Haphazard travels of Sirman Deville with Manneken Pis

[niminy-piminy]

1975 poll No10:
TARZOON, SHAME OF THE JUNGLE (Boris Szulzinger, Picha)

https://youtu.be/A609EzrAR8w

Shame, the ape man of the jungle, is aghast when his woman, June, is kidnapped by a gang of giant penises. They take her to their queen, Bazunga, a bald woman with fourteen breasts. After tangling with a gang of great white hunters, a marauding lion and the Molar Men, Shame sets off to rescue her with only his faithful friend Flicka at his side. He heads for that darkest of areas ..... Bush Country!

https://letterboxd.com/film/shame-of-the-jungle/
reviews digest...
1/ Horribly racist, misogynist shitshow or searing postcolonial deconstruction, you decide. If you ask me, it was just an excuse to have anthropomorphic penises running around, which is amusing for about 5 minutes but this goes on for another 80.
2/ Younger generations will be shocked by its racist and sexist undertones, the rest of us are merely embarrassed.
3/ So racist, and times I couldn't tell if some elements are intended to be racist or not.
4/ I don’t know what this film was trying to prove by bombarding my retinas with deliberately racist imagery and anthropomorphic penises for 80 minutes, but I do know that I will never get those 80 minutes back.
5/ Sometimes it's truly embarrassing how little I value my own time.

[niminy-piminy]

1954 poll No18:
THE CHANGING EARTH (Bert Haanstra)



pre-environmental-grief Shell-sponsored "educational film" that portraits oil drilling as an integral ("natural") part of ONE BIG (all-encompassing) divine force that shapes the Earth from time immemorial.

cinephiles with guts & thick skin can also try the sequels (also sponsored by Shell) called...
— THE SEARCH FOR OIL (Bert Haanstra, 1954)
— THE OILFIELD (Bert Haanstra, 1954)
— THE WILDCAT (Bert Haanstra, 1954) ... alert! i can imagine it is hard to believe but THE WILDCAT is really NOT Bert Haanstras's hommage to Ernst Lubitsch or Pola Negri but the story of "the first drill".

[sally]

now you're talking! haanstra the shell shill thanks ♥ (am finding it difficult to enthuse about 54 but i do love dutch movies for some reason, they were as strong in documentary cinema in the early c20th as lithuania was in the later)

[Lencho of the Apes]

The Louisiana Story, by Robert Flaherty (1948) did similar pro-oil, pro-drilling work. Probably not as icky.

[niminy-piminy]

visited today an exhibition (details later in the eponymous thread) and there was on display this Shell-Man!

[niminy-piminy]

JIDFF 2021
PLANKTONIUM (Jan Van Ijken, 2021)

Nature’s wonders not visible to the naked eye are revealed in a documentary shot through a microscope lens. It shows to the viewer various kinds of plankton, a ubiquitous form of life, without which life on Earth wouldn’t exist. The vivacious movements of the water microorganisms are accompanied by the music of Jana Winderen, a Norweigan artist, composed using the sounds of water organisms, waves and icebergs.

https://youtu.be/msYidXcX1V8

JIDFF 2021
MESSAGE FROM MUKALAP (Judith Westerveld, 2021)

A unique recording from 1936 in South Africa captures the voice of a man named Mukalap, who invites the Europeans to listen to him and hear his native language, !Ora. The film is a response to Mukalap’s message, which the director understands not only as a valuable historical artifact, but, above all, as an invitation to communicate across time and space, in languages living and dead.

https://vimeo.com/530824156

[niminy-piminy]

JIDFF 2021
PAGIRNIS (Anastasija Piroženko, 2021)

In her film, the director juxtaposes Lithuanian mythology on household deities and the current situation in the Netherlands, where the housing crisis has pushed people to live in camping vans. The stories of the inhabitants of the camping village about their destinies and life philosophies, contrasting with the footage of their vans, are a testimony of the effects of late capitalism on everyday life, from which the old deities have been disappearing.

https://youtu.be/cozmeH32r-w

[rischka]

wow there are trailer parks in europe!

[niminy-piminy]

https://twitter.com/jirinvk/status/1498 ... qsr2N2GbDg

[niminy-piminy]

2009 poll highlights:
oh, i almost forgot i watched in the past this gorgeous doc about a Dutch photographer Gerard (Gerrit Petrus) Fieret (1924-2009)!
(certainly gonna be part of my ballot.)

PHOTO & COPYRIGHT BY G.P. FIERET (Frank Van Den Engel, 2009)

With his highly personal, grainy womens portraits, Gerard Petrus Fieret (1924-2009) managed to antagonize the entire late sixties establishment. In his mouse-infested studio he photographed his semi- or wholly undressed models as well as himself, his cat and the many sick pigeons living there with him. His photographic work has a unique quality which today is increasingly recognised by collectors and museums alike. His international breakthrough means prices for his work are rocketing, a development from which Fieret himself didnt actually reap any benefits. He died in 2009 at the age of 84.

This documentary film was shot during the final two years of his life. The camera shows Gerard Fieret to be alternately lucid and confused, aggressive and suave, stubborn and cooperative, accusing all and sundry and bemoaning his physical decline. Sixties models reminisce about the sometimes bizarre sessions, and photographic experts and art dealers speak about this versatile artists singular body of work. At the end of his life a major discovery is made: on the Duindigt country estate near The Hague, in the mole catchers cottage next to the trailer which had become his home, negatives which were thought to have been lost are discovered, stuffed into jerry cans.

https://youtu.be/mTwoGDIHues

[sally]

huh, so was wondering what our innovative man of mystery JC Mol was up to in 1946 (nothing apparently, recovering in australia apparently) and discovered that he was in the dutch east indies when the war broke out, got captured by the japanese and forced to make propaganda films, and thereby influenced a strain of documentary filmmaking in japan via one of the crew that was sent to work with him - https://letterboxd.com/film/selected-la ... n-shirota/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15rBvmYgsIY

[Lencho of the Apes]

Found this the other day and felt it needed to be shared...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY2CnXZ1LtA

[sally]

well, that was loaded, thanks lencho

[niminy-piminy]

1946 poll:

THE WORLD OF PAUL DELVAUX (Henri Storck, 1946)

In this film, Henri Storck, one of Belgiums most prolific experimental and documentary film makers, evokes the poetic world of the surrealist painter Paul Delvaux (1897-1994), then on the verge of his international breakthrough. The paintings and drawings are at the center of the film makers’s attention. The painter himself is present only through his work.

Poem by Paul Eluard (is being) recited by the author.

In Le Monde de Paul Delvaux the camera follows the bodies, the architecture, the perspectives by accompanying and revealing their story, what they show and the emotions they summon. The camera runs over the paintings like an eye reads a story. The music and the text also play on the principle of equivalence that echoes the force of the image and gives the soundtrack the role of poetical amplifier. Meditation, incantation, elegy, this setting in motion of an immobile world uncovers the sensuality of the big beautiful distracted women and the psychoanalytical echoes of the painter’s world. The height of daring was to film this in black and white. Yet this lack of colour, which could have been the death of the painting, in fact gives it an added, secret dimension, that of a reading where meaning is as important as the pictorial aspect.

This is an historic film since it is the first that Henri Storck made about art.

[niminy-piminy]

1955 poll:
CUCKOO WALTZ (Emiel van Moerkerken)

boobs, catholicism, camels, drummers, rallies, parades, mass exercise, penguins, unicycles, unicorns (with occasional reverse motion)...

https://vimeo.com/32833455