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.

A wasteful act: Crispus Attucks, (arguably) the first American victim in the American Revolution, dies on March 5^th, 1770.

“She's always happy. She desires nothing, envies no one, is curious about nothing. You can't surprise her. She doesn't notice the humiliations, though they happen to her every day. It all rolls off her back like some waterproof material. Zero ambition. No moral code. Not even a whore's love of money.”

– The Writer

An ambitious but aimless girl – she wants to be loved, and to be a model, a proto-Edie – mills about her day.

 

Sublimely shot, we see Adriana through glass panes, in reflections, in an off-focal plane, in other people's words.

Imaginary animals or food for Theodor “Dr.” Seuss Geisel's birthday (1904).

“I like the settings where the lights and desire cross path. The desire to communicate with the invisibles in the darkness, or in memory, or in the future. It's always related to cinema and we as insects that are drawn to lights.”

– Apichatpong Weerasethakul, via

Villagers in the north of Thailand reported a rare sighting of a male and female Nok Phii, an elusive species of bird that feeds on animals' blood. It is unknown if the sighting was reliable, and if this vampire does, or ever did, exist.

A film about communism to commemorate the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact on February 25, 1991.

“Alexandre Ivanovitch Medvedkine est le seul cinéaste russe né en 1900. (…) Son énergie, son courage, ses illusions, ses désillusions, ses compromissions, ses bagarres avec les bureaucrates, ses illuminations prophétiques, ses aveuglements, volontaires ou non, son humour indestructible et la lumière déchirante que l’effondrement de l’URSS jette rétrospectivement sur toute sa vie, ce sont ceux de toute une génération, et c’est le portrait de cette génération que j’entends tracer à travers le portrait d’un ami.”

– press kit (via)

A film essay using the life and work of filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin to tell the story of communism. Medvedkin traveled the Soviet Union with his Kinopoezd or Cinetrain (also Agit-train), a moving film production train with the sole purpose to create Agitprop while documenting the Five Year Plan.

– Why are we making pancakes?

– Monsieur likes them. Besides, what else is there?

People eat dinner together on No One Eats Alone Day*.

“My God. What am I doing in this place?”

– Henri Sénéchal

The bourgeoisie meet for dinner in various settings, but never consume.

 

* this event takes place on the Friday of the second full week in February, which makes the 2025 date February 14.

A film about friendship for Jennifer Anniston's birthday (1969).

 

1960. Michel is due to leave for Algeria to serve in the Algerian War. Juliette and Liliane are best friends as inseparable as “Filipino almonds”(?). When they meet, the girls decide to join Michel on his final vacation, on Corsica.

Books, or art, in commemoration of Savonarola's 1497 Florentine falò delle vanità (bonfire of the vanities).

“I used to spend afternoons reading in bed. Tommaso would call and find me there. He could have kissed me. I wouldn't have resisted, out of boredom. But he was satisfied to watch me as I read. All those purposeless books.”

– Lidia

A lavish #CocktailParty in celebration of the launch of a novel is bookended by tragedy, in the loss of a befriended writer and the unraveling of another writer and his wife's marriage.