Best Of 1969

Experimental short, featuring strobe-like erotic imagery with several shots of the Rolling Stones in performance and an original synthesizer score by Mick Jagger.

Elizabeth Alione is sinking into a deep melancholy when she drags down the corridors, the park and the dining room of a hotel.

The life of the Armenian poet Sayat-Nova, from childhood to death: his spiritual journey, artistic endeavors, and inner conflicts within the cultural and historical context of Armenia. Hailed as revolutionary by Mikhail Vartanov.

How do we learn? What do we know? Night after night, not long before dawn, two young adults, Patricia and Emile, meet on a sound stage to discuss learning, discourse, and the path to revolution. Scenes of Paris's student revolt, the Vietnam War, and other events of the late 1960s, along with posters, photographs, and cartoons, are backdrops to their words. Words themselves are often Patricia and Emile's subject, as are images, sounds, and juxtapositions. In addition to the two characters' musings, the soundtrack includes narration, music, news clips, and noise. The result is a montage, a meditation, a reflection on ideas and how words and images mix - and how filmmaking is a path.

With minimal narration by the director and very little context this is a kaleidoscope of stunning visuals from Calcutta, a city of 8,000,000 in the late 1960's: rich and poor, exotic and mundane, secular and religious, children and adults, animate and inanimate. Given only the images, the viewer can read any meaning she or he wants into the film.

A camera in a classroom continuously sways back and forth at various speeds as people occasionally move around the setting.

Set in Central Europe during World War II, a demented cremator believes cremation relieves earthly suffering and sets out to save the world.

An old phonograph assembles itself, plays songs on wax drums before self destructing. In many ways The Phonograph is a companion piece to Renaissance, there is nevertheless something quietly affecting about Borowczyk's final 'object' animation.

Jean-Paul and Marianne spend lazy holidays at their villa in idyllic Southern France. However when Harry and his attractive young daughter Penelope show up, the dreamy summer days are suddenly filled with unspoken tension and jealousy.

A man wandering in a volcanic desert forms a band of murderous cannibals. A post-war German industrialist learns that his son is unable to make decisions or form relationships.

A series of disjointed mythical tales set in first-century Rome.

An aging group of outlaws in 1913 Texas look for one last big score, selling stolen Army rifles to a rogue Mexican general during that country's revolution, as the traditional American West is disappearing around them.

The public murder of a prominent politician and doctor amid a violent demonstration is covered up by military and government officials. A tenacious magistrate is determined not to let them get away with it.

The lives of a disparate group of contestants intertwine in a grueling and inhumane dance marathon.

After his quest to retrieve the fabled Golden Fleece, Jason returns to Greece with powerful sorceress Medea. However, when the king banishes her, it's only human that Medea plots her furious revenge. Can they escape her wrath?

One night noble married couple Fabiusz and Waleria find that their long-estranged friend Mucjusz has returned from his travels of distant lands. During dinner, he presents them with mysterious and exotic gifts.

A series of psychedelic, otherworldly visuals of all different colors and designs.

A Russian fairy tale about a maiden named Snegurochka, who is made out of snow.

A chronogical about life including self, family, friend, couple and idol in 6 reels

A group of boys spend their day outdoors exploring, wreaking havoc and letting their imaginations run wild.

A musical telling of the life of the Blackfoot Chief and the betrayal and fall of his tribe with the White conquest of the Canadian West.

A documentary about a group of native Americans near the Canadian border. They attempt to blockade a road that runs through their land, leading to the Canadian police getting involved to open the road.

A man is trapped inside a mysterious cube.

With its title taken from Georges Bataille's journal Acéphale (literally, a headless man, but figuratively expressing the need to go beyond rational ways of thinking), Deval's film is the most literary of the Zanzibar works. The film opens with an illustrative image: a head in the process of being shaved, in close up. This image is accompanied not by the sound of an electric razor but an electric saw, suggesting the need to achieve a tabula rasa by radical means. The story follows the adventures of a young man and his friends as they wander through a barely recognizable post-May 1968 Paris. In documenting the by-gone expressions and gestures of the '68 generation in France, Acéphale becomes something of an anthropological film that reveals the rites and beliefs of the ideological novitiates.

Paul, a middle-class young man, in a break with his sphere, meets a group of wandering vegetarians who live begging; he decides to join them.