In southern France, in a quaint little town, the mayor, who also owns a castle with some cattle, is in the wine cellar with some other people–the pharmacist, the veterinary, and some of his employees. As they are drinking wine, they hear a terrible noise and the heat’s getting higher and higher. They don’t realize what’s happening: when they come out of the cellar, they realize that everything has burned, and all the buildings are destroyed.
Tag: 1980s
The world is a blazing atomic hell. Civilisation is dying in agony… What do you do? …THROW A PARTY! The Third World War has happened. Bombs are dropping everywhere, even Elwood, Melbourne, Australia. In the ruins that follow, three survivors find a bomb shelter. Only to find that the survivors in there are having a party.
Fictionalized portrait of one of history’s great literary couples: Stein & Toklas. Summer 1930s France, Alice tends to ailing Gertrude; they visit Fernande Olivier, Guillaume Apollinaire, others; and Hemingway pops in.
The protagonist of this Kafkaesque tale receives a telegram ordering him to appear at his own execution at dawn on the following day. His acquaintances try to reassure him that it is all probably just an administrative error, but the Complaints Office has already closed for the day and it is impossible to discover the truth. The man finally decides that, after all, it is perhaps best if he does actually appear at the scaffold the following day. This final film by Miklós Erdély examines a most vexing subject using his inimitable experimental cinematic solutions.
A multiplicity of animation techniques enlivens this vision of the struggle between Shakespeare’s hapless buffoon and the forces of enchantment, set to the Scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Felix Mendelssohn.
A nuclear awareness fan-film satire, from 1984, synced to “Life During Wartime” by the Talking Heads, created as an expression of dismay on that era’s trigger happy leaders. It traveled the world among like-minded films a generation ago, with recognition in Portugal, Tunis, Brazil, and around the US. The MPD awarded it the “Bill Barton Animation Film Award” in 1985.
Actually the comedy of unemployment, which is defined as possibly the worst, or maybe the best, thing that ever happened to this film’s group of protagonists: a middle-aged loan officer, his successful wife, a champion of professional joblessness (and mountain-climbing enthusiast), and the employment agency professional who falls passionately in love with him. This film’s honest work involves potatoes, ditch-diggers, a wheelbarrow, doomed love, jam in bed, and gunfire involving dueling employment agencies.
Four Canadian girls skip off university to get to the wedding of one of their number’s relatives across the border in Portland. After the event one stays on with a guy she’s met, one returns home to get ready for her own wedding, and the other two head off for San Diego in a newly acquired Cadillac in search of the usual things.