Category Archives: Video

Saturday Matinee: Le Orme (aka Footprints on the Moon)

Posted on by
Reply

From Archive.org:

“Le Orme” (a/k/a “Footprints on the Moon” and “Primal
Impulse”) has been described variously as an Italian giallo, a sci-fi film, a
mystery, or a psychological thriller. Ultimately, it defies pigeonholing.

It stars Florinda Bolkan as Alice Cespi, a professional
translator, who is tormented by a recurring nightmare; in it, a lunar-landing
team deliberately abandons a colleague on the moon’s surface as part of a scientific
experiment.

Alice arrives for work one day and is summarily canned. The
reason? She’d walked out of an international astronomy conference and disappeared
for three days, incommunicado.

Those three days are a complete blank for her. Alice finds a
few vague clues — a torn postcard from Garma, a resort she’s never visited; an
earring, a unfamiliar bloody yellow dress that fits her perfectly — and sets out
to learn what has happened.

When she arrives in Garma, all of the strangers are
delighted to see her “again” — but claim that she’s another person entirely. And that’s
just the beginning…

Although the storytelling in “Le Orme” is fairly linear, it’s also disorienting — so you’ll
have to pay attention to it. There are blind alleys, red herrings and
(possibly) misleading implications throughout.

Cast includes Bolkan, Peter McEnery, Nicoletta Elmi, and a cameo by Klaus Kinski.

Titles and credits are in Italian, but all dialogue is in English.

Saturday Matinee: The President’s Analyst

Posted on by
Reply

“The President’s Analyst” (1967) is a political satire written and directed by Ted Flicker. James Coburn stars as Dr. Sidney Schaefer, a psychiatrist recruited by the U.S. government to serve as the president’s private psychoanalyst. Overwhelmed by stress and paranoia, he goes on the lam and is promptly hunted down by foreign and domestic intelligence agents as a pawn in a technocratic plot to control the world. The film’s comedic sensibility is at times dated but features themes which are even more relevant today such as the conflict between power and ethics, transhumanist aspirations of Big Data corporations, the ever-encroaching surveillance state and resultant loss of privacy.

Watch the full film here.

Saturday Matinee: The Constant Gardner

Posted on by
Reply

“The Constant Gardner” (2005) is a conspiracy thriller directed by Fernando Meirelles (City of God) with a screenplay based on a John le Carré novel of the same name. Loosely based on a actual incident in Nigeria, the plot follows Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), a British diplomat based in Kenya who while investigating the death of his activist wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz), uncovers criminal activities of a Big Pharma corporation with connections to the highest levels of power.

Saturday Matinee: Tomato Is Another Day

Posted on by
Reply

Un(der)seen Cinema: Tomato Is Another Day

By TNI AV

Source: The New Inquiry

James Sibley Watson, doctor and Western Union heir, will be famous to some as publisher and president of The Dial, the literary magazine which, more than any other publication, brought Modernism to America. Under Watson’s patronage, the magazine was the first to publish T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land stateside, brought the work of Picasso, Munch, Chagall and many others to a major American audience for the first time, and regularly featured D.H Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, Bertrand Russell, John Dos Passos, etc. etc.

To others, Watson will be known for directing The Fall of the House of Usher and Lot in Sodom, important early works in the American Avant-Garde. Heavily influenced by the poetic theories of Ezra Pound and E.E Cummings (Cummings worked with Watson on treatments for Usher) and the cinematic innovations of German Expressionism and Jean Cocteau, these films are literary, hallucinatory and often nightmarish experiments in film language and the unconscious.

We here at A/V, however, prefer his even less well known Tomato is Another Day, which strikes us as an unparalleled bit of Dadaist pranksterdom and parody whose pun-heavy critique of Hollywood writing and directing styles, at six and a half minutes long and eighty-two years old, still resonates more forcefully and hilariously then most that have followed.