Juan Vargas – Google

The saga opens with the coronation of the grand prince Ivan IV as a holy autocrat, the Tsar of All Russ. The ascension is conferred by God himself and thus inviolable. Ivan IV would have been Stalin’s idol. Boyarina Efrosinia considers Ivan a mortal enemy as she defends the boyars’ power and treasure. The acting is reminiscent of the stage acting, with over-the-top caricatures not characters, and are given to repetitive, long-winded speeches. The cinematography favors tight closeups, grimaces, tortured expressions, and eye movements belying secret intentions. The scenes are rich with darkness and light against cavernous lobbies and small doors. Ivan’s enormous shadow is cast against the wall in a beautifully framed scene. Richly painted icons, angels and spectres on the walls are used as background. Backgrounds become foregrounds, foregrounds, backgrounds, yielding a new transcendent visual experience. Battles, wars, and riots arise. Intrigues and treachery plague Ivan everywhere. Ivan pretends to be on death’s door (in a play within a play, like matryoshka dolls) proclaiming, “My death is nigh… I’m saying goodbye to this world.”. He equates the law of succession with the Russian state. He pleads with the boyars individually for their support. Each turns away. Only Burnsky, who catches on to the ruse, wildly pledges his support. Ivan says to him, “for in the time of the holy test you were the only one who remained faithful to your tsar”. Boyarina Efrosinia poisons Anastasia. The tsar abandons the state, but when a procession of icon-bearing masses come to him, he accepts being re-crowned as tsar. Stalin approved of Part I of Ivan IV conferring the film the Stalin Prize - First Class to Eisenstein, Prokofiev, Cherkasov, Birman and Tisse.

It was made using paper cut-outs [4] It is stylized according to the socialist realism dictates, no single prominent characters and laden with heavy propagandistic messages, the Soviets will aid the peasants oppressed by the evil British colonizers. The British profiteers financed the missionaries who in turn indoctrinated the peasants teaching them to be servile and obedient turning them into better slaves. [4] History of Russian and Eastern Animation. SU

An amateur entomologist accustomed to collecting insects is himself collected by a village. He is confined in a sand trap that will be his new home. There lives a woman who lost her husband and daughter to a sand storm. The villagers have brought her food, water and provisions and finally, a husband-to-be. Jumpei tries to escape but is trapped by quicksand. Sand is everywhere and inescapable from the camera’s probing eye. Teshigahara’s lush shots of the sand being molded by the wind evoke time, love, and inescapable suffering, one might even say, a samsara Every frame is sensual, minimal, and ghastly. We see the textures in boards, in the wind, and of the skin. The cinematography suggests the closeness in which they live. -J. Juan Vargas

Priest Nazario walks bare-footed and his diet is meager. Nazario, like Siddhartha, ventured outside his comfort zone. The conversations express a mixture of folklore, customs and religious superstitions. In a philosophical exchange with the two prostitutes, he concludes, “Así es la vida” (That’s life). His answer to superstition is, “Reza” (Pray). As prayer necessitates faith - faith necessitates prayer. In an allegorical device two women follow him. Nazarín is a satirical and critical view of religion, society and corruption. We see a social realism throughout, including in the Indian-Mexican-Castilian mix of Spanish-language dialects which evokes the comic and poetic, i.e. Nazario intoning, “¡ (Cada cual)…tiene su dignidad como cualquier déspota pasado, presente o futuro!” He is pointing a finger at the despotism endemic to Mexico’s political history, past, present and future. Bunuel’s lens does not overlook the patriarchy and misogyny of Mexican society. At the conclusion, he is offered a pineapple (piña). He hesitates in agony as his inner demons battle. The pineapple as a metaphor embodies all of his psychological distress. In the end he appears to have reached a spiritual resolution. The music however, a steady military drumming, underscores a fact that life continues inexorably with all its unanswered questions, “Así es la vida.”

Shukichi and his wife, Tomi, visit their son and daughter-in-law in Tokyo. Shukichi and Tomi encounter a Tokyo that is alien, their children changed. When Shukichi talks with his peers in a tavern drinking sake they bemoan the fact children nowadays don’t listen, and are failures. They vent painful memories of war, its ravages and the loss of their sons. Yasujirō Ozu’s camera takes us inside busy homes, then breaks away to gorgeous outdoor scenes seen from a distance as well as the bustle of railroad stations, and always the pillow cut to a factory bellowing its white smoke. Progress in post-war Japan is evident. The film is Buddhist in that the only constant is change. It seems one has to grow old to see it and with that aging comes loneliness. His daughter, Shige, is bossy and selfish, even shameless as when her mother dies, she demands certain clothing items immediately. Tokyo is a metaphor. It reflects change, suffering, sacrifice and loss, all the stuff of samsara. The most innocent apart from the grandparents are Noriko, the widowed daughter-in-law and Kyoko who vows never to be greedy and selfish. It is poetic in its sweeping grandness and in its painful simplicity.

The story revolves around a female commissar who on becoming pregnant is expelled from the army and sent to live with a Jewish family. There are a number of reasons it would be censured and delayed: there are scenes of the rounding up of Jews, the word “pogrom” is mentioned. Klavdia, though loyal to the cause, is cast off when no longer useful remains true to her ideals, though these ideals are questioned throughout the film. Flashbacks and flash forward dream sequences are poetic cinema. As the White Army passes by, the Jewish family sings and dances to Jewish folk songs while hidden beneath the earth. This dance scene led by Rolan Bykov is a cinematic master work. The film was completed in 1988 at the Mosfilm Studio. In Life is Beautiful (1997), Guido sees his family off to the death camp singing and dancing, much as Rolan Bykov (as Yefim) does, with great aplomb and surrealistic effect. There is even a physical resemblance between the two ill-fated figures. Probably just a script and make-up contrivance. Nonna Mordyukova should have won more than a Best Actress nomination – she wins my award for Best Actress. -J. Juan Vargas.

A morbid tale of a family that is devouring itself from within. Part horror, part avant garde, this film surreptitiously invites us 3to have pity on a murderous clan that is so vested in its deviancy that no amount of penance can save them, certainly not Alessandro, who killed his mother and epileptic brother with the complicity of his siblings. He dies in an epileptic fit while miming and dancing to the aria Sempre libera from Verdi’s La Traviata. The film set a tone for a new genre after neorealism.

An innocent girl is “sold” to the traveling entertainer, Zampano, as a replacement for her sister, Rosa, who he says, died. He beats her, and eventually succumbs to his own misdeeds of thievery and murder, but not before she is swept through an emotional whirlwind of unrequited love, desperation and pain. Oscars: Best Foreign Language Film. Venice FF: Silver Lion. Restoration in 4K resolution by the Criterion Collection and others. Italy