Films worth seeing at least once Archives - Fra SouFilm https://soufrafilm.com/category/films-worth-seeing-at-least-once/ Blog about inspirational documentaries Tue, 20 Jun 2023 14:32:28 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.2 https://soufrafilm.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/cropped-film-145099_640-32x32.png Films worth seeing at least once Archives - Fra SouFilm https://soufrafilm.com/category/films-worth-seeing-at-least-once/ 32 32 Monterey Pop https://soufrafilm.com/monterey-pop/ Sat, 20 May 2023 14:23:00 +0000 https://soufrafilm.com/?p=85 There were two major films about music events in the '60s, Woodstock and Monterey Pop, made one year apart.

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There were two major films about music events in the ’60s, Woodstock and Monterey Pop, made one year apart. In “Monterey” (to the director’s credit, films about Bob Dylan, John Lennon and David Bowie) it is obvious that the “summer of love” crowd has not yet turned into a flood of undressed people dressed in hippie fashion. “Monterey Pop,” a festival attended primarily for the music and secondarily for the buzz and nature, registers a transition to another quality and a new scale of Janis Joplin, Ravi Shankar, The Who and Simon & Garfunkel. Sitting on chairs and cautiously dancing in a small square are young guys – primarily intellectuals and advanced fashionistas of their time, who bought tickets to launch their favorite subculture into space. As is often the case with archival footage, watching the makeup and hairstyles of ordinary festival guests is hardly more interesting than watching the stage convulsions of Townsend or the guitar of Jimi Hendrix. A timeless, energizing and 50 years later and a unique film from the heart of an interesting time.

One of the most interesting aspects of this film is that it captures performances by such legendary performers as Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin and The Who. Their performances were not only energetic and thrilling to watch throughout the concert, but also full of emotion and feeling.

Another interesting aspect of this film is its social significance. The festival took place at a time of an active civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War. Many of the performers used their platform to convey social messages to their audiences.

It was the first film to use the Dolby system to enhance sound quality and create the effect of being at the concert.

But that’s not the only thing that makes this film so interesting and meaningful. It is a reflection of a time when the world was changing before people’s eyes, art was becoming increasingly experimental and free, and new technologies were helping to expand the possibilities of filmmaking.

Monterey-Pop 1968 – is a beautiful example of documentary filmmaking that combines high quality sound and image with social significance. It left an unforgettable mark on the music industry and still serves as a model to follow. If you haven’t seen this film yet, I recommend it to all music and film lovers.

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Sans Soleil https://soufrafilm.com/sans-soleil/ Mon, 10 Apr 2023 14:19:00 +0000 https://soufrafilm.com/?p=82 Sans Soleil, an "experimental" film from director Chris Marker (perhaps best known for La Jetée, which inspired Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys), is a pretentious love-it-or-hate-it piece of cinema.

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Sans Soleil, an “experimental” film from director Chris Marker (perhaps best known for La Jetée, which inspired Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys), is a pretentious love-it-or-hate-it piece of cinema. A 100-minute collage of disjointed images from around the world (with a heavy emphasis on Japan and Bissau), Sans Soleil is complemented by the existential elliptical musings of the narrator (who reads aloud the recordings of a fictional cameraman named Sandor Krasna). While it could be argued that the film is only about memory and time, this would be an attempt to organize what is essentially a random series of stream-of-consciousness philosophical musings.

To be fair, there are moments when some of what Marker has to say is at least fascinating, if not interesting. However, he never lingers on any one subject long enough for it to bear fruit, preferring to move on to something else. His monologues are philosophically pedantic. He lectures a lot, and many of the dialogues have an elitist tone that hints that the director believes he is revealing amazing truths. The images are banal by design. (Something of a confession early in the process when he offers this comment: “I have traveled the world several times, and now I am only interested in banality.”) Few, if any, of them remain in the memory. The film flits from topic to topic like a crazed butterfly, one minute offering insight into revolutionary thinking, the next offering deconstruction of dizziness.

There is no single storyline to speak of. In the film, a female narrator (Alexandra Stewart in the English version) reads letters written to her by Krasna (Marker’s pseudonym) while clips he has shot are played on the screen. This gives Marker the freedom to express himself on any topic that strikes his fancy. The title Sans Soleil (or without the sun in English) refers to a science fiction film that he is planning but does not plan to make. Like many of his other discourses, it touches on ideas about time, memory, and how they are interconnected.

A connection can be made between Sans Soleil and Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi. Both films rely primarily on images to convey a message. The difference is that while Reggio has arranged the visual elements of his film with great care, aiming at times to evoke awe and wonder, Marker’s approach is more haphazard and grounded. Aurally, Koyaaniskaqi relied on Philip Glass’s score. Sans Soleil replaces this with Stewart’s voice.

Four versions of Sans Soleil were created at the time of its release. There are no visual differences, but each has a completely different soundtrack. The film was released in English (narrated by Stewart, a French actress of Canadian descent), French (Florence Delay), Japanese (Ryoko Ikeda) and German (Charlotte Kerr). There is no reason to favor one over the other.

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Good Ol’ Freda https://soufrafilm.com/good-ol-freda/ Sun, 05 Mar 2023 14:26:00 +0000 https://soufrafilm.com/?p=88 In a small British cottage, the filmmakers find the elderly Frieda, a girl who worked as a typist and, as a teenager, became the keeper of The Beatles fan club.

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In a small British cottage, the filmmakers find the elderly Frieda, a girl who worked as a typist and, as a teenager, became the keeper of The Beatles fan club. From the band’s first day performing in the Liverpool cellars until the breakup, when tens of thousands of fan regrets were sent to the studio, Frida spent a lot of time with the Beatles: as the invisible heroine of Richard Lester’s comedies, accompanying them on their star-studded journey. “Good Old Frida” is a tender film about friendship, the juxtaposition of stardom and unremarkable living, and why the world, including Frida, was head over heels in love with The Beatles. An excellent student, a quiet mouse and a big soul, 70-year-old Frieda recalls the swinging ’60s and looks at the adventures of her youth from the distance of her unremarkable British life. The former secretary, who can be found in half of the group’s pictures, tells a direct and very lively story of a generation and a supergroup without narcissism or speculation.

There’s probably not much information about the Beatles that hasn’t been made public in the forty-some years since their demise, and even if there had been, their former secretary Fred Kellie probably wouldn’t have told you about it. There is good information about the Beatles’ early career, especially about their days at the Cavern Club, but this is not so much a documentary about the Beatles as it is a documentary about what it is like to run a fan club for a cultural phenomenon.

What makes the film so enjoyable is Freda herself. The visibly unglamorous woman is exceedingly likable, and it’s charming to hear her recount the efforts she made to make sure that the fans got what they wanted (she repeatedly points out that she was a fan herself). She also says a few things about the Beatles parents and the various incidents, such as George being the one who dismissed her.

But the heart of the film is Freda, whose dedication and turbotism make her wonderfully endearing.

There are many sources of information about the Beatles; this film is not so much a look in the middle at them, as the experience of being in the middle. And it turns out to be very interesting.

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Paris Is Burning https://soufrafilm.com/paris-is-burning/ Tue, 21 Feb 2023 14:29:00 +0000 https://soufrafilm.com/?p=91 In the late '80s, Jenny Livingston spent several years observing the ballroom-dance subculture, popular primarily among poor and unprivileged New Yorkers

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In the late ’80s, Jenny Livingston spent several years observing the ballroom-dance subculture, popular primarily among poor and unprivileged New Yorkers: African-Americans and Latinos, mostly gay and transgender. Local contests and private clubs, marginalized companies and day jobs all remain in the director’s lens as stunning archives of grainy film and unprecedented access code. Nothing as interesting in color, character vividness, and anthropological accuracy in music underground documentary has been around for a long time.

Until a couple of Europeans traveled back to the States to meet the famous dancers who invented voguing, something they did in “Paris is Burning” and which became the basis for Madonna’s landmark “Vogue” video. Most of them grew out of the ballroom context and, in Madonna’s subplot, finally found worldwide fame and incredible royalties. “Take a Pose” documentarians meet them two decades after triumph, the AIDS epidemic, world tours and chronicles of the beautiful life. As often happens in such cases, the meeting of one’s peers says a lot about the generation, the time that has passed, irreparability and the power of personal choice: two deaths, poverty and world fame, discrimination and quiet maturity – in each of the characters of “Take Pose” reflects a dozen possible scenarios for the famous dancer of the early 90s, where sharing a stage with Madonna is either the very beginning or the peak of the life journey.

Poor and discredited, second-class people doubly, black, queer, transgender, and often rejected even by their relatives, find their place in communities called homes, creating a subculture of voguing and drag balls, a world of glamour, where groups compete in competition. Voguing is plastic defiling, a hybrid of dance and mannequin gait, the poses of photo models on magazine covers, the theatricality, performativity and aesthetics of the forms of fitness and aerobics popularized at the time. Experiencing the difficulties of self-identification and integration into the world of white and successful, they are like children playing in the world of adults and princesses, trying on the roles of movie stars and businessmen from the covers of “Forbes”.

Contestants were divided into groups – houses, and adhered to a certain category or theme. For example, the “benjee realism” category depicted macho archetypes of sailors, soldiers, and street hooligans, as well as the categories of “model image,” “punk,” “shopping on Fashion Avenue,” “best performance,” “leather versus suede,” “high fashion,” and “Hollywood evening gowns.” Sometimes it was realness-the ability to pass for heterosexual in the real world-and sometimes it was the emphasis on extravagance and flamboyance. Chantal Rénier photographed the balls: “It was a unique performance, full of emotion, laughter, drama and skilful theatricality.

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