vintage world cinema | The Female Gaze

Released: 1986

Available On: Out Now on DVD and Blu-ray

Director: Margarethe von Trotta

Reviewer: Sarah Gonnet

We received a free copy of this film from ORGANIC Media, in exchange for an honest review.

Margarethe von Trotta’s feminist films often put the personal at the heart of the political. Rosa Luxemburg is a perfect site for building on this theory- she spent her entire life, personal and political, battling to have her views heard, mostly over the voices of men within her own party. Von Trotta’s film guides us through Luxemberg’s life in a fairly traditional biopic way. This makes the attention paid to Luxemburg’s friendships with other women, and her deeply personal experiences of depression, stand out as something different. This is a view of Rosa Luxemburg that is highly sympathetic, yet doesn’t smooth over her flaws.

I came to the film knowing very little about Luxemburg, and I did find myself having to look her up and read reams about her in order to fully understand what was going on in this film. However this process of educating myself is not something I regret, and the quality of the film encouraged me to do so. I also ended up researching the other films of von Trotta- a leading light of the New German Cinema. Rosa Luxemburg was made in the mid-1980s, but has the gravitas of a film make a couple of decades earlier. Its careful pacing allows the viewer to become immersed in Luxemburg’s (often harsh) reality. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that von Trotta has been compared to Ingmar Bergman. It is therefore fitting that this new release of the film has been done through Studio Canal’s Vintage World Cinema imprint.

Overall I enjoyed this film, and I will be seeking out von Trotta’s other films about rebellious, and complex women. I hope that more are re-released as they are currently quite difficult to find!

Released: 1961

Available On: DVD and Blu-ray

Director: Alain Resnais

Reviewer: Sarah Gonnet

We received a free copy of this film from ORGANIC Media, in exchange for an honest review.

Over the years Last Year in Marienbad has been criticised for being largely “incomprehensible”. I can’t argue otherwise; however, there is still something about this film that had me hanging on to every (often repeated) line. It is like a puzzle that needs to be solved. However I’m not entirely convinced there is a logical solution.

As the film opens, we are taken on a tour of a baroque hotel, the same description is repeated several times, and we see the hotel as a deserted shell. It is only when the action of the film finally starts that we see people. All of the action takes place in the hotel. Or possibly the hotel, and a second hotel, located somewhere else (either physically, or in the character’s minds) which functions as a shadow of this one. It is still unclear at the end of the film is there is one hotel or two (or more).

As we follow characters, jumps in time and space confuse any sense of chronology. Frequently we watch a character walk through one setting, right into another; or turn around and have the setting change immediately in front of them. Reality, dream and possibly hallucination/delusion are so blurred it is impossible to see straight. All of this makes it difficult to capture the film in a review. In some ways the film is such a complete experience, that you need to watch it to get any sense of what it is like.

In terms of plot- the only thing that is clear is that an unnamed man, repeatedly approaches an unnamed woman, and suggests to her that they met a year ago, and agreed to meet again this year. The unnamed woman denies this. There is also a second unnamed man who has some kind of power over the unnamed woman; and he may or may not be her husband. Grasping onto anything else is difficult. Every time the events seem to be coming to some kind of conclusion, any sense of logic quickly slips away again.