Films with: Iosseliani, Otar

Brigands, chapitre VII Brigands, chapter VII /

This crazy, satirical epic humorously portrays several eras in European history. Though the costumes and regimes change, the film suggests, the human motives of lust and greed remain the same. Jumping back and forth in time, the film condemns its characters to an eternity of irony. In one section, a medieval king named Vano, who has a penchant for exotic torture techniques, executes his wife for being unfaithful. Seamlessly the film flashes forward to the early 1930s, with another Vano, played by the same actor, portraying a low-down thief who suddenly seizes power. Intercut with all of this is the story of a contemporary Vano, a hapless drunk who wanders across the underworlds of Europe.

DVD 2714

Complete Jean Vigo

'Even among cinema's greatest legends, Jean Vigo stands alone. The son of a notorious anarchist, Vigo had a brief but brilliant career making poetic, lightly surrealist films before his life was cut tragically short by tuberculosis at age twenty-nine. Like the daring early works of his contemporaries Jean Cocteau and Luis Buñuel, Vigo's films refused to play by the rules. This set includes all of Vigo's titles' -- Container. À propos de Nice: What starts off as a conventional travelogue turnes into a satirical portrait of the town of Nice on the French Côte d'azur, and its wealthy inhabitants. Taris: A short documentary about the swimmer Jean Taris, notable for Vigo's innovative techniques Zéro de conduite: In a repressive boarding school with rigid schools of behavior, four boys decide to rebel against the administration on a celebration day. L'Atalante: When Juliette marries Jean, she comes to live on his ship, on board of which are, besides the two of them, only a cabin boy and the strange old second mate Père Jules. Soon bored by life on the river, Juliette slips off to explore the nightlife when they come to Paris. Angered by this, Jean sets off, leaving Juliette behind. Overcome by grief and longing for his wife, Jean falls into a depression and Père Jules goes and tries to find Juliette.

DVD 10242