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On April 27, 1937, in the midst of a grueling and increasingly brutal Spanish Civil War, the
ancient Basque town of Guernica was subjected to an extended duration bombardment
campaign by German forces in an unrelenting aerial campaign designed to demoralize the
collective psyche of the Basque nation and to also show camaraderie (and military
alliance) with the nationalists under Generalissimo Francisco Franco.Read More »
Joey Wellman, a cantankerous American cartoonist, accepts an invitation to come to an exhibition in Paris, because his estranged daughter Elsie is a student there. He arrives with his girlfriend Lena, and very soon wants to go home as the culture shock is too much for him. Elsie puts off meeting him because she is busy trying to find Professor Christian Gauthier, in order to get him to read her thesis on Flaubert. However Gauthier is enamored with American culture, and invites Joey and some other Americans to his mother’s house for the weekend. Elsie arrives at the gathering in time for the masquerade party and to see her father beginning to appreciate French culture.Read More »
The history of Nazi Germany’s death camps of the Final Solution and the hellish world of dehumanization and death contained inside.Read More »
In Paris in the 1920s, a concert violinist meets and falls in love with a stylish young flapper who’s the wife of an old friend. Romaine instigates the affair with Marcel, and carries it forward even as her husband, Pierre, falls ill. She may even be purposely giving Pierre a treatment that adds to his misery. After Marcel returns from a concert tour and Romaine stoops to a new low in abandoning Pierre for an assignation, she reconsiders the affair and takes a drastic step. Three years later, Pierre pays Marcel a visit to demand the truth. Will the jealous and aggrieved Marcel manage a convincing performance?Read More »
Synopsis:
Seyrig is a fortyish widow dealing antique furniture from her apartment, who invites an old flame she hasn’t seen since the Algerian war to visit her and her troubled eccentric filmmaker stepson (Thierre), whom she shares an apartment with in Boulogne (a city in the provinces). The stepson is a recent veteran of the Algerian war who can’t escape the memory of a young girl named Muriel he tortured and killed during the war, as he watches grainy 8mm film clips of newsreels which remind him of the Arab girl.Read More »
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Simon secretly loves Camille. Camille, due to a misunderstanding, falls for Marc Duveyrier. Marc, a handsome realtor, who’s also Simon’s boss, is trying to sell an apartment to Odile Lalande, Camille’s sister. Odile really wants this apartment, despite the silent disapproval of her husband, Claude. Claude, somewhat wan in character, finds it hard to stomach the reappearance, after many years, of Nicolas. Nicolas, an old friend of Odile’s becomes the confidant of Simon… The dialogue is in part made up of extracts of French hit songs, sung in situation by the actors.Read More »
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The film narrates a utopian abandonment, consensual and festive of the market economy and high productivity. The population decides on a number of resolutions beginning with “We stop everything” and the second “After a total downtime will be revived-reluctantly-that the services and products including lack will prove intolerable. Probably: water to drink, electricity for reading at night, the TSF to say “This is not the end of the world, this is an 01, and now a page of Celestial Mechanics”. The implementation of these resolutions is the first day of a new era, Year 01.Read More »
A cinematic puzzle, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad is a radical exploration of the formal possibilities of film. Beautifully shot in Cinemascope by Sacha Vierny, the movie is a riddle of seduction, a mercurial enigma darting between a present and past which may not even exist, let alone converge. The film stars Giorgio Albertazzi as an unnamed sophisticate attempting to convince a similarly nameless woman (Delphine Seyrig) that they met and were romantically involved a year ago in the same enormous, baroque European hotel. Read More »
from rogerrobert.com
The hero of the film (Yves Montand) is a Spanish citizen who has been engaged ever since the war’s end in a variety of underground anti-Franco movements. He is part of a network that moves people and information in and out of Spain, prepares reports, calls general strikes, prints propaganda newspapers and does everything else that seems to be indicated. But the members of the underground are weary; they subscribe to political dogmas that no longer seem relevant, except to a few of them; they can show few tangible results.Read More »