Dramatic short animation based on the song of the same name (“For You Armenia”/”Kez Hayastan”) composed by George Garvarents and performed by Charles Aznavour. The song is dedicated to the memory of the devastating earthquake that struck the Armenian region of the Soviet Union in 1988.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
Mysterious young Andrina is the only friend of an old man. When she fails to visit him one day, he goes down to his seaside village to look for her but no one knows of such person there. Who is Andrina?
Directed by Cannes-award winner Sándor Reisenbüchler, Holdmese is a psychedelic animated short that mixes pulp sci-fi, Tibetan mysticism and Slavic folklore. Two scientists propose that the moon is an ancient, derelict spaceship, and go on a journey through deep space to discover its origins. The influence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 is clear, but Reisenbüchler’s collage technique is distinctively- and irreverently- his own. Holdmese stands as a brilliant forgotten work of Communist animation.
An almost psychedelically luminous invocation of the Battle of Borodino set to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (1880). As Reisenbüchler put it: the film deals with “self-destruction in the power struggle for the conquest of empires”.
Beginning with the arrival by canoe of a TV and VCR in their village, The Spirit of TV documents the emotions and thoughts of the Waiãpi as they first encounter their own TV images and those of others. They view a tape from their chief’s first trip to Brasilia to speak to the government, news broadcasts, and videos on other Brazilian native peoples. The tape translates the opinions of individual Waiãpi on the power of images, the diversity of native peoples, and native peoples’ common struggles with federal agents, goldminers, trappers and loggers.
If we split the Spanish word “cadáveres” (corpses) in three parts, we obtain another three different words: “Cada-ver-es”, that can be roughly translated in English as “Every-sight-is”. This experimental documentary follows the life and work of Juan Espada, the man in charge at the morgue of the Medicine Faculty in València, Spain, and deals with our visual taboos, the ones that we evade to watch: madness, solitude, death,… and several more that get portraited during its shocking footage. Shot on 16mm with a budget so low that the filmmaker had to sell his camera to finish post-production.
The World is Watching is a political documentary about the ethical dilemmas of news gathering in the electronic age. Focusing on international journalists in Nicaragua during the negotiations of the Arias Peace Plan in November 1987, the film follows an ABC News crew in the field and their interaction with editors in New York, offering a rare look at how news is reported, shaped, and broadcast.
The son of computer graphics pioneer John Whitney, Sr., Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps and worked as animator for Hollywood films like Westworld and The Last Starfighter. He also made this experimental short in 1972, with abstract and swirling color patterns familiar from the visual music tradition of animation. These patterns gradually reveal themselves as a human face, derived from long exposure photography of a nude model.