This is the 1951 film of Menotti’s opera about a fake medium who starts to feel real supernatural presences. Beautifully filmed and sung (in English)
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/4B1AB961700146D/Medium%2C_The_%281951%29.avi
The print is quite good, not perfect, but enjoyable enough.
Language(s):English
Subtitles:None
“Ce film n’est pas l’illustration d’un récit historique ou d’une pièce de théâtre mais il est structuré par sa dynamique propre et trois éléments basiques: la lumière, la couleur et la vitesse de projection. Par leur interaction il vise le regard du spectateur.
Le film propose un questionnement sur:
1) ce qu’il génère c’est-à-dire sa propre histoire;
2) l’imaginaire du spectateur et son regard;
3) le seul dehors questionné: le devenir de l’image qui est sa seule possibilité d’être. (…)
La musique utilisée n’illustre pas le film, mais elle propose un contrepoint à l’image et développe un parcours parallèle, parcours qui trouve par moments les points de suture, qui sont des cristallisations de chaînes de motivations provoquant et montrant la possibilité infinie d’interprétations d’une image.(…)”
LINK
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/AB982CC70E0CB33/SALOME.mkv
Language(s):No dialogue
Subtitles:None
London Road documents the events of 2006, when the quiet rural town of Ipswich was shattered by the discovery of the bodies of five women. The residents of London Road had struggled for years with frequent soliciting and kerb-crawling on their street. When a local resident was charged and then convicted of the murders, the community grappled with what it meant to be at the epicentre of this tragedy.
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/A7D06B79D033C8B/London.Road.2015.FESTiVAL.DVDRiP.X264-TASTE.mkv
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/495EC84CBC14676/london.road.2015.festival.dvdrip.x264-taste.idx
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/92D628DE0BA6FCA/london.road.2015.festival.dvdrip.x264-taste.sub
Language(s):English
Subtitles:English
Synopsis:
As the title suggests, this dramatised documentary about the eccentric Canadian pianist Glenn Gould is broken up into thirty-two short films (mirroring the thirty-two part structure of Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’, the recording that Gould made famous), each giving us an insight into some aspect of Gould’s life and career. Out of respect for the music lead actor Colm Feore is never seen playing the piano, merely reacting to Gould’s own recordings, which are extensively featured
Review:
In the control room of a recording studio, the engineers discuss the merits of taking cream in their coffee, only half-noticing the enraptured figure behind the soundproof glass. There, Glenn Gould (Colm Feore) begins by casually testing his blood pressure, then listens to a playback of his recording of Bach. To the sounds of the English Suite No. 2, he begins swaying and floating in the throes of esthetic ecstasy, his white shirt billowing in gravity-defying slow motion. Far removed from the engineers’ prosaic talk, he seems truly to have passed into another dimension.
The audience for “Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould,” a brilliant and transfixing cinematic portrait by Francois Girard, can look forward to enjoying much the same sensation. For an hour and a half, without repeating himself or resorting to tactics that are even slightly familiar, Mr. Girard, whose film opens today at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, thoughtfully holds the viewer in thrall.
Though it glancingly incorporates a great deal of biographical information, this carefully measured film does not choose to describe Gould in ordinary terms. Suffused as it is with the artist’s musical sensibility, it doesn’t even have to show him playing the piano. Instead, Mr. Girard explores and replicates his subject’s eccentric thought processes in a remarkably visceral way, drawing the audience palpably into Gould’s state of mind. This film works hypnotically, with great subtlety and grace, in ways that are gratifyingly consistent with Gould’s own thoughts about his music and his life.
Mr. Girard’s film is indeed a compilation of 32 glimpses, each of them instantly intelligible, some of them strung together in supremely delicate ways. The format makes dependable sense: this is hardly the first time the variations motif has been brought to bear in describing Gould. More than an homage to his triumphant recordings of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, this multifaceted structure seems the only possible means of approaching such a complex individual. If it sounds defiantly arty, that suits the subject and his “academic owlishness” (in the words of his biographer Otto Friedrich) perfectly. If it sounds obscure and daunting, it most certainly is not.
If anything, “Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould” should prove even more mesmerizing to those who know little about Gould’s life than to those aware that he really did have tastes for ketchup, tranquilizers, arrowroot cookies and Petula Clark (not necessarily in that order). In its own quirky way, it assembles a surprisingly rigorous and illuminating portrait of the man. Defying any usual constraints of narrative or chronology, Mr. Girard can leap freely from Gould’s boyhood to his mature work, from the hotel room to the concert stage, from the raptures of the music to silly questions asked by the press. The individual fragments are so meticulously realized that the whole becomes much greater than the sum of its parts.
Typically fascinating is “L.A. Concert,” a fine example of how cannily Mr. Girard can present the facts of Gould’s life. We first see the pianist backstage, poised over a sink, soaking his arms in steaming water five minutes before a concert is to begin. Pill bottles are conspicuously arrayed in front of him. Called to the stage, he next appears dressed and ready, maintaining a serene detachment as an aide tries to instruct him about the irritating show-business realities of the evening. Just before reaching the stage, he pauses to talk with a stagehand and winds up signing a program for the man. Only when the stagehand examines the autograph does he learn that Mr. Gould has decided to make this 1964 concert performance his last.
It would be difficult to think of a more adroit, economical way to convey all this information in a such relatively brief time. “Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould,” which was written by Mr. Girard with Don McKellar, is also able to fuse the informative with the poetic, particularly in the passages that deal hauntingly with Gould’s final days. (He died at 50, in 1982.) One of the film’s last images is of a Voyager satellite that went into space carrying aural souvenirs of Earth’s culture, including Gould’s recording of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier.” The film’s announcement that the two Voyager spacecraft left our solar system in 1987 and 1989, respectively, suits its lingering impression that Gould was never quite of this world.
Mr. Feore, a Canadian stage actor, does not overwhelmingly resemble Gould, but he becomes a commanding and believable presence all the same. With a voice that has been made to sound strangely disembodied, and with the ability to project brooding, playful intelligence, Mr. Feore enhances the film’s sense of deep mystery. Equally lulling and seductive are Mr. Girard’s fluid camera movements, which enable the film to prowl and survey with uncommon ease. In the end, his methods induce a complete and satisfying immersion into his many-faceted subject.
Among the individual glimpses that must be mentioned here: “Practice,” in which Gould resonates to his own thrilling impression of Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata without ever touching a keyboard; “Truck Stop,” in which he hears and seems to orchestrate the voices of people around him; “Personal Ad,” in which he toys with the language of the lovelorn, then chuckles at the thought of ever representing himself in that way; “Diary of One Day,” a stunning compilation of formulas, medical notations, heartbeats and detailed X-rays of a person playing the piano. Even before the film reaches this last juncture, you will know that the heart and blood of the pianist have been captured on screen.
Also worth noting: some significant omissions. Mr. Girard knew better than to mention Gould’s intense admiration for Barbra Streisand, or to use those sections of the “Goldberg” Variations that have powerfully evoked Dr. Hannibal Lecter ever since they were used to shocking effect in “The Silence of the Lambs.”
— JANET MASLIN (New York Times )
https://filejoker.net/xkrjekuvgu28/Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) — Francois Girard.mkv
https://filejoker.net/3ky66a9235a7/Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) — Francois Girard.srt
http://nitroflare.com/view/0A0A92D8FE9F3CE/Thirty_Two_Short_Films_About_Glenn_Gould_%281993%29_–_Francois_Girard.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/22BE5B311B135FB/Thirty_Two_Short_Films_About_Glenn_Gould_%281993%29_–_Francois_Girard.srt
Language(s):English, French
Subtitles:English (muxed, srt)
Do you like rare things?
Low-budget but striking film version of TS Eliot’s revolutionary work.
How much we would like to have the film!, 1 March 2007
Author: Dr Jacques COULARDEAU from Olliergues, France
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
This concerns the only public artifact connected to the film, the book entitled “The film Murder in the Cathedral” The film itself, by T.S. Eliot and Hoellering is not available. A copy exists in the archives of the British Film Institute but it does not seem easy to get to it. What a shame for a cult play like « Murder in the Cathedral » ! The book presents the complete scenario with of course the text and all the directions necessary to imagine what is happening on the screen. Plus a great number of illustrations taken from the film, which gives us a sample of the atmosphere on the screen. And that makes this book really beautiful, like an art book of kinds. But we are altogether reduced to analyzing the script and comparing it with the play itself. A short introduction (in the film of course) is added to explain the audience the political situation at the moment when Thomas Becket comes back to Canterbury after a seven years’ exile. Then there will be little change in the text till the end and the come-back of the knights after the killing. In fact in the film they don’t come back but are confronted to a hostile crowd arriving in the cathedral. They have to explain themselves to save their skin. These explanations are a lot shorter and situationally directed at the crowd. Yet at the very end the tone will change with the changing of the target which becomes the audience today, eight hundred years after the event, which was the original target and tone in the play. The shortening of this section does not take too much out because in fact this section in the play is kind of a play in the play and has no dramatic justification on the stage. The purpose of this scene seems to be in the play the desire to name the four knights and the desire to alleviate their crime by a sound historical explanation that heavily burdens Thomas Becket with unsound political and religious judgment. Just after that the intervention of the priests is cut off and we get directly to the concluding Chorus. The most significant changes come in the various choruses. I will quote the chorus after the intervention of the four tempters. A first chorus is attributed to a priest in the film and then the chorus of the four tempters is split among these and that changes the meaning of the fourth tempter who is no longer a tempter but becomes very precisely the guardian angel Thomas Becket refers to at this moment, and clearly this guardian angel has advised Thomas Becket to keep along an unyielding line and hence to become a martyr. So, Becket’s refusal when that tempter was tempting him is only cosmetic. Clearly then his attitude will be to provoke violence and be submissive to it. It sure is self-murder (to use the word in the German operatic adaptation), or plainly suicide. But we will note that the film makes the identity of this fourth tempter very clear and yet it cuts off the reference to « suicide while of unsound mind » that is contained in the play in the mouth of one of the knights. This splitting of choruses into their members enables the film to clearly demonstrate the existence of four knights, which is not at all clear in the play where you often have only three knights speaking together. In the film, systematically, the four are stated as speaking one after another or together. The splitting of the women’s chorus after the first discussion between Thomas Becket and the knights is interesting because of the numerical symbolism we should analyze in depth in the whole play, or film. 1st woman – 2nd w. – Chorus (prose) – 3rd w. – 4th w. – 5th w. – 6th w. – 7th w. – 8th w. – 3rd w. – 9th w. – 10th w. – Chorus (8 lines) – 4th w. – 11th w. – Chorus (6 lines) – 10th w. – Chorus (prose). Without entering more details here (every single one of the numbers used to list the women is meaningful in Christian symbology, both in number and rank), it seems very clear that such elements reinforce greatly what we can find in a few strategic places in the play, such has the final quatrain : the crossing of three symbolism (at least), viz. Solomon’s number or David’s star (3 + 3 = 6), the trinity in all its values (christian, but also the basic disruptive element in the English tradition going back to the Elizabethans and the iambic pattern of English poetry), but also the simple, neutral, balanced binary element that gets into various associations and various values : 2 + 2 = 4 and Christ in his Passion and on his cross, hence the martyr ; 2 + 2 + 2 = 6 and we are back to Solomon’s number, but seen from a binary standpoint ; 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 8 and the Christ in his glory of the Resurrection and the Second Coming, hence the martyr in glory after his death, and seven, here and there, as the holy week, the week of the passion, and once again the reference to martyrdom as suffering and glory at the same time since the glory comes within the suffering and from the suffering. When we see how the text of the film has been reworked upon to increase these symbolical elements we regret even more than before the absence of the film itself.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
http://nitroflare.com/view/D2AD9073CFC3DFE/murderinthecathedral.avi
https://filejoker.net/vvuliioqc6ou/murderinthecathedral.avi
Language(s):English
Subtitles:none
Oh man, this is a gem. Highly recommended if you dig Tenjosajiki/Terayama’s musical numbers. For starters, take a peek at this lineup:
Lyrics composed by Terayama Shuji
Music composed by J.A. Seazer, Panta, Fukamachi Jun…
Performed by Zunou Keisatsu (Brain Police, far left political rock band, Les Rallizes Denudes’ Hiroshi Nar was a member at one time), Tanaka Seiji
Terayama Shuji’s slightly…dark? interpretations of the fables, mixed with the absolutely wonderful composition and experimental, theatrical vocals/instrumentation…it’s a surreal journey.
1. 骨つき肉のはなし
2. いじわる猫
3. 悪口唄
4. とべなかったカメ
5. 猫が来た
6. 月夜のイタチ
7. 大きな豚と小さな豚
8. 川に溺れた子ヒツジ
9. キツネ火事
10. アリとキリギリス
01 Prologue, The Story of Meat.mp3 4MB
02 The Nasty Cat.mp3 9MB
03 Singing Smack.mp3 5MB
04 The Turtle That Couldn’t Fly.mp3 7MB
05 The Cat’s Coming.mp3 6MB
06 Weasel on a Moonlit Night.mp3 8MB
07 The Large Pig and The Small Pig.mp3 8MB
08 Lamb That Drowned in the River.mp3 5MB
09 Foxfire.mp3 7MB
10 And and a Grasshopper.mp3 7MB
11 Untitled.mp3 9MB
12 Untitled.mp3 4MB
http://nitroflare.com/view/11334D105D1D36A/Terayama_Shuji_-_1973_-_Aesop%27s_Fables.rar
https://filejoker.net/5vm4f9zhemb4/Terayama Shuji – 1973 – Aesop’s Fables.rar
no pass
In this Andre Gide adaptation, an activist (Ali Mahrez) is released after many years in prison and returns home, shaking up established relationships among his family members at the farm governed by his strict father. Demonstrating Chahine’s eclecticism, this is an elegant melodrama, exuberant musical, layered allegory, and profound portrait of personal and political disillusionment. This is one of Chahine’s best movies and one of the greatest Arabic films. Great performances by Mahmoud El-Meliguy and Hoda Soltan.
http://nitroflare.com/view/8963C9128AC411B/The_Return_of_the_Prodigal_Son_%281976%29.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/4538A9F9340E7C7/Awdat_al_ibn_al_dal_AKA_The_Return_of_the_Prodigal_Son_%281976%29.srt
Language(s):Arabic
Subtitles:English
Quote:
In an impoverished refugee village in Calcutta, an attractive and industrious young woman, Nita (Supriya Choudhury), breaks a sandal while passing through the market square, and without complaining, continues barefoot on the graveled street, unable to buy a replacement pair of sandals for the walk home. Patently aware that Nita has received her monthly salary, her talented, but indolent older brother Shankar (Anil Chatterjee) pays an unexpected visit, and encountering Nita absorbed in reading a personal letter from a suitor named Sanat (Niranjan Ray), playfully snatches the note and reads aloud its affectionate contents, before asking her for spending money. Meanwhile her younger sister, Gita (Gita Ghatak) and brother Mantu (Dwiju Bhawal) brazenly plead with their desperate and resourceless mother (Gita De) for new articles of clothing, before re-directing their vain and selfish entreaties to Nita. Having spent her entire salary on her burdensome, coddled siblings, her embittered and insecure mother then vociferously complains to her father (Bijon Bhattacharya), an underemployed school teacher, that Nita has squandered the monthly household budget. Bound by a selfless sense of familial duty, Nita has decided to postpone her marriage to Sanat until Shankar realizes his ambition to become a classical singer. However, as Nita perseveres in her sacrifice for her ungrateful and demanding family, her own prospects for happiness proves ever increasingly bleak.
Ritwik Ghatak presents a visually sublime, idiosyncratically overripe, but provocative and deeply personal account of poverty, disillusionment, and exile in The Cloud-Capped Star. By interplaying light and shadows and incorporating evocative, aggressive sounds that underscore emotional impact and comedic tone, Ghatak creates a unique, sensorial experience that chronicles the systematic demoralization of the human soul: the surreal, foreboding shot of Nita descending a staircase after she is compelled to leave her studies in order to support the family; the overemphasized sounds of cooking as the mother spies on Nita and Sanat that aurally conveys her anger and fear at losing their primary source of income; the contrasted image of Nita – first, illuminated in front of a latticed window as she reads Sanat’s letter and later, concealed behind the window after Shankar’s return; the sound of lashing as Nita and Shankar sing a melancholic Rabindranath Tagore song (evoking Raskolnikov’s dream on burden and responsibility in Fyodor Doestoevsky’s Crime and Punishment). An allegory for the traumatic consequences of the partition of Bengal, The Cloud-Capped Star captures the disintegration of a Bengali middle class family as a result of dislocation, poverty, self-interest, and petty, internal division. Note the repeated imagery of a passing train bisecting the horizon that alludes to the physical division of the family’s ancestral homeland. Inevitably, as Nita attempts to recuperate from the ravages of self-denial, want, and exploitation, her cry of anguish becomes an indistinguishable, resonant echo from the lost and irredeemable soul of a displaced and uprooted people.
http://nitroflare.com/view/3FEE176CD2260DD/Ritwik_Ghatak_-_%281990%29_The_Cloud-Caped_Star.mkv
Language(s):Bengali
Subtitles:English
Quote:
If there was one feature that lived up to its title in Berlin this year, it’s Bizarre, French director Etienne Faure’s squiggle of a film about a directionless and taciturn French teenager — with the prerequisite pout, hard abs and studiedly nonchalant way of always being semi-disrobed — who finds refuge in a Bushwick burlesque bar run by two girlfriends who are into (rather explicit) sex with other guys. Often indeed too bizarre for words, this collection of sounds and images in desperate need of a plot, or even just some recognizable human behavior, will appeal to that shady part of the queer market where young cuties plus the promise of nudity are enough for at least some VOD and DVD sales.
Even before the film really gets going, Maurice (Pierre Prieur, fresh out of high school when this was filmed), informs the audience that he was asked by the director to do his voice-over in English even though he’s from France. A broodingly attractive Frenchie in search of a home and a backstory, Maurice finds at least the former when he’s adopted by one half of a female couple (Rebekah Underhill) who run the titular burlesque bar in Brooklyn, though why and how exactly he’s taken under their wings remains something of a mystery, as the film shows their first, apparently random encounter on a subway platform with all the dialogue drowned out by the noise of the passing trains.
Indeed, it’s never clear what pushes the young woman to walk up to that random stranger, perhaps compliment him on his top-notch moping skills, and then inquire if he happens to be homeless and is looking for a job and whether he’d want to get his cute French hands dirty in her bar’s dishwater, wants to move into her place over the bar and occasionally sleep in her and her girlfriend’s (Raquel Nave) bed, which of course has a no-underwear-allowed rule (one assumes to get the most out of those no-doubt expensive, high-thread-count, Egyptian-cotton sheets).
But logic is not this film’s strong suit and Maurice thus moves in and soon finds his own bed in the guest room invaded by his colleague, Luka (Adrian James, who looks like Keira Knightley’s elfin brother), who forgets his keys at his own apartment one day and then inexplicably ends up sleeping in Maurice’s bed for all subsequent nights (if he Airbnb’d out his own room in the meantime, the movie never shows it). Luka’s clearly into Maurice, who’s either the world’s biggest cocktease or frustratingly ambivalent about his sexuality and unwilling to experiment, telling his bedmate he has to face away from him so he can’t see the Frenchman’s moue when they’re in bed. Indeed, the rather particular rules of bedroom and bedtime etiquette in this Brooklyn apartment, which almost approaches that of the infamous Red Room from Fifty Shades of Grey, is the only thing in the film that could be qualified as “complex”.
Much to Luka’s frustration, Maurice has a very flirty rapport with Charlie (Charlie Himmelstein), a boxer friend and sex fiend who’s straight but concedes he’ll do anything that moves — cue Luka’s confession that he moves, Maurice’s subsequent scene of jealousy, which goes nowhere, and Charlie’s willingness to stir the pot even further by then sleeping with the girls running the bar.
The problem of Bizarre is that it’s all much too loose-limbed to amount to anything. Its apparent desire to be non-committal to a specific character, storyline or idea means it ends up being about nothing at all. It’s not a portrait of a sexually liberated, makeshift band of outsiders, because the film insists on remaining entirely indecisive about Maurice’s own sexuality and, for all its gay and queer characters, has a strange double standard in that the only explicit act of copulation involves three supporting characters, Charlie and the girls, involved mainly in heterosexual practices. But neither is it a thriller about a young man haunted by his shady past, despite the fact Maurice carries a symbolic knife around at all times; is clearly scared of a louche customer (Luc Bierme) equally devoid of a backstory and despite the film’s last reel, in which whatever goodwill the essentially unreadable Maurice character had built up with the audience will evaporate because his acts become both brutal and senseless.
At least the performances have a kind of hard-edged steeliness to them that avoids them from becoming too wooden, though scenes of Maurice walking down the street, filmed from behind as if Brooklyn where a kind of pimped-up hipster version of the Dardenne brothers’ Seraing, take up way too much running time. Some of the occasionally outre burlesque routines, of which there are also way too many, are pretty good but none of them are even vaguely tied into the plot, despite the fact there are acts featuring Luka in drag or a half-naked, blindfolded Maurice who allows himself to be kissed by strangers for money (if ever a scene could potentially comment on Maurice’s ambivalence about being loved, this is it).
The film’s sound mix isn’t always entirely clean and Faure relies too often on musical montages or the absence of audible dialogues to introduce major characters, practically denying them an entrance that would at least partially explain who they are. Production design and cinematography, by Faure’s partner, Stephane Gizard, and Paris-based Serbian d.o.p. Pavle Savic, respectively, are bohemian on a budget.
http://nitroflare.com/view/2814E52F3148635/Etienne_Faure_-_%282015%29_Bizarre.mkv
Language(s):English
Subtitles:None
Werner Schroeter’s rhapsody of excess leaps from 1949 Cuba to contemporary France to points in between, while its feverishly shifting visual style evokes and parodies everything from kitschy Mexican telenovelas to silent French art films.
Film en quatre épisodes : Cuba, Drame du rail, Coeur brisé et La Trahison. Dans Flocons d’or, qui traite de la mort, l’héroine Montezuma est l’épouse française d’un gros propriétaire terrien qui se droque. L’action se déroule à Cuba vers la fin des années 40. Des quatre épisodes du film, un seul comporte une ironique lueur d’espoir.
FOR TECHNICAL REASONS, THE FILM IS SPLIT IN 2 FILES. THERE’S AN INTERRUPTION ANYWAY SO…
http://nitroflare.com/view/DA9947CC9009D8E/part_1.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/405361008F41C78/part_2.mkv
https://uploadgig.com/file/download/b1d7ca276061f9be/part 1.mkv
https://uploadgig.com/file/download/C6d35d9e3082Be34/part 2.mkv
Language(s):French, German, Italian (1 track)
Subtitles:German for non-German parts (hard)
The artists list on this DVD reads like a Who’s Who of the best international jazz musicians of all times. It features Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins — musicians whose names have become synonymous with the great Jazz Age in the 1950s and 60s. With Carlos Santana, Cassandra Wilson and André Previn and jazz experts like Joachim Ernst Berendt and Bertrand Tavernier, the list of interviewees and artists on this DVD becomes encyclopaedic. But how many people have heard of Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff, to whom we owe the recorded memory of our Jazz legends? These two Jewish Germans emigrated from Nazi Germany to New York in 1939 and promoted Jazz Music, which at the time had received little serious attention from mainstream America. Without money or connections and speaking little English, the two men began to record practically unknown musicians, following their own taste and judgement, and thus establishing the legendary Blue Note label.
“Blue Note – A Story of Modern Jazz” tells the story of Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, of a friendship in exile and of uncompromising artistic excellence. Told by the musicians, by friends, associates and fans of the Blue Note recordings from all walks of life, the film recreates an era of American cultural history. Directed by German filmmaker Julian Benedikt, it was the most successful movie about jazz ever to hit the worldwide cinemas. This testimony to the passion and vision of two men, interspersed with concert recordings and rarely seen archival footage, swings like the propulsive sounds that made their label so famous — a great music film!
Language(s):English
Subtitles:English Spanish French German
Synopsis:
Richard Wagner’s last opera has remained controversial since its first performance for its unique, and, for some, unsavory blending of religious and erotic themes and imagery. Based on one of the medieval epic romances of King Arthur and the search for the holy grail (the chalice touched by the lips of Christ at the last supper), it recounts over three long acts how a “wild child” unwittingly invades the sacred precincts of the grail, fulfilling a prophecy that only such a one can save the grail’s protectors from a curse fallen upon them. Interpreters of the work have found everything from mystical revelation to proto-fascist propaganda in it.Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s production doesn’t avoid either aspect, but tries synthesize them by seeking their roots in the divided soul of Wagner himself. The action unfolds on a craggy landscape which turns out to be a gigantic enlargement of the composer’s death mask, among deliberately tatty theatrical devices: puppets, scale models, magic-lantern projections. The eponymous hero is sung by the specified tenor voice (Reiner Goldberg) but mimed on screen by a male and a female performer alternately, reflecting what the director takes to be the creator’s own sexual conflicts. Syberberg’s pacing, dictated by the majestic pace of Wagner’s score, is slow, but enlivened by constant subtle shifts in point of view, and memorable performances by actress Edith Clever as the villainess/heroine Kundry (sung by Yvonne Minton), orchestra conductor Armin Jordan as the remorseful knight Amfortas (sung by Wolfgang Schoene), and Robert Lloyd (the faithful retainer Gurnemanz).
— Roger Downey (IMDb)
Part 1:
Part 2:
Review:
Set in medieval times, around the temple of the Holy Grail, Parsifal offers its director more than just the possibility of interpreting Wagner’s seductive last opera. He reduces the central Christian theme and refocuses it on a decaying Europe, while simultaneously confronting past with present, myth with reality, the rational with the romantic. Filmed exclusively within a studio – a practice which Syberberg has practically reinvented – it’s all staged within a gigantic set of Wagner’s death mask, with constantly shifting projected backgrounds. Among a mixed cast of actors and singers, Edith Clever gives a particularly impressive expressionist performance as Kundry (sung by Yvonne Minton). Wagner, as the most radical dramatist of his age, is matched by Syberberg’s vision, confirming that he is one of the most visually distinctive film-makers of his time. Continually surprising, provocative, probably infuriating for purists, Parsifal is compulsive viewing for both music and movie enthusiasts.
— TimeOut
http://nitroflare.com/view/375D039186DC969/Parsifal_%281983%29_–_Hans-Jurgen_Syberberg_%28Part_1%29.mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/B82123D4E4E3D41/Parsifal_%281983%29_–_Hans-Jurgen_Syberberg_%28Part_2%29.mkv
https://uploadgig.com/file/download/0a2b8e5AE2b7dC83/Parsifal 1983 — Hans-Jurgen Syberberg Part 1.mkv
https://uploadgig.com/file/download/f24d3Eb21e1dc8C8/Parsifal 1983 — Hans-Jurgen Syberberg Part 2.mkv
Language(s):German
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)
Quote:
One dark night, at water’s edge, a family of musicians encounter aquatic sirens Silver and Golden. After assuring the family that they won’t eat them up, the winsome sirens are recruited to join the Figs and Dates band at a neon-lit Warsaw dance club. When Silver becomes romantically entangled with beautiful blonde bassist Mietek, the more cunning Golden, who cannot escape her bloodthirsty nature, worries that her sister’s relationship will doom their shared dream of swimming to a new life in America.
Quote:
An erotic, body-violent new wave rock opera about wayward sirens. The Lure mashes up folklore, vampiric mermaids, ‘80s hair and body horror to create a bewitching and surprisingly touching musical drama.
Sirens Silver and Golden (Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olszanska respectively) loiter on the shores of Warsaw in 1980s Poland, hoping to catch unwitting humans to take as food. But on this occasion, Silver refrains from dinner, instantly falling for a young guitarist (Jakub Gierszal) singing on the beach.
The mermaids assume human form and are taken in by the guitarist and his band, who see a business opportunity in their striking vocals and bewitching appearance. In a kitsch discotheque, the group, now called The Lure, performs to seedy punters willing to part cash to see their magical transformation. But as Silver falls more and more for the waifish guitar player, Golden warns her not to get too used to life on land.
Director Agnieszka Smoczynska called the film a “coming-of-age story”, echoing her own youth. She recalled that her mother ran a nightclub, where she had her “first shot of vodka, first cigarette, first sexual disappointment and first important feeling for a boy.” The mermaids were an abstraction that allowed her to tell her story without revealing too much of herself. The screenwriter Robert Bolesto sought to write a story based on two friends of his that frequented nightclubs in the 80s, which enthused Smoczynska and resonated with her own adolescence.
http://nitroflare.com/view/83E3DBFD066DDAE/Corki_dancingu.mkv
https://uploadgig.com/file/download/88bbC4189f0eec19/Corki dancingu.mkv
Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English
Review by mark.waltz at IMDb:
Quote:
A campy shipboard musical
A family of bluebloods made destitute by the depression are scammed into leasing out their yacht and posing as crew to tacky “new money”, one of whom is their former cook. The scam turns out to be a plot by the gruff captain (Ned Sparks, the Walter Matthau of his day) to shipwreck them on a desert island run by a madcap queen (Mary Boland) and escape with their money. Of course, things go afoul as the queen has plans of her own.
Such is the basic plot of this pre-code comedy with a few musical numbers thrown in for good measure. It was the era of Astaire and Rogers at RKO, and in their other musicals, RKO attempted to give them the gloss of the popular dance team. This relatively short film (just over an hour) was a major disaster in its day according to “The Hollywood Musical”, but seen today, it is fairly fun, campy, and a passable timefiller. There is nothing remarkable in the songs or numbers (except one production number, “South Sea Bolero”), and the romantic leads (Sidney Fox and Sidney Blackmer) are uninteresting. The character parts, however, add humor, especially Spark’s grumpy ship’s captain, Boland’s dizzy queen, and Polly Moran’s butch cruise director. Throw in Sterling Holloway (the voice of Winnie the Pooh), and you have enough humor to make this an adequate second feature.
The comic moments (most notably Holloway’s rigging of a roulette table) are enjoyable, but there is a somewhat disturbing portrayal of South Sea Islanders as lazy folks who do nothing but make love all day. There was plenty of eye-raising and “I can’t believe they said that!” among my friends whom I watched this with, but just another example of what Hollywood “used” to be like. I view it as an interesting idea with tacky elements thrown in that make this film a product of its times.
http://nitroflare.com/view/7678D87B8DB5509/Last_Yacht.avi
https://uploadgig.com/file/download/70Fc7554bb6215df/Last Yacht.avi
Language(s):English
Subtitles:none
Plot:
Members of a circus troupe “adopt” Lili Daurier when she finds herself stranded in a strange town. The magician who first comes to her rescue already has romantic entanglements and thinks of her as a little girl. Who can she turn to but the puppets, singing to them her troubles, forgetting that there are puppeteers. A crowd gathers around Lili as she sings. The circus has a new act. She now has a job. Will she get her heart’s desire?
http://nitroflare.com/view/24C90E030D5CF7A/Lili_%281953%29_WAC_DVDRip_BBM__CG_.avi
http://nitroflare.com/view/9F1D1D44516B1F7/Lili_%281953%29_WAC_DVDRip_BBM__CG__Spanish.srt
https://uploadgig.com/file/download/2c38E44d3F688b69/Lili 1953 WAC DVDRip BBM CG.avi
https://uploadgig.com/file/download/5aD4c0c75d9a29b0/Lili 1953 WAC DVDRip BBM CG Spanish.srt
Language(s):English
Subtitles:Spanish
Rick Todd uses the dreams of his roommate Eugene as the basis for a successful comic book.
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky wrote:
There’s a meaty essay to be written about the lengths to which modern-day Americans will go to distance themselves from Jerry Lewis. Lewis represents the unrefined tastes of some earlier era of moviegoing, explained away through pejorative references to “slapstick” and “the French.” (Never mind that Lewis was never as popular abroad as he was in the U.S.) The truth, of course, is that though Lewis produced his share of dross, the gold remains pretty damn funny, and the stuff that isn’t funny tends to be strange and formally audacious in a way Hollywood comedies rarely are. It’s possible to be turned off by Lewis’ mugging (which is fairly relentless) and still appreciate the command of style displayed by his best films, whether it’s the ones he directed himself, or his collaborations with cartoonist-turned-director Frank Tashlin.
Which brings us to Artists And Models, the first movie Lewis made with Tashlin, and arguably the best of his 16 collaborations with comedy partner Dean Martin. (The other contender for that title is their final film together, Hollywood Or Bust, also directed by Tashlin.) Artists And Models is one of the most exuberant and colorful American movies of the 1950s. It uses the era’s comics boom as both a visual reference and a plot point, spinning a story about two pairs of mismatched roommates into a quasi-surreal satire of anti-communist paranoia, fandom, and art, packed with throwaway quotations (it may contain the first Rear Window riff in film history) and sight gags. All that, and it’s pretty funny, too.
The visual palette is Technicolor at its brightest and most saturated, with colors slathered across the widescreen frame. Artists And Models was shot in VistaVision, which would eventually lose the widescreen format war to CinemaScope; because it was non-anamorphic, VistaVision had greater detail around the edges of the frame, and a more even and panel-like sense of space. (Coincidentally, VistaVision was resurrected half a century later for several scenes in a much more serious comics movie, The Dark Knight.) Tashlin directed animated shorts for Warner Bros. before moving on to features, and many of his best movies play like live-action cartoons. Artists And Models, though, looks like paper, inked and colored; its clean lines and bright colors make it the definitive Golden Age comics movie.
Richard Brody wrote:
The debate over violence in children’s entertainment was already raging in 1955, when Frank Tashlin made it the fulcrum of this Jerry Lewis–Dean Martin vehicle. Lewis plays a comic-book-crazed writer of insipid children’s stories who erupts in his sleep with lurid ravings, which his roommate (Martin), a penniless artist, transcribes and sells to a pulp publisher who is struggling to compete with television’s violent fare. Tashlin, a pop visionary, puts unhinged pop visions at the core of modern life, presenting Lewis’s nocturnal babble as scientific insights that get the attention of the F.B.I. and Soviet spies. “Don’t shoot,” one of them says. “Remember, we need his dreams.” But the villains are ultimately thwarted by the dreamer’s sexual instinct, and a scene that parodies “Rear Window” (one of Tashlin’s many Hitchcockian winks) emphasizes the connection between sex and violence. Suppress depictions of lust and horror, Tashlin implies, and you suppress imagination itself—which nonetheless is often better left imagined.
http://nitroflare.com/view/5BD6AB73C0D3020/Artists.and.Models.1955.DVDRip.x264.mkv
https://uploadgig.com/file/download/3930Cfb3457e1e87/Artists.and.Models.1955.DVDRip.x264.mkv
Language(s):English
Subtitles:English
quote from Amazon user: A complement I say, as this not being complete (well, I’d better say severely truncated) it cannot be your sole Boris in a collection; necessary I add, because it preserved a sizable portion of the title part, as portrayed by one of its foremost exponents ever, the great russian bass Alexander Pirogov. This incompleteness is only implied but not clearly stated in the disc’s box, which should advise would-be purchasers. So what you get is some kind of “extended highlights” of this, arguably the greatest of russian operas and certainly the most popular. It is a film by Vera Stroieva, made in 1954 as part of a project dear to soviet authorities of putting into film both the lives of Russia’s greatest artists and adaptations of their works, to “educate the masses” and of course not being entirely without some ideological hints (or rather more than mere hints).
Stroieva made effective use of exterior shots, as well as mixes of “theatrical stage” sequences with other ones filmed inside the Kremlin, which gave the film an intriguing aura and allowed us to look at Boris Godunov from an unusual perspective; the soundtrack was dubbed and lip sinchronised of course, but remarkably well, with results far better than those in contemporary efforts by RAI to film standard italian operas. From the film perspective, it followed the traditions of soviet film making, with stunning images, stark closeups and vast shots of hundreds of extras in the opera scenes involving the people; the soudtrack had to be made on purpose for the project, as the myriad cuts in the score ruled out cutting and splicing existing recordings. Stroieva also made a startling use of the Kromy revolt scene: she cut it rather abruptly at the point when the jesuits from the Pretender’s army enter and swiftly switched to the Kremlin quarters where the Duma has met, to proceed with Boris’s entrace and death scene; after Boris’s death she goes back to Kromy but not in a straight “continuation” of what she had left but to a panorama of violence and destruction by war. Then, after the speech by the Pretender the retinue proceeds its victorious march towards Moscow to the rather perplexed and disillusioned expressions of the onlookers faces, the Simpleton utters his final comments that were Mussorgski’s original ending for the opera (and Stroieva’s film). The film as a whole certainly makes for stirring viewing and has been very well preserved and restored, with colours that have not faded nor acquired that curious tint so typical of decades-old pictures; VAI’s dvd adaptation is very good.
http://nitroflare.com/view/855A1F49F2A91B4/boris.godunov.1954.CD1%2B2.avi
https://uploadgig.com/file/download/954a5A4804C99b29/boris.godunov.1954.CD12.avi
Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English (hard encoded)
About the Jazz Loft Project
In January 1955 W. Eugene Smith, a celebrated photographer at Life magazine whose quarrels with his editors were legendary, quit his longtime well-paying job at the magazine. He was thirty-six. He was ambitious, quixotic, in search of greater freedom and artistic license. He turned his attention to a freelance assignment in Pittsburgh, a three-week job that turned into a four-year obsession and in the end, remained unfinished. In a letter to Ansel Adams, Smith described it as a “debacle” and an “embarrassment.”
In 1957, Smith moved out of the home he shared with his wife and four children in Croton-on-Hudson, New York and moved into a dilapidated, five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York City’s wholesale flower district. 821 Sixth Avenue (between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth streets) was a late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz—Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk among them—and countless fascinating, underground characters. As his ambitions broke down for the epic Pittsburgh project, Smith found solace in the chaotic, somnambulistic world of the loft and its artists. He turned his documentary impulses away from Pittsburgh and toward his offbeat new surroundings.
From 1957 to 1965, Smith exposed 1,447 rolls of film at the loft, making roughly 40,000 pictures, the largest body of work in his career. He photographed the nocturnal jazz scene as well as life on the streets of the flower district, as seen from his fourth-floor window. He wired the building like a surreptitious recording studio and made 1,740 reels (4,000 hours) of stereo and mono audiotapes, capturing more than 300 musicians, among them Roy Haynes, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, and Paul Bley. He also recorded legends such as pianists Eddie Costa, and Sonny Clark, drummers Ronnie Free and Edgar Bateman, saxophonist Lin Halliday, bassist Henry Grimes, and multi-instrumentalist Eddie Listengart.
Also dropping in on the nighttime scene were the likes of Doris Duke, Norman Mailer, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Salvador Dalí, as well as pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves, photography students, local cops, building inspectors, marijuana dealers, and others.
The Jazz Loft Project, organized by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in cooperation with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona and the W. Eugene Smith estate, is devoted to preserving and cataloging Smith’s tapes, researching the photographs, and obtaining oral history interviews with all surviving loft participants. The transferred recordings reveal high sound quality and extraordinary musical and cultural content, offering unusual documentation of an after-hours New York jazz scene.
http://nitroflare.com/view/A5C7FE9295FD012/The_Jazz_Loft_According_To_W._Eugene_Smith.mkv
https://uploadgig.com/file/download/4EF55F0f300f1788/The Jazz Loft According To W. Eugene Smith.mkv
Language(s):English
Subtitles:None
Here is the text for the poem by Sully Prudhomme that the song is based on:
Le long du Quai, les grands vaisseaux,
Que la houle incline en silence,
Ne prennent pas garde aux berceaux,
Que la main des femmes balance.
Mais viendra le jour des adieux,
Car il faut que les femmes pleurent,
Et que les hommes curieux
Tentent les horizons qui leurrent!
Et ce jour-là les grands vaisseaux,
Fuyant le port qui diminue,
Sentent leur masse retenue
Par l’âme des lointains berceaux.
English translation (not mine!)
Along the quay, the great ships,
that ride the swell in silence,
take no notice of the cradles.
that the hands of the women rock.
But the day of farewells will come,
when the women must weep,
and curious men are tempted
towards the horizons that lure them!
And that day the great ships,
sailing away from the diminishing port,
feel their bulk held back
Same song as the other short with the same name by Kirsanoff.
http://nitroflare.com/view/1FD81D8E75CB1CE/Les_berceaux_%281931%29.mkv
https://uploadgig.com/file/download/F5e1baF96dccd31b/Les berceaux 1931.mkv
Language(s):French
Subtitles:English
This is the Andrei Tarkovsky production of the famous Pushkin/Mussorgsky opera, performed in 1990 at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, conducted by Valery Gergiev.
[To avoid some confusion: Tarkovsky, who died in 1986, was the director of the opera production, not the man behind the camera for this performance. The original production was staged 1983 in London. Amazon lists both Tarkovsky and Gergiev as directors, IMDB lists Humphrey Burton.]
Review from Amazon.com:
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Look no further – finally, Mussorgsky’s ideas about his great drama have been realized. This is the ONLY video of Boris Godunov using Mussorgsky’s own orchestration. (After the composer’s death, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov took it upon himself to create a new orchestration, arrogantly considering that Mussorgsky could not possibly have meant his music to sound the way it did. Unfortunately, this reorchestration was the standard version until very recently – almost all the available recordings of the great Russian basses in this role are the Rimsky-Korsakov version.) Murder, treachery, passion and misery – what more could one want from a great opera? Mussorgsky’s epic is brilliantly staged by the great Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky in a rich production from London’s Covent Garden (1983). Tarkovsky succeeds in posing disquieting psychological questions in a brutally faithful rendition of great originality and profundity. There are no cuts in Mussorgsky’s music in this production: it is allowed to speak for itself. The film dates from 1990, when the production was given and filmed at St. Petersburg’s ornate Mariinsky Theater. A mostly Russian cast, including Olga Borodina as Marina, Alexei Steblianko as the false Dimitri, Sergei Leiferkus as Rangoni and Alexander Morosov as Pimen, is headed by the English bass Robert Lloyd in the title role (and only rarely is his foreign accent noticeable!). The singing is magnificent throughout – I think the recording technology itself is responsible for a loss of sheen from the soloists and the orchestra, conducted with true insight and bravura by a young Valery Gergiev. The chorus is superb. My only criticism is that, throughout, the film is somehow too clean and self-conscious. The extensive subtitles are extremely helpful, as are the all-too-brief notes included with the set. I hope your interest will be piqued enough to delve into this fascinating period of Russian history. Perhaps the greatest triumph of this film is that Mussorgsky’s own vision of Russia is at last presented as I feel he would have wished. Bravo to the entire production!
http://nitroflare.com/view/61446FDC3B3455F/Boris_Godunov__Disc_1_.avi
http://nitroflare.com/view/FFCF9DFDE8F0C55/Boris_Godunov__Disc_2_.avi
Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)
