“Taking pictures is a way of proving things. Waiting for the image to develop, I was often filled with a strange unease. I could hardly wait to compare the picture with reality. But comparing them wouldn’t reassure me either. As the still images were always overtaken by reality“ Reality is one of the most pivotal…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
Claudine (1974)
Claudine (Diahann Carroll) is a single mother living in Harlem with her six children. She has to work extremely hard to make ends meet, with her meagre earnings from her job as a domestic worker for a rich suburban family not being anywhere close to enough to support her family, and thus she has to…
Scenes from a Marriage (1974)
In the pantheon of great cinematic artists, there are few that can hold the prestige and pedigree as Ingmar Bergman, whose reputation as one of the finest filmmakers to ever work in the medium is undoubtedly and thoroughly earned – over the course of a career that lasted half a century, he blazed a trail…
The Mountain (2019)
Rick Alverson truly embodies the idea of outsider art – his films have digressed so far from anything even remotely understandable or normal, and extend further from the very definitions of independent filmmaking, defying even the most transgressive of filmmakers. Yet, his work is always so astute and brilliant and demonstrates an individual with one…
Blinded by the Light (2019)
Everyone has that one artistic hero, the person who inspires, moves and motivates them, and has helped them through the most difficult times in their lives. Often, this individual takes the form of a musician, a figure that makes use of the universal language of music to tell their story and inspire the lives of…
Non-Fiction (2019)
Léonard (Vincent Macaigne) is a writer who is amassing a small but dedicated group of supporters due to his unconventional “fictional autobiographies”, which chronicle the life and times of a man also named Léonard who just so happens to be a writer himself. His latest book, Final Point, is one that is stirring quite a…
The Night Porter (1974)
The 1940s, Hungary, during the height of the Holocaust. Maximilian Theo Adolfer (Dirk Bogarde) is a Nazi prison guard stationed at one of the notorious extermination camps, where he masquerades as a doctor, as a way of satiating his perverted desire for voyeuristic dominance by invading the personal space of the prisoners by photographing them…
Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)
Where could we possibly hope to start with Céline and Julie Go Boating? It wouldn’t be an uncommon occurrence to be left utterly bewildered by this film, and it doesn’t really matter if it is a loss for words out of sheer amazement, or through perplexed anger towards whatever this almost inconceivably strange film put…
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)
When it came to finding the intersections between intelligence and mindless action, Sam Peckinpah was one of the best to ever live. A director whose career consisted of some of the most brutal but fascinating portrayals of violence ever produced, his status as one of the most controversial filmmakers of his generation is not ill-earned….
Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974)
“The whole past is just fiction” I don’t think we’ll ever understand exactly what was going on in the gloriously twisted mind of Shūji Terayama, whose groundbreaking work spans a few decades and looked at growing up in a way very few artists ever managed to. Perhaps his most beloved film is Pastoral: To Die…
The Postmodern Pelican 