Fifty-six-year-old Argentino Vargas arrives in Buenos Aires. Standing in the main lobby of the San Martin Theater, he waits for someone to come and take him up to the tenth floor for a screening of the film in which he has the lead role. He has never set foot in a cinema. Misael Saavedra, who has also been invited to the screening, loses his way in the theater trying to find the screening room. The tall building, its rest rooms, staircases, elevators and workshops are the real protagonists of a mystery encountered by two men who are strangers to this setting.
A digital age motion study inspired by the chronophotographic work of Etiènne-Jules Marey. The signature scene from the Hollywood musical Singin’ in the Rain is split into seven layers. Each layer is moving at a different speed and is visible equally in superimposition. The result uncovers a new cinema, music and dance that are buried within the familiar iconic sequence.
An inventive black & white fairy tale about the power of the human voice, located in a metropolis, ruled by the mercilessly bad Mr. TV. The whole city is without a voice and he has monopolized word and image. People watch TV and eat the TV meals produced by Mr. TV. Mr. TV is working on a sinister plan with a hypnotic machine that operates through the TV to ensure that all life will be subjected to him forever. To achieve this, he kidnaps the only one who still has The Voice – a stunningly beautiful singer…
An attempt to reconstruct the events of 9/11 by highlighting the parallels between the fictive worlds and the images of the real events. This paradoxical déjà vu presents a great challenge to our realism. If documentary images are graphic testimony of real events, then footage of 9/11 is evidence of the realization of the existing fiction.
There are not many immortal directors that still inspire and influence on the young ones. Polish director Krzysztof Kie?lowski is one of them. Although he passed away ten years ago, the popularity of his movies is undeniable proof of his greatness. The films includes an interview with Marta Hryniak, daughter of Kie?lowski, the first ever interview with any member of his family.
The first 110 years of the Portuguese cinema history in short and made almost exclusively with archive footage from the series History of the Portuguese Cinema produced in 1998 by Pedro Efe. It conjugates film clips and testimonies of some of its most relevant contributors. The film tries to report this history chronologically, in an accessible, concise and didactic way, in spite of some gaps.
Lincoln, NM, July 14, 1881. 21-year old outlaw Billy the Kid is gunned down by his friend, sheriff Pat Garrett. A legend is born. And a rumor. Today, a French woman, the film’s Narrator, sets off on a search for Billy the Kid’s shadow in New Mexico just as Lincoln County’s modern day Sheriff Tom Sullivan is opening a murder case into the circumstances that led to the Kid’s escape from jail and his death. The sheriff has one goal: finding the truth. Did Pat Garrett kill Billy the Kid that night or did Billy the Kid escape to Mexico as the century-old rumor has it? The Kid, impersonated by Kris Kristofferson, rises from the dead to give his own account of events.
The film takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride through some of the greatest movies ever made. Serving as presenter and guide is the charismatic Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst. With his engaging and passionate approach to thinking, he delves into the hidden language of cinema, uncovering what movies can tell us about ourselves. Whether he is untangling the famously baffling films of David Lynch, or overturning everything you thought you knew about Hitchcock. The film cuts its cloth from the very world of the movies it discusses; by shooting at original locations and on replica sets, it creates the illusion that Zizek is speaking from within the films themselves.
“V. O.” combines images from gay porn films produced before 1985 with sound from foreign language films such as Renoir’s “La Chienne”, Buñuel’s “Los Olvidados”, or Manoel de Oliveira’s “Amor de Perdição”. The resulting collisions ‚ at times comic, often melancholic ‚ pay tribute to a former era not only of gay life, but of cinephilia as well.
The protagonist of a legendary Krzysztof Kieslowski film (“From a Night Porter’s Point of View”, 1978) revisited 30 years later … This man’s views, despite the different political situation, haven’t changed.
Early 70’s, Los Angeles. “Viva” is a tribute to the best of sexploitation cinema: She was a housewife seeking kicks, in a world of swingers, orgies, booze and sin that was the sexual revolution!
Portrait of a factory porter, a fanatic of strict discipline, who extends his power even into his personal life as he tries to control everybody and everything in the belief that “rule are more important than people. That means when a man doesn’t obey the rules,” he says, “you could say he’s a goner”.
A cocky psychiatrist with obsessive voyeuristic tendencies rents an apartment under an assumed name in which he installs surveillance cameras to record every intimate detail of his life and, in particular, his sexual conquests.
Pat Garrett and Billy were once friends. Now one of them is on the side of the law and the other an outlaw. As a sheriff, Pat Garrett has been integrated into the system that Billy hates with all his heart. It feels like times have changed! proclaims Pat Garrett at the beginning of the film; Times maybe. Not me!, is the Kid’s response. But it’s the landowners who rule things now. And they can bend the rules any way they want. The longer he takes to track down Billy the Kid, the more Pat Garrett begins to understand his erstwhile friend. When the search culminates, the hunter has long since become the mirror image of the hunted. And when Pat Garrett finally shoots Billy the Kid, it is an act of self-betrayal tantamount to suicide.
PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID was released in July 1973 to mixed reviews. many critics complained the film was incoherent. Unfortunately, during shooting open warfare broke out between Peckinpah and MGM. The studio forbid Peckinpah to shoot certain scenes, but the director defied them and shot them anyway. Fifteen years after its initial release, and four years after Peckinpah’s death, the film was restored and 16 minutes were added.
On its premiere, in 1980, The Big Red One didn’t last for two hours and was far from the version that Samuel Fuller had imagined for his war epic. Twenty-five years later, the film critic Richard Schickel and the producer Brian Jamieson retrieved whatever they could from the original film, considered to be hopelessly lost, and restored to the screen The Big Red One. The Reconstruction, 40 minutes longer, in what migh as well be the closest to Fuller’s original vision. Semi-autobiographical war movie, inspired by the director’s experience at the service of Big Red One Task Force during Second World War, the film is a summary of stories of a military group composed by the veteran Sergeant Possum and four young soldiers that survive in the midst of chaos and horror of the world-wide conflict. Eight complete sequences have been added, including an appearance of Fuller himself – as an action cameraman – and his wife Christa – acting as a German countess. Delirious and episodic, the film combines realism and surrealism, lyricism and dark comedy, and represents a modern and ruthless insight into the war.
The actor Lon Chaney (1893-1930) – son of deaf-mute and handicapped parents – was called The Man of a Thousand Faces because of his extraordinary mutability. He worked not only as an actor, but also wrote scripts, occasionally directed and created all his famous make ups himself. He appeared in 161 movies, all but one of them silent. Most of those films are lost. A Messenger from the Shadows is a surreal re-montage of shots from 46 films that have survived.
Eve focuses on the reveries of a young woman who tries to reconcile “real” life pragmatism, essentially translated into the pressure of finding a “job”, and her dreamy vision of what surrounds her. Thus, her main concern is to find a function for Beauty and for herself.
Professor Baum is preoccupied with one of his patients, the criminal genius Dr. Mabuse. When his notes are found to be connected with recent crimes, the commissioner must determine how does he communicate with the criminals.
