The world of 15 year old unicyclist Tony Marienthal includes visits to assist the elderly, learning new juggling tricks, and trying to make it home for supper. The film is a wonderful, idyllic “day in the life” film of a teen-ager. It’s also somewhat bittersweet, as Tony Marienthal, who wanted his baby son to see this film, died at the young age of 51.
Tag: 1970s
Thirty-year-old Irén dreams of a separate apartment so she can move in with her lover, the married Attila. Hope is sparked by one of the man’s acquaintances, the construction contractor Hevesi, but in order to apply for the larger apartment, she must first enter into a marriage of convenience with the young Gábor. Irén takes out a loan on her modest kindergarten teacher salary, wanders through the mazes of socialist bureaucracy, while Hevesi and her nominal husband harass her with sexual offers, and by the time the day of moving in is within reach, it turns out that Attila doesn’t want to leave his family after all.
Ulrike Ottinger’s singular debut feature is an extravagantly stylized lesbian pirate spectacle that radically deconstructs decades of male-oriented adventures. Madame X (Tabea Blumenschein) is the notorious pirate ruler of the China Sea who recruits a motley crew of women (among them avant-garde icon Yvonne Rainer as a disillusioned artist) to leave behind their humdrum lives and join her on her outlaw ship, the Orlando. Once aboard, the women’s search for freedom leads them on an odyssey that, in Ottinger’s words, “is not a journey outward into adventure but a journey into the interior.”
A controversial documentary screened in the official competition at the Cannes Festival. It depicts a hypnosis session in which participants, under its influence, inflict pain on themselves and others. The film addresses important themes such as manipulation, abuse of power, and collective obedience, provoking strong reactions from audiences and critics.
A documentary, almost silent depiction of a meeting between a woman and a worker on a bridge — this intimate ritual without dialogue is interpreted as a symbol of love, hope, and human encounter in a minimalist representation.
The film made for the centenary of the birth of poet Endre Ady is set in the golden age of peace before the outbreak of the First World War. By depicting the silence preceding the suffocating storm at the beginning of the century, the director expresses the public mood of his own time in impactful animated images.
In 1867, with Garibaldi’s forces close to bringing Rome into the Italian kingdom, Monsignor Colombo da Priverno, a world-weary judge on the papal court, wants to resign, disgusted by the violence to which the papacy resorts to hold secular power. That night, three rebels blow up the Zouaves’ barracks. Colombo learns that a brief liaison with a countess 20 years’ before produced a son, one of the rebels arrested for the bombing. He uses his influence to gain the youth’s release, hides him, and then engages in doomed battles of wit with the court and with the Black Pope to free the other two. Can this priest be a father, blunt power, and live out his faith?
Péter Tímár, visionary developer of a unique filmmaking perspective in his graphics and effects period, directed this short in the experimental film group of Balázs Béla Studio, in which he investigates human sight through five topics: anatomy, photo-sensitivity, contour, refraction and resonance. The result is a fascinating experimental film packed with cinematic reflections far removed from scientific demonstration and didactic intent.