Captured in beguilingly chic noir et blanc, Jean Luc Godard’s Une Femme
Mariée (A Married Woman) is an erudite, somewhat autobiographical,
handsome and twisted examination of female infidelity. Although it has
been rather overlooked amidst Godard’s formidable body of work, it is
one of his most alluring and personal cinematic endeavours and
represents a critical juncture in his evolution as a film-maker.
Originally titled La Femme Mariée (The Married Woman), Godard bowed to
the French censors, Commission de Contrôle, who were fearful of the
film’s potential to be interpreted as an incendiary indictment of
womankind. Made after his most commercial offerings Le Mépris (1963) and
Bande à Part (1964), Une Femme Mariée marked a clear departure in style
with a defiant, lovelorn Godard disenfranchised with the direction of
contemporary Hollywood cinema (to whose mores he had never wholly
subscribed); rejecting it as a source of both inspiration and
provocation.
Set in beautiful 14th century Sweden, it is the sombre, powerful fable of peasant parents whose daughter, a young virgin, is brutally raped and murdered by swineherds after her half sister has invoked a pagan curse. By a bizarre twist of fate, the murderers ask for food and shelter from the dead girl's parents, who discovering the truth about their erstwhile lodgers, exact a chilling revenge.
Austere, fragmented, and minimalist, Katzelmacher captures the inert lives of a group of aimless, financially struggling apartment dwellers on an anonymous residential city street. The film opens to an implicit shot of one of the residents, Erich (Hans Hirschmüller), parked alongside a grocery store, biding idle time in his car as his lover Marie (Hanna Schygulla) closes shop for the evening. It is an insightful glimpse of interminable silence and existential waiting that defines the lives of the residents as they attempt to escape from the inertia of their daily existence through anonymous sexual encounters, alcohol consumption, rumor mongering and, on occasion, lapses of domestic violence.
One of the best Israeli films of all time, highly influenced by the French New Wave cinema of that time. Three Days and a Child (Hebrew: Shlosha Yamim Veyeled) is a 1967 Israeli drama film directed by Uri Zohar. It was entered into the 1967 Cannes Film Festival where Oded Kotler won the award for Best Actor.
Watching Ingmar Bergman’s 1961 Through a Glass Darkly now, you’re carried back to a golden era that was also an ice age. The year before, Michelangelo Antonioni’s drifting, elliptical masterpiece L’Avventura had been booed at the Cannes Film Festival; three years later, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud would receive still worse treatment on its Paris premiere––an episode compared by one observer to “a spontaneous, unexpected lynching.”
"Heavily artistically infused this chamber piece from Bergman lauded numerous international awards for both the film and the performances. It's beautiful imagery from Sven Nykvist's magnificent cinematography, its high level of pretension and its inability to be comprehensible have given it a unique place in cinema history. "Persona" can causes a myriad of personal reactions.
Long out-of-circulation and unavailable on home video, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 masterpiece Une femme mariée, fragments d’un film tourné en 1964 en noir et blanc [A Married Woman: Fragments of a Film Shot in 1964 in Black and White] has, until now, represented the ostensibly ‘missing’ key work from the first, zeitgeist-defining phase of JLG’s filmography. The feature which bridges the gap between Bande à part and Alphaville, Une femme mariée is, nevertheless, a galaxy, or gallery, unto itself — a lucid, complex, profoundly funny series of portraits, etched with Godardian acids, of the wife that represents either a singular case, or a universal example, of “a”/”the” married woman, and the men in her orbit.
Godard. We all went to Jean-Luc Godard in the 1960s. We stood in the rain outside the Three Penny Cinema, waiting for the next showing of "Weekend." One year the New York Film Festival showed two of his movies, or was it three? One year at the Toronto festival Godard said, "The cinema is not the station. The cinema is the train." Or perhaps it was the other way around. We nodded. We loved his films. As much as we talked about Tarantino after "Pulp Fiction," we talked about Godard in those days. I remember a sentence that became part of my repertory: "His camera rotates 360 degrees, twice, and then stops and moves back in the other direction just a little_to show that it knows what it's doing!"
The primary protagonists in this routine drama are two French journalists, Delmas (Pierre Grasset) and Moreau (Jean-Pierre Melville, the director), and also the city of New York at night. The two journalists are on the trail of a story -- a French diplomat has disappeared from the U.N. for no apparent reason. As they wander through the city tracking down the reason for the disappearance, the journalists eventually discover that the diplomat has met with foul play. Now the two men have a serious disagreement. Delmas wants to take photos of what happened and use them to create sensational headlines and plenty of attention, but Moreau wants them both to cover up what they have found and bury what they know.
When a military computer error deploys a squadron of SAC bombers to destroy Moscow, the American President (Fonda) tries to call them back. But their sophisticated fail-safe system prevents him from aborting the attack, so he must convince the Soviets not to retaliate. In desperation, the President offers to sacrifice an American city if his pilots succeed in their deadly mission over Moscow. A four-star techno-thriller that builds tension and suspense with every tick of the nuclear clock.
When the Czechoslovak writer and director Pavel Jurácek died, in 1989, he was 53 years old and hadn?t made a film in 20 years. The film industry is tough on its unique talents, and when a filmmaker labors under the restrictions of a repressive state, it?s even tougher. Czechoslovak Communism fell the year of Jurácek?s death. The playwright Václav Havel (who acted in one of Jurácek?s films) became his country?s first non-Communist president in 41 years, and Jurácek?s 1969 masterpiece Case for a Rookie Hangman, which had been suppressed by the Communists the year it was made, could finally be shown. It was too late for Jurácek. Havel was elected in December; Jurácek had died in August.
Orson Welles called it the best movie he ever made. No, it's not Citizen Kane (1941), it's The Trial (1962), which has finally been released on an essential DVD. Welles always claimed that Kane was the only film over which he had complete control, but The Trial came close. He had control over every aspect except the music, which to my ears, turned out great.
Released in 1965, Jean-Luc Godard's 'Pierrot Le Fou' was his tenth feature film in only six years, and for many represents a career highpoint.
Loosely based on Lionel White's novel 'Obsession', Godard uses the story (a man fed up with his materialistic life runs off with his child's babysitter and chaos ensues) as a framework to incorporate many elements of his personal philosophies, as well as ideas and techniques already introduced in previous films. The presence of Jean-Paul Belmondo on the run evokes 'A bout de souffle', and the stunning widescreen cinematography recalls 'Le Mepris'.
With its giddily complex noir plot and color-drenched widescreen images, Made in U.S.A was a final burst of exuberance from Jean-Luc Godard’s early sixties barrage of delirious movie-movies. Yet this chaotic crime thriller and acidly funny critique of consumerism—starring Anna Karina as the most brightly dressed private investigator in film history, searching for a former lover who might have been assassinated—also points toward the more political cinema that would come to define Godard.
Col. James Granilla is on a mission to learn about the Terranians and destroy their vessel. Terranians capture him, and he quickly blends in and gains their trust. In order to learn about them he ends up making love to their disgusting alien bodies (not so disgusting if you ask me).
This film is pretty corny. It's not pornographic, just lots of nudity such as films of the time had. The women in this film are quite beautiful, except for one way over-tanned blonde who looks like a ganguro girl.
With subliminal influences on everything from Austin Powers (1997) to Fight Club (1999) to Daredevil's assassin girlfriend Elektra, The 10th Victim stands as one of the least known yet insider-influential classics of the Sci-Fi Cinema.
NEW YORK CITY, SOMETIME in the near future: Across a construction site, a fashionably clad woman is being chased by an Asian man who fires wild pistol shots at her. Remarkably, no bystander or policeman intervenes. For as a thin, feverish spokesman tells us, these two are engaged in the "Big Hunt," a socially sanctioned killing game.
MY BROTHER'S WIFE, Wishman-heads are back in safe territory with plenty of cutaways to paintings, chairs, and shoes and awkward dubbing. But more than a roughie, this film is Wishman's take on the 40s film noir genre, with a doomed love triangle, scheming criminals, hard-boiled dialogue and a number of far-fetched plot twists amidst the typical Wishman trappings. To keep the plot moving, a cast of familiar faces play each sad and pathetic character. To play the unhappy hausfrau, Wishman tapped June Roberts, a baby-faced nude model whose figure could cut glass and who bears a striking resemblance to Mike Vraney and Something Weird's #1 lady, Lisa Petrucci. Roberts would also grace the films of Barry Mahon, Michael Findlay, and Joseph Mawra, but her talents would be best tested by sexploitation maestro Joe Sarno in a leading role in MOONLIGHTING WIVES and supporting roles in FLESH AND LACE, THE NAKED FOG, RED ROSES OF PASSION and THE LOVE MERCHANT.
Charlotte Hollis, wealthy southern spinster, is shunned by her community for the grisly murder some 40 years prior of her intended, John Mayhew. Even though her guilt in the matter was never proven, the townspeople liken her to a modern-day Lizzie Borden. The murders are similar in nature and the children even taunt her with cruel rhymes. For this reason she lives a life secluded from the mainstream of society.
“As the 1960s drew to a close, European erotica really had its work cut out for it. In particular, Sweden, the country known for crashing American art houses with racy dramas, found itself competing with other countries like France and Italy to produce the latest scandal du jour. Budgets got bigger, acting got better, and plots became richer as directors tried to push the envelope, and no one benefited from this more than director and distributor Radley Metzger. Vibration (Lejonsommar) was released overseas hot on the heels of Metzger's Therese and Isabelle, also starring the fascinating and talented Essy Persson, and it shows the increasing influence of directors like Ingmar Bergman (who, lest we forget, was also promoted at first in the U.S. more for his flashes of skin than his artistic merit).
Orgy of the Dead wouldn't be worth anyone's time were it not for its star and screenwriter. The star is the inimitable prognosticator Criswell; the screenwriter is the immortal Ed Wood Jr., adapting his own novel. The King of Wretched Cinema weaves an incredible tale of a writer who decides to spend a night in a cemetery, the better to get into the mood to write a book on necrophiliacs. The writer and his girl friend are overpowered by several zombielike nude ladies (all played by LA strippers). Hero and heroine are tied to posts and subjected to the oratory of Criswell, aka "The Emperor." As if Criswell's ramblings aren't torture enough, the couple is then forced to watch the naked necromancers punish several "sinners" who've been condemned to eternal Darn-ation. The festivities come to an end when the sun rises, reducing Criswell and his followers to dust.
