1971-1980

  • Gordon Hessler – Scream, Pretty Peggy (1973)

    1971-1980Gordon HesslerThrillerTVUSA

    A sculptor hires young college girls to take care of his elderly mother and his supposedly insane sister, both of whom live in the old family mansion with him.Read More »

  • Nicolás Echevarría – María Sabina, Mujer Espíritu AKA Maria Sabina, Woman of the Spirit (1978)

    1971-1980DocumentaryMexicoNicolás Echevarría

    Quote:
    María Sabina is a Mexican indian. She was born in 1894 according to the church records Huautla, Oaxaca.

    Huautla is inhabited by Mazatecan indians. They preserve the ancient religious ritual of eating mushrooms in nocturnal ceremonies.

    These are provided by a shaman. Shamanism has existed in Mexico since pre-Colombian times. María Sabina is a shaman. She uses mushrooms to communicate with tribal gods.

    The ethnobotanical R. Gordon Wasson knew her in 1955. She has given rise to a new discipline: ethnomycology.

    This is the only documentary on María Sabina, an intimate portrait of the world-renowned Mazatec curandera and her extensive use of Psilocybe mushrooms as a healing aid. Narrated by Maria’s biographer, Alvaro Estrada; directed by Nicolas Echevarria.Read More »

  • Cesare Canevari – L’ultima orgia del III Reich AKA The Gestapo’s Last Orgy (1977)

    1971-1980Cesare CanevariExploitationItalyWar

    A Jewish WWII survivor revisits the ruins of a hellish concentration camp, and the memories are still vivid. How did she escape the humiliation, the tortures, and the destruction of human flesh? How did she flee from Gestapo’s last orgy?Read More »

  • Stefan Uher – Javor a Juliana AKA Maple and Juliana (1973)

    Stefan Uher1971-1980DramaFantasySlovakia

    Based on old slovak ballads, it tells of fiddlers who with their magic violins spread evil and destruction all over the world.

    From Skritek’s film journal:
    A girl is transformed into a maple tree by her impulsive and angry mother. Three poor wandering musicians come by the tree and create instruments from it. Walking around the country instead of happiness they bring death everywhere with their cursed instruments. However they cannot get rid of them, unless they bury the wooden instruments at the place of the tree. The three are anything but harmonious, each taking in their disputes various stances. In the end they are enlisted to go to war, because they hardly survive as unlucky musicians and bring the instruments back. That’s when the story takes an even more tragic turn for all.Read More »

  • Harley Cokeliss – Crash! (1971)

    Harley Cokeliss1971-1980ExperimentalShort FilmUnited Kingdom

    A surreal, moody short about the fetishization of automobiles and auto accidents.

    Short film produced by the BBC about JG Ballard’s Crash. “The film was a product of the most experimental, darkest phase of Ballard’s career. It was an era of psychological blowback from the sudden, shocking death of his wife in 1964, an era that had produced the cut-up ‘condensed novels’ of Atrocity plus a series of strange collages and ‘advertisers’ announcements’. […] After Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised.’ Later there were further literary experiments, concrete poems and ‘impressionistic’ film reviews, and an aborted multimedia theatrical play based around car crashes. After that came an actual gallery exhibition of crashed cars, replete with strippers and the drunken destruction of the ‘exhibits’ by an enraged audience.”Read More »

  • Fred Zinnemann – Julia (1977)

    Fred Zinnemann1971-1980DramaUSA

    From “Pentimento,” the memoirs of late playwright Lillian Hellman, JULIA covers those years in the 1930s when Lillian attained fame with the production of her first play “The Childrens’ Hour” on Broadway. Not surprisingly, it centers on Lillian’s relationship with her lifelong friend, Julia. It is a relationship that goes beyond mere acquaintance and one for which the word “love” seems appropriate. While Julia attends the University in Vienna, studying with such luminaries as Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, Lillian suffers through revisions of her play with her mentor and sometimes lover Dashiel Hammett at a New England beachhouse. After becoming a celebrated playwright, Lillian is invited to a writers conference in Russia.Read More »

  • Lefteris Xanthopoulos – O Giorgos apo ta Sotirianika (1978)

    1971-1980ArthouseDocumentaryGreeceLefteris Xanthopoulos

    ‘Giorgos from Sotirianika’ in contrary with ‘Greek Community of Heidelberg’, which deals with the immigration community of a city, focuses on a particular person that is the typical success story of a Greek immigrant. There no dramatization nor any beautification of the character.Read More »

  • Costa-Gavras – Clair de femme AKA Womanlight (1979)

    Costa-Gavras1971-1980DramaFrance

    Quote:
    With his wife dying a slow and undignified natural death, Michel prepares to leave France and catch a plane to Caracas. At the airport, he has second thoughts. Whilst walking the streets of Paris, he runs into Lydia, a middle-aged woman whose husband is brain damaged after a car accident in which her daughter died. Michel and Lydia find mutual support in each other’s company, but are they destined for one another…?Read More »

  • Satsuo Yamamoto – Kinkanshoku AKA Annular Eclipse AKA Solar Eclipse (1975)

    Satsuo Yamamoto1971-1980AsianJapanPolitics

    In the wake of Watergate, the scandal surrounding then Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka’s dealings with construction companies in Japan caused a similar political upheaval. Director Yamamoto chose as the subject for his film a scandal that had taken place some ten years prior to the Tanaka disclosure, to let the Japanese people know that such corruption had long been part of their politicians’ lives.Read More »

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