Celebrating human rights on Human Rights Day: the right to work

“Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.”

– Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations General Assembly

A Mauritanian immigrant (Robert Liensol) too starts anew in Paris. But first, he'll need a job.

World AIDS Day: conquering fear.

“J’ai mal, mais la douleur me rassure. Son souvenir me donne du plaisir.”

An uptight, white accountant in odds with himself, sees a Black masseur at a Turkish bathhouse. Antoine experiences a relieve – an atonement – through the pain, and forms a bond with the man. After an injury, Antoine must learn to come to terms with his fears. Based one Tennessee Williams' Desire and the Black Masseur (One Arm and Other Stories, 1948).

A heartfelt reunion scene*

“Oh, it's you.”

– Margaret Wheeler, welcoming the viewers to this curious retelling of her life's events

Through an unexplained muddle, the Wheeler and the Rylatt girls were mixed up at the maternity ward. One of the mothers, Mrs Wheeler, had a hunch something was off. Her girl was suspiciously long and skinny, unlike the one that was entrusted to her. Over the years and to Mrs Rylatt's increasing chagrin, Mrs Wheeler kept in touch with that woman from the maternity ward. And was proven to be correct. This film is one breezy yet tense reunion scene. Heartwarming, awkward, and – like all that's nostalgia – slightly surreal.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for November is, again, not date-based, but follows a sloppy schmaltzy all-American Thanksgiving-y narrative. Trying to make it work my way.

A bit – occasionally a lot – Greenaway without the room for interpretation. Lovely though and impossible to make in this overly self-aware selfie universe.

“The day they put jerks into orbit, you won't stop rotating soon!”

– Comissaire Joss, le Pacha

“Dead meat always attracts flies.”

– Monsieur Hire

A movie with gorgeous sweater fashion*

“She's a strange breed.”

– Jim

Throwing in a little Movember for good measure.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for November is, again, not date-based, but follows a sloppy schmaltzy all-American Thanksgiving-y narrative. Trying to make it work my way.

[A favourite] horror remake*

“I never thought I could be friends with a German again. But here I am… Werner is somehow like Murnau brought back to life.”

– Lotte Eisner visiting the set of Herzog's Nosferatu (via)

Coming back to Murnau's expressionist masterpiece was Herzog's bridge between the films made by the grandfathers of German cinema and his era. Herzog, born in 1942 Munich, noted this void created by that philistine regime and felt that, by picking up the thread cut a quarter of a century earlier, German culture could see a restoration to its (non-nationalistic) greatness. Thus a menagerie of rats and actors was released in a reluctant, bourgeois Dutch town.

 

But that's a story for another generation to draw upon.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.

A favourite horror film adapted from a book or short story*

“Everything in this masterpiece contributes to its unity: the absolute mastery of editing and rhythm; slow motion, superimpositions, tracking shots, the mobile camera all play their roles and never gratuitously. The photographic quality, worthy of the most learned German operators, the lighting of the sets which envelops them in mystery, the sets themselves, neither realistic nor stylized, but as if sketched; the acting neither realistic nor expressionist, and yet adapted to the fantastic, to the violence; to the pauses; to the blur.”

– Henri Langlois, via

A groundbreaking expressionist interpretation of Poe's inner horrors. Many of the tropes so common in later horror films, are fully fledged and present here.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for October is horror-themed as opposed to date-based, and is all about favourites. Expect non-horror and films I believe to be relevant instead.