Dario Argento meets the Marquis de Sade as sexploitation guru Norifumi Suzuki plunges us into a maelstrom of torture, secret masochistic desires and blasphemous rites. A young woman enters a convent to investigate the mysterious death of her mother. She soon discovers a smorgasbord of vice as she’s abused by lecherous archbishops, a lesbian mother superior and a line of fellow nuns ready to whip her (in the film’s most deliriously over-the-top scene) with rose-thorns.
Tag: 1970s
This independent film, a slice-of-barrio- life that was shot and exhibited in South Texas. It is a compelling film about the dilemmas facing a young Chicano in the spring of 1972 amid the Chicano Movement.
Two eccentrics who have ended up in jail due to their inability to conform build a fantastical flying machine to flee their grey reality. At once a bizarre comedy with bite about two outsiders in some indeterminate place at some indeterminate time, a plea for the power of dream and a concealed critique of the system.
A poor working girl goes to a ball and falls in love with the prince. Based on the famous European folk tale as told by Charles Perrault, with Russian verse by Genrikh Sapgir.
A poetic folk ballad set around the dramatic events of the Second Silesian Uprising of August 1920 – the story of the family of an old miner whose sons fight for the Polish identity of their land. The film does not reconstruct the course of the uprising – it recreates its atmosphere and creates a collective portrait of the Silesian people.
Chronicle of the Years of Fire portrays Algeria’s struggle for independence from French colonial rule. The story follows a peasant’s migration from his drought-stricken village to his eventual participation with the Algerian resistance movement, just prior to the outbreak of the Algerian War of Independence.
Louise lives alone and seems to like it that way. She has been through a divorce and the recent death of her mother. Recently, she has moved to Annecy, a moderate-sized city, to take work as a schoolteacher. She encounters a much younger man, Luigi, an Italian who is down on his luck. Though he moved to France to find work, he was robbed of his money and papers and is stranded. When he helps her bury her dogs, which her neighbour has poisoned for barking, their relationship grows to a new level.
In her second feature (and her first solo feature), the multidisciplinary artist Niki de Saint Phalle pursues her own take on the fairy tale, and the result is a visionary exploration of female desire that unfurls according to the logic of dreams and poetry. The film follows a princess (played by Saint Phalle’s daughter, Laura Duke Condominas) who, following a series of encounters with fantastical beings, is magically transformed into an adult, and finds herself navigating a frightening and surreal new world. A work suffused with ideas and strong ties to Saint Phalle’s work in other media (sculpture, painting, assemblage, etc.), Un rêve plus long que la nuit is both an exemplary artist’s film and an underseen gem of 1970s French avant-garde cinema.