionary tale is told by the protagonist as he sits on a psychiatrist’s couch, his recollections amusingly illustrated in colourful vignettes of his past. Both entertaining and visually rich, the film is a deterrent against smoking drawn in typical ’60s modernist/pop-art style.
François Truffaut said of Paul Vecchiali in his early days that he was “the only true heir of Jean Renoir.” The first short film of this director, who was to become a singular figure of independent French cinema, follows the path of an elderly woman towards her memories and beyond. Attentive, affectionate and sometimes cruel, Vecchiali’s camera invents its own expressive language.
Rita, a vivacious co-ed is in love with her music teacher, a man who leads a double life – bespectacled professor by day and composer of rock songs by night. Will Rita win his heart?
After the Civil War ends, a rich horse rancher out West hires the Bannisters, a married Southern couple who lost everything in the war, to help run his ranch. What the Banisters don’t know is that their new boss has more on his mind than breeding horses, and his plans include the pretty Mrs. Bannister.
A gang of young delinquents from a coastal town terrorize the locals, the tourists that spend the summer holidays there, as well as the young girls. They are especially focused on a pretty girl that sells newspapers, and they make a bet on which one will seduce her.
This anti-drug film uses common childhood habits and activities, such as building a machine out of Lego blocks, to metaphorically illustrate the effects and dangers of drug abuse.
Wavelength is anything but simple, however, as Snow’s statement of intention suggests. He describes the film as “a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and aesthetic ideas.” The spine of the film is its famous zoom from a fixed camera position facing a wall with four tall sash windows. Over the course of the film, the angle of view narrows until the frame is filled with a black and white photograph of waves pinned up between the middle two windows. Other features of the room, in which four events involving people take place, are sloughed off. The spectator is led to concentrate on this central element, the photograph—it has been there all along—until the image is washed out and the film comes to an end.