Gonzo (Toshiro Mifune), a member of the Imperial Restoration Force, is being asked by the emperor to deliver official news to his home village of a New World Order. Wanting to pose as a military officer, he dons the Red Lion Mane of Office. Upon his return, his attempt to tell the village about a brand-new tax cut is quashed when the townfolk mistakenly assumes that he is there to rescue them from corrupt government officials. He learns that an evil magistrate has been swindling them for years. Now, he has to help the village, ward off Shogunate fanatics, along with the fact that he can’t read his own proclamations…
In Taxandria, a totalitarian regime has forbidden time: time watched have been confiscated, photo cameras are illegal as they freeze a point in time. A typical Servais theme: a power is oppressed by a constraint that denies what is best in the individual, and therefor has to be twisted in various ways, to establish an entirely artificial world, that has rules that may question some of the rules of our world at this side of the mirror. The digital era has begun. “Servaisgraphy” threatens to become obsolete. It was finally only to be used for the fabric of the backgrounds and no longer for the encrustation. The film’s traditional approach and the fact that it no longer holds pace with technological changes displeases the partners, who want to make it a live action film with special effects. An ultimate re-writing finally integrates a series of live action scenes: a scriptwriter is commissioned to write passages made to measure with the sequences that were already made. The final film disappoints. The ‘critics’ reaction to the first public screening at the Ghent Film Festival, with a print which is no final cut yet, is very moderate. The box office results are poor. Yet, the film enjoys an amount of success at festivals specialized in fantastic cinema. In Porto and Rome, “Taxandria” even wins major prizes.
+ Extras : Taxandria vue par Raoul Servais et François Schuiten (in french with optional dutch subtitles) Premiers essais en Servaisgraphie (no sound)
LIGHT YEARS – The film diaries of Tim Cawkwell (1968-87 / 2015-18)
LIGHT YEARS brings together a series of short films made on 8mm between 1968 and 1987 to create a single diary film in 25 sections with its own narrative arc as a bildungsroman or story of self-education.
Between 2015 and 2018 this material was digitized, reduced and re-edited, and voice-over and sound added. LIGHT YEARS draws inspiration from the American Underground films reaching Britain at the time, and seeks to emulate the qualities of the diary, making the personal public and re-envisioning the world.
Length: 193 minutes.
DVD Source: Lux, region 0, DVD9 DVD Format: PAL DVD Audio: English DD 2.0 Program: DVD Decrypter Menus: Untouched Video: Untouched Audio: Untouched DVD extras: Untouched
Synopsis Due to the EXPO 98 promotion campaign the Portuguese capital city appeared quite often in the French media. During their Summer holidays the following year, João Pedro Rodrigues once again films this emigrant family in France during their journey through Lisbon’s old districts, its outskirts, and their visit to Expo or Luz Stadium.
Synopsis: A village on the border between Galicia and Portugal, hidden deep in the woods, a world out of time. Documentary moments of everyday life stand alongside dramatized scenes acted by the villagers working in the fields, sitting in the pub, singing traditional songs in the local dialect and telling old tales. Scenes of their own lives are interwoven with quotes from the play „O bosque” (The Woods) by the Galician writer Marinhas del Valle, a parable about the Franco dictatorship. When a fire breaks out in the woods, there are growing signs of an impending apocalypse. Arraianos is a film about remembering and the disappearance of a way of life.
Quote: Yousuke Kobayashi, a detective assigned on a homicide unit, saw his wife killed by a serial killer, Shinji Nishizono. From a shock he suffered MPD (multiple personality disorder) and became Kazuhiko Amamiya. Soon after he managed to hunt down and killed the murderer of his wife, new series of murders have occured and the suspects claimed to be Shinji Nishizono himself. Is it really him? Or a copycat? And who is Kazuhiko Amamiya?
The film was inspired by Jure Kaštelan’s famous war poem Tifusari. Aleksandar Marks’s woodcut-style drawings graphically depict hallucinations of sick partisans marching through wastelands.
Synopsis: Rare is the film in movie-history that can announce the entire movement of it’s ‘plot’ with its title alone. But Pialat’s second feature, Nous Ne Viellirons Pas Ensemble does exactly that, encapsulating all the turmoil, and the final end-point, of a couple who among themselves once made a commitment – and living together will come to make another one yet. Jean (Jeane Yanne, of Godard’s Weekend) and Catherine (Marlene Jobert, of Godard’s Masculin Feminin) are the couple whose every move charts an advancement deeper into an emotional warzone. Theirs is the classic and the tragic case of an emotional abuse centered around a perplexing, but powerful, interdependency. At last the point arrives that determines the relationship, with all its weekend holidays, its apologies and submissions, can go no further – and, in a final shot of genius, Pialat discloses all the ways in which the future might be at once liberated, and enslaved, by the past. Based on a novel by Pialat himself, and on the trauma of his own personal life in the years leading up to the film, Nous Ne Viellirons Pas Ensemble was a smash-hit at the time of its release – and yet is arguably one of the most upsetting films ever made.
This highly kinetic tableaux of uprooted sights and sounds works most earnestly to expose the racial biases concealed in familiar images. Relying on valuable snippets from feature films such as “Exodus”, “Lawrence of Arabia”, “Black Sunday”, “Little Drummer Girl”, and network news shows, the filmmakers have constructed an oddly wry narrative, mimicking the history of Mid East politics.
Review by TV Guide Of the six films Eddie Cantor made for Samuel Goldwyn, Roman Scandals was his fourth and second only to The Kid From Spain in popularity. When Goldwyn’s idea to adapt George Bernard Shaw’s “Androcles And The Lion” as a vehicle for Cantor proved too difficult, the producer hired Robert Sherwood and George S. Kaufman to fashion a story that would take Cantor to imperial Rome. Displeased with their draft, Goldwyn brought in Nat Perrin, George Oppenheimer, and Arthur Sheekman to add jokes, and William Anthony McGuire to get the whole thing into shape for shooting. This film turned out to be one of the best Cantor-Goldwyn associations. With humor, music, and more than a little female flesh, Roman Scandals is a sort of Wizard of Oz in that Cantor, a wacky delivery boy in West Rome, Oklahoma, goes into a dream sequence and imagines himself to be a slave in old Rome. His major job is official food taster to the evil emperor, Edward Arnold. The slim plot includes Cantor proving that Arnold is a fraud, a love story between Gloria Stuart and David Manners, and a chase (this time a chariot chase, a direct satirical shot at Ben Hur by the sequence’s director Ralph Cedar). In the end, Cantor wakes up and is back in the present. Making the story a dream was a mistake; the prolog and epilog were not needed. The picture is slapstick nonsense from the moment it goes to Rome and is verbally funny as well, although Cantor has a totally anachronistic “black face” scene that sticks out badly. Every penny of the then-huge million-dollar budget is on screen. Busby Berkeley, in his last choreographic job before going on to Warner Bros., staged one scene in which The Goldwyn Girls, including Lucille Ball, are totally nude except for long blonde wigs. Harry Warren and Al Dubin, who would later join Berkeley at Warner Bros. for a host of hits, wrote several tunes including: “No More Love” (sung by Ruth Etting, Goldwyn Girls, danced by Grace Poggi), “Build a Little Home” (sung by Cantor, Goldwyn Girls), “Keep Young and Beautiful” (sung by Cantor, Goldwyn Girls, Billy Barty), and “Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day.” Warren and L. Wolfe Gilbert teamed to write “Put a Tax on Love” (sung by Cantor).
Situated in the vein of Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Dostoievski and Benjamin and of free jazz and punk, this film bears witness to the iniquitous policies that shape our era, the “infernal” nature of certain political lives or black bodies (those of immigrants, emigrants, workers, the unemployed, students…). It operates, as a minority film, in a critical stasis of mythical and mainstream realities, and deals with the issue of revolt and insurrection: excesses, disidentification, unclear reconfiguration… We are presented, through a dialectical reversal, “non-places” that cannot be assimilated, utopias, corps-impossibles.The film is divided into five parts: I. Niggers Wood (Je brûle comme il faut!) Calais, a desolate town. A white mantle of snow covers the town. Black, tutelary shadows, crosses and belfreys dominate the skyline. Scarlet fires that surround and burn it. Figures and faces of people who re-gress from far away. Migrants. Pariahs. A variation on scenarios of burnt out and infernal political lives: the corps-nègres. II. Ballad For A Child (On ne te tuera pas plus que si tu étais cadavre) Calais, a desolate town. Evocation: In a small wood, the “jungle”, a young man from far away, from a war-torn Middle East, was killed. That was in December 2008. It is a whole world, a political world, one that hands over the soul, and to which the soul will return. Invocation: A young man from far away passes by. His words, scars and experiences, like a song, come from even further away: from caves, the sea and the deserts, from oblivion, infinite open spaces. A young man from far away passes by, like a new Orpheus, political, black and rebellious. An impossible young man that nothing or nobody will be able to hold back from now on… III. Je me suis armé contre la justice (Burn! Burn! Burn!) Paris. Demonstration, 19th March 2009. Civil servants, students, temporary workers, illegal immigrants, unemployed people and pensioners take to the streets. Until it burns, somewhere between rage and anger. Voices that throw off a yoke and are frozen in time. Until the State represses them, with arbitrary violence, and some innocent bodies are condemned. IV. Le Temps des Assassins (Fire Music) Paris. Demonstration, 1st May 2009. Pursuit, and the repetition of the insurrectionary slogan: “Peace for humble cottages, war on the châteaux”. A few centuries later, the City Hall is occupied once more, and the Council of Paris besieged by a revolutionary assembly. Invocation: the Commune of Paris. Evocation: the people that is coming. Time, revisited… V. Tu resteras hyène etc. (The book of the damned) Like an infernal circle. A variation on treachery and disavowal, the spit of the renegade as a medal, “pension funds” as a future, based on the book “Lettres à ceux qui sont passés du col Mao au Rotary” de Guy Hocquenghem (we would add “… and to Sarkozy’s court…”) and the films of Lionel Soukaz and of/or with Guy Hocquenghem.
DVD Source: private, region 0, DVD5 DVD Format: PAL Menus: Untouched Video: Untouched Audio: Untouched DVD extras: none Format : MPEG Video Format version : Version 2 Format profile : Main@Main Format settings, BVOP : Yes Format settings, Matrix : Default Bit rate : 2 000 Kbps Width : 720 pixels Height : 576 pixels Display aspect ratio : 4:3 Frame rate : 25.000 fps Standard : PAL Color space : YUV Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0 Bit depth : 8 bits Scan type : Interlaced Scan order : Top Field First Compression mode : Lossy
Variety review : “Is Gallic helmer Jean-Stephane Sauvaire hooked on violence? Almost everyone appearing in his documentary “Carlitos Medellin” was dead by the time it was edited, while his fictional “Johnny Mad Dog” headlined a murderous child soldier. Next to these earlier offerings, the violence in “Punk” seems relatively mild, though the rage and frustration fueling its teenage protagonist fairly explode off the screen. Released in France as a TV movie under another title, this vibrant evocation of the contemporary European punk scene impresses, but looks oddly, unavowedly time-warped, as if unfolding in punk’s ’70s/’80s heyday, considerably lessening distrib possibilities.
Paul (Paul Bartel), sharing a suffocating, nearly incestuous relationship with his mother (the incomparable Beatrice Dalle), searches desperately for a father figure to replace the one who left before his birth. He escapes to subterranean passages of the projects, and there joins mohawk-spiked punks in drunken sprees, his destructiveness visibly surpassing theirs. He stands ready at any moment for self-immolation as he throws himself against any resistant force, be it a mosh pit or lead-pipe-wielding skinheads, the handheld camera capturing with strange clarity this dizzying whirlwind of energy that lacks viable outlets.”
DVD Source: Arte TV Channel (french side), ALL regions, DVD5 DVD Format: PAL DVD Audio: Stereo Program: none needed Menus: none Video: Untouched Audio: Untouched DVD extras: none
Yuri and Takumi are brother and sister who faced unusually harsh treatment by their father. An act of brutality keeps them extremely close together until an older couple occupy the house where their secret was buried.
Alt: A brother and sister share more than the standard love for each other, much more, but that is only the beginning of the extraordinary relationships which are accompanied by unusual affections and deeds all around.
The Sacrifice, director Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, begins in Bergmanesque fashion on a small, remote island, where friends and family gather for drama critic Alexander’s (Erland Josephson) birthday celebration.
The revelry is interrupted by a radio announcement: World War III has begun, and Mankind is only hours away from utter annihilation. Each of the guests reacts differently to the news: the most dramatic response is Alexander’s, who promises God that he’ll give up everything he holds dear – including his beloved 6-year-old son – if war is averted. Allan Edwall, a local mailman with purported mystical powers, offers to intervene with the Creator on Josephson’s behalf.
The Sacrifice is so dependent upon its visuals and overall mood that any attempt at a detailed synopsis would be woefully inadequate. The willingness of Tarkovsky’s protagonist to forego all his possessions may well have sprung from the cancer-ridden director’s awareness that he, too, would soon be giving up everything to face his Maker.
The Sacrifice won four awards at the Cannes Film Festival, including the Grand Prix.
Synopsis: “A forty-something antiques dealer, Pierre Noix is a busy man, in just about every aspect of his life. Having bought a large house in Provence built on the remains of a Roman structure, he wastes no time digging around for some long lost treasure. Pierre’s plans are threatened, first by the town’s mayor, who is about to authorise the construction of a motel in the area, and then by Edwige, the daughter of the previous owner of the estate. When Edwige queries the legitimacy of the sale, Noix responds by seducing and marrying her, all in record time. Unfortunately, his troubles are far from over…” – Films de France
Extras (in French): Interview with Edouard Molinaro:
Moustapha Alassane is a living legend in African cinema. His adventures take us to the era of “pre-cinema”, to the times of magical lantern and Chinese shadows. He is the first director of Nigerien cinema and animation films in Africa. He tells very old stories with current technology, but he also narrates the most current events with the most archaic means. This documentary not only tells the adventure of a human being and an extraordinary professional, but the memories of a generation, the history of a country, Niger in its golden age of cinema.
One of the most powerful documentaries ever made, Oratorio for Prague contains the only footage from the Soviet-led invasion of Prague in 1968. Czech New Wave filmmaker Jan Nĕmec (A Report on the Party and the Guests) began filming with the intention to document Prague Spring, a celebration of the newfound liberalization of Czechoslovakia, but the film’s subject took a dramatic turn when Soviet tanks rolled through the streets. The invasion ended Prague Spring, leaving Nĕmec blacklisted and Oratorio for Prague banned. Even so, the film was able to have a profound impact. The raw footage represented the first proof that the Soviet Army had not been “invited” into Czechoslovakia and was used in international news reports, screened to a standing ovation in New York, and was sourced for Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), and featured in Slavoj Žižek and Sophie Fiennes’ The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology.
Synopsis: Jacques Darnay (Delon) is released after having served ten years in prison for robbing a jewelry store. Much about that crime remained a mystery: the stolen diamonds were never recovered, and no one knows exactly how Charby the jeweler died. At his trial it was declared that Darnay acted alone, yet the size and complexity of the heist make that seem highly unlikely. Darnay’s release is anxiously awaited, by both the police, who hope he’ll reveal more information about the crime, and by some of Darnay’s former friends, who have a few ideas as to what might have happened to the diamonds. Having, perhaps, played in his years enough of both, Delon is the perfect point man in this duel between cops and crooks, capitalizing on each side’s strengths and weaknesses while decidedly pursuing his own agenda.
Quote: Sounding like some cheap pastiche, The German Chainsaw Massacre comes as a surprisingly independent feature, able to stand on it’s own without the crutch of it’s predecessor. However, Tobe Hooper’s movie is not so much tipped and winked as screamed in the face of in this relentless madness and more specifically in a similarly edited chainsaw chase through a forest. Choosing to loosen Hooper’s tight bolts of ‘humour’, Schlingensief loses dramatic intensity but gains an awesome sense of the egregious: unemployed customs officials form appalling folk groups at the West/East border and a woman with a knife up her butt sits down…
Schlingensief manages to attain the almost impossible with virtually no plot leading a blindly satisfactory and jolly dance. Rather than making love to her ‘horny’ partner, Clara kills him/her, androgynous in a wig, before crossing the border. Here, she becomes masochistically involved with an incestuous, cannibalistic family that bring out the worst in her. Clara veers between her positions as killer and user-friendly object of lust as unpredictably as the family’s regard of her as food and companion.
The reason for the agreeable blending of the movie is that the subject matter is watertight in analogy in the reunification of Germany and the wanton dismemberment of the individual. The family here represent the Old Ways, the desire for division taken to an extreme upon those who flit the borders. They are, of course, equally divided in petty feuds of their own. Dietrich turns Normanesque and harbours poor dead Nazi Vati all to himself in his room causing unrest that leads to physical dismemberment of the family and an icon of political instability.
Anarchy is inherent in the form and structure of the movie itself. Whilst Johnny daubs a CND logo on the wall with a freshly amputated stump and thereby expressing his support for ‘disarmament’, Arthur glumly removes the gorily convincing flayed skin make-up from his face, shattering all illusion. Likewise, Clara develops another skin of her own at one stage that she peels off as the chrysalis of her new identity. Other textures provide easy cohesion with the introduction of projected 16mm slowmo deaths and low-resolution video depicting the Germanic fight for ‘pluralism’. Thus the deconstruction is universal and plummets into mayhem as each character destroys or is gleefully destroyed. No redemption. No happy endings.
Shortly after a delegation of Russian nuclear physicists arrives in London, one of their number, a man named Haliakov, is abducted by the British security services. Haliakov is in truth Clément Tibère, a French scientist who was coerced into working for the Russians some years ago. The British agents compel Tibère to work for them, revealing the identity of two notorious spies. Tibère realises that his life is now in peril, that it is only a matter of time before the KGB takes its revenge…
