The screening room used to be a microcosm of a larger world, filled with churning emotions and explosive temperaments. Welcome to the comfortable world of the private screening rooms where what is on the screen pales in comparison to what happens among the viewers.
The Italian Rino Lupo directed some of the most important silent films of Portuguese cinema. Pedro Lino develops, in Lupo, an investigation about the director, discovering one of the mysteries that surrounded him, the year and place of his death.
This key title in the direct cinema movement explores the daily lives of two aging, eccentric relatives of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Edie Bouvier Beale and her mother, Edith, who are the sole inhabitants of a Long Island estate.
A massive montage of movie characters going to the movies. Clips from more than 100 films are cut together to create a new cinema-going experience. Romance, musical, action, horror, noir, comedy – and countless characters watch in the dark.
Between 1933 and 1945 about 1000 films were released in Germany. Hitler’s Hollywood analyzes the films produced during the Third Reich, as well as the marketing techniques and the artificial construction of a star system.
Chris Olsen appeared in films by some of the best directors of the fifties. Even though he never became a famous child actor, he was in a handful of the most iconic fifties movies. He “retired” at the age of ten.The Boy Who Criedis part of Rappaport’s series of fictional autobiographies.
Shot in Venice by Jean Rouch and his two friends, who came to the festival in 1985 to present a film made by Mariama Hima,Cousin, Cousineis now presented in a new digital 2k restoration.
Elettra, filmed from the tragedy of Sophocles, is the title usually referred to as Tonino De Bernardi “first official feature”, played by non-professional actors of Casalborgone and produced by RAI. To be seen together with Galileo’s Thermometer.
The black LA ghetto of Watts in the mid-1970s through the eyes of a dreamer who is growing numb from the psychic toll of working at a slaughterhouse. Finished in 1977 and shown sporadically, its reputation grew. The Library of Congress has declared it a national treasure. However, due to the expense of the music rights, the film was never shown theatrically or made available on video. The UCLA Archive present it in a brilliantly restored new 35mm print.
A documentary essay about a research for an adaptation of the legendary 1927 feature film Metropolis, resulting from the artists’ trip to China in 2004. The film creates a convergence of two myths ‚ the modern totalitarianism depicted in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and modern China, whose staggering growth has become the subject of heated debate in the West. It is also a potent metaphor on visions of the future.
All shots of the slapstick comedy A Film Johnnie (USA, 1914) are shown simultaneously in a symmetrical grid, one after the other. Each scene, from one cut to the next, from the first to the last frame, is looped. A pulsing visual poly-rhythm is produced as a result, because of the shots’ varying lengths. The total length of the mosaic film corresponds precisely to that of the original.
Revue is based on archive propaganda newsreels produced in the USSR in the 50-s and 60-s. The film shows the almost forgotten side of the Soviet times and the way of thinking at that period. It explores the life of people all across the vast expanse of the Soviet Motherland, though full of hardship, deprivation and absurd rituals, but at the same time illuminated by the glorious shining of the communist illusion.
It’s not a simple ABC, this found footage alphabet by Volker Schreiner. Schreiner reveals his qualities in collecting and choreographing footage from classic (Hollywood) films. The concept of alphabetical ordering is loosely maintained so there’s room for a playful contribution from the subconscious.
In the late 1960’s Kim Jong Il guaranteed his succession as the Dear Leader of North Korea by adapting his father’s Juche philosophy to propaganda, film and art. Translated as self-reliance, Juche is a hybrid of Confucian and authoritarian Stalinist pseudosocialism. The film is about a South Korean video artist who comes to a North Korean art residency to help bring Juche cinema into the 21st century.
Hollywood seen through the eyes of a bunch of look-alikes. You can have your photo taken with them for a dollar. Although they look as if they stepped straight out of a film, their lives are quite different from those of the real stars. Without Hollywood, these one-time leading actors wouldn’t exist and they don’t all realize that.
Critical examination of the special effect of the dolly zoom – first used by Hitchcock in Vertigo – Vertigo Rush becomes a declaration of love to film and the richness of the cinematic language. Used as an extremely effective means of creating shock in numerous films (Jaws, Goodfellas), here the focus of 20 minutes of experimentation is on the sensation of rotating and revolving (Vertigo).
After winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2006 with the film Still Life, independent Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke returns to his hometown. Through the lens of his memories, from childhood to professional renown, we see places where he shot his first two films as well as his critical view of contemporary China, the country’s social disparity and the censorship imposed on some of his films.
Profiling of director John Ford by director Peter Bogdanovich, originally released in 1971, re-edited and expanded in 2006. Original Orson Welles narration and the interviews with Ford, John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda have been kept intact, but this is a more personal version. This updated version is much richer and contains an enormous amount of information that was not included in the original. Bogdanovich’s interviewed himself and speaks about Ford sense of spirituality, his emphasis on family in his films and his legendary relationship with Katherine Hepburn.The whole new version is warmer as has an emotional thread that takes you along, as opposed to a chronological timeline.