Bob Rafelson was an American film director. I remember him for Head (1968) and Five Easy Pieces (1970).
Five Easy Pieces is famous for its chicken salad scene.
Head is known for being a hippie film in the style of The Trip (1967), Medium Cool (1969) and Putney Swope (1969).
Philip Baker Hall was an American actor.
A character actor, he was known for his collaborations with Paul Thomas Anderson in such films as Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999).
Lino Capolicchio was an Italian actor, screenwriter, and director known for performances in such films as Escalation (1968), The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970) and The House with Laughing Windows (1976).
Agnès Varda was a Belgian-born French film director.
Her films were popular among critics and directors, giving her the status of a cult director.
This is perhaps not the best of times to rid the world of a minor misconception regarding the work of Varda, but it is what I must do after researching her oeuvre following her death.
Agnès Varda made one film about the Black Panther Party, just one. That film was Black Panthers (1968), a color film which can be viewed in its entirety at Archive.org[1].
Another film from that same year is called Huey! and is directed by a certain Sally Pugh. It can be seen in full on YouTube [below] and has nothing to do with Varda, although the general subject matter as well as some scenes overlap.
I’ve taken an interest in biopics.
Researching Nietzsche I stumbled upon the film Beyond Good and Evil (1977) by Liliana Cavani, which follows the intense relationship between Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Salome and Paul Rée.
The film features the scene in which Lou Salomé reins Nietzsche and Rée in front of her cart[1] (above) as well as the horse scene in Turin [2](Nietzsche saw a horse being flogged, embraced it and collapsed and lived ten more years in a vegetative state).
Another interesting film appears to be Days of Nietzsche in Turin[3], a 2001 Brazilian film.
Referring to the horse incident, the film The Turin Horse[4] asks “what happened to the horse?”.
In director Béla Tarr’s introductory words:
Into the Wild is a 2007 American biographical drama survival film written and directed by Sean Penn, based on the travels of Christopher McCandless across North America and his life spent in the Alaskan wilderness in the early 1990s.
Depending on who you ask, Christopher McCandless was a Thoreau-like ‘back to nature!‘ hero or a simple-minded romantic.
The Double is a 2013 dark comedy written and directed by relative newcomer Richard Ayoade, starring Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) and Mia Wasikowska. The film is based on the novella The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It is about a man driven to mental breakdown when he is usurped by a doppelgänger.
The Double is World Cinema Classic #218.
… I like paintings you can listen to, music for the deaf and drawings for the blind. I like playing with medium specificity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuMI4lMk_-s
I recently discovered High Note (1960, above), a Warner Bros. Looney Tunes animated short directed by Chuck Jones.
In this charming film, various musical notes set up the sheet music to get ready for a performance of The Blue Danube Waltz. However, a sole note is missing. It turns out the note (a red-faced “High Note”) is drunk upon staggering out of the sheet music to “Little Brown Jug“, and the irritated conductor chases after him to put him back in his place so the waltz can continue as planned. Eventually, the rogue note is put back into place, but when the performance starts again, it has disappeared again, along with the rest of the sheet music. The composer then discovers that all the notes have gone into the “Little Brown Jug” to get drunk.
This film entered my head as visual music, although it is less so than the music visualization of Fantasia (1940), of which Oskar Fischinger‘s interpretation of J. S. Bach‘s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is online here.
Big Eyes (2014), a biographical drama film by Tim Burton about American artist Margaret Keane, who specialized in portraits of kitschy doe-eyed children and waifs.
Lana Del Rey contributed the song “Big Eyes”.
See 2014 in film.
Above is the trailer to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s first film in 23 years
The Dance of Reality (2013) is an autobiographical film by Alejandro Jodorowsky (born 1929).
Other films of 2013 I have enjoyed: