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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Marnie (1964)

Recommended

USA

Feature Film

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writers: Jay Presson Allen, Winston Graham

Cinematographer: Robert Burks

Composer: Bernard Herrmann

Cast: Tippi Hedren, Sean Connery, Diane Baker, Louise Latham, Martin Gabe, Bruce Dern

Hitchcock’s troubling film – in which a serial thief (Hedren, excellent) is blackmailed into marriage by one of her victims, despite her evident psycho-sexual problems – is one of his bleakest, most ambitious efforts but, perhaps due to Connery’s rather lightweight turn, it never quite reaches the heights of his best work. Iain.Stott

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Les Temps Morts (1964)

Recommended

France

Animated Short Film

Original Title: Les temps morts

Director: René Laloux

Writers: René Laloux, Roland Topor, Jacques Sternberg

Composer: Alain Goraguer

Narrator: Roland Dubillard

Laloux’s blackly comic short film – mixing animated footage with moving and still archive materials, showing images of war, murder, and execution – is presented, from an alien perspective, as an anthropological study of the peculiar behaviour of the residents of planet Earth. Iain.Stott

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Gertrud (1964)

Essential Viewing

Denmark

Feature Film

Director: Carl Th. Dreyer

Writers: Carl Th. Dreyer, Hjalmar Söderberg

Cinematographer: Henning Bendtsen

Composer: Jørgen Jersild

Cast: Nina Pens Rode, Bendt Rothe, Ebbe Rode, Baard Owe, Axel Strøbye

Dreyer’s majestic final film – in which the attractive, refined lady of the title strives (and fails) to connect with the four men in her life, refusing to make the compromises necessary for cohabitation – is a film of exquisite beauty, full of delightfully restrained performances and ravishingly expressive mise en scène. Iain.Stott

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I Am Cuba (1964)

Highly Recommended

Cuba/Soviet Union

Feature Film

Original Title: Soy Cuba

Director: Mikhail Kalatozov

Writers: Enrique Pineda Barnet, Evgueny Evtushenko

Cinematographer: Sergei Urusevsky

Composer: Carlos Fariñas

Cast: Sergio Corrieri, Salvador Wood, José Gallardo, Raúl García, Luz María Collazo, Raquel Revuelta

Although its championing of martyrdom leaves something of a bad taste, the film’s general rightness – an attack against tyranny, exploitation, and nefarious foreign interest – and the sheer poetic brilliance of its cinematic technique, make watching this fourth (and unfortunately final) collaboration between Kalatozov and Urusevsky an overwhelmingly memorable experience. Iain.Stott

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Les Jeux des Anges (1964)

Recommended

France

Animated Short Film

Original Title: Les jeux des anges

Writer/Director: Walerian Borowczyk

This unsettling animated short film from (a pre-porn) Borowczyk, full of ominous train journeys, labyrinthine buildings, and macabre machinery, all in a dirty blood red hue, is an enigmatically powerful and rather disturbing piece of work. Iain.Stott

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21-87 (1964)

Highly Recommended

Canada

Short Documentary

Director: Arthur Lipsett

Made entirely from found footage, juxtaposing images of modern man at work, rest, and play, Lipsett’s stunning short film – nominally an attack against the dehumanising nature of society in the machine-age – is as much a celebration (at least through my eyes) of humanity in all its forms as it is a lamentation. Iain.Stott

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