Hugues Quester

A young couple out for a walk decide to take a stroll through a large cemetery. As darkness begins to fall they realize they can’t find their way out, and soon their fears begin to overtake them.Read More »

“Alain Tanner’s sparse, beautiful film is a philosophical reflection on and a poetic, atmospheric representation of human homelessness.”

Synopsis:
“No man’s land” tells the story of four people trying to fulfil their most basic desires in life. A group of young people meet up regularly in a nightclub situated in a former customs house on the Swiss-French border, as a means of escape from their drab lives. No Man’s Land is an “in- between” film. Between staying and leaving, between Paul and Jean, about friendship, between Paul and Madeleine, Jean and Mali, Jean and Lucie, about love. Between Paul and his route of escape, Jean and his territory, Madeleine and her music, Mali and her exile.Read More »

Quote:
Raúl Ruiz’s City of Pirates is (de)composed under the sign of Surrealism, with its trust in ecstasy, scandal, the call of the wild, mystification, prophetic dreams, humour, the uncanny. Given the surprising swerves and disorientations evoking Buñuel and Dalí, and the confidence in a poetic discourse recalling Eluard and Péret, one wonders if Ruiz didn’t elaborate his scenario using the Surrealist mode of automatic writing. Troubled, graceful Isidore – Ducasse and Duncan? – is a purely Surrealist heroine, part Ophelia, Salomé, Bérénice, prone to trances, somnambulism, hysterical seizure, contact with the ‘other side’. Her calm violence links her to the real life murderesses – Germaine Berton, the Papin sisters – exalted by Breton’s circle, and by Jacques Lacan. Indeed, Lacan’s notion of a psychoanalysis in which the analyst stays off his patient’s wavelength, inspired by the idea of ‘surrealist dialogue’ in which paired monologues at cross purposes strike sparks of meaning off each other, underpins the scatty trajectory of Ruiz’s own graphomania, snared this time as the tale of a Pirate’s City.Read More »

Quote:
Simple conversations engender complicated human interactions. Jeanne is open and even-tempered, a philosophy teacher at a lycée. Her fiancé is away and she doesn’t want to stay at his messy flat; she’s loaned hers to a cousin, so she accepts the invitation of Natasha, a music student whom she meets at a party, to sleep in her father Igor’s bedroom.Read More »

Quote:
Serge Gainsbourg’s Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus, the iconic singer-songwriter’s 1976 directorial debut, is on the surface the story of a love triangle. But nothing about this film is conventional. It’s set in an almost postapocalyptic wasteland that’s supposed to be somewhere in the American Midwest, if the signage and the locals’ penchant for fractious roller derbies is to be believed. (There’s even a visual joke that seems to riff on John Boorman’s Deliverance.) Two sides of the triangle are gay garbagemen, while the third is a boyish truck stop waitress. And Gérard Depardieu puts in a glorified cameo as an amorous hayseed who’s just a little too much into his horse.Read More »

Synopsis:
Another planet in the period of medieval times. An employee of the institute of experimental history from Earth, who is send under the name of noble don Rumata of Estor as a spy with a mission to contact the local resident of the institute, arrives in the city of Arkanar. But the resident perishes under an unlucky attempt to make a palace coup, and Rumata have to take his place as the resident. Soon he meets all the horrors of the medieval society – a peasant war, palace coups, mass executions. To continue to be an indifferent watcher of all these horrors turns out to be simply impossible…Read More »

City of Pirates
(La Ville des pirates, France/Portugal, 1983)

Raúl Ruiz’s City of Pirates is (de)composed under the sign of Surrealism, with its trust in ecstasy, scandal, the call of the wild, mystification, prophetic dreams, humour, the uncanny. Given the surprising swerves and disorientations evoking Buñuel and Dalí, and the confidence in a poetic discourse recalling Eluard and Péret, one wonders if Ruiz didn’t elaborate his scenario using the Surrealist mode of automatic writing. Troubled, graceful Isidore – Ducasse and Duncan? – is a purely Surrealist heroine, part Ophelia, Salomé, Bérénice, prone to trances, somnambulism, hysterical seizure, contact with the ‘other side’.Read More »