Amour



2012
Michael Haneke

Georges and Anne are in their eighties. They are cultivated, retired music teachers. Their daughter, who is also a musician, lives abroad with her family. One day, Anne has an attack. The couple's bond of love is severely tested.


Pieta


2012
Ki-duk Kim

A loan shark is forced to reconsider his violent lifestyle after the arrival of a mysterious woman claiming to be his long-lost mother.


Visual Training


1969
Frans Zwartjes

“Visual Training” is a short 1969 experimental film from the Netherlands. The film looks so ahead of its time, with its goth makeup and gritty look. I wonder if Marylin Manson or the band the Misfits have ever seen Visual Training? A man and two topless ladies sit at a table and eat. They grotesquely smear food on one another. The one girl is blindfolded and covered with baking powder by the guy. The screen sometimes turns black, as the camera cuts fast between shots. When the camera zooms in on the actor’s face, it looks as if he’s staring right at the viewer. The one girl’s nude body is used as a canvas for body food art. Frans Zwartjes has a created a rare short film that’s unique for viewers. It’s like a mild version of the “Vienna Aktionists” for the surreal at heart.


Frans Zwartjes is a experimental Dutch film-maker that creates abstract, artistic cinematic expressions of physical concepts such as eating, sex, desire, the act of spectating, loneliness, the anxiety of a new home, a wife, walls, rooms and companionship, etc. The silent characters expressing ideas are often painted white or employ gothic makeup, they make use of body language and bodily functions, nudity, facial expressions, and various camera movements and editing tricks are used, all suggesting pure and primitive instincts or passions. Made a few silent shorts (all collected on the DVD collection "The Great Cinema Magician"), then some impossible to find full-length movies. 

L'éden et après




1971
Alain Robbe-Grillet

In the labyrinthine Eden Cafe where ads for Coca-Cola share wall space with living friezes of nude models and slogans like "Drink Blood" a group of French students play games of Russian Roulette, poisoning, and rape. The Dutchman (Pierre Zimmer) enters the scene and demonstrates a "trick" he learned in Africa in which he heals one of the students who he has asked to pick up pieces of broken glass. He gives fear powder (not cocaine because that's already on the menu as a beverage at the Eden Cafe) to Violette (Catherine Jourdan) and she imagines herself in Tunisia in a series of sadomasochistic vignettes with the Dutchman and her fellow students inhabiting various roles (characters playing multiple roles - including themselves as actors - is an element of several Robbe-Grillet films) suffering multiple deaths and Violette even encounters her own double. Like THE MAN WHO LIES before this, EDEN AND AFTER was a French/Czechoslovakian co-production but location shooting is in picturesque Tunisia in color with striking choices of contrasting colors in the set and costume design (as well as that vivid blood which always splashes across bright surfaces). According to Robbe-Grillet, it was partially inspired by De Sade's JUSTINE and Lewis Carroll's ALICE IN WONDERLAND. An alternate version played on French TV titled N TOOK THE DICE. The scenes were re-ordered and alternate takes were also utilized with their arrangement being determined by a throw of the dice. Shots from the film appeared in Robbe-Grillet's last film GRADIVA.


Tierra Infierno



2003
Julian Moguillansky, Mor Navón

The awakening of Zos, Luciferian spirit of imagination, as Normal Chaos.
A hommage to the book "Earth: Inferno" (Austin Osman Spare, 1904)


Earth Inferno is the first book by the English artist and magician Austin Osman Spare when he was 18, the book introduces the reader for the first time to Spare's fundamental concepts such as Kia, Ikkah and Sikah and Zos.

Conceived as an anti-establishment reaction to the publicity surrounding his inclusion in the Royal Academy summer show in 1904, the book was developed over the remainder of that year and was eventually published in 1905. Printed by the Co-Operative Printing Society, the book was designed by the artist and self-published in an edition of 265 numbered and signed copies.

Influenced heavily by Dante's Inferno the book is decorated with poems and aphorisms in an aesthetic style and clearly shows the design influence of Spare's early supporter Charles Ricketts. Each pair of pages contains a painting and a commentary toward that painting. In addition to excerpts from Dante, the book also contains excerpts from Edward FitzGerald's translation of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.



Austin Osman Spare (30 December 1886 – 15 May 1956) was an English artist and occultist who worked as both a draughtsman and a painter. Influenced by symbolism and the artistic decadence of art nouveau, his art was known for its clear use of line, and its depiction of monstrous and sexual imagery. In an occult capacity, he developed idiosyncratic magical techniques including automatic writing, automatic drawing and sigilization based on his theories of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious self.

Born into a working-class family in Snow Hill in London, Spare grew up in Smithfield and then Kennington, taking an early interest in art. Gaining a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington, he trained as a draughtsman, while also taking a personal interest in Theosophy and the wider Western Esoteric Tradition, becoming briefly involved with Aleister Crowley and his A∴A∴. Developing his own personal occult philosophy, he authored a series of occult grimoires, namely Earth Inferno (1905), The Book of Pleasure (1913) and The Focus of Life (1921). Alongside a string of personal exhibitions, he also achieved much press attention for being the youngest entrant at the 1904 Royal Academy summer exhibition.

After publishing two briefly lived art magazines, Form and The Golden Hind, during the First World War he was conscripted into the armed forces and worked as an official war artist. Moving to various working class areas of South London over the following decades, Spare lived in poverty, but continued exhibiting his work to varying success. With the arrival of surrealism onto the London art scene during the 1930s, critics and the press once more took an interest in his work, seeing it as an early precursor to surrealist imagery. Losing his home during the Blitz, he fell into relative obscurity following the Second World War, although continued exhibiting till his death.

Spare's esoteric legacy was largely maintained by his friend, the Thelemite author Kenneth Grant in the latter part of the 20th century, and his beliefs regarding sigils provided a key influence on the chaos magic movement and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Spare's art once more began to receive attention in the 1970s, due to a renewed interest in art nouveau in Britain, with several retrospective exhibitions being held in London. Various books have been written about Spare and his art by the likes of Robert Ansell (2005) and Phil Baker (2011).

Vania Zouravliov


Russian-born Vania Zouravliov was inspired from an early age by influences as diverse as The Bible, Dante’s Divine Comedy, early Disney animation and North American Indians. Something of a child prodigy in his homeland, he was championed by many influential classical musicians including Ashkenazi, Spivakov and Menuhin. He even had television programs made about him and was introduced to famous communist artists, godfathers of social realism, who told him that his work was from the Devil.

Vania Zouravliov‘s whimsical and highly detailed illustrations are exquisitely gothic and layered with symbolism. Given the high quality of both craftsmanship and detail, as well as the rigorous layers surrounding the morbid characters in the illustration

By the age of 13, Vania Zouravliov was exhibiting internationally, visited Canterbury several times as well as Paris, Colmar and Berlin. He subsequently studied in the UK, and during this time began creating illustrations for The Scotsman and comics for Fantagraphics and Dark Horse in the US. His most recent projects have been for Beck's The Information and National Geographic.