Using interviews and other footage shot especially for this documentary, French director Claude Lanzmann investigates the state of Israel in 1972. This movie concentrates on Israelis going about their business of everyday living. One interview shows the reactions of a concentration camp survivor, now a police chief, to being called a “Nazi” by demonstrators. Another segment follows the experiences of a Russian Jewish immigrant, beginning with his first visit to the Wailing Wall and continuing to his disturbing perception that he is welcomed more by virtue of his being Russian than for the fact that he is Jewish.
Tag: 1970s
Maddalena Ciarrapico arrives in New York City from Italy to get married and brings her fiancé a gift of mortadella (large Italian pork sausage) from her co-workers at the sausage factory where she used to work. But she is refused permission to bring the mortadella into the country because of the ban on meat that may contain food-borne diseases. An indignant Maddalena refuses to hand the sausage over, staying in the customs office at the airport, sparking a diplomatic incident in which she attracts widespread sympathy and support.
S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED signifies a fairly abrupt shift and departure from Sharits’ previous mandala films; this was his first work in many years that did not employ the flicker technique and used moving images. Paul Sharits’ epic and groundbreaking work is composed of three repeated, fourteen-minute sections of a river current. Each repetition consists of six dissolving layers of a river flowing in a myriad of directions, broken up by horizontal tape splices acting as dams. Deep and precisely executed emulsion scratches—created by custom tools Sharits made—eventually appear in continuous sets of threes throughout the film until the entire screen is nearly covered. The resulting effects represent, in the words of P. Adams Sitney, a “powerful and beautiful act of vandalism.”
A women is trying to change her life for the better, but everything and everyone in her life is giving her more headache than joy.
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A high school science teacher builds an atomic bomb and uses it to extort the nation, but cannot decide what he wants. Meanwhile, a determined cop is catching up to him, as is radiation poisoning.
Set in a dreamlike rural Japan, the story starts out to be about an adolescent boy’s attempt to escape his overprotective mother and then surprisingly becomes a filmmaker’s desire to confront his own elaborated creation. There is also an effort to reconcile the individual with the collective or old and new Japan through this parade of emblematic images. Gossiping women wear sinister eye patches. An outcast simple-minded woman drowns her own baby and later returns as a sophisticated prostitute. A circus fat lady yearns to have her fake body inflated by a dwarf. Curious and astounding scenes abound, all contributing to an overwhelming experience of a creative mind interrogating itself.
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In 1930s Paris, seemingly innocent 18-year-old Violette Nozière spends her nights seducing older men. When her current lover needs money, the troubled Violette plots to murder her dispassionate middle-class parents to help him out.
Laurie believes that it’s possible to communicate with plants via telepathy and devotes all her time and love to them. Her plants do warn her of her sister Rilla’s new boyfriend Robert. When Laurie’s found dead on the street under her balcony one morning, Rilla doubts that it was an accident. Only a plant was witness that night, so she tries to find a way to learn the truth from it.