1954 UNSEEN

This way madness - or experimental filmmaking - lies. A solitary man in coat and tie enters an apartment. It's midnight. He appears agitated and distraught. He throws a glass of water in his face and laughs. He takes off the coat and tie. His moods swing. He stares at a light bulb. He removes his shirt. He lights a cigarette. He looks at a book. He does something drastic and self-destructive. He opens doors to a garden.

A Slavonic Mass by Leos Janácek plays as historical figures, biblical characters, and mythical creatures gather in the pleasure dome. Aphrodite, Lilith, Isis, Kali, Astarte, Nero, Pan, and the Great Beast and the Scarlet Woman are part of a visual feast of images superimposed, hallucinations, and the spirit of decadence of the "Yellow '90s." Mythological images from Aleister Crowley, cabalistic symbols, artifice, and magic combine to render the pleasure dome both as prison and as celebration.

A German nurse gets sent to the front because she gives medical aid to a wounded Yugoslav partisan during World War II.

Gone several years, the brooding Alejandro returns to the hacienda of his foster sister, Catalina, whom he loves, to find her married to the wealthy and effete Eduardo.

After the American Civil War, mercenaries travel to Mexico to fight in their revolution for money. The former soldier and gentleman Benjamin Trane meets the gunman and killer Joe Erin and his men, and together they are hired by the Emperor Maximillian and the Marquis Henri de Labordere to escort the Countess Marie Duvarre to the harbor of Vera Cruz.

With delicate, unobtrusive strokes, Naruse evokes both the humor and bitterness of his characters’ dilemmas, in this bleak, compelling poignant portrait of a quartet of aging geishas contemplating their troubles with men and money.

A stranger in town becomes the target of a lynch mob in Allan Dwan's feverish Western noir, made at the height of the nation's "Red Scare" witch hunts and now acclaimed as one of the most concise anti-McCarthy parables ever made by Hollywood. About to marry the lovely Rose (Lizabeth Scott) on the 4th of July, straight-ahead Dan Ballard (John Payne) finds his nuptials interrupted by "marshal" Ned McCarty (a sneering Dan Duryea) who claims he’s wanted for murder. Innuendo and suspicion soon turn the townsfolk from caring neighbors to a braying mob and it is up to Rose and one of Dan's ex-lovers to keep our hero from the gallows. Famed noir cinematographer John Alton shrinks the West's expansive plains into a claustrophobic nightmare of disorienting camera angles and harsh high-contrast lighting, the better to match the film's rapidly escalating sense of utter paranoia. With SILVER LODE, Dwan turns the American frontier into an American prison, with a madman named "McCarty" ready to destroy anyone who stands against him. - Jason Sanders

The Extraordinary Child applies his developing style to broad slapstick. His friends from the previous films and the director himself play out a riotous farce about an overgrown baby who steals his father’s cigars. Everyone mugs hilariously. The movie could be taken as another example of the Romantic notion of the artist as a monstrous child or misfit, or a parody of the same rather than the personal confessional statement seen so often in these film movements.

A useless and bloody vendetta has been going on for ages between two families in this Mexican village. Men, sons, have killed each other for generations, for a so-called conception of honor in a revenge that never ends since it is also triggered by people of the village. Now, today, there are only two sons left, one in each family. One has become a doctor in the big city and his culture is modern. The other last one - of the other family - hasn't left the village and is waiting for the doctor to come "home" as he plans to kill him, to settle this war on this matter of honor once and for all. And the people of the village want blood.

At New Mexico's Empire Zinc mine, Mexican-American workers protest the unsafe work conditions and unequal wages compared to their Anglo counterparts. Ramon Quintero helps organize the strike, but he is shown to be a hypocrite by treating his pregnant wife, Esperanza, with a similar unfairness. When an injunction stops the men from protesting, however, the gender roles are reversed, and women find themselves on the picket lines while the men stay at home.

Two detectives are investigating a robbery in which $300,000 was taken. Their investigation leads them to the main player and they find the cash, but one of them has meanwhile fallen hard for a woman with expensive tastes, and though he desperately wants to keep her, he knows that a cop's salary isn't going to be enough for her.

When a stagecoach guard tries to warn a town of an imminent raid by a band of outlaws, the people mistake him for one of the gang.

Parajanov's diploma film for the VGIK, based on the Moldavian fairy tale by Emilian Bukov.
A young shepherd is given a magical instrument from a giant.

A student at a woman's university takes a controversial action against the school's old-fashioned doctrines.

An Inn at Osaka, rarely seen outside Japan, follows the story of an insurance company executive from Tokyo, Mr. Mito, who is demoted to the Osaka office. He takes a room at a small inn and tries to rebuild his life. Notable for its exquisite framing and cinematography, An Inn at Osaka allows its complicated plotlines to disappear behind the minutiae of penury and humiliation that Mito and others suffer during the post-war economic and social reconstruction.