watchlist_extended

Political and sexual repression in Hungary, just after the revolution of 1956. In 1958, the body of Eva Szalanczky, a political journalist, is discovered near the border. Her friend Livia is in hospital with a broken neck; Livia's husband, Donci, is under arrest. In a flashback to the year before, we see what leads up to the tragedy. Eva gets a job as a writer. She meets Livia and is attracted to her. Livia feels much the same, but as a married woman, has doubts and hesitations. In their work, they (and Eva in particular) bang up against the limits of telling political truths; in private, they confront the limits of living out sexual and emotional truth.

Young lovers ask, "What would you do if I died?" In this case, the young lovers are twins, Nina and Lucien, brother and sister. He answers, "I'll make you live again." Then, in an accident, Nina dies. She's been a rocker on the rise, taking Lucien out of a stable where he worked and bringing him into the music business. He seals her body in the case of a bass fiddle, straps it to the top of his car, and travels across France. He picks up a hitchhiker, helps a Turk he bumps into on the road, visits his birthplace and a boyhood friend, and reaches a seaport. Along the way, he listens to Nina's music, pastes up her posters, and remembers. How will he make her live again?

With Tag der Idioten (1982), Schroeter perhaps draws upon his brief studies of psychology. The film centres around a passionate woman, Carole (played by the well-known French actor Carole Bouquet) who feels alienated and repressed by the highly institutionalised public and private spheres of Western society. Unable to extract any kind of emotional response from her reserved boyfriend, Carole seeks attention by falsely denouncing her neighbours as terrorists. With this detail Schroeter briefly touches upon the panic and paranoia that was brought about by the German government crackdown on terrorism at its height during 1977 and Carole's subsequent institutionalisation in a mental asylum can be seen as an allegory for a society wishing to suppress radical activity of any sort. In Tag der Idioten Schroeter returns to a less linear narrative structure, more reminiscent of the episodic films of his second phase. He employs numerous hallucinatory sequences in order to convey the protagonist's state of mind. Furthermore, much of the film's meaning is delivered through Carole's body, facial expressions and gestures rather than through dialogue, and the film's montage serves to create spatial and temporal disorientation. Schroeter again won the German Film Prize for best direction for this film.

After fifteen years of marriage, an affluent couple divorce and take up with new partners.

Following on from his earlier film A Ilha Dos Amores (1982) on the Portuguese writer Wenceslau Moraes (1855-1929), this documentary uses texts by Moraes, photographs, manuscripts, news film as well as visits to places where people still remember him.
Wenceslau José de Sousa de Moraes was born in Lisbon on the 30th May 1854.
After studying at the Naval College he served aboard several war ships of the Portuguese Navy. In 1885 he traveled for the first time to Macao, where he settled. There he was Deputy to the Captain of the Harbor, and teacher of Macao Secondary School since its creation in 1894. While there he married Vong-Io-Chan (aka Atchan), a Chinese woman of whom he had two sons, and established a friendship with Camilo Pessanha, a celebrated poet.
Meanwhile, in 1889, he traveled for the first time to Japan, a country that charmed him, and where he will return, in official duty, several times in the next few years. In 1897 he visits Japan with the Governor of Macao, and was received by the Emperor Meiji. The following year he deserted Atchan and his two sons, and moved to Japan, as consul in Kobe.
His life there is marked by his literary activity and by the chronicles he sends to several Portuguese newspapers and magazines, by his love affairs with two Japanese women (Ó-Yoné Fukumoto and Ko-Haru), and by his increasing "japonisation".
During the next thirty years Wenceslau de Moraes was to be the great Portuguese source of information about the East, sharing his intimate experiences of day-to-day life in Japan with his readers in Portugal, in a parallel activity to that of Lafcadio Hearn, of whom he was a contemporary.
Saddened by the death, due to illness, of Ó-Yoné, Wenceslau de Moraes renounced his post as consul, and moved to Tokushima, her birth place. There he lived with Ko-Haru, a niece of Ó-Yoné, with whom he shared his life until her death, also due to illness.
There he started to dress, eat and live like the Japanese, against a backdrop of growing hostility from the local inhabitants. Increasingly lonely, and with deteriorating health, Wenceslau de Moraes passed away, in Tokushima, in the 1st July 1929, without having ever returned to Europe.

After a businessman is captured by kidnappers, his rescue seems incumbent on a group of filmmakers, rather than a lackluster police force -- a premise that is matched by the rest of this movie. The kidnapping victim rambles on philosophically with his captors, who end up leaving him alone -- thereby providing him with a chance to escape. As he makes a break for it, he is literally hounded by some guard dogs. Then there are also some interviews with people who know one of the kidnappers, though it is not clear why. Neither the victim, nor the kidnappers, nor the filmmakers can compete with the canines, the only protagonists who add some bite to the action.

A young couple who are amateur roller-skating buffs practice their chosen avocation at a Parisian roller rink. Their hopes rise with a chance to go to Chicago to compete, especially when a magazine reporter assures them that his company will back them -- but then lets them know some sex-related business is a part of the package. Caught up in the couple's drama are several other characters who look like they might need some help themselves, making the problem of how to get to the Windy City seem more and more insoluble.

Britannia Hospital, an esteemed English institution, is marking its gala anniversary with a visit by the Queen Mother herself. But when investigative reporter Mick Travis arrives to cover the celebration, he finds the hospital under siege by striking workers, ruthless unions, violent demonstrators, racist aristocrats, an African cannibal dictator, and sinister human experiments.

1982 film

1981 film

The horrors of World War I have robbed returning veteran Chris Baldry of his memory. The traumatized soldier doesn't even recognize his own wife, Kitty, or remember their years together. While Baldry attempts to cope with the unfamiliar surroundings of his own home, he seeks out the company of an old flame from his childhood, Margaret Grey. His amnesia also makes him a ready target for the affections of his older cousin, Jenny.

Seen right through the sandstorms that rack the lives of a tribe living on a desert oasis, is a subtle and not-so-subtle mistreatment of the female members of the tribe - tribal chiefs have the right to be the first to deflower virgins, and single or widowed mothers must walk a narrow line of behavior restrictions that do not apply to their male counterparts. Both genders, however, fight the brunt of the harsh desert winds together.

A young drifter meets up with a strange old man who claims that he has been taught to fly by birds

It has been said that most great twentieth century novels include scenes in a hotel, a symptom of the vast uprooting that has occurred in the last century: James Ivory begins Quartet with a montage of the hotels of Montparnasse, a quiet prelude before our introduction to the violently lost souls who inhabit them.
Adapted from the 1928 autobiographical novel by Jean Rhys, Quartet is the story of a love quadrangle between a complicated young West Indian woman named Marya (played by Isabelle Adjani), her husband Stefan (Anthony Higgins), a manipulative English art patron named Heidler (Alan Bates), and his painter wife Lois (Maggie Smith). The film is set in the Golden Age of Paris, Hemingway's "moveable feast" of cafe culture and extravagant nightlife, glitter and literati: yet underneath is the outline of something sinister beneath the polished brasses and brasseries.
When Marya's husband is put in a Paris prison on charges of selling stolen art works, she is left indigent and is taken in by Heidler and his wife: the predatory Englishman (whose character Rhys bases on the novelist Ford Madox Ford) is quick to take advantage of the new living arrangement, and Marya finds herself in a stranglehold between husband and wife. Lovers alternately gravitate toward and are repelled by each other, now professing their love, now confessing their brutal indifference -- all the while keeping up appearances. The film explores the vast territory between the "nice" and the "good," between outward refinement and inner darkness: after one violent episode, Lois asks Marya not to speak of it to the Paris crowd. "Is that all you're worried about?" demands an outraged Marya. "Yes," Lois replies with icy candor, "as a matter of fact."
Adjani won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her performances in Quartet: her Marya is a volatile compound of French schoolgirl and scorned mistress, veering between tremulous joy and hysterical outburst. Smith shines in one of her most memorable roles: she imbues Lois with a Katherine-of-Aragon impotent rage, as humiliated as she is powerless in the face of her husband's choices. Her interactions with Bates are scenes from a marriage that has moved from disillusionment to pale acceptance.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and James Ivory's screenplay uses Rhys's novel as a foundation from which it constructs a world that is both true to the novel and distinctive in its own right, painting a society that has lost its inhibitions and inadvertently lost its soul. We are taken to mirrored cafes, then move through the looking glass: Marya, in one scene, is offered a job as a model and then finds herself in a sadomasochistic pornographer's studio. The film, as photographed by Pierre Lhomme, creates thoroughly cinematic moments that Rhy's novel could not have attempted: in one of the Ivory's most memorable scenes, a black American chanteuse (extraordinarily played by Armelia McQueen) entertains Parisian patrons with a big and brassy jazz song, neither subtle nor elegant. Ivory keeps the camera on the singer's act: there is something in her unguarded smile that makes the danger beneath Montparnasse manners seem more acute.

Facts is a dramatization of a massacre in a Lithuanian village during World War II when Nazis rounded up over 100 men, women, and children accused of partisan activity and then torched the houses in which they were held. Using Russian interrogations of a few survivors, the testimony of villagers, and some of the Germans responsible for the killing, the film gradually reconstructs the event and its context.

Anita is a barmaid at the center of a community of street preachers, prostitutes, dealers and users. When a beloved friend (and young drug dealer) is caught by narcotics agents, Anita takes it upon herself to score for his struggling clients.

Thatcherism and the Irish troubles provide the backdrop for this study of Mick, a well-meaning youth in Sheffield, who has, unlike Dickens' Pip, no expectations. Mick lives with his parents, works on his motorbike, looks for work, and every two weeks gets his check from the dole. There are no jobs. His best mate Alan joins the army to fix tanks and is sent to Belfast to quell Catholics. At a disco, Mick meets Karen, who works at a shoe shop and lives with her recently-separated mom. Karen misses her dad. She offers Mick emotional stability and a route to adulthood; Alan pitches the army. Does Mick have a future? Written by <[email protected]>

The film follows four families, with different nationalities (French, German, Russian and American) but with the same passion for music, from the 1930s to the 1960s. The various story lines cross each other time and again in different places and times, with their own theme scores that evolve as time passes. The main event in the film is the Second World War, which throws the stories of the four musical families together and mixes their fates. Although all characters are fictional, many of them are loosely based on historical musical icons (Édith Piaf, Josephine Baker, Herbert von Karajan, Glenn Miller, Rudolf Nureyev, etc.) The Boléro dance sequence at the end brings all the threads together.

1981 film by Dušan Makavejev

1981 film by Bertrand Blier