One of the very few films made by Etienne O'Leary, all of which emerged from the French underground circa 1968 and can be very loosely designated 'diary films.' Like the contemporaneous films by O'Leary's more famous friend Pierre Clementi, they trippily document the drug-drenched hedonism of that era's dandies. O'Leary worked with an intoxicating style that foregrounded rapid and even subliminal cutting, dense layering of superimposed images and a spontaneous notebook type shooting style. Yet even if much of O'Leary's material was initially 'diaristic,' depicting the friends, lovers, and places that he encountered in his private life, the metamorphoses it underwent during editing transformed it into a series of ambiguously fictionalized, sometimes darkly sexual fantasias. - Experimental Film Club
In the background is a row of three-masted sailing ships, at anchor, their sales furled. In the foreground, a simple pier that's more like a yardarm juts out above the water; about 15 boys of six or seven years of age are on the jutting wood, and they jump off into the water below.
The film shows a parade down Fifth Avenue, New York. In the foreground many children, both black and white, can be seen following alongside the parade.
This engaged reading of the urban black riots of the 1960s references Guy Debord’s Situationist text, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).
In this meditation on contemporary race relations, two black men discuss in voiceover certain “casual” events in life and cinema that are unnoticed or discounted by whites—gestures, hesitations, stares, off-the-cuff remarks, jokes—details of an ideology of repressed racism.
They set off, looking for work in far-off places, but disappeared along the way. Inspired by Shiv Kumar Batalvi’s “birha” poetry, the film traces the longing on both sides: on the part of those who are missing, and those that wait for them to return.
The Three Kingdoms period begins as the walled fortress of Hsin Yang falls to invaders. Centered around this historical event, The Last Days of Hsin Yang follows the escape of the prince of Hsin Yang as he hides with a small family and escapes from the sacked and burning city.
A Southern soldier in the American Civil War is sent to reconnoiter the enemy positions and becomes trapped beneath a huge pile of rubble by Northern cannon fire.
Centring on the legend of the four ancient Chinese heroines, the film was a novelty for audiences at the time, as the singing performance was in Cantonese and used huangmei operatic rhythms—a popular trend in the 1960s, yet it retained traditional flavours by using operatic luogu percussion in the battle scenes.
Humanity finds a mysterious object buried beneath the lunar surface and sets off to find its origins with the help of HAL 9000, the world's most advanced super computer.
Comments
Have you watched Chromo sud yet? What did you think about it?
