Penniless and without a future, an English teacher agrees to tutor a pampered woman, only to become enmeshed in a strange reality and a downward spiral of desire and illusion, guilt and self-contempt. Will the ugly truth set him free?
Tag: 1960s
In this effective though still slightly uneven drama about mental illness, the worsening condition of a highly disturbed son wreaks havoc on the rest of the family. Dario has episodes when he becomes violently insane yet his mother refuses to put him in an institution where he can be professionally helped. Her desperate clinging to the belief that Dario will get better starts to wear away the equilibrium of the two other members of the family, the father and Dario’s brother, Gabriele. In the end, the continued presence of Dario and his mother’s near-fanatical insistence that he will recover create tragic consequences for everyone.
During World War II, by way of covert communication in besieged Sofia, Veska joins a group of teenage anti-fascists. Here she meets Dimo, a handsome, passionate member of the small but ferocious resistance. As the group strives to thwart Nazi advancements in Sofia, romance blossoms between Veska and Dimo. With an ambitious stylistic eye, Zhelyazkova masterfully directs a story of forbidden love and the relentlessness of teenage conviction.
Shopkeeper Theo and his live-in lover, Vivien, ease their weariness with one another by pretending to be characters from the famous Dr. Crippen murder case during lovemaking. When gorgeous bisexual photographer Reingardsees them in the act, she takes up residence in the next room and begins photographing them during sex. As Reingard becomes further enmeshed in the threesome, she pushes Theo into a fantasy that may have dire consequences.
The Marquis de Sade is locked in the Charenton mental hospital and decides to put on a play. His overseers agree as long as he follows certain conditions. He writes and directs the other mental patients in a play based on the life of the Jean-Paul Marat. As the play progresses, the inmates become more and more possessed by the violence of the play and become extremely difficult to control. Finally, all chaos breaks loose.
A group of boys, evacuated during World War II from London to a coastal town, form a gang and play war games. Too young to fight in the war and afraid it will be over by the time they come of age, the group members, who are also in the school’s Army Cadet Force initiate a battle with the local teenagers. Based on the novel “The Custard Boys”, by John Rae.
Made on a wind-up Bolex camera, The Sound of Seeing announced the arrival of 21-year-old filmmaker Tony Williams. Based around a painter and a composer wandering the city (and beyond), the film meshes music and imagery to show the duo taking inspiration from their surroundings. The Sound of Seeing served early notice on Williams’ editing talents, his love of music, and his dislike of narration. It was also one of the first independently-made titles screened on Kiwi television. Composer/author Robin Maconie later wrote pioneering electronic music.