Bruno Stroszek (Bruno S.), his friends Eva (Eva Mattes) and Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz, responsible for the fairy-tale music you hear in this film) decide to leave dreary #Berlin behind and move to #Wisconsin where the latter's nephew lives. A new life, with dreams of music and animal magnetism, awaits them there.

“Was ist loos? Der Hund is loose.”

– Clayton

As so oft with #Herzog, the story behind Stroszek is as engrossing as the resulting film. Documentary maker Errol Morris and Herzog were fascinated by Wisconsin's own Ed Gein and wondered if Gein had dug up his own mother, as was rumoured at the time. As they would, they decided to open the poor woman's grave. Morris never showed up, and neither did Herzog but only because his car broke down en route to Plainfield, Wisconsin. Trying to get the vehicle fixed, Herzog entered the workshop of a Clayton Szalpinski.

 

A character in his own right, and a non-actor to boot, Clayton ended up in Stroszek as Scheitz's nephew; a MacGuffin odder than a dancing chicken.

“We're in America now.”

– Bruno S.

“I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; Handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail; Only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick; I’m so mean I make medicine sick.”

– Muhammad Ali

One day, in a quiet village, a traveling movie theatre appears. The proprietor has no words for the miracle he brings in on the reels. When it's finally time, and the whole town is crammed into the crumbling impromptu playhouse, and the lights are dimmed, a word of warning. This is the story of Dr. #Frankenstein, it starts.

“Just close your eyes and call him… It's me, Ana… It's me Ana…”

– Teresa

The old folk in the audience remember their first brush with cinema, and life, and death. For sisters Ana (Ana Torrent) and Isabel (Isabel Tellería) it may be their first, and it may as well be real. The creature, Isabel assures her younger sister, is not dead. He's a spirit and you can call for him.

 

When you're little, everything is a miracle. Milagros is the name the maid answers too. And so does the landscape, the mushrooms, the heart, and the magic of cinema.

Le temps d'une chasse is the definition of unease. It starts at dawn, when two old friends pick up their buddy Richard (Marcel Sabourin) from the home he shares with his wife and son. The son, the wife insists, comes along. The men have planned a #hunting trip, in a cabin far away from #Montréal, far away from everything, with a beer-filled cooler at hand. The last they need is an underage kid towing along. But the boy comes along, she insists. With a trunk full of Dutch courage and a mouthful of boasting, the men find themselves at a hotel instead of the expected cabins.

“Tomorrow morning we'll get up early.”

Hotel days are short and its nights long and booze-filled, commanding their own temptation and regret.

28 is no age to die, regardless if your name is Susan Superstar or Edie Sedgwick. But it happened, right during the wrap-up of Ciao Manhattan. Edie was gone, just like that, snuffed like so many of the other #Warhol Superstars. What did remain was footage, so much abandoned footage shot in the 60s when those stars were shining at their brightest. That footage, set in glitzy black-and-white Manhattan, is where Edie and Paul America race around town on amphetamine. Or see a doctor to get shots of some sorts.

“Speed is the ultimate, all-time high. That first rush. Wow! Just that burning, searing, soaring sense of perfection.”

– Susan

And there's colour footage too. Susan, topless, semi-(un)consciously dragged around the floor of her empty pool-turned-Superstar-temple. She babbles, drinks, dances around in her panties. And she ODs. Like Edie would even before this movie had seen the light of day.

 

They snuff so fast, these bright Superstars.

It's August 30, #Frankenstein​day.

“If you're not sure a mushroom's good, don't pick it. Because if it's bad, and you eat it, it's your last mushroom and your last everything too.”

Zbigniew Rybczyński's autobiographical Zupa follows an unnamed couple's faltering monotonous relationship.

 

Produced by the groundbreaking Se-ma-for Studios in Łódź – you may be familiar with their 1981 Oscar-winning Tango by, again, Rybczyński – the story is told through colourised analogue still #photography and electronic music and sound effects created by PRES's Eugeniusz Rudnik.

Slow cinema of a different kind. We spend long hours in the company of a father (Vasilis Diamantopoulos) and his sons Sakis (George Dialegmenos), Nikos (Dimitris Poulikakos), and Giannis (Nikitas Tsakiroglou). The four of them – rich, bourgeois – have inherited a country villa and the plan is to do nothing for the next seven years. No work, no unnecessary movements. There's #sleep, lots of it. And copious amounts of food prepared by maid Sofia (Olga Karlatos) – she comes with the house; chattels personal – in addition of her body to be consumed by the increasingly idle men.

“Do you want to work? What a nightmarish idea”

Οι Τεμπέληδες της Εύφορης Κοιλάδας is a slow satire, quietly addressing Greek #class struggle through the viewer's observation. Who do we follow? The father, who quickly surrenders to sloth; the sons – young, with their whole lives ahead of them; the maid – never questioning her position and slavishly fulfilling her duties of the flesh, in bed and in the kitchen?

 

The similarities are there but unlike #MarcoFerreri's La grande bouffe (1973), there's no culmination in decadence. No euphoria to speak of. No grand release either; while the camera roams the mansion, attuned to #Mahler's tone poem Symphony No. 1 [Titan] – our only clue of the passing of time; even the vegetation succumbs to ennui – the story plods on. One of the men gets dressed, to go to work. It's foolish.