mary rose mcclain

SOFT TITLES


still from film polisario still from PPOLISARIO, UN PEUPLE EN ARMES by Med Hondo

MR has operated live english subtitles for the following films:

  • PASSION
    Jean Luc-Goddard, 1982, 88 min
    • "Brooding Polish director Jerzy Radziwiłowicz (star of Wajda's MAN OF MARBLE and MAN OF IRON) fusses over his film’s tableaux vivants, while dallying with both rich Hanna Schygulla and striking worker Isabelle Huppert, with Schygulla’s busily bribing husband Piccoli completing the quadrangle." - Film Forum

  • BATAILLE SUR LE GRANDE FLEUVE
    Jean Rouch, 1951. 35 min
    • "BATAILLE SUR LE GRANDE FLEUVE follows a group of 21 Sorko fishermen as they embark on a banghawi, or a hippopotamus hunt by harpoon. Though generally considered one of his more orthodox ethnographic films (its aim being, ostensibly, to capture a “traditional” way of life on celluloid), for Rouch, BATAILLE SUR LE GRANDE FLEUVE was hugely transformative – “the beginning,” he has said, of the practice he came to call shared anthropology. When he returned to Niger to show the Kodachrome footage to the community, Rouch catalyzed a dialogue that not only deepened his understanding of the Sorko and their traditions, but also gave the Sorko insight into the nature of his ethnographic enterprise. “For the first time, the work [was] judged not by a thesis committee but by the very people the anthropologist went out to observe.” In addition to the criticisms they offered (which Rouch took into account for his final cut of the film), several members of the community approached Rouch about making their own films. Those films then gave rise to new conversations, critiques, and questions, which, in turn, gave birth to new collaborations. In this way, BATAILLE SUR LE GRANDE FLEUVE [screened for the first time with English subtitles] is the linchpin of Rouch’s cinematic archive and participatory practice." - Anthology Film Archives

  • POLISARIO, UN PEUPLE EN ARMES
    Med Hondo, 1978, 90 min
    • “POLISARIO, UN PEUPLE EN ARMES, a documentary made for TV co-produced with Algerian television is Med Hondo’s second film devoted to his support for the Saharawi people’s right to self-determination in Western Sahara. Shot in one of the rare former Spanish colonies in Africa, the film chronicles a last clash between Morocco (that has occupied much of the Western Sahara after Spain ended its colonial rule in 1975) and the Polisario (The Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro) before the signing of a ceasefire. Relying more on images than words, the film foregrounds actual battle scenes in which the crew found themselves in this context of armed struggle of a people sacrificed on the altar of geopolitical interests.” –Aboubakar Sanogo

  • COLLOQUE DE CHIENS
    Raúl Ruis, 1977, 22 min
    • .“COLLOQUE DE CHIENS makes inspired low-budget use of the French tradition of the ‘photo-roman’.” –Simon Field

  • Treasures from Trash: Shorts from Samba Félix Ndiaye
    Samba Félix Ndiaye, 1989, 64 min
    • LES CHUTES DE NGALAM (9 min)
    DIPLOMAT À LA TOMATE (12 min)
    AGUA (12 min)
    TEUG OU CHAUDRONNERIE D’ART (17 min)
    "Stunning in beauty, radical in style, incisive in experience, there are not enough superlatives to shower on the quintet of films depicting the ingenuity of artisans in Dakar. AGUA condenses the day-long task of creating beautiful, delicate botanical marines in glass bowls, from catching the fish, to inserting flowers, into a ten-minute masterclass of economy. DIPLOMAT À LA TOMATE is a magic trick of transformation as soda cans become luggage. These are the works of a master." - L'Alliance NY

  • HÔTEL DES AMÉRIQUES
    André Téchiné, 1981, 95 min
    • "A tale of doomed passion set in the resort town of Biarritz featuring Patrick Dewaere and Catherine Deneuve in their only on-screen pairing. Master of emotional nuance and romantic intensity, André Téchiné tailor-made this love story for his two legendary stars, capturing Dewaere’s bewitching blend of vulnerability and wounded charisma and giving Deneuve a haunted quality belying her icy exterior. In short, a tearjerker in the noblest sense of the term. Interviewed after Dewaere’s death, Deneuve revealed that he was one of the few actors whose work ever made her weep on set." - L'Alliance NY

  • LILY AIME-MOI
    Maurice Dugowson, 1975, 110 min
    • "Patrick Dewaere’s flair for physical comedy shines in his performance as the boxer Gaston—aka “Johnny Cask”—in Maurice Dugowson’s underappreciated first feature. This story of a Paris journalist who falls in with a romantically beleaguered worker and his boxer friend while researching a piece about the working class is really an excuse for a romp through French class and gender relations in the 1970s. Among several riotous set pieces, Dewaere’s reenactment of a Hollywood movie with a ripped pillow is surpassed only by the goading monologue he elicits from real-life partner Miou-Miou when he tries to pick her up in a café." - L'Alliance NY

  • PLEIN SUD
    Luc Béraud, 1981, France, 94min
    • "Luc Béraud described his second feature as a cross between “Malcolm Lowry, Simenon, and Raymond Queneau,” but even that fails to capture the rollicking weirdness of this offbeat comedy that would be a paint-by-numbers steamy romance in less original hands. Spending half his time onscreen partially or fully naked, Dewaere stars as a married professor who drops everything to follow an exquisite seductress (played by Clio Goldsmith) to Barcelona. There’s only one problem: outside of sexual chemistry, the egghead and the ditz have nothing in common. A deep cut for fans of Buñuel and cinematic oddities of every kind." - L'Alliance NY

  • F COMME FAIRBANKS
    Maurice Dugowson, 1976, 110 min
    • "With their second film together, Dewaere and Maurice Dugowson returned to the social commentary of their first collaboration LILY AIME-MOI, focusing on unemployment through the tribulations of André Fragman, a graduate in chemical engineering forced to take a series of routine jobs. While F COMME FAIRBANKS revisits the first film’s tonal exuberance, it is also far more intense, fueled in large part by Dewaere and his longtime partner Miou-Miou’s breakup only days before they began shooting. Dewaere’s descent into madness here culminates with one of the most arresting examples of his no-holds-barred, emotionally raw performance style—which was shot without a stunt man." - L'Alliance NY

  • PIERRE ET JEAN
    André Cayatte, 1943, 73min
    • "Adapted from de Maupassant’s novella of the same name, a delicate family drama of an unhappy marriage, the arrival of a possible new love, and the confused parentage that tends to result, naturally, from such scenarios. André Cayette (ANATOMY OF A MARRIAGE) who worked at a steady clip throughout the 1940s and into the late 1970s, continues to offer revelations long underseen in the US. PIERRE ET JEAN has been adapted multiple times for the screen (including Luis Buñuel’s A WOMAN WITHOUT LOVE), with Cayette’s version being closest in tone and historical distance to de Maupassant’s text." - L'Alliance NY

  • LA VALLÉE CLOSE
    Jean-Claude Rousseau, 1995, 143 min
    • "In the mid-1980s, Rousseau visited the Fontaine de Vaucluse in Southern France, a grotto along the Sourgue river where, at springtime, a violent torrent of water suddenly gushes forth. Rousseau would continually return to this site over the next ten years, drawn by the primordial pull of this strange phenomenon, the inspiration for many folktales and legends. He brought along a Super-8mm camera given to him by his parents, and the accumulation of this material resulted in his seminal second feature, LA VALLÉE CLOSE." - Anthology Film Archives

    still on previous page from COLLOQUE DE CHIENS by Raúl Ruis