– 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.

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.

 

El lugar sin límites harks back to those days. We follow the plight of La Manuela, a transvestite* who together with daughter La Japonesita works as a fichera (a dancehall performer) in the brothel run by Madame La Japonesa, La Japonesita's mother.

 

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.

 

Sergio de la Mora's excellently researched EL LUGAR SIN LÍMITES: Ripstein in Review delves much deeper than this little writeup here. Do read it (spoilers ahead).

 

*Roberto Cobo's La Manuela is transsexual. The term “transvestite” is what's used in the film and typical for its time.

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.

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.

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).

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

The following year during a drug-related arrest attempt, he was shot in the face under shady circumstances. This is where Sidney Lumet's Serpico, based on Peter Maas and Frank Serpico's book of the same name, starts.

High up in the Himalayas, Christian nuns attempt to found a school and hospital in a Raja's former palace. The palace, decorated with ancient erotic murals and run by the attractive Englishman Mr Dean, becomes an increasingly impossible to resist source of secular lust for the chaste Sisters.

“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.

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

Die Angst is an early, perfect example of Junger Deutscher Film (”New German Cinema”). Its cinematic thanks to Robby Müller's observant eye and Peter Handke's precise language, both describing scenes and performers as if observed through a fourth wall.

 

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.

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

The most clearly it's seen in the men's eyes. That stare we recognise all too well from the many images that reached the west in the 60s, ever before and after.