Stan Brakhage uses his wife’s childhood backyard and depictions of the sea to create a meditation on memory, life, and consciousness. This 1991 film is part of his “Vancouver Island Quartet.”
Tag: 1990s
Hoping to escape the complications of 15th-century Paris, young lawyer Richard Courtois takes a job as a public defender in a rural area. There he finds himself defending a pig accused of murdering a Jewish boy. Squaring off against a determined prosecutor and Catholic priest, Richard defends the animal, which is owned by a beautiful gypsy woman, Samira. The medieval justice system and local superstitions mingle as the case plays out.
Characters adrift in an isolated landscape collide with the past and each other as they unravel the secrets of a dead man’s dreams. A moody meditation on anti-heroism, the film pays tribute to the black and white style of cinema noir.
A soporific adaptation of The Awakening, Kate Chopin’s proto-feminist, turn-of-the-century novel about a Kentucky-born wife and mother of two whose summer season on Grand Isle with her husband’s easy-going Creole friends frees her from inhibitions. Courted by the young Robert, she finds herself through swimming, unrequited love, painting and other unconventional behaviour.
A movie buff desperately wants to enter a theater to see a Fassbinder film but the doorman will not let him go because he has no ticket. The film is the confrontation between the two that ends with happy end.
Clepsydra is an ancient Greek water clock (literally, “to steal water”). This film envisions the strip of celluloid going vertically through a projector as a sprocketed waterfall (random events measured in discreet units of time), through which the silent dreams of a young girl can barely be heard under the din of an irresistible torrent, an irreversible torment.
Horrendous acts of sexual abuse were discovered at Miami’s Country Walk Day Care Center in 1984. The ensuing investigations required unprecedented work and a pair of University of Miami psychologists were called upon for assistance. This case paved the way for a successful legislation in the protection of children during court proceedings and mandatory finger printing of adults who work with young children.
Cageman is a focused social critique of a uniquely Hong Kong phenomenon: in this city with the world’s most unequal wealth and income gap, many unfortunate middle-aged men can’t afford the most basic lodging, and live in low-rent cages inside squalid tenements. Cageman is a microcosm of Hong Kong, where most citizens must live squeezed into incredibly dense neighbourhoods, prey to monopolistic ‘tycoons’ – the (Chinese government-supporting) land-owning billionaire class – while nevertheless enjoying a way of life that, despite its frictions, forges a uniquely communal, indomitable ‘spirit of Lion Rock’.