The Red Shoes, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger,1948
Synops: A glorious Technicolor epic that influenced generations of filmmakers, artists, and aspiring ballerinas, The Red Shoes intricately weaves backstage life with the thrill of performance. A young ballerina (Moira Shearer) is torn between two forces: the composer who loves her (Marius Goring), and the impresario determined to fashion her into a great dancer (Anton Walbrook).
Dog Days, Ulrich Seidl♥ 2001
Synops: Famed for his controversial documentaries Models and Animal Love, Ulrich Seidl makes his first fiction film with this impassioned attack on the banality and emptiness of modern suburban life. Using a documentary shooting style and mostly non-actors, Seidl weaves together a series of vignette story lines into a tapestry of loneliness and quiet desperation. A retired old man obsesses over meaningless information in life – the weight of his groceries, and noise level of the neighborhood. A faded beauty queen’s devotion to her boyfriend ends after an ugly night at the discotheque. A couple who has long since divorced though still lives under the same roof engages in a psychological war of attrition, trying to force the other into moving out the house. A young teacher’s date with her boyfriend turns unexpectedly into a drunken orgy. This film won the prestigious Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Film Festival.
Scorpio Rising, Kenneth Anger, 1964
Synops: Decried as obscene upon its initial release, this short documentary style feature from avant garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger contains no dialogue and rapidly inter-cuts images against a score of slyly selected pop tunes, predating the advent of the music video by a decade and a half. Delving into the homoerotic world of bikers, Anger focuses his camera on Scorpio (Bruce Byron), a leather-wearing, crystal methamphetamine-snorting bad boy who is alternately compared to Jesus Christ, Adolf Hitler and the Devil, depending on his activities. Scorpio is seen strutting his stuff, racing his bike, vandalizing a church and attending a rowdy party where a fellow reveler is tortured and humiliated by the bikers. Through it all, Anger draws clear parallels between Scorpio’s crowd, sadism and homosexuality, with alternately subtle and obvious montages depicting snippets of other films, comic strips, plenty of gleaming phallic chrome, and symbols like the Nazi swastika. Considered by many to be one of the first post-modern films, Scorpio Rising (1964) was a controversial hit only on the underground circuit, but its style greatly influenced a generation of popular filmmakers, most notably director Martin Scorsese.
Own Death, Peter Forgacs, 2008
Synops:
“Dying is a tough job, especially when one has to finish urgently some galley proofs. Peter Nádas has evocated this brilliantly in his short novel One’s own death. And it has now an evenly brilliant equivalent in the imagery Peter Forgács designed for it. Hardly ever since Marguerite Duras’ India Song the collaboration between the literary and the cinematic have been so successful as in this Forgács film of the Nádas story.”
Brand Upon The Brain! Guy Maddin, 2006
Synops: In the weird and wonderful supercinematic world of Canadian cult filmmaker Guy Maddin, personal memory collides with movie lore for a radical sensory overload. This eerie excursion into the Gothic recesses of Maddin’s mad, imaginary childhood is a silent, black-and-white comic science-fiction nightmare set in a lighthouse on grim Black Notch Island, where fictional protagonist Guy Maddin was raised by an ironfisted, puritanical mother. Originally mounted as a theatrical event (accompanied by live orchestra, Foley artists, and assorted narrators), Brand upon the Brain! is an irreverent, delirious trip into the mind of one of current cinema’s true eccentrics.
Naked, Mike Leigh, 1993
Synops:Mike Leigh’s brilliant and controversial Naked stars David Thewlis as Johnny, a charming, eloquent, and relentlessly vicious drifter on the lam in London. Rejecting all those who would care for him, the volcanic Johnny hurls himself into a nocturnal odyssey through the city, colliding with a succession of the desperate and the dispossessed, and scorching everyone in his path. With a virtuoso script and raw performances from Thewlis and costars Katrin Cartlidge and Lesley Sharpe, Leigh’s panorama of England’s crumbling underbelly is a showcase of black comedy and doomsday prophecy, and was the winner of the best director and actor prizes at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.
