Filmed study of Bunraku, the classical Japanese puppet art, which uses three-quarters life-sized figures, handled by black-clothed manipulators who remain in plain view of the audience, convention rendering them invisible. These scenes trace Bunraku from the making of the puppets and the way in which their limbs are articulated, to their costuming and reflections on their relationship to kabuki theater. It includes complete performances of traditional Bunraku plays. Commentary by the well-known authority on dance and Asian arts, Faubion Bowers.
Tag: 1970s
A merchant’s house in the Stockholm archipelago. Katha, an old woman comes here every year. So does her father, who once built the house. She wants the family, her children and their children to join her at Paradistorg. This leads to conflicts.
Franklin Cane is a red-hot professional tennis player who climbs the ladder of success with his trainer, Jonathan, at his side. Jonathan was once considered the greatest American tennis player and intends to guide Franklin to the high-road. Franklin does not transcend the interest he has in local Hollywood-type parties littered with has-beens, wannabes and think-they-ares. It is there that he meets Cynthia, a pretty photographer who makes a living photographing people like French filmmaker Jean Renoir and taking production photos of commercials.
A drama about a group of people stranded at an old wartime guesthouse during a flood. One guest announces that he has the power to “decreate” people and is asked to demonstrate. From an original story by Harry Farjeon.
A journalist lives a well-established civil life, married to a woman from a respectable family. However, conflicts with his boss at work become frequent, his marriage is on the wane, and the outward manifestation of everything is a strange skin disease. Doctors recommend that he take a vacation in nature and reexamine himself. In the mountains, in a lonely house by a lake, he meets a woman, also lonely and maladjusted. The consequences of this meeting are beneficial…
An adaptation of the renowned Portuguese Letters, originally written in French and attributed to Soror Mariana Alcoforado. As letters may have been written by Soror, in the Convent of Nossa Senhora da Conceição in Beja, to her lover Noel Bouton, Count of Chamilly.
1943. A bourgeois family spends part of their Easter vacation in an old family home near a fishing village, close to the beach. On the first floor of the house lives temporarily a Belgian woman with two young children, a refugee from the war raging in Europe. Life is mundane until, from the mist one morning, two men emerge from the beach, one of them wounded. They are one of the pilots and the helmsman of a British fighter plane that crashed into the sea…
The touching portrayal of a young mother (and dance student) who travels to California after the death of her husband. In order to pay the bills she takes up burlesque dancing. To her dismay, the club she works at is sold to new owners who transform it into a hardcore strip club, where the dancers must bare all. Reluctantly, she performs. Unfortunately, a photographer hired by her father-in-law is in the audience, who snaps some naughty pics of her performing. He uses these to try and get custody of his grandson.