1961-1970

  • Jean-Luc Godard – Une femme mariée AKA A Married Woman (1964)

    1961-1970DramaFranceJean-Luc Godard

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    Quote:
    With A Married Woman, Jean-Luc Godard leeches a story of a bored, attractive, unfaithful housewife of much of its escapist luridness, favoring ennui over sex, symbols and signifiers over narrative. The film is remarkably chilly and precise even for the legendary director, providing a peek at where his career would head after his run of comparatively quasi-populist 1960s-era hallmarks. A Married Woman is exhilarating in its masterful suggestion of how fictional films could formally evolve, utilizing documentary and image and narrative fragmentation in fashions that have proven to be greatly influential.Read More »

  • Werner Schroeter – Eika Katappa (1969)

    1961-1970ArthouseExperimentalGermanyWerner Schroeter

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    Collage of dramatic scenes, some exaggerated to comic effect, with asynchronous sound from well known classic, operatic, and rock and roll music – with different approaches to love, suffering, and death.Read More »

  • Jean-Luc Godard – Une Femme Est Une Femme AKA A Woman Is a Woman (1961)

    1961-1970ComedyFranceJean-Luc GodardMusical

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    “Director Jean-Luc Godard’s deceptively blithe tribute to the musical comedy features Anna Karina as an exotic dancer who decides that it is time for her to have a child. When her lover refuses to commit to the decision, she turns her romantic attentions to his best friend. This being a Godard film, the straightforward story serves as a framework for improvisation and stylistic experimentation, allowing for odd interludes and unexpected images. Rather than the sometimes alienating, dense intellectualism of later Godard works, Une femme est une femme offers aesthetic pleasure through luxurious visuals and a charming musical score by Michel Legrand. Against this bright backdrop, Karina proves particularly fetching, capturing the film’s frolicsome mood in an unforced manner. While not one of Godard’s most groundbreaking or influential films, Une femme est une femme is one of his most appealing and pleasurable efforts.”Read More »

  • Luis Buñuel – Viridiana (1961)

    1961-1970ClassicsDramaLuis BuñuelSpain

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    Viridiana, a young novice about to take her final vows as a nun, accedes to a request from her widowed uncle to visit him. Moved purely by a sense of obligation, she does so. Her uncle is moved by her resemblance to his late wife to attempt to seduce Viridiana, and tragedy ensues. In the aftermath, Viridiana tries to assuage her guilt by creating a haven for the destitute folk who live around her uncle’s estate. But from these good intentions, too, comes little good.Read More »

  • Masahiro Shinoda – Kawaita hana AKA Pale Flower (1964)

    1961-1970CrimeFilm NoirJapanMasahiro Shinoda

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    Quote:
    Like Imamura and Oshima, Shinoda Masahiro was a university-educated intellectual who was employed by Shochiku as an assistant director in the early 1950s and felt stifled by the company’s conservatism. But Shinoda was less openly rebellious than the other two and took the opportunity to learn a great deal about camera technique, editing and shot composition by working conscientiously as an assistant to all of the company’s leading directors.Read More »

  • Masaki Kobayashi – Kaidan AKA Kwaidan [uncut] [+commentary] (1964)

    1961-1970DramaFantasyJapanMasaki Kobayashi

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    Quote:
    For a film so widely and indelibly remembered, Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan has confounded a surprising number of critics over the years. Ever since its release in 1965, there have been those who have found it too long, too artificial, too self-consciously exotic, not socially minded enough for the director of The Human Condition (1959–61) and Harakiri (1962), not scary or gory enough to qualify as a horror film. To be sure, this four-part adaptation of four renowned ghost stories by Lafcadio Hearn—not quite comparable to any other film, regardless of genre or country of origin, and unique in Kobayashi’s oeuvre—defies easy categorization. That is perhaps why it has remained for countless viewers such a singular experience, clinging to memory like an unshakable dream, a glimpse into some alternate zone where light falls differently on faces, time moves by a different measure, and terror blends disturbingly with beauty.Read More »

  • Barbara Loden – Wanda (1970)

    Drama1961-1970ArthouseBarbara LodenThe Female GazeUSA

    Quote:
    With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loden), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men—including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme. An until now difficult-to-see masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers, Wanda is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society’s margins.Read More »

  • Jean-Luc Godard – Made in U.S.A (1966)

    1961-1970ArthouseComedyFranceJean-Luc Godard

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    Quote:
    With its giddily complex noir plot and color-drenched widescreen images, Made in U.S.A was a final burst of exuberance from Jean-Luc Godard’s early sixties barrage of delirious movie-movies. Yet this chaotic crime thriller and acidly funny critique of consumerism—starring Anna Karina as the most brightly dressed private investigator in film history, searching for a former lover who might have been assassinated—also points toward the more political cinema that would come to define Godard. Featuring characters with names such as Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, David Goodis, and Doris Mizoguchi, and appearances by a slapstick Jean-Pierre Léaud and a sweetly singing Marianne Faithfull, this piece of pop art is like a Looney Tunes rendition of The Big Sleep gone New Wave.Read More »

  • Various – Swissmade (1968)

    1961-1970CultSci-FiSwitzerlandVarious

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    In 1968, the Popular Swiss Bank asked to three directors to give their vision about the future of Switzerland. This is their answer.Read More »

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