Locked in the world of everyday life, the woman – a mother of three children – not wanting to lose her beloved man, her husband, hides another pregnancy from him. She finds herself in a no-win situation. It is impossible to conceal her condition any longer, and whatever she does will be the wrong solution. A tragedy occurs. When the woman finally begins to be aware that outside her home there is another life, other people, another world – it is too late for everything.
Tag: 1980s
?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) is ostensibly about the making of Peter Greenaway’s feature film, A Zed and Two Noughts, the production of which Phil Hoffman was invited to the Netherlands to observe. However, Hoffman’s film actually concerns the terms and conditions under which it was itself made. In part, the film translates actuality and memory into invention and fiction in which the symbolic father is cast as a real ancestor. Hoffman rewrites the Canadian documentary tradition into a family memory and romance.
Passing Through/Torn Formations is a wide open ramble through the labyrinth of memory… The film deals with the life and history of Philip Hoffman’s Czech-born mother and her family, as presented as a kind of polyphonic recitation of words, of images and of sounds.
A young orphan who lives with her grandmother in a large Virginian home infatuates herself with the voices of Joan d’Arc. Her nanny seeks out the help of a rich suitor (David Lynch’s first real acting role) to take her and the orphan away when she realizes that the often cruel grandmother cannot offer the orphan the love that she needs.
In this extremely funny satire on Soviet bureaucracy, the protagonist, a hapless author, attempts again and again to get his editors to accept his manuscript — a novel with the title “Blue Mountains or Tieshan.” The story unfolds with the inevitability of a fairy tale in which a naive hero is painfully being initiated into the ways of the world, and while the would-be author wanders through the hallways of his publishers, we in turn learn a lot about the crumbling Soviet system and the inactivity of its bureaucratic functionaries. By Hollywood standards, the film may be slow and repetitive, but it is precisely the repetition of tragicomic situations that bring the film to the heights of a Beckettian absurdity.
A soldier in a Soviet nuclear facility finds himself trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare with no exit in sight. The surreal imagery in this cartoon from Armenfilm includes a platoon of miniature shock troopers, mutant generals and dinosaurs singing We Are the World. The sense that communism had failed to advance, and was in fact causing the Soviet Union to turn in on itself, is powerfully felt.
This animated film is based on an old Persian parable. The inhabitants of a village learn to overcome their fear of the unknown. The benefit of their new-found knowledge is demonstrated. The black-and-white images are reminiscent of German wood-cuts. No dialogue.
Three ‘Bukowskian’ torrid nights in the life of a man in search of love. Harry, 12, is young and naive. Love, for him, is romantic love between princes and princesses demurely kissing each other on the mouth. His father is a hero who kidnapped his mother and married her on a lonely mountain peak – Later on, he’ll do the same. But Harry has a lot to learn. He also learns that there are handsome men and ugly ones, that love can be unfair. That one can find comfort in drinking – but above all he learns that man is capable of anything – absolutely anything. – to get his fair share of love.