Amos Vogel: Film as a Subversive Art

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 »

Quote:
Brilliant farce propels two ineffectual Christmas tree salesmen (played by Laurel and Hardy) into a prolonged bout of savage destruction directed against a customer who refuses to buy. Mutual insults, tie snipping, and small violence escalate from controlled disturbance to surrealist cataclysm, in which the American Home is levelled once and for all.Read More »

Quote:
Why Not is hypnotic, compulsive and claustrophobic. It is bathed in a cold, pervasive eroticism, which, oblique and displaced at first, finally becomes explicit in one of the most bizarre masturbation sequences ever filmed. For almost two hours, we observe a young, strikingly pretty girl, nude most of the time and alone in an apartment, engaged in a sonambulistic and sensuous attempt at coming to terms with herself.Read More »

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
An excellent example of a particularly interesting new genre of young German cinema; bizarre, deadly serious variations on the reactionary German “Heimat” films of yore – those insufferable, sentimental “kitsch” prosodies to Fatherland, Soil, and Family. This fully realized work effectively upsets this tradition by recounting a tale of oppressed 19th-century German peasants who become rebels against the state out of poverty, revealing (instead of romanticizing) the brutal degradation of German rural life at the time. Particularly audacious is the presence of an itinerant Jew peddler as mastermind (!) of the conspiracy, predictably leading to (unfounded) charges of anti-semitism against a young director who has dared to reintroduce the Jew into German dramaturgy.Read More »

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
Possibly the most ‘aesthetic’ and ‘experimental’ of revolutionary Cuba’s films, this outstanding work utilizes high-contrast photography, over-exposure, and solarization to create the faded chiaroscuro and poetic authenticity of the period it depicts. The film deals with an 1870 uprising against the Spanish occupation troops in Cuba, in which the machete, originally used to cut sugar cane, becomes a weapon of the people’s warfare. The portrayals of decadent upper classes and heroic peasants are sharp and incisive, and distancing devices – such as characters addressing the camera – are used to induce attitudes of analysis instead of involvement. The emergence of such a strongly poetic work within the Cuban film industry testifies to the divergent aesthetic tendencies permitted expression within the revolution.Read More »

Quote:
Loosely based on William A. Seiter’s 1948 film One Touch of Venus, Steven Arnold’s first film is a macabre, decadent work presenting mannequins and models that travel through strange universes.

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
A haunting, genuinely decadent work about mannequins that may be real and girls that may be models, journeying through strange universes towards possible self-discovery. An exorbitant, perverse sensibility informs the ambiguous images and events.Read More »

A 4-year-old child is the element from and around which the action develops, and brings sentiments and emotions to light. The French word “révélateur”/developper describes the product to develop or “reveal” film negatives.)Read More »

An early example of ultra-realism, this movie contrasts the quiet, bucolic life in the outskirts of Paris with the harsh, gory conditions inside the nearby slaughterhouses. Describes the fate of the animals and that of the workers in graphic detail.
Xavier Martin on IMDBRead More »

Quote:
In 1969, the film director Enrique Juárez thus anonymously produced Ya es tiempo de violencia (Now is the Time for Violence), mainly concerned with the events of the May 1969 Cordobazo riots and the assassination of the trade-unionist Augusto Vandor on 30 June 1969. Other images included those of the massive funerals of Emilio Jáuregui, another trade-unionist shelled three days before Vandor’s death during a demonstration in protest of Nelson Rockefeller’s (owner of Miramax there) arrival to Argentina.Read More »