A documentary made by the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo in honour of anarchist Buenaventura Durruti, who was murdered on November 20, 1936.

“Fascism is not to be debated, it is to be destroyed.”

– Buenaventura Durruti

“You take away my life and offer me a favor in return. That's what I call a 'bargain'.”

– John Ellman

“No, I never left the wheel; not for a moment.”

– Anton Lorenzen

A movie that makes you want to travel*

“Arigatō! [Thank you!]”

– Mr Thank You to everyone – poultry included – he passes on his bus

Friendly and helpful, Arigatō-san (Ken Uehara) is there for his passengers and non-bus travellers alike. A sweet roadmovie from a Japan now lost to time.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for November is, again, not date-based, but follows a sloppy schmaltzy all-American Thanksgiving-y narrative. Trying to make it work my way.

 

[A] favourite horror movie overall*

”'M. Valdemar,' I said, 'are you asleep?' He made no answer, but I perceived a tremor about the lips, and was thus induced to repeat the question, again and again. At its third repetition, his whole frame was agitated by a very slight shivering; the eye-lids unclosed themselves so far as to display a white line of the{n} ball; the lips moved sluggishly, and from between them, in a barely audible whisper, issued the words:

'Yes; — asleep now. Do not wake me! — let me die so!'”

– Edgar Allan Poe, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845) (via)

A man agrees on being hypnotised while in the state of dying. This particularly haunting and efficiently gory film – the first in the genre – is the result.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.

[A favourite] Bela Lugosi film*

“No, I never left the wheel; not for a moment.”

– Anton Lorenzen

A post-Dracula Lugosi demonstrates that he's more than the cursed aristocrat. An efficient early Hammer production, made just a year after their founding.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.

“You'll go under like all the others.”

– Judith Denning

A mode of transportation to get me to my ideal vacation destination*. And yes, I would travel to an island by transcontinental locomotive

“What I sought in 'Pacific' was not the imitation of the sounds of the locomotive, but the translation of a visual impression and a physical enjoyment through a musical construction. It starts from objective contemplation: the quiet breathing of the engine at rest, the effort of starting, then the progressive increase in speed, to arrive at the lyrical state, the pathos of the 300-ton train, launched in the middle of the night at 120 km/h.”

– Arthur Honegger, Dissonances. Revue musicale indépendante (1925) (via)

Hinted on in Abel Gance's La Roue (1923), composer Arthur Honegger's Пасифик 231 follows the narrative of a stream train ploughing through the night. The conductor's gestures mirror the fireman's and slowly, the machine comes to live. The music becomes abstract, machine-like, in its rendition of pistons and valves. Using double exposure and Soviet montage theory, music and movement become one. The Futurists, if not opposed to the Soviets that is, would have had a field day with this outing.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for July is, for unknown reasons, mostly not date-related and follows some sort of vacation narrative.

“That gets it. That little touch of lavender. Am I gonna stink pretty.”

– Danny Kean