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La Belle et la Bête [Beauty and the Beast] (Jean Cocteau + René Clément, 1946)
Aug
15
a cornucopia of wonder
La Belle (Josette Day) at a fancy table stacked with good foods and nice wines. She's cleaning her fingernails with the silverware while a chagrined Bête (Jean Marais) looks on. As magical as the story are the production and set design by Christian Bérard, Lucien Carré, and René Moulaert. They breathed a soul into almost everything, including the candelabras. DP: Henri Alekan.
– Does he crawl on four legs? What does he eat and drink?
– I've given him water to drink on occasion. He would never eat me.
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El lugar sin límites [The Place Without Limits] (Arturo Ripstein, 1978)
Aug
13
Gay Uncles Day
Pancho (Gonzalo Vega) watches La Manuela (Roberto Cobo) dance flamenco for him. DP: Miguel Garzón.
Cabaretera, a sub-genre from the Epoca de Oro (the golden epoch of Mexican filmmaking, 1930s—1950s), combines film noir with melodrama and musical numbers. Often set in cabarets (brothels), these films talk about the plight of the prostitute who – not without their pride and dignity – are forced to being the breadwinner in a poverty-stricken community.
The return of Pancho, a hyper-macho trucker, disrupts the family regime. The trucker's attraction to the #flamenco dancing fichera is at odds with his machismo. Him being outed as a maricón (a Mexican slur for homosexual) would be the end of his world.
El lugar remains a groundbreaking film, not only in how it handles taboos like #gender roles and trans- and homosexuality, but also because it highlights how (self) destructive #machismo is in Mexican society.
*Roberto Cobo's La Manuela is transsexual. The term “transvestite” is what's used in the film and typical for its time.
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Drak sa vracia [Dragon's Return / The Return of Dragon] (Eduard Grečner, 1968)
Aug
9
Smokey Bear Day
Drak (Radovan Lukavský), a Caucasian man with a rough looking face and an eyepatch over his left eye. The landscape behind him is mere blurs. DP: Vincent Rosinec.
Drak [“dragon” or “devil”] returns to his village. No one understands why he came back, or where he has been. The villagers postulate smugglers and there's other drunk nefarious thoughts, but for sure they know that with the potter, the draught returned. In an unspoken ritual sung in old tongues, the grey women summon the rain. The forest, dry as tinder, has taken the cattle, all there is. Drak knows where the animals went and a deal is struck.
“Don't you recognise me?”
– Drak
Drak sa vracia speaks in mere whispers and smoky greys. The main characters – the #fire, smoke, pottery, and composer Ilja Zeljenka's often silent motif – weave their wordless presence throughout the ancient landscape; that same landscape that carved itself into the locals' being.
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Drak sa vracia [Dragon's Return] (Eduard Grečner, 1968)
Aug
6
Eva (Emília Vášáryová) stares into the fire on which a small anthropomorphic cooking vessel is mounted. DP: Vincent Rosinec.
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The Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang, 1953)
Aug
5
International Hangover Day
After a horrible birthday alone followed by a lovely night out, Norah wakes up with a terrible hangover and a hunch of being a murderess.
“How about you slip into something more comfortable, like a few drinks and some Chinese food?”
– Harry
The Blue Gardenia is Lang's hard-bitten take on the gruesome Black Dahlia murder case and part of his newspaper noir trilogy together with While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, both from 1956.
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Michael [Mikaël / Chained: The Story of the Third Sex / Heart's Desire] (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1924)
Aug
3
National Michael Day
Art critic Switt (Robert Garrison) with muse Michael (Walter Slezak). DPs: Karl Freund & Rudolph Maté.
Considered one of the earliest positive cinematic depictions of (male) homosexuality, Carl Theodor Dreyer's Michael tells the story of lonely artist Zoret (director Benjamin Christensen), his bright young muse and model Michael (Walter Slezak), and the more mature art critic Switt (Robert Garrison). Though it's mostly suggested – there's a female temptress (Nora Gregor) assuming a heterosexual perspective – its motif of the spoken and unspoken relationship between the men is definitely one of love, much in the same way Charles Vidor's Gilda (1946) is.
“Now I may die content, for I have seen great love.”
– opening title card
Michael is the second book adaption of Herman Bang's Mikaël (1902) after Vingarne [The Wings] (Mauritz Stiller, 1916).
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Serpico (Sidney Lumet, 1973)
Jul
30
National Whistleblower Day
The cover of the Austrian film magazine “Neues Filmprogramm”. A red-filtered lobby card of Frank Serpico (Al Pacino) and his partner (F. Murray Abraham, uncredited) during police proceedings. DP: Arthur J. Ornitz.
In the late 1960s, Frank Serpico worked as a plainclothes cop for the #NYPD. He spoke out when he uncovered systematic, widespread #corruption within the force, but his findings were ignored. In 1970, Serpico cowrote a page 1 article for the New York Times about the problem, which led to the instalment of the Commission to Investigate Alleged Police Corruption aka the Knapp Commission.
“The reality is that we do not wash our own laundry; it just gets dirtier.”
– Frank Serpico
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Black Narcissus (Michael Powell + Emeric Pressburger, 1947)
Jul
29
National Lipstick Day
“Do you think it's a good thing to let her feel important?”
– Sister Clodagh
With Jack Cardiff's sweeping cinematography and #Technicolor splendour, Black Narcissus establishes a stark contrast between the Sisters dour piety, the luminance of the Himalayan landscape, and the spellbinding pull of worldly desire. The bewitching #lipstick scene, set in a dimly lit space, works as well as it does precisely because of the scene's photography. That red smear, like blood pulsating from a fresh wound, becomes a deeply unsettling, vulgar gesture.
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Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter [The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick] (Wim Wenders, 1972)
Jul
28
National Soccer Day
Trainer, reserve players and goalkeeper Bloch on the bench after the latter has been removed from the match. Bloch (Arthur Brauss) has his upper body turned away from the others' and sits with only half of his backside on the bench. DP: Robby Müller.
A lot of #soccer there's not, in Wim Wenders' Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter. What we do have happens almost right at the start. After a foul, the titular goalkeeper Bloch (Arthur Brauss) is removed from the match. Frustrated he leaves and finds himself roaming the streets of #Vienna where he picks up boxoffice girl Gloria (Erika Pluhar). In the morning he kills her and travels to the countryside, waiting for the police to arrest him.
“Ich werde mich entschlossen verirren.”
– Peter Handke
A very slow burning road movie, a Taxi Driver in reverse if you will, that doesn't suffer the neurotic showmanship of its Hollywood counterpart.
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Culloden [The Battle of Culloden] (Peter Watkins, 1964)
Jul
27
Bagpipe Appreciation Day
John Hunt Leigh in Culloden, pìobaireachd “ceòl mór” (litt. piping “great music”). DP: Dick Bush.
Great Highland #bagpipes, or a' phìob mhòr as they're called in Scottish Gaelic, are traditionally played on the battlefield. Peter Watkins' Culloden moves the senseless bloodshed from 1960s Vietnam to the Scottish Highlands of 1746.
“And wherever he went, he took with him his music, his poetry, his language and his children… thus within a century of Culloden, the English and the Scottish lowlanders had made secure forever their religion, their commerce, their culture, their ruling dynasty.”
– narrator