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Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Chaos: The Manson Murders (Errol Morris)

Over half a century later, what new information can be gleaned from the nights of August 9 and 10, 1969? Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring’s riveting (if convoluted) book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties––released in June 2019, between the Cannes premiere and theatrical release of Quentin Tarantino’s cathartic rewrite of that history––argues that while all the evidence of the murders has been gleaned, there’s a complex and knotty web of conspiracies for the motivations, some more plausible than others. To pare down the 528-page book to its most overarching theory, it postulates Manson may have been allowed (and perhaps even directed) by the CIA to concoct a reign...

While an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego, in 1971, Carrie Rickey took a course taught by Manny Farber called “A Hard Look at the Movies.” On the syllabus was Agnès Varda‘s “Cléo from 5 to 7,” a film that brought tears to Rickey’s eyes as soon as she saw the “Script and Direction by Agnès Varda” credit appear on screen. “I was stunned,” the film critic told IndieWire. “I never thought a woman could direct a movie. You get a little older and you realize the first feature film was directed by a woman, Alice Guy-Blaché, but Varda was the first female filmmaker I ever saw on screen.”

As the decades passed and Rickey saw more of Varda’s work, Varda expanded and deepened Rickey’s ideas not just about female filmmakers but about what it meant to be a filmmaker in general. Her interest in...

Madrid-based distributor Atalante is ramping up its heritage cinema titles in Spain, where it’s set to release Vera Chytilová’s 1966 Czechoslovakian dark comedy “Daisies” and Kavery Kaul’s 1988 calypso music documentary “One Hand Don’t Clap.”

“Daises,” which Atalante is releasing in November, “is maybe one of the most iconic modern European films that we are very proud to put in theaters,” Atalante CEO Ramiro Ledo Cordeiro told Variety at the Lumière Film Festival’s International Classic Film Market (Mifc) in Lyon, France.

While the company had previously released one or two heritage films a year, 2024 saw an extraordinary number of releases, Ledo added.

Indeed, Atalante’s releases this year included the 4K restoration by Toho of Yasujiro Ozu’s 1950 Japanese drama “The Munekata Sisters,” which premiered last year in Cannes; the new restoration of Martha Coolidge’s 1975 U.S. drama “Not a Pretty Picture,” a reconstruction of sexual...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Bam

Films by Warren Beatty, Mike Judge, and more play in Facing the Future; the restoration of I Heard it Through the Grapevine screens.

Roxy Cinema

Gummo, Love Streams, and Dancer in the Dark play on 35mm, while Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro screens screens on Saturday and a 16mm puppet program shows Sunday.

Museum of Modern Art

A massive retrospective of Portuguese cinema begins, featuring films by Paulo Rocha and Manoel de Oliveira, among many others.

Museum of the Moving Image

A highlight of the 1969 Directors’ Fortnight includes prints of Oshima’s Death By Hanging and Garrel’s The Virgin’s Bed; a Frank Oz retrospective continues.

Anthology Film Archives

Dreyer’s Ordet plays in “Essential Cinema.”

IFC Center

The black-and-white restoration of Johnny Mnemonic plays, as does a 40th-anniversary restoration of Paris, Texas and Bennett Miller’s The Cruise; The Company of Wolves,...

Noémie Merlant’s star is rising as an actress. Baby Ruby and Tár won her international recognition across 2022 and 2023, while anticipation is growing around her starring role in Audrey Diwan’s English-language reboot of erotica classic Emmanuelle. In the meantime, Merlant is hitting Cannes with The Balconettes, her second film in the director’s chair after Mi iubita, mon amour. Set against a Marseille heatwave, the riotous comedy and gorefest co-stars Merlant alongside Souheila Yacoub and Sanda Codreanu as female flatmates who are pushed to the brink when a late-night drink with an attractive neighbor (played by Emily in Paris actor Lucas Bravo) takes a bloody turn.

Deadline: What was the inspiration for Les Balconettes?

NOÉMIE Merlant: Four, five years ago I fled my home in a sort of escape from something that was suffocating me. I sought refuge with two girlfriends who were living together and stayed for several months.

2024 marks the 20th edition of the festival.

Glasgow Film Festival (Gff) has set the first titles and events for its upcoming 20th edition, that will run from February 28 to March 10, 2024, as well as the team with which Allison Gardner will programme the festival, after her long-standing co-director Allan Hunter stepped down following the 2023 edition.

This year’s country in focus will be Czechia, also known as Czech Republic, under the banner ’Czech, please!’

Titles include Is There Any Place For Me, Please? a debut feature documentary and UK premiere from Jarmila Štuková, that showcases an intimate portrayal of one woman...

The protagonists of Vĕra Chytilová’s gleefully anarchic 1966 comedy Daisies are two beautiful young women, both named Marie (although they go by a series of fake names in the movie itself). Marie I (Jitka Cerhová) is a brunette with pouty lips who wears her hair in girlish pigtails; Marie II (Ivana Karbanová) has a strawberry blonde bob and habitually dons a flower crown. After an intro sequence that rolls credits over whirring machinery and footage from World War II, the film cuts to the Maries sitting against a wooden wall like dolls in a toy box (complete with creaking joint noises), lamenting the “spoiled world” and resolving to beat it at its own game. And so the stage is set: it is a horrible day in Czechoslovakia, and two equally horrible (yet strangely likable) girls set out to cause problems on purpose.

No genre is as prolific as horror, so it’s understandable that movies fall through the cracks all the time. That is where this new recurring column, Deep Cuts, comes in. While some movies remain popular and talked about, regardless of age, countless others have faded into the background or obscurity.

Each themed installment of this series will spotlight several overlooked, unappreciated or generally unknown movies from the past — some from way back when, and others from not so long ago — that could use some more attention.

The first edition of this column will look at horror movies featuring wintry settings. It may not feel or look like winter wherever you are right now, but somewhere it’s cold. And with a frosty backdrop, the five winter horror movies here feel more bleak than usual.

A Cold Night’s Death (1973)

Directed by Jerrold Freedman

Robert Jones and Frank Enrari (Robert Culp...

The Berlin Film Festival has revealed a raft of titles across strands and also 33 film projects vying for coin at the coproduction market.

Selections for the topical Perspektive Deutsches Kino strand from emerging German talent include “Seven Winters in Tehran” by Steffi Niederzoll, “Elaha” by Milena Aboyan, “Ararat” by Engin Kundag, “The Kidnapping of the Bride” by Sophia Mocorrea, Fabian Stumm’s “Bones and Names,” “Long Long Kiss” by Lukas Röder, Tanja Egen’s “On Mothers and Daughters,” “Ash Wednesday,” by João Pedro Prado and Bárbara Santos, “Nuclear Nomads” by Kilian Armando Friedrich and Tizian Stromp Zargari and “Lonely Oaks” by Fabiana Fragale, Kilian Kuhlendahl and Jens Mühlhoff.

All the selected films in the strand will compete for the Heiner Carow Prize and the Compass-Perspektive-Award, both of which are endowed with €5,000.

A 4K restoration of David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch” will open the Berlinale Classics section, which also includes Oliver Schmitz’ “Mapantsula,...

It’s been less than 24 hours since the announcement of Sight and Sound’s greatest films of all-time polls. While we have a decade more of discourse, the first reactions were expectedly divisive when certain 21st-century films make the list and other venerated classics are dropped. As interesting as the top 100 is to discuss, we wanted to look a bit deeper to see how the reception of certain films shifted over the last decade, with a rundown of the films that were added and those removed.

As one can see below, about a quarter of the list switched up this time, with major showings for a number of women filmmakers—Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman, Julie Dash, Jane Campion, Barbara Loden, Céline Sciamma, Maya Daren, and Věra Chytilová. Wong Kar-wai, Hayao Miyazaki, Charles Burnett, Spike Lee, Jordan Peele, Barry Jenkins, and Bong Joon-ho were also well-represented.

The films that were dropped...

Another decade, another Sight & Sound poll. On Thursday, the British magazine unveiled the 2022 edition of its long-running critics’ poll on the greatest films of all time, with “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” taking the top spot — the first film from a female director to achieve the honor since the poll began in 1952.

Directed by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman and released in 1975, “Jeanne Dielman” is a three-hour, 20-minute film following the title character (Delphine Seyrig), a single mother and prostitute, as she carries out a monotonous daily routine that slowly breaks apart and collapses. Since its premiere, the film has been highly acclaimed as a landmark of feminist cinema. Previously, it ranked 36 on Sight & Sound’s 2012 edition of the poll, where it was one of only two films in the top 100 from a female filmmaker; the other, “Beau Travail” by Claire Denis, is now ranked at number seven.

In celebration...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSMuch-loved genre filmmaker Albert Pyun (above) has died. Working mostly with low-budgets, and often making films for the direct-to-video market, Pyun’s career spanned five decades and included films such as The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982), Cyborg (1989), and the popular cyberpunk film series Nemesis. Cynthia Curnan, Pyun's wife and producer, had recently requested messages from fans to pass onto the filmmaker, who had been ill for a number of years prior to his passing.It seems that Paul Thomas Anderson is planning to start shooting his next feature in July 2023. Little is yet known about the new project, but a casting call has been listed for a “15-to-16-year-old female of mixed ethnicity who is physically athletic and excels at Martial Arts.” Previous...

While there might be filmmakers who more readily come to the minds of cinephiles when you mention Czech New Wave cinema of the 1960s, I'd argue that there is no more important film of that era than Daisies. Věra Chytilová's groundbreaking film is at once a art collage, a philosophical rant, an experiment in form, and a tale of two women on the cusp of the sexual revolution. Deceptively complex and intelligent, deeply humourous, often dark and brimming with energy, it defies both expectations and easy categorization. Even more than 50 years after its creation, it remains fresh, relevant, and unequaled. Marie I (Jitka Cerhová) and Marie II (Ivana Karbanová) are two seemingly ordinary yound women who randomly decide one day to be bad. Well,...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

“Something should be happening. But what?” wonder two women named Marie in “Daisies,” Věra Chytilová’s 1966 anarchic sendup of all things bourgeois and authoritarian. At the heart of the film lies the conclusion reached by Marie I and Marie II that the world is “spoiled,” henceforth, they too shall be “spoiled.” Almost immediately banned by authorities in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic upon release, ‘Daisies’ is as subversive in content as it is experimental in form, as it eschews linear narrative in favor of utilizing various film stocks and montage editing techniques to amplify its critique of authoritarianism and patriarchy.

Continue reading ‘Daisies’ Trailer: 4K Restoration Of Czech New Wave Masterpiece To Open In August at The Playlist.

"We exist, we exist..." Janus Films has revealed a superb new 4K restoration trailer for the Czech New Wave feminist masterpiece Daises, first released in 1966. Directed by Vera Chytilová as her second feature at the time, the film was restored and premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival in the Classics section earlier this year. After realizing that all world is spoiled, Marie and Marie are committed to be spoiled themselves. They rip off older men, feast in lavish meals and do all kinds of mischief. But what is all this leading to? A very good question, and hopefully the film criticizes that lavishness instead of continues to indulge in it. The film stars Jitka Cerhová as Marie I the Brunette + Ivana Karbanová as Marie II the Blonde. Described in reviews as: "Among the essential movies of the '60s, a bolt of liberatory lightning that illuminates future possibilities." This is...

Few movies loom like Daisies, as beloved among first-year film students as it is revered by experts of the Czech New Wave. But being both introduction and figurehead means you likely haven’t seen it in some time. (Yours truly is going on a decade since their Eastern European Cinema class.) Thus a restoration of Věra Chytilová’s work should be greeted with open arms when it opens at New York’s IFC Center on August 19, followed by Los Angeles and Chicago rollouts on August 26, and for which Janus Films have unveiled a vibrant, musically galvanizing trailer.

Per usual with Janus’ recent releases, the film has simply never looked so good. Color is strong but overall palette retains the era’s muted tones, while grain and noise are especially visible in the trailer’s opening sepia section. It may be about time for another look.

Find preview and poster below:...

The Cannes Film Festival has set its lineup for this year’s Cannes Classics program, which shines a spotlight on restorations of classic movies and features contemporary documentaries about film. Kicking off the sidebar is Jean Eustache’s controversial film The Mother and the Whore, the 1973 Cannes Grand Prize winner which incited riots at the time. Also included in the program are films by Vittorio de Sica (Sciuscià), Satyajit Ray (The Adversary), Orson Welles (The Trial) and Martin Scorsese (The Last Waltz), as well as a new 4K master of Singin’ in the Rain to mark the movie’s 70th anniversary.

Among the documentaries is Ethan Hawke’s study of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, The Last Movie Stars. Executive produced by Scorsese, it features Karen Allen, George Clooney, Oscar Isaac, Latanya Richardson Jackson, Zoe Kazan, Laura Linney and Sam Rockwell among others in an exploration of the iconic couple and American cinema.

As exciting as the new films premiering at Cannes Film Festival is its Classics section, featuring new restorations as well as documentaries spotlighting film history. They’ve now unveiled their 2022 lineup which most notably includes the new, much-anticipated restoration of Jean Eustache’s masterpiece The Mother and the Whore, which it looks like Janus Films has picked up for a U.S. run later this year.

The lineup also includes new restorations of films by Satyajit Ray, Vittorio de Sica, Aravindan Govindan, Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese, Glauber Rocha, Vera Chytilová, and more, alongside new documentaries on Romy Schneider, Jane Campion, Souleymane Cissé, and beyond. Check out the full list below.

The Mother and the Whore back in the theater!

La Maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore)

Jean Eustache

1972, 3h40, France

4K digital restoration of The Mother and the Whore was done in 2022 by Les Films du Losange,...

This year’s line-up will also celebrate classics such as Singin’ In The Rain and Indian director Satyajit Ray’s 1970 work The Adversary.

Late French filmmaker Jean Eustache’s recently restored cult 1973 drama The Mother And The Whore will open Cannes Classics this year, the line-up for which was announced on Monday (May 2).

Other highlights include two episodes of the series The Last Movie Stars directed by Ethan Hawke about Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman; a screening of Singin’ In The Rain to coincide with the 70th anniversary of its release and a restored 4K version of Vittorio de Sica’s 1946 work Sciuscià.

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Bungalow (Ulrich Köhler)

Ulrich Köhler remains underseen—even by the standards of Berlin School brethren Christian Petzold and Maren Ade—and a 4K restoration of his 2002 debut Bungalow comes at the right time: its story of isolation, frayed connections, and romantic infatuation foreground an only idyllic-seeming summer getaway. 18 years on, not a shred of it feels dated or resolved, down to a conclusion that puts one in mind of ’70s American classics.

Where to Stream: Grasshopper Film

Czechoslovak New Wave

A period of creative fervor and political deconstruction like few others in cinema, Czechoslovak New Wave is now getting a spotlight on The Criterion Channel. Selections includes Black Peter (Miloš Forman,...

Director who was part of the ‘Czech film miracle’ in the 1960s but made his masterpieces in Hollywood

Ivan Passer, who has died aged 86, was one of the new wave of Czech film directors who emerged during the social and cultural democratisation of the mid-60s that afforded them unprecedented artistic freedom. With his childhood friend Miloš Forman, Passer co-wrote A Blonde in Love and The Firemen’s Ball (1967), and directed Intimate Lighting (1965), his brilliant feature film debut.

In that short period, Passer, Forman, Vera Chytilová, Jirí Menzel and Jan Němec, among others, made films that rejected the official state socialist-realist aesthetic and produced eclectic, highly assured features that captured the world’s attention.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSJia Zhangke's Ash is Purest White.Just in case you missed it, the multiple lineups for the various festivals at Cannes this year have been announced. You can find all of the announcements on Notebook: the 71st Cannes Film Festival, Directors' Fortnight, Critics Week, and Acid. Additionally, Cannes has also announced the jury tending to the official selection: Cate Blanchett (President), Chang Chen, Ava DuVernay, Robert Guédiguian, Khadja Nin, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Denis Villeneuve, and Andrey Zvyagintsev. After a truly eventful life (which includes being kidnapped by Kim Jong-il) and phenomenal career in cinema, the Korean screen legend Choi Eun-hee has died. Screen International provides a thorough obituary.Czech New Wave luminary and New Hollywood transplant Miloš Forman has died. Duane Byrge honors the man and artist with an obituary for The Hollywood Reporter.

Foreplays is a column that explores under-known short films by renowned directors. Vera Chytilová's Ceiling (1962) is free to watch below.Cinema wasn’t Vera Chytilová’s first vocation. Before enrolling at Famu (The Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague), she had studied architecture and philosophy, and did various jobs. For a time, she worked as a fashion model—an experience that, undoubtedly, provided inspiration for Strop ("Ceiling"), her graduation short film of 1962, directed when she was already in her thirties. Watching Ceiling, one is immediately reminded of certain scenes from Hollywood’s classical period that feature female characters, often from modest origins, working as models. I’m thinking of particular moments in Caught, Pitfall, or Mannequin that hint at how, below the fashion milieu’s image of glamor and sophistication, lies an environment of harassment, entrapment, and exploitation that has to be endured by the models.

After polling critics from around the world for the greatest American films of all-time, BBC has now forged ahead in the attempt to get a consensus on the best comedies of all-time. After polling 253 film critics, including 118 women and 135 men, from 52 countries and six continents a simple, the list of the 100 greatest is now here.

Featuring canonical classics such as Some Like It Hot, Dr. Strangelove, Annie Hall, Duck Soup, Playtime, and more in the top 10, there’s some interesting observations looking at the rest of the list. Toni Erdmann is the most recent inclusion, while the highest Wes Anderson pick is The Royal Tenenbaums. There’s also a healthy dose of Chaplin and Lubitsch with four films each, and the recently departed Jerry Lewis has a pair of inclusions.

Check out the list below (and my ballot) and see more on their official site.

100. (tie) The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese,...

“Criminally unfair. Those are the two words that spring to mind when I consider the fate of female directors throughout the short history of the cinematic medium. Not enough opportunity. Appalling sexism. Terrible chance and circumstances, coupled with biases, slander and mistrust,” our friend Scout Tafoya stated when asking a group of critics for their favorite films directed by female filmmakers. He added, “When I began asking for these lists from all the critics below many replied reluctantly. Their reasoning that so many of their films would be modern, that so many of the classics would be homogenous, is not without justification. But it’s no one’s fault that we all fall back on the same seven classics.”

He continues, “It’s a worldwide shortage of support and funding for female artists. It’s a lack of distribution of more esoteric work by women. It’s many major film...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Museum of the Moving Image

Maurice Pialat‘s six-hour miniseries, Le maison de bois, will conclude the career-spanning retrospective.

“It Came from Within: A David Cronenberg Horror Weekend” brings the director’s classics to the big screen.

Film Forum

“Classic 3-D” offers three dimensions of repertory viewing, with titles such as Dial M for Murder and House of Wax.

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Museum of the Moving Image

Several more titles play in the Museum’s excellent Maurice Pialat retrospective. Read more about his work here.

Wiseman‘s Model and Central Park show on Saturday and Sunday, respectively.

Anthology Film Archives

Olivier Assayas‘s Irma Vep and its central inspiration, Louis Feuillade‘s eight-hour Les Vampires, play on Friday and Saturday & Sunday,...

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

Written by Jaromil Jires and Ester Krumbachová

Directed by Jaromil Jireš

Czechoslovakia, 1970

Beginning with Jaroslava Schallerová’s glance directly into the camera, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders instantly and insistently unravels in playful nods of incongruous and intentionally self-conscious stylization. Directed by Jaromil Jireš, this 1970 feature, in classic art film tradition, takes a basic narrative with reasonably standard character types and turns the whole thing topsy-turvy via stunning imagery, a proliferation of ambiguous symbolism, and a structure that leads to places quite unexpected, if certain sequences lead anywhere at all. It certainly is a wondrous week for young Valerie, and the film itself is equally astounding.

After Eaglet (Petr Kopriva) steals Valerie’s (Schallerová) magical earrings, apparently at the behest of the Constable (Jirí Prýmek), otherwise referred to/existing as the malicious Polecat, a vampire-type monster who terrorizes a small Czech town, an...

★★★★★ A lapsarian search for truth sits at the heart of Vera Chytilová's avant garde masterpiece Fruit of Paradise (1970), but meaning is itself something that must be discovered by its audience. This was the last film that Chytilová made before she endured a seven year ban from filmmaking imposed by the Soviet government ruling Czechoslovakia at the time. Although her worked remained provocative for decades afterwards, when she returned behind the camera for 1977's The Apple Game her audacious formal experimentation was considerably less evident, making Fruit of Paradise a remarkable departing line in the first act of her career. Not that such narrative conventions were of any interest to her.

In today's roundup of news and views: Agata Pyzik for frieze on Vera Chytilová's Daisies; a history of censorship and the movies in Iran after the Islamic Revolution; Jonathan Rosenbaum on Alain Resnais and Chris Marker's Statues Also Die and Roberto Rossellini's Rome Open City (1945) plus a speech by Pere Portabella; Matt Connolly on Andy Warhol’s Vinyl, Fernando F. Croce on Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il vangelo secondo Matteo, Francine Prose on David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, Peter Hogue on Raoul Walsh, Danny King on James B. Harris, Todd Field's interview with Sissy Spacek, Michael Tully's with James Gray—and more. » - David Hudson...

In today's roundup of news and views: Agata Pyzik for frieze on Vera Chytilová's Daisies; a history of censorship and the movies in Iran after the Islamic Revolution; Jonathan Rosenbaum on Alain Resnais and Chris Marker's Statues Also Die and Roberto Rossellini's Rome Open City (1945) plus a speech by Pere Portabella; Matt Connolly on Andy Warhol’s Vinyl, Fernando F. Croce on Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il vangelo secondo Matteo, Francine Prose on David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, Peter Hogue on Raoul Walsh, Danny King on James B. Harris, Todd Field's interview with Sissy Spacek, Michael Tully's with James Gray—and more. » - David Hudson...

Though the Czech New Wave of the sixties was not as addicted to anthology films as the Italians (any major Italian director could have called a film Eight and a Half, since they all directed episodes at one time or another), they did make Pearls of the Night (1966), which showcased nearly all the major graduates of the national film school, Famu (a.k.a. the Kids from Famu): Vera Chytilová, Jaromil Jires, Jirí Menzel, Jan Nemec and Evald Schorm.Three years later, Schorm was back, collaborating with new chums Jirí Brdecka and Milos Makovec on a raunchy supernatural triptych, Prague Nights. An international traveller picks up a strange woman, determined to enjoy a night of illicit passion during his Czech stopover. Driven through a green-tinted sepia night in her vintage limo, he's told three tales of murder, lust and the supernatural, and, at the end, as in any Amicus...

★★★★☆ After her staggering visual and philosophical odyssey, The Fruit of Paradise (1970), Vera Chytilová found herself serving a lengthy ban from filmmaking in Czechoslovakia. Shackled by the clamp-downs of the Soviet regime, when she did finally return to feature filmmaking after seven years in the cold, she was forced to reject much of the formal abandon that had characterised her early masterpieces. Despite this, from The Apple Game (1977) onwards she continued to make cinema that challenged and provoked with equal verve. Even as late as the 1990s, the sexagenarian Chytilová continued to play with subversive themes, not least 1998's Traps.

If…

Directed by Lindsay Anderson

Written by David Sherwin

UK, 1968

If….(1968) directed by Lindsay Anderson and winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1969 premiered one year following the May ’68 protests in France. The screenplay was written by David Sherwin who based the narrative off his experiences at Tonbridge School in Kent. The script made its way to Nicholas Ray who was interested in making the film but felt that a British director should direct it. Anderson was approached and accepted the project. He wanted to make a film similar to Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1934) and even screened the film to his screenwriters in the pre-production stage. If… was given an X-rating upon release for nudity and violence. Aside from the more graphic scenes the censor board was probably put off by the ideological message of the film.

Like Vigo’s film, If…. is about authority figures...

Film director who suffered censorship in her native Czechoslovakia for her 'anti-communist' films

Vera Chytilová, who has died aged 85, was one of the brightest of the new wave of film directors who emerged in Czechoslovakia in the mid-60s. Chytilová, Ivan Passer, Jan Nemec, Jirí Menzel, Ján Kadár and Miloš Forman were all products of Famu, the national film school in Prague. After the Russian invasion in 1968 put an end to the Prague Spring, Passer, Kadár and Forman left for the Us, and Nemec went into exile in western Europe. Menzel, who remained, was restricted despite repudiating his "anti-communist" films in 1974. But Chytilová, whose Daisies (1966) was the most adventurous and anarchic film of the period, was silenced.

Born in Ostrava, now in the Czech Republic, Chytilová had a strict Catholic upbringing. "I left that basic, personified faith," she later said. "It seemed like a crutch to me. I realised it...

Above: Eva Švankmajerová’s poster for Alice (Jan Švankmajer, Czechoslovakia, 1988).

The adage that behind every great man stands a great woman was rarely truer than in the case of the incomparable Czech animator/filmmaker Jan Švankmajer and his wife, the painter, ceramicist and writer Eva Švankmajerová (1940-2005). Eva Dvoráková met Švankmajer when she was 20 (he was 26 and working in experimental theater) and just out of college (she had studied drama at the music academy of Prague), married him the following year and for the next 45 years they were inseparable artistic collaborators. The director of a 2001 documentary about the Švankmajers, entitled Les chimères des Svankmajer, has said “The more I worked with Jan, the more I realised that the influence of Eva was essential. Their whole life is dedicated to their work, which takes on gigantic proportions, without separation.” (You can see Eva at work in this trailer for the film.

by Vadim Rizov

A tornado took Dorothy out of black-and-white Kansas into colorful Oz: destruction bred creation and imaginative release. The link in Vera Chytilová’s Daisies is brusquer. Two girls are sitting in what appears to be some kind of bathhouse: Marie I (Jitka Cerhová) is the brunette, Marie II (Ivana Karbanová) the blonde. A brief discussion of the state of the world leads to the conclusion that it's spoiled, and hence the Maries will be too. Marie I slaps Marie II, knocking her backwards out of the black-and-white interior into a colorful field.

"Even those of us who love Daisies have trouble finding the proper terms to account for it," blogger/theorist Steven Shaviro wrote in 2007. Many dazzling, ahead-of-their-time effects literally saturate Daisies, their connection to broader ideological dissent rarely obvious. Within a brief scene, Chytilová will cut every few seconds to slather the shot in another pop-art monochrome.

To celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Venice International Film Festival (1932-2012), the 2012 edition will feature a retrospective of ten films presented during past Venice Films Festivals.

The films were selected on the basis of rarity, using the copies from the Collections of the Historic Archives of the Contemporary Arts of the Biennale (Asac).

As has often been pointed out by historians and researchers, the films from the Venice Film Festival preserved over the years in the Asac represent a valuable and extremely important legacy of documents. In many cases, they are the only copies of films that were considered lost, or of versions that differ from the copies successively released in theatres.

The retrospective project consists of a limited number of films not otherwise available in 35mm or DVD copies, and that have never been restored. The Biennale will keep one 35mm or Dcp/HD-cam copy of all the restored films,...

This week’s Must Read comes from donna k., whom I link to a lot every week. But her description this time about how Brent Green’s sculpture To Many Men Strange Fates Are Given was created is unbelievably fascinating. After reading this, you’ll have a new appreciation on how your LCD monitors work — and how visionary Green is.Curator and filmmaker Brenda Contreras has launched a new blog that you need to check out. Her first big post about seeing some experimental filmmakers — Bruce McClure, Marie Losier and Ricardo Nicolayevsky — is a great read already.Preservationist Mark Toscano writes about preserving Lous Hock’s 1975 film Studies in Chronovision.At the Filmmaker website, Eddie Mullins gives a great review to a new DVD box set of Robert Downey Sr.’s early films called Up All Night With Robert Downey Sr. and includes Babo 73, Chafed Elbows and more.Superstar...

Influential Czech film director with a talent for self-preservation

The Czech film director Otakar Vávra, who has died aged 100, was born in Bohemia when it was part of the Austro- Hungarian empire, and was seven years old when Czechoslovakia became an independent nation in 1918. He lived through the German occupation, communism and the Velvet Revolution, and saw his country become the Czech Republic in 1993, while never ceasing to make films. In each epoch, Vávra changed his skin in order to save it.

Among his lasting achievements was the film faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (Famu) in Prague, which he helped establish after the second world war and where he taught for five decades. Among his students were Vera Chytilová, Milos Forman, Ivan Passer and Jiri Menzel, all directors of the 60s Czech new wave, and more recently Emir Kusturica, all of whom had high praise for his teaching.

Savage Witches is the upcoming feature film by British filmmaker Daniel Fawcett. After getting constantly in trouble with their headmistress, Gretchen and Margarita (Christina Wood and Victoria Smith) hide out in their secret location in the woods and transform the world around them with their magic.

Described as a “playful and experimental” movie, the filmmakers are raising production funds through the crowdfunding website Sponsume. It’s basically the same idea as other crowdfunding websites in which the escalating levels of donation come with different gift packages, including, in this case, posters, DVDs, production photos, screening invites and more.

Inspired primarily by two films — Daisies, directed by Vera Chytilová; and Hausu, directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi — Savage Witches is designed to be “an ode to cinema, to the magic of cinema, to filmmaking as an art form, as a tool for expression and exploration.”

To help fund this project, please visit the Savage Witches page on Sponsume.

Craig reporting from the London Film Festival.

Argentinian film editor Delfina Castagnino makes her directorial feature debut with What I Love the Most / Lo que más quiero, a slight but thoughtfully quiet film full of long takes and extended pauses. The slim plot follows Pilar, who has recently lost her father, visiting her friend Maria, who is absconding from her boyfriend. The two spend their days by nearby lakes, at gigs or on the beach, idling away the time. Pilar ties up her father’s business loose ends and Maria meets a local guy (Esteban Lamothe) who takes her mind off her relationship and the friends begin to drift apart.

What I Love is a cleanly directed, well-composed film. Each scene is clinically precise in its framing, though often deliberately askew – actors awkwardly shot from just below waist-height, tree-lined landscapes partially obscure parts of the film frame. Most shots outlast...