Tag: 1960s

November 17, 2019 / Documentary

Compilation film, tracing the political career of Dr. Hans Globke, allegedly a former Nazi and Secretary of State in West Germany. Included in Amos Vogel’s classic book Film as a Subversive Art.

November 6, 2019 / Film Noir

Reichau, a former army captain, is back in France after serving three years in prison for belonging to the OAS (Secret Armed Organization), a dissident paramilitary group during the Algerian War. Marked by his past, he does not believe in the values of his country any more. At a loss to know what to do with his life, he agrees one day to take part in a heist set up by Pierre, a pilot, the very man who gave him away in Oran. The operation, in which Yo, a gorgeous woman, participates, consists in stealing a bag containing 55 million francs during a Paris-Bordeaux flight.

November 6, 2019 / Comedy

In a small village in Sicily, the girl Assunta is seduced by Vincenzo. The man, however, runs away the day after they become lovers. According to the local traditions Assunta and her sisters are unable to marry unless someone in the family kills the offender and restores the honor of the family. She leaves for England where Vincenzo has fled. Assunta finds herself intimidated by the different culture, but resolutely travels to Edinburgh, Sheffield, Bath, and London in search of Vincenzo in order to kill him.

October 26, 2019 / Animation

Author/illustrator Sanpei Shirato’s Ninja bugei-cho was a popular graphic novel serialized across Japan in the 1960s, well loved by students and leftist radicals for its tale of a young boy’s alliance with a band of ninja during a peasant uprising. Nagisa Oshima takes an experimental approach to adaptation; out of deep respect for Shirato’s artistry (and his usual cinematic prankishness), he films Shirato’s images as they appear on the page, like an anime version of Sans soleil, with the camera hovering and darting over each “scene” to provide movement and life. Adding voices, sound effects, and a narration that connects the plot’s myriad strands, Oshima intervenes in yet another unexpected genre to create a fascinating treatise on cinema, narrative, and action.

October 26, 2019 / TV Movie
October 26, 2019 / Drama

Czech immigrant Frantisek Král has a terrible car accident in West Berlin. The West German secret service immediately takes advantage of the situation, provides him with a new identity and starts training Král, who is suffering from partial amnesia, to become a spy and to get hold of a microfilm from Prague. At first everything goes according to plan, but when he realises his home town is anything but the dreary, suffering place that had been drummed into him, things move in a different direction…

October 21, 2019 / Thriller
October 21, 2019 / Comedy

Popular jazz drummer and actor Frankie Sakai stars in this comic version of the “industrial competition” genre: two tourism companies compete for foreign clients in the run up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Highlighting the coming internationalization of Japan, the film dramatizes the felt tensions between tradition and modernity, the pressures of the “economic animal” lifestyle, and the energy of high economic growth. The closest Japanese cinema ever came to the full-blown Broadway style musical, with singing and dancing on the streets of Tokyo, music by avant-garde composer and jazzman Toshiro Mayuzumi, lyrics by renowned poet Shuntaro Tanikawa.