Films to recommend

I just got into watching old movies with the 1981 Australian “The killing of Angel Street”, describing a community struggling against commercial property development in the 70ies in Sydney. It is based on the history of activist Juanita Nielson , who was murdered because of her opposition to the high-rise developments. The film is now hard to get.

Yesterday I watched marxist (?!) filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville”, a classic 1965 film about a totalitarian, de-humanised and computer-controlled society.  It came with a pack of videos some artist dumped on us in a tidy-up action, along with Luis Bunuel’s 1964 “Diary of a Chambermaid”. I found both films quite hard to watch, they are quite intelligent and heavy, definitely challenging and disturbing the audience more than any current Hollywood superficial blockbuster.  Especially the Luis Bunuel film shocked me. Unbelievable that such films were made in the early 1960ies.
Jean Luc Godard’s new film “Socialisme” will be released next year, will try to catch up on his other movies till then.

“This Revolution” could be subtitled as “Indymedia goes Hollywood”; and is a hommage to the 1969 film “Medium Cool”- half documentary, half movie. Unfortunately, it seems that not much exciting protest action happened at the RNC convention to document, except that the police accidentally arrested the leading actors as a suspective subversive group, contributing to a sudden end of the movie.  Still quite nice to watch though therefore not that much action included.

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