The work of child psychologist Jean Piaget has been influential in the areas of child development and education. In this film made shortly before his death he discusses his ideas, attempts to clarify misunderstandings about them and explains some of his classic experiments with children which are recreated. He also explains his theory of knowledge.
Tag: 1970s
A sophisticated Hollywood film editor, on location for a film she is working on, falls for a local cowboy who is hired to work on the film.
Alvin is a quiet, urban Australian male who finds himself the unlikely object of female lust. The film tracks him from his schooldays through early jobs – water-bed salesman, sex therapist where he seeks psychiatric help to solve his problems. His psychiatrist is, of course, a woman. He ultimately falls in love with the one girl who doesn’t throw herself at him. She becomes a nun, and he ends up a gardener in the convent’s garden, but even then he inflames the nuns with a desire to fornicate with him.
Little Gennarino, orphan of his parents, performs on the streets of Naples as a street musician together with his adoptive mother Angela. Unfortunately one day the woman falls ill and she has to be hospitalized, so the child, needing to find money for treatment, joins a group of petty thieves.
Budd Boetticher’s final release is an independently produced documentary about legendary bullfighter Carlos Arruza, narrated by Anthony Quinn. A film he spent much time, effort and money on and was to be his masterpiece, perhaps his most personal. Boetticher himself had been a bullfighter before going into movies. Tragically, a car accident on May 20th, 1966 took the lives of Carlos Arruza and some of Boetticher’s filming crew.
A flower vendor, Jack, brings his mentally challenged nephew, Joey, to the ten-lane Chicago Lakeshore roadway to help him sell flowers to motorists. In the course of their first day working together, Joey manages to prove himself in difficult and confusing circumstances and gains the loving respect of his uncle.
A year before his death in 1972, M.C. Escher’s process and essence was captured by fellow Dutch creative Han van Gelder for the 20-minute film Adventures in Perception. The documentary, while short, is a striking portrait of the artist, whose tessellations, perspective-shifting drawings, and studies garnered fans in both the art and scientific fields. The film was crafted for Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Netherlands’ program “Living Art The Netherlands.”
The first Canadian fiction feature directed by a woman, Sylvia Spring’s Madeleine Is… investigates themes of patriarchy, art, and emancipatory politics in the context of Vancouver’s counterculture. Madeleine, an aspiring painter from Quebec, relocates to Vancouver at the height of the hippie era and has a series of encounters with men—a macho political radical, a fantasy figure-cum-young businessman, an older homeless man—which lead to self-discovery. The city and its paradoxes and politics are vividly evoked, while the era’s emergent feminism informs the film’s perspective.