Philosophy

Plot Summary :
During the shooting of Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film Offret, cameraman Arne Carlsson taped around 50 hours of behind the scenes footage. Editor Michal Leszczylowski took the material and added scenes of previous interviews and interesting statements from the script of Offret and from Tarkovsky’s book ‘Sculpting in Time’. The result is a documentary that shows the way Tarkovksy worked: carefully building each scene. Shows why he did the things he did: his vision on film. And shows the emotion of the man Tarkovsky: his great disappointment when the camera breaks while shooting the house going up in flames.Read More »

IMDb wrote:
A man takes up residence with a mysterious marquis and is soon persuaded to enter into an asylum for preventative therapy. Things are not what they seem, and the marquis may be even more sinister than what the young man may’ve predicted.

Quote:
The classic stories of Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade are filtered through the creative mind of noted surrealist Jan Svankmajer in a philosophical horror film that probes the darkest depths of the human mind.Read More »

Quote:
Correction Please is a formally adventurous and rigorously philosophical essay on the nature of early cinema, made under the auspices of the Arts Council of Great Britain in the late 1970s. It emerged in the era of works like Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) and Anthony McCall and Andrew Tyndall’s Argument (1978), two other instances of filmmaking-as-film-theory to which Burch’s otherwise singular project might be compared. The topic of Correction Please is the development of narrative cinematic language from film’s inception to the period of sound—what Burch has dubbed “the gestation of the Institutional Mode”—investigated through a series of tautly structured segments, including ten archival examples of so-called “primitive” films made prior to 1906, animated diagrams explicating these early works, quotations from Maxim Gorky, Christian Metz, and Lillian Gish, and, most dramatically, a series of five staged sequences that recapitulate and analyze emblematic formal properties of five different chapters in cinema’s evolution.Read More »

Laika, a stray dog, was the first living being to be sent into space and thus to a certain death. According to a legend, she returned to Earth as a ghost and has roamed the streets of Moscow ever since. Following her trace, and filmed from a dog’s perspective, SPACE DOGS accompanies the adventures of her descendants: two street dogs living in today’s Moscow. Their story is one of intimate fellowship but also relentless brutality, and is interwoven with unseen archive material from the Soviet cosmic era. A magical tale of voyagers scouting for unknown spaces.Read More »

In this adaptation made during the the London Blitz of George Bernard Shaw’s edgy comedy of the same name, Wendy Hiller as the idealistic title character is running a Salvation Army shelter in the East End that aims to save the souls of the destitute while preserving their physical well-being. She becomes engaged to the sceptical, unworldly Adolphus Cusins (Rex Harrison), a professor of Ancient Greek who discards his agnosticism and joins the Salvation Army to be near his fiancee. Cusins is then startled to learn that Major Barbara in fact comes from a privileged background – she is the grand-daughter of an earl on her mother’s side, and her long-absent estranged father Andrew Undershaft (a young Robert Morley) is a multi-millionaire arms manufacturer.Read More »

IMDB:
An ex-soldier, living homeless in London, is offered a place to stay at a decaying house inhabited by a young woman and her dying mother. As he starts to fall for her, he cannot ignore his suspicion that something sinister is going on.Read More »

»Der Entschluß steht fest, das KAPITAL nach dem Szenarium von Karl Marx zu verfilmen«, notierte Sergej Eisenstein am 12. Oktober 1927. Eisenstein, der mit Panzerkreuzer Potemkin (1926) die Filmsprache revolutionierte, wollte Marx’ Buch »kinofizieren«. Die Herausforderung, die von einem solchen Werk ausgeht, so glaubte Eisenstein, würde die Filmkunst von Grund auf umrücken. Ihm schwebte die Anwendung völlig neuer, von James Joyce’ Ulysses abgeleiteter Formen vor: »faits divers«, »emotionale Konvolute« und Reihen »dialektischer Bilder«.Read More »

A cultural documentary that uses some of the central ideas of 19th century German socialist and philosopher Karl Marx to try to make sense of the global financial crisis of 2008-09. This crisis prompted the U.S. government to spend more than 1 trillion dollars in order to rescue its banking system from financial meltdown. But can the largest financial losses in history really be put down to the natural risks and uncertainties of the free market? Or is there another explanation as to why the crisis happened and what its implications are for the future of our society, our economy, for our whole way of life?Read More »

After a bike accident, the amnesiac produces one-minute shots. The voice-over weighs in on gender, animals and the end of literary culture. An essay featuring Elvis, wrestlers, boy ballet, naked cyclists and the heavenly voices of ChoirChoir!. (from MUBI)Read More »