The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has become essential within the art cinema, his films are characterized by exploring obsessions such as alienation and disorientation produced by a gap between language and reality, the robotic repetition of social conventions , dystopia, and the use of catharsis as an escape route. There is no better way to …
The first, largest and commercially most successful independent record company in whole Germany until today has been Türküola. It was founded in Cologne by the Turkish migrant Yılmaz Asöcal in 1964. In the history of independent record companies as well as in the history of pop music in Germany Türküola and the many other Turkish …
The year is 1983. The setting is Washington D.C., the nation’s decadent and corrupt foundation upon which swindling political power brokers plot, scheme, and shuffle around Americans’ hard-earned taxpaying dollars like obnoxious Scotch-fueled frat boys drunkenly dealing monogrammed playing cards. The infamous Marion Barry (D.C.’s mayoral “Scarface in Miami” equivalent) presides over a city splattered …
There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai unless perhaps that of the tiger in the jungle. Book of Bushido Something is wrong with Jef Costello (The Samourai‘s theme, it is one of those rare cases in which the film music is a crucial factor for the analysis of the film. It is …
Melancholia is a very special film for me, coming from my favorite director in cinema, the Danish Lars von Trier. The story begins with the opera “Tristan und Isolde“, by the legendary composer Richard Wagner. While we listen to it we see the space trajectory of a mysterious and unknown planet that is getting closer …
Director: Jean-Pierre Melville [Exterior. Paris. Grey, grey, grey.] Alain Delon, Gian-Maria Volonté and Yves Montand play an unlikely trio- one was just released from jail, the second fled it, and the third is an ex-cop. The three plan a big coup by breaking into a big jewelry store at Place Vendome and are being chased …
A Woman Under the Influence is one of the most famous films directed by John Cassavetes, the father of American independent cinema. Cassavetes used to make his own films behind the back of the big industry and financed them with the earnings of his career as an actor. For this reason, he could afford to …
Director: Alfonso Cuarón Many directors have portrayed the near or distant future in their films. Some have done it with optimism, others with pessimism, but very few have dared to analyze the social, political and catastrophic repercussions of a collapsed present that is totally devoid of a promising future. Apparently, the Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón …
(This is an early interview from 1997 that Güldal Kızıldemir did for the Turkish newspaper Radikal. Translation by Saliha Enzenauer) “States like meaninglessness and melancholy can only be melted in a transcendental value. Art is one of these values.” Nuri Bilge Ceylan You received two big awards so far for your first feature film, The …
The 13th Floor Elevators weren’t only innovative for their time. They were so different- I liked that from the first moment I discovered them. Like me, they came from a boring small town, and they established a musical independence that was new in its consequence. Optically they looked like backward hillbillies, but stylistically they conveyed …
