Dario Argento's "Suspira"

Suspiria is quite the experience.  It's an Italian horror movie that could be accurately described as candy-colored.  It's almost like a live-action cartoon at times, but remains frightening and disorienting.  Check it out.  It has recently been released on Blu-Ray in the UK, which is a great use of the format.

Still courtesy of dvdbeaver.com.

Title Sequence for Gillo Pontecorvo's "Burn!"

"Funny Games" (US) Posters

The poster for Michael Haneke's Funny Games, designed by Akiko Stehrenberger recently got the nod for "Poster of the Decade" over at theauteurs.com.  I'm inclined to agree.  The winner is on the right, but I like both of them.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

Karl Theodore Dreyer's silent masterpiece can be seen in its entirety on YouTube.  Part 1 below:

George Orwell: A Life in Pictures

A Documentary about George Orwell

George Orwell -- A Life in Pictures uses a bold and original approach to put him on the screen. Chris Langham plays the writer and every word he speaks is as written by Orwell himself. But the pictures are all 'invented' -- a specially created 'archive' because there's not a single frame of archive footage of Orwell in existence. Not even one word or one of his trademark hacking coughs on recorded audio. All that is left is one oil painting and a couple of hundred photographs. By bringing to life his extraordinary treasure trove of writing - nine books and some eight thousand pages of journalism, essays, diaries and letters -- the film creates a unique dramatised biography of Orwell. Written essays become authored documentary films shot in the style of the day; events described in diaries are 'captured' on home movies; and Movietone footage is manipulated to reveal Orwell in the trenches of the Spanish Civil War. From Eton and Burma to London and Paris, Orwell's writing -- poignant and polemical, scathing and sometimes just funny -- is at last caught on film. http://www.walltowall.co.uk/catalogue_detail.aspx?w2wprogram=55

From "Why I Am Not a Christian"

"We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world -- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create." -- Bertrand Russell