MUBI Blog

We are again partnering with Queer Lisboa—Festival de Cinema Gay e Lésbico de Lisboa—to bring you over twenty films from its 2012 program for free. The festival, now in its 16th year, is not only the oldest film festival in Lisbon, but it is also the sole Portuguese film festival dedicated exclusively to screening gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and transsexual themed films.

Films will be available from now until the end of the festival, September 29. One particular gem, is Happy Birthday!, an early short by João Pedro Rodrigues, the director of To Die Like a Man who has a new film in the festival circuit this year, The Last Time I Saw Macao, co-directed by João Rui Guerra da Mata. See the full lineup here.

We’re excited to announce that MUBI is evolving for subscribers in the UK. Life is complicated, watching great movies shouldn’t be. That’s why we’re changing the way you discover the best cinema in the world. Every day we’ll curate a wonderful new film and you’ll get 30 days to enjoy it, all for just £2.99 a month. By adding a new film every day, the library will always stay fresh and exciting and fits into even the most hectic schedule. All without putting a big dent in your pocket book. Say hello to the new MUBI. Watching great cinema just got a lot simpler.

“One of the rising stars of contemporary Mexican cinema… Nicolás Pereda combines aspects of some of the most notable trends in contemporary world cinema, including deadpan minimalism, slacker cinema, the documentary/fiction hybrid, and long-take formalism.” —Anthology Film Archives

MUBI is proud to be showing films by this exciting new talent. Now playing on the platform: 

Where Are Their Stories? (2007)

Interview with the Earth (2008), pictured above

Together (2009)

All Things Were Now Overtaken by Silence (2010)

WATCH FILMS FROM THE IMAGES FESTIVAL FOR FREE!

For the duration of the 25th anniversary edition of the Images Festival (site), Toronto’s second oldest film festival and the largest festival in North America for experimental and independent moving image culture, we’re presenting three films from the program worldwide — and for free!

At the AV Club, John Semley writes that Antoine Bourges’s medium-length film East Hastings Pharmacy is “a gripping watch, wondrously despondent without ever seeming miserable.”

In Monique Moumblow’s short, Charles, a young man delivers a monologue in Danish outlining a chronic series of disturbing actions and strange behavioral patterns attributed to his brother, Charles; and in Puhelinkoppi (1882-2007), Hope Tucker documents the final days of the last public phone booths in Finland.

The festival runs through Saturday, April 21, so you’ll want to watch these innovative films now!

We’re partnering with the Rome Independent Film Festival, running through April 20 (site), to present — for free! — a selection of films from this year’s lineup.

Alessandro D’Ambrosi and Santa De Santis’s Nostos tracks the surreal journey of a young Italian soldier who deserts in 1943. Elisa Resinaro says her short MyShoes “aims at mixing the fast paced language of thriller movies with the sweet-sour tones of a true melodramatic fiction.” In Nicolò Mazza de Piccioli’s Notizie da Godot, a young screenwriter celebrates with friends as one of his films heads to Cannes.

All three of the above films are viewable worldwide, but you’ll have to be in Europe to watch Daniele Sartori’s Doris Ortiz in which a man of the cloth pursues two surreal clowns through the night.

Last week, in partnership with Watchmaker Films, we presented Tobe Hooper’s rarely seen comedic short The Heisters (1964). This week: the main attraction, Hooper’s debut feature, Eggshells, (1968/69), long believed to have been lost until, four decades on, it was rediscovered, restored and presented at the 2009 edition of the South by Southwest Festival.

That’s when Louis Black, a co-founder of both the Austin Chronicle and SXSW, wrote that “Eggshells makes explicit what many have long assumed — that Hooper’s sense of cinema is the defining characteristic that makes [The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)] great. Eggshells is a true 1968 film, psychedelic and political; it seems clear that Hooper had watched more than a film or two by Jean-Luc Godard. The film celebrates alternative lifestyles and politics and people and an odd, kinky semi-mysticism that is grounded more in humor than the supernatural. It captures what Austin looked like in the Sixties as well as the political sensibility shared by so many at the time. As a period piece and/or as a psychedelic film and/or as a first effort by a gifted director, the film is well worth watching. But there is something more going on. Throughout Eggshells are the kinds of telltale camera movements, manipulations of POV, casually intricate cutting, and scenes that are mystifying and haunted, elements that all come to fruition in Chainsaw, where they harmoniously work together to create that horror film masterpiece.”

Beyond a few rare festival screenings, Eggshells has seldom been seen and has never had a proper release. Until now. Watch and enjoy.

In late 2010, a panel of judges that included John Carpenter, Wes Craven, John Landis, George Romero, Guillermo del Toro and Eli Roth put The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) at the top of Total Film’s list of the “Greatest Horror Movies Ever Made.” But five years before Tobe Hooper would carve his signature on the genre, leaving a proud and permanent scar, he made a feature for $100K called Eggshells — which, for decades, was believed to have been lost. But in 2009, a print was discovered and presented at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Hooper’s hometown, and it’s since seen the occasional festival screening — but never a full-blown release. Until now.

MUBI’s proud to be teaming up with Watchmaker Films to present a proper worldwide release later this month of what Hooper himself describes as “a real movie about 1969, kind of verite but with a little push, improvisation mixed with magic. It was about the beginning and end of the subculture. Most of it takes place in a commune house. But what they don’t know is that in the basement is a crypto-embryonic hyper-electric presence that managed to influence the house and the people in it. The presence has embedded itself in the walls and grows into this big bulb, half-electronic, half organic. Almost like an eye, but like a big light, it comes out of the wall, manipulating and animating. I’ve always described it as being a mixture of Andy Warhol’s Trash and Walt Disney’s Fantasia.”

Tobe Hooper will have more to say about Eggshells when we host a Q&A — do come and bring your Qs! To whet your appetite for Eggshells, we’re presenting The Heisters, a short Hooper made five years before, in 1964. It’s a “10-minute color comedy about three medieval outlaws who get into an absurdly escalated Road Runner-cartoony fight over their stolen booty,” as LM Kit Carson describes it in a profile of Hooper for Film Comment. “It won awards at the Tours, Cannes, and San Francisco film festivals.”

Watch it now! The Heisters.

We’ve partnered with the Istanbul Film Festival, currently running through April 15, to present a couple of films to viewers in Turkey for free right here.

Rémi Bezançon’s A Happy Event is “the film Knocked Up strived to be,” writes Serena Whitney at exclaim! “Bezançon’s visual style and his uncanny ability to embrace inappropriate humor, as well as being able to showcase couples at their most vulnerable, make this film stand out from the rest.”

In Keep Me Upright (Tiens moi droite), Zoé Chantre, diagnosed as a child with scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine, chronicles her “search to find words to fit her symptoms and visual expression for her condition,” as the Berlin International Film Festival described the film when it screened in the German capital in February. “Proceeding chronologically from her diagnosis, Chantre playfully splices together pencil sketches of bodies and body parts, medical diagrams and images and film footage to create a rich seam of visual, linguistic and sonic associations.”

Larry Jordan, occasionally known in more formal circles as Lawrence Jordan, has been making experimental and animation films for half a century now. A friend of Stan Brakhage, with whom he hung out in New York with the likes of Maya Deren, and of Bruce Conner, with whom he started Camera Obscura, a film society that ran for a number of years, Jordan also established The Movie, San Francisco’s first 16mm experimental film theater in 1958. He’d also become a founding director of Canyon Cinema Cooperative, with whom we’re partnering to present seventeen of Jordan’s films.

So where in the world to start? Probably with Our Lady of the Sphere (1969), if for no other reason than that it was entered into the National Film Registry in 2010. Here’s what the Library of Congress has to say about it: “Jordan uses ‘found’ graphics to produce his influential animated collages, noting that his goal is to create ‘unknown worlds and landscapes of the mind.’ Inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Our Lady of the Sphere is one of Jordan’s best-known works. It is a surrealistic dream-like journey blending baroque images with Victorian-era image cut-outs, iconic space age symbols, various musical themes and noise effects, including animal sounds and buzzers.”

Another recommendation would be Cornell, 1965 (1978). The background on that one is that, in 1959, Jordan sent Joseph Cornell a handmade book of stills taken from Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible and the two of them struck up a correspondence. McKenna: “Over the next few years, Cornell commissioned Jordan to provide photographs and film sequences for him by mail…. In 1965, Cornell asked Jordan to come east to be his assistant. Living for a month in Cornell’s house in Flushing, Jordan worked on box assemblages, edited Cornell’s film Legend of Fountains and shot new footage for him, in addition to making the only film of Cornell at work.” Jordan would continue to make boxes and collages of his own throughout the following decades.

In 1970, Jordan won a Guggenheim award to make Sacred Art of Tibet (1972), which features lives scenes and his friend Dean Stockwell. The San Francisco Chronicle has called it a “monumental effort that is laced with brilliant artistry, moments of deep impact.”

If you’re looking to sample more recent work, Jonathan Marlow has a suggestion: “Cosmic Alchemy [2010] is thematically and visually consistent with his earlier shots and yet, set to an evocative score by John Davis, Jordan has crossed into an unfamiliar and richly rewarding territory of metaphoric complexity. For the handful of folks unfamiliar with Lawrence Jordan’s work, Cosmic Alchemy will leave you desperately wanting more. For the rest, already quite familiar with his brilliance, this film will install a fresh appreciation for Jordan’s justifiable position among experimental cinema’s ascended masters.”

This way to the cinema, Films by Larry Jordan.

We’ve just opened a virtual cinema featuring the work of Reha Erdem, ranging from the blackly comic to the eerily poetic (and we should note right at the top that not every film mentioned here will be viewable in every country; we do what we can). In the US, most were first introduced to Erdem when his Times and Winds, which had won the award for Best Film (as well as the FIPRESCI Prize) at the Istanbul International Film Festival in 2006, saw a limited theatrical run two years later before its release on DVD. It’s “a film bewitched by the rhythms of everyday life in a remote Turkish village,” wrote Ed Gonzalez in the Voice. “Erdem sees pain and love the same way he does the moon and sun — as constant, illuminating forces — and his camera pushes forward as if on an axis, peering at family and communal experience through the impressionable eyes of three pre-adolescents.”

“Aching with the Górecki-like symphonic throbs of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, the film suggests a version of Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive for the new millennium, even if its poetry outpaces Erice’s,” wrote Michael Atkinson in 2008. “You’re never sure what’s going on in these enigmatic images, or, really, between them (the characters do not express themselves openly), you’re just sure you’ve never quite seen this particular brand of mysterious poetry before.” In 2007, Michael Guillén, at the top of one of his excellent roundups, recalled being moved to tears: “I noticed a fellow a few seats away from me who kept staring at me with a bemused grin…” Of course, it turned out to be Erdem himself.

Erdem began picking up awards with his feature debut, Oh, Moon! (1989) when it screened at festivals in Locarno, Nantes, Moscow, Vancouver and Dunkerque. It’s the tale of Yekta, an 11-year-old girl who lives in a mysterious, castle-like house on the shore of the Bosphorus and daydreams about her long-lost mother.

Erdem’s second feature, Run for Money (1999), a black comedy about the insidious power of money, was Turkey’s entry that year in the race for the Foreign Language Oscar. Mommy, I’m Scared (2004), also known as What Is a Human Anyway…, is another comedy set in contemporary Istanbul and indeed won the FIPRESCI prize in the National Competition at the 23rd International Istanbul Film Festival.

In 2009, Italian journalist Giorgio Gosetti explained FIPRESCI’s decision to present the same award to Erdem once again: “What made My Only Sunshine (Hayat Var [2008]) stand out was the precision with which it conveys the values of a larger movement of filmmakers belonging to the strange condition of a country making a thrilling passage from Asian tradition to European sensibility…. The story deals with the troubles endured by the fourteen-year-old Hayat, who lives with her father and grandfather in today’s dangerous Bosporus. Her father owns a little fishing boat, using it for illegal traffic. Young Hayat’s life is tough and merciless, but she resists falling into despair — even when she is raped, even when life shows her how indifferent and cruel it can be. This courage and hope, held against all odds, will lead Hayat to a sort of martyrdom — the dramatic and natural issue in this contemporary society, full of sound and fury — which she confronts without losing her faith in love, or people, or the future.”

How would six Catalan artists depict Japan, and would these visions match reality? Those questions are explored in Japan: Imaginary Visions, just one of a good handful of short documentaries from DocsBarcelona you can watch right now — for free! — thanks to our partnership with the international film festival and pitching forum, an annual meeting of audiences and professionals in Spain’s bustling city.

Note that not every film is viewable in every country, but for most, four or five works should be available through Sunday.

We just opened a cinema featuring four short films by Kate McCabe, founder of the art collective Kidnap Yourself. Often combining live action photography and animation, with time manipulation techniques both in-camera and with optical printing, much of her work, distributed by Canyon Cinema, explores a realm between daydreams and reality.

She describes Tack (1995; image above) as “a collage of outtakes, forgotten still camera negatives, and super 8 film all chopped and rearranged on 35mm leader.” Portraits (2001) is comprised of 37 ten-second animated light paintings of artists and friends. The Chicago Underground Film Festival has called Das Neue Monster (2001) a “Frankenstein for identity politics.” And of her 17-minute film from 2004, she says: “Moving to Los Angeles seemed to me like traveling to a remote planet and we were astronauts hovering within its borders isolated in a strange sanctuary. Milk and Honey allows you to drift into that twilight world and dream of home.”

Through February 1, we’re partnering with the My French Film Festival to show you ten recently released French features (first and second films) and ten French shorts. Presented by Unifrance, the festival invites you to award points to the films you like at the main site — and these points count, as six prizes will be awarded (three for features, three for shorts): the Internet Users Prize, Social Networks Prize and International Press Prize.

Outside of both competitions, we’ve also got a few extra presentations. The online festival was a hit around the world last year and you won’t want to miss this second edition. Check out our notes on all the features and shorts here, then watch, enjoy and tell your fellow Francophiles!

MUBI has just reduced its prices across the board, including much lower monthly subscriptions. We’ll even give you unlimited viewing for 14 days for free to indulge in the very best of cinema. Start your free trial here.

There’s never been a better time to watch a great film online.

Love,
MUBI Team

Thomas Imbach’s Day Is Done, which screened in the Forum at this year’s Berlinale in February and won the Zurich Film Award 2011 earlier this month, opens in Berlin on Thursday. The site’s flaunting some pretty winning quotes, with Screen Daily noting that the documentary essay features “images of ravishing though unconventional urban beauty,” while Der Tagesspiegel writes that an “evocative maelstrom of great power emerges in the course of nearly two hours.”

But you won’t have to be in Berlin to watch work by this independent Swiss filmmaker. For a full year, we’ll be showing a selection of Films by Thomas Imbach.

Well Done (1994) is an absurdist comedy about the all but uncontrollable flow of data and money through Switzerland. Augusteb “loved it.” In Ghetto (1997), we follow a group of teens through an anarchic class room, a basement disco and into the night. “Allow the film 15 minutes to start sinking into you,” advises Giammiz, “and then you are going to love it.”

Happiness Is a Warm Gun (2001) offers “variations on a true story,” as the tagline goes, namely, that of Petra Kelly, a cofounder of the German Green Party who, in 1992, was shot dead while she slept by her partner, ex-general and Green politician Gert Bastian. Happiness screened in Berlin, Locarno and also won a Zurich Film Award.

Lenz (2006, image above) tells the story of a filmmaker researching Georg Büchner’s novel fragment Lenz. In August, Tsienni wrote: “Thanks to an empathetic show of sensitivity and personableness, this film manages to weave those little seemingly banal moments from one man’s quaint inner quest into a beautiful visual hymn of veritable life.”

If you read German, by the way, Michael Sennhauser writes about Imbach’s work in a recent issue of film-dienst. But of course, you won’t need to know German to watch Films of Thomas Imbach here on MUBI.