1981-1990

Shlykov, a hard-working taxi driver and Lyosha, a saxophonist, develop a bizarre love-hate relationship, and despite their prejudices, realize they aren’t so different after all.Read More »

Richard Strauss’ opera is featured in a landmark collaboration by conductor Karl Boehm and director Goetz Friedrich. Boehm died shortly after the film was completed. Featured soloists include Astrid Varnay, Leonie Rysanek, Catarina Ligendza, Hans Beirer ad Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, among others. There is also a full-length documentary included in this program.
Filmed on location on the outskirts of Vienna, director Gotz Friedrich vividly creates the staggering impact of the tragedy of vengeance. Karl Boehm conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.Read More »

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In 1947, just before the communists took over Hungary, Dorottya (Eva Igo) is thrown out of school because she was found with Communist materials. Her lover is a Communist and she decides to join his party cell just to be with him – and then finds herself falling in love with the cell’s party leader. The feelings are reciprocated and it does not take long for the couple to make a commitment and begin a family. After the Communists take over, Dorottya’s husband disappears during the purges – and it looks as though her former lover were culpable in his presumed death. When Dorottya finds work in a factory as a cleaning woman, she runs into her old lover and he swears he had nothing to do with her husband’s disappearance. Resigned and disilluisioned, Dorottya begins to despair as she imagines how life will be for her alone, under a Stalinist regime, and unable to find a decent job.Read More »

Oskar Panizza’s The Council of Love (1895) is a blasphemous play set in 1495, during the first recorded outbreak of syphilis, which Panizza satirically presents as the punishment from Satan for sexually active humans. As a result, Panizza was imprisoned for obscenity. Schroeter alternates scenes from the Panizza’s work with a dramatization of his trial, presenting the play as an expressionist spectacle performed by actors wearing exaggerated makeup who gesture and grimace grotesquely. The film thus forms a bridge between Schroeter’s use of tableaux in his early experiments with the political urgency of his 1980s films. On the eve of the AIDS crisis, Schroeter is presciently worried about disease as an excuse for governmental repression and the oppression of sexuality.Read More »

The continuation of the adventures of Maria and Mirabella, in which the two girls get lost in a fabulous world inside a television set.Read More »

A New York hooker tries to keep her daughter out of the clutches of the mobsters she works for.Read More »

When three close friends escape from Hong Kong to war-time Saigon to start a criminal’s life, they all go through a harrowing experience which totally shatters their lives and their friendship forever.Read More »

A radical American journalist becomes involved with the Communist revolution in Russia, and hopes to bring its spirit and idealism to the United States.Read More »

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Louise lives with Rémi in Marne-la-Vallée. He is an architect, she is an interior decorator. Their lives would be perfect if Rémi were less of a homebody, and if Louise were not such a night owl. Conscious of preserving her independence, Louise rents a pied-à-terre in Paris. Octave, her friend and confidant, is always ready to accompany her during her night prowls. One evening, beneath a full moon, and Octave’s jealous, loving gaze, she succumbs to the charms of a sensual dancer. As day breaks she realises, however, that she would much rather be with Rémi.Read More »