Using a Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 early one August morning, Claude Lelouch attached a camera to the bumper of the car and sped through the streets of Paris. He set the route to be from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur, which is straight through the heart of Paris. When this film was first shown, Lelouch was arrested, and because of this, the footage spent many years underground until it was finally released on DVD in 2003.
Tag: 1970s
Struggling hippie independent filmmaker Mick gets his big break after he finds out that his girlfriend Marlene’s father Burt is a movie producer. Unbeknown to Mick, Burt only specializes in porno pictures. Mick cranks out a cruddy science fiction stinker in three days for Burt, who demands countless changes and has a hard time figuring out how to distribute Mick’s lousy movie.
Gizmo! is an irresistible collection of newsreel footage chronicling the inventive spirit in America. We are treated to some of the strangest inventions ever concocted by man, as well as a few forgotten contraptions that seem to make a great deal of sense. Naturally, filmmaker Howard Smith does not let slip the opportunity of showing the inventors at their most foolish, so once again those ubiquitous shots of collapsing one-man airplanes and malfunctioning jet-powered backpacks are trotted out. Gizmo! is a wonderful way to spend 77 minutes, as well as an ideal fund-raiser for your local PBS “pledge week”.
Based on Sam Greenlee’s novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door tells the story of Black CIA agent hired to showcase agency integration in order to boost a white senator’s re-election campaign. After going undercover as a Black nationalist, he abandons the agency in order to train young recruits in Chicago to become urban guerrillas. Though filmed mostly in Gary, Indiana due to Mayor Daley’s personal distaste for the subject matter, the landscape of Chicago casts a strong shadow over the movie.
In this comedy special, Lily Tomlin plays familiar characters such as young Edith Ann, housewife Judy Beasley, and telephone operator Ernestine, while debuting a new character, Wanda V. Wilford. Lily opens the show by talking about how there’s “more to life” than being a gifted actress, and how, as a youth, she dreamed of becoming “a big city waitress.”
This puppet animation film is based on Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. A 1936 symphonic fairy tale for children, the piece tells the story of Peter and a little bird who outwit and catch the dangerous wolf and take him to a zoo.
Francois Truffaut in conversation in 1977 with Richard Roud, then Director of the New York Film Festival. Truffaut, director of “Jules and Jim,” “The Four Hundred Blows, etc. was in America for the premier of “The Man Who Loved Women” at the 15th NYFF. The film director speaks of his childhood, the moral challenge of World War Two, the real meaning of the “auteur theory”, how the conservative French film industry was forced to change, Truffaut as a “culture hero” in the US, making a film that is as personal as a novel, the difference between French and American approaches to cinema, and many other themes.
America’s great film director-actor Buster Keaton, discussed by film critic Andrew Sarris and Raymond Rohauer, cinema historian, with some unusual perspectives on his goals and motivations. Illustrated with many film excerpts from 1917 to 1928. Rohauer knew Keaton and was partly responsible from rescuing many of his old films from destruction. Sarris is a leading film critic who has often written about Keaton. Excerpts include portions of “The General”, “Cops”, “Frozen North”, “The Boat”, “Sherlock, Jr.” and others. Rohauer also describes rescuing Keaton’s films from a garage and talking with Keaton at the end of his life when he had been forgotten.