Two recent limited editions from Second Sight approach horror from very different angles – classic Hammer Gothic in Terence Fisher’s Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974), and contemporary Right-wing violence in Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room (2015).
Part eight of my review of what I saw at the Fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival covers my introduction to the great Greek filmmaker Theodoros Angelopoulos, who addresses the fraught political history of 20th Century Greece in four thematically rich and visually stunning features made between 1972 and 1980.
In this, the longest section of my notes from the Fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival, I cover the English-language films from Britain, Australia and the U.S., which include documentaries, mainstream movies, films about sexuality and toxic chauvinism, class conflict and ennui.
Part six of my review of what I saw at the Fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival covers a handful of Eastern European films which range across history and politics and into fantasy.
The second instalment of my review of what I saw at the Fifth Hong Kong International Film Festival in 1981 covers films from Thailand, Turkey, China, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Criterion’s two-disk Blu-ray release of Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil (1964) not only presents and impressive restoration of a key film in Brazilian cinema; it anchor’s an impressive survey of the Cinema Novo movement which transformed that cinema in the early 1960s, with two feature-length documentaries – on Rocha himself and the larger movement – a commentary by the film’s restoration supervisor, and a 1964 documentary about the cangaceiro outlaws who formed a crucial element in the background of Rocha’s feature.
Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba (1964) uses the striking cinematography of Sergei Urusevsky to create a fever dream version of the Cuban Revolution, a series of archetypal moments of oppression and resistance leading to an ecstatic explosion of justified communal violence. Filled with heightened emotions rendered in breathtaking images and seemingly impossible camera movements, the film looks gorgeous in a 4K restoration on Criterion’s Blu-ray.
Thrillers may exploit real-world issues for story material, but often distort and trivialize reality in their quest to entertain. The terrorism which erupted and spread during the 1970s is used in quite different ways in Otto Preminger’s Rosebud (1975), John Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday (1976) and Andrew V. McLaglen’s North Sea Hijack (1980).
Three recent releases blend reality and fiction to explore political themes, with varying success. Alain Jessua’s Les Chiens (1978) is an allegory of Fascism, while Jean-Claude Lord’s Mindfield (1989) and Jayro Bustamante’s La llorona (2019) are both rooted in real crimes, the former turning history into pulp entertainment, the latter into a haunting exploration of national trauma.
With their fourth set of World Cinema Project restorations, Criterion again present a fascinating collection of films from different periods and different cultures: two features from post-colonial Africa which illuminate the complex effects of tradition distorted by colonial influences; a South American movie which also deals with colonialism and the exploitation of labour; a pre-war Hungarian feature about two women struggling to survive in a city towards the end of the Depression; an Indian film exploring myth and the politics of Independence and partition through music and dance; and a pre-revolutionary film from Iran which uses melodrama as a metaphor for the nation’s transition from feudalism to modernity.