The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Highly Recommended

France/West Germany

Feature Film

Original Title: Les parapluies de Cherbourg

Writer/Director: Jacques Demy

Cinematographer: Jean Rabier

Composer: Michel Legrand

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo, Anne Vernon, Marc Michel, Ellen Farner, Mireille Perrey

Demy’s majestically gaudily coloured musical, in which all of the dialogue is sung by its beautiful young cast – producing a portrait of a 16-year-old girl, who falls pregnant to her petrol-pumping boyfriend just as he is called up for two year’s national service – is a very entertaining and exceedingly poignant illustration of the elasticity of the human heart. Iain.Stott

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Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)

Essential Viewing

West Germany

Feature Film

Original Title: Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes

Writer/Director: Werner Herzog

Cinematographer: Thomas Mauch

Composer: Popol Vuh

Cast: Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo, Del Negro, Ruy Guerra, Peter Berling, Cecilia Rivera, Dan Ades, Edward Roland

A group of Spanish explorers traverse the jungles and rivers of South America in search of fame, fortune, and El Dorado, stubbornly and bloodily making no concessions to rationality nor native pressures, in Herzog’s hallucinatory examination of colonial madness and greed, which boasts a cracking performance from Kinski. Iain.Stott

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Muriel ou Le Temps d'un Retour (1963)

Recommended

France/Italy/West Germany

Feature Film

Original Title: Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour

Director: Alain Resnais

Writer: Jean Cayrol

Cinematographer: Sacha Vierny

Composer: Hans Werner Henze

Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Jean-Pierre Kérien, Nita Klein, Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée

The excellent Seyrig plays a widow, living with her step-son, who invites a former lover, whom she hasn’t seen for twenty-odd years, to visit her in her Boulogne home, but, unexpectedly, he also brings along his “niece” and a whole lot of memories, in Resnais’s third feature, an enigmatic, unsettling, and menacing examination of the organic nature of memory. Iain.Stott

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Alice (1988)

Highly Recommended

Czechoslovakia/Switzerland/UK/West Germany

Animated Feature Film

Original Title: Neco z Alenky

Director: Jan Švankmajer

Writers: Jan Švankmajer, Lewis Carroll

Cienamtographer: Svatopluk Malý

Cast: Kristýna Kohoutová, Camilla Power (voice - English dub)

Demented Czech Genius Švankmajer’s disturbing (and definitive?) adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s much-adapted Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) - a dreamy tale of a young girl who follows a rabbit down a hole into a magical other world, or in this case, follows a rabbit, stuffed with sawdust, through a magic desk drawer into a world populated by delightfully inventive stop-motion wonders - is a film that will delight, revile, titillate, and scare silly people of all ages. Iain.Stott

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F for Fake (1974)

Highly Recommended

France/Iran/West Germany

Feature Documentary

Original Title: ?: About Fakes

Director: Orson Welles

Writer: Orson Welles, Oja Kodar

Cinematographer: François Reichenbach

Composer: Michel Legrand

Featuring: Orson Welles, Oja Kodar, Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving

Welles’s final film is a documentary of and about fraud and fakery, taking a look at the art forger Elmyr de Hory, notorious biographer Clifford Irving, as well as at Welles himself, which proves to be a fun, playful, and absorbing look at the role of the artist in a capitalist society. Iain.Stott

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