A terrified young man is running away from the mysterious man in a black coat and a bowler hat. He finds the asylum in the nearby mental hospital, where the doctor takes care of him. However, one cannot escape from his fate.
Tag: FHD
While travelling through the countryside, a young man named Ivan is drawn to an isolated castle feared by the local villagers. There he encounters Sibila, a mysterious young widow, and becomes captivated by her as well as by the strange music echoing through the castle. But as he grows increasingly entangled in her world, he begins to realize that the place harbors a dark secret.
Prison discharges Hans into the inhospitable freedom of a cold Munich winter. As a stranger, he strays through familiar streets and bars and tries unsuccessfully to contact old friends. Eventually he takes a plane to a friend in Berlin, fleeing from invisible enemies, on the way to an indeterminate destination.
A send-up of the bawdy life of Romantic composer/piano virtuoso Franz Liszt, with ubiquitous phallic imagery and a good portion of the film devoted to Liszt’s “friendship” with fellow composer Richard Wagner. The film begins during the time when Franz would give piano performance to a crowd of shrieking teenage fans while maintaining affairs with his (multiple!) mistresses. He eventually seeks Princess Carolyne of St. Petersburg (at her invitation), elopes, and, after their marriage is forbidden by the Pope, he embraces the monastic life as an abbé.
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.
In German-occupied Poland in 1943, a writer and a mysterious new acquaintance travel to a country estate, hoping to escape the hardships of wartime Warsaw. Amid the seemingly peaceful surroundings, the two men become absorbed in a disturbing game of manipulation, attempting to bring two young people together while the violence and moral uncertainties of the war linger just beyond their secluded refuge.
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.
Miklós Erdély, a leading exponent of Hungarian Neo-Avant-garde, made a major contribution to the burgeoning in Hungary of experimental filmmaking in the 1970s and 80s through his works created in the Balázs Béla Studio. In this film he asked people to recount dreams and then an attempt was made at playing out and reconstructing these dreams. The situations that arise in front of the lens pose questions for both psychology and epistemology.