King Lear, old and tired, divides his kingdom among his daughters, giving great importance to their protestations of love for him. When Cordelia, youngest and most honest, refuses to idly flatter the old man in return for favor, he banishes her and turns for support to his remaining daughters. But Goneril and Regan have no love for him and instead plot to take all his power from him. In a parallel, Lear’s loyal courtier Gloucester favors his illegitimate son Edmund after being told lies about his faithful son Edgar. Madness and tragedy befall both ill-starred fathers.
Tag: 1990s
Petra professionally works as a thief abroad to finance the studies of her younger sister Franziska in Germany. When she returns, she realizes that her sister has a secret, too.
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.”
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.