For Idus Martiae, the Ides of March, a scene showing the main character's back.

 

Olivier, a carpentry teacher at a youth rehabilitation center, has a new apprentice, 16 year old Francis. Fascinated by the boy and his unspoken backstory, he starts following him around.

“With these shots from the back and the neck, we hope to confront the spectator with a mystery, the impossibility of knowing and seeing. The face and the eyes should not try to express a situation that already sufficiently stirs up the spectator’s interests. This expression would direct, limit or even prevent expectations, whereas the back and the neck allow the spectator to go deeper, like a car driving into the night.”

– Luc Dardenne, via [spoilers]

“The Dardennes' brothers’ camera follows Olivier in his enigmatic, ominous obsession with the boy and almost constantly films him up close and from behind. In the absence of a true gaze, the back turns into a face that speaks but doesn’t explain anything, “a body that becomes a vibrating membrane”, as Jean-Pierre Dardenne so beautifully put it.” (via)

A weird of quirky sci-fi film on the date Under the Skin (2013) was released in the UK.

“I cast my hat out into the universe, let it greet those who are on their way from Earth. From this day forward, the Moon is no longer a dream.”

– Cyrano de Bergerac

An artistic child for Youth Art Month (USA).

 

Small children work with clay, paint, and other materials. Under the camera's watchful eye, we see their work come to life.

A favourite non-Hitchcock mystery for National Hitchcock Day (USA).

“You're a foreigner and you're lost.”

Close quarters: US premiere of 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016).

 

A filmmaker (Akerman) reluctantly hosts a guest (the always imposing Jeffrey Kime) in her already cramped quarters. His increasingly expanding presence in volume, sight and sound are insufferable for the quiet cineast.

A film ithrah69 may like for their birthday.

 

Filmmaker and photographer Colomb de Daunant's spiritual sequel to Crin blanc : le cheval sauvage [White Mane] (1953) and Glamador (1958) follows the same wild Camargue horses in their dreams.

 

The accompanying music is performed on a Cristal Baschet, a glass instrument key to several avant-garde films. I refer to John Coulthart's writeup about Le Songe, which links through to an article about the Cristal Baschet.

Strategy for Bobby Fischer's birthday (1943).

 

People meticulously plan, move, and countermove in response to an invasion.

A mother for International Women's Day

 

When returning home to the castle he grew up in, Jan attempts to free himself from the suffocating clutches of his neurotic mother.

 

This film was the final straw for Shirley Temple; she resigned from the board of the San Francisco Film Festival calling Zetterling's film “pornography for profit”.

An immortal character on the date Highlander (1986) was released.

– Dont raise your voice! I'll kill you if you make a sound.

– Would you please?

When a woman eats the flesh of a 人魚 (ningyo, litt. “human fish” but in Western context commenly translated as “mermaid”), she may become a 八百比丘尼 [yao bikuni], an 800 year^* old Buddhist nun granted youth and longevity.

 

^*The number 8 symbolises growth and prosperity. Larger numbers starting with 8 indicate that the amount is endless, comparable to saying “hundreds/thousands/millions of […]” in English. Therefore, 800 years can be understood as immortal.

Chemistry: Dimitri Mendeleev presented his version of the periodic table on this date in 1869. He claimed to have had a dream in which he envisioned a table in which all the chemical elements were arranged according to their atomic weight (via).

“Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) was a French chemist who gave the first accurate scientific explanation of the mysteries of fire. He also provided the law of conservation of matter which states that matter can be neither created or destroyed.n His work and this film are situated between modern chemistry and alchemy. The film stages a drama of abstraction and theoretical realism. Everyday life seen photo-chemically and musically. The film is a materialist projected-image conversion of matter.”

– Michael Snow, via

The film stock was chemically altered, giving it an dreamlike quality.