Free Resources of Rare Movies
Posts tagged Documentary
The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches on / Yuki Yukite shingun (ゆきゆきて、神軍) (1987)
Feb 12th
This documentary was five years in the making, and revolves around 62-year-old Okuzaki Kenzo, a survivor of the battlefields of New Guinea in World War II who gained notoriety by slingshooting steel pinballs at Emperor Showa to protest against what he considered to be the ruler’s war crimes. Setting out to conduct interviews with survivors and relatives, he finds the truth of the past to be elusive, achieving a breakthrough only when he confronts ex-Sergeant Yamada, who grudgingly admits the occurrence and instructional source of certain atrocities.
Tokyo Olympiad (東京オリンピック) (1965)
Nov 26th
Ichikawa’s cameras follow the 1964 Summer Olympics from opening to closing ceremonies. Sometimes he focuses on spectators, as athletes pass in a blur; sometimes he isolates a competitor; other times, it’s a closeup of muscles as a hammer is thrown or a barbell lifted; or, we watch a race from start to finish. We see come-from-behind wins in the women’s 800 and the men’s 10,000 meters. We follow an athlete from Chad from arrival to meals, training, competition, and loss. Throughout, the film celebrates the nobility of athletes pushing themselves to the limit, regardless of victory
Jackass 3D (2010)
Aug 31st
‘Jackass 3D’ opens with the entire cast all lined up, each wearing a different color of the rainbow, in front of a rainbow colored background, each in turn being attacked in various ways. Some of the footage is slowed down for maximal effect. This is repeated again at the end of the movie with additional explosions mixed in with gallons of water to wash away the cast- chaos is resumed. Throughout the movie the team are subjected to the usual foray of physical abuse from team members or perform hilarious stunts (including some of the more stomach turning stunts such as the Sweat suit cocktail, Toy Train Eruption and Poo Cocktail Supreme – not for the weak stomached!).
Buena Vista Social Club (1999)
Jul 8th
A group of legendary Cuban musicians, some as old as their nineties, were brought together by Ry Cooder to record a CD. In this film, we see and hear some of the songs being recorded in Havana. There is also footage from concerts in Amsterdam and New York City’s Carnegie Hall. In addition, many of the individual musicians talk about their lives in Cuba and about how they got started in music.
Germany in Autumn (1978)
Jul 8th
Germany in Autumn does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped, and later murdered, by the left-wing terrorists known as the RAF-Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction). The businessman had been kidnapped in an effort to secure the release of the orginal leaders of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. When the kidnapping effort and a plane hijacking effort failed, the three most prominent leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Enslin, and Jean-Carl Raspe, all committed suicide in prison. It has become an article of faith within the left-wing community that these three were actually murdered by the state. The movie has several vignettes, including an extended set of scenes with…
Land of Silence and Darkness (1971)
Jul 8th
Through examining Fini Straubinger, an old woman who has been deaf and blind since her teens, and her work on behalf of other deaf-blind people, this film shows how the deaf-blind struggle to understand and accept a world from which they are almost wholly isolated.
Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember (mi ricordo, sì, io mi ricordo) (1997)
Jan 6th
In 1996, Marcello Mastroianni talks about life as an actor. It’s an anecdotal and philosophical memoir, moving from topic to topic, fully conscious of a man of a certain age looking back. He tells stories about Fellini and De Sica’s direction, of using irony in performances, of constantly working (an actor tries to find himself in characters). He’s diffident about prizes, celebrates Rome and Paris, salutes Naples and its people. He answers the question, why make bad films; recalls his father and grandfather, carpenters, his mother, deaf in her old age, and his brother, a film editor; he’s modest about his looks. In repose, time’s swift passage holds Mastroianni inward gaze.
Ultime grida dalla savana (1975)
Jan 6th
Here’s a National Geographic style documentary that’s alternately exploitive and informative. The film presents a wide variety of ways that humans interact with nature. It depicts the actual footage of a careless man (Pit Dernitz) leaving the safety of his car to film lions close up and ends up being their dinner. Other highlights include natives humping the ground in hopes of bringing life to the land, various big game hunting and last but not least naked hippies.
Africa addio (1966)
Jan 6th
From the producers of the Mondo Canes comes this violent document of a continent in transition; the change from white colonialism to independent black statehood. Often times, this resulted in the wholesale massacre of thousands of people and the indiscriminate extermination of wild life. Captured on film are mercenary killer squads wiping out entire villages, executions, Mau-Mau massacres and more!
Mondo cane 2 (1963)
Jan 6th
The original shockumentary sequel made up of episodes in the life of man and beast, filmed all over the world – New Guinea, Germany, Singapore, Portugal, Australia, America and beyond. This time around, the voyage includes vivisection, recreations of old west lynchings, a visit to a mortician’s school, transvestites, wild sex clubs and alligator hunting.
Mondo cane (1962)
Jan 6th
Nominally a documentary, this film combines a number of unrelated sequences (both real and staged) — including a South Pacific “cargo cult”, the ritual slaughter of a bull, tribal dances and rituals, and a visit to an ornate pet cemetery — all focused on the lurid, sensational, and eccentric.
