JUNGLE LOVE
Dir. Sherad Anthony Sanchez, 2012
Philippines, 85 min.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28 – 7:30 PM

Up-and-coming Filipino director Sherad Anthony Sanchez’s latest film JUNGLE LOVE follows a handful of people who have disappeared into the jungle: a woman who has kidnapped her sister’s child; an urbane couple and their indigenous guide; a bored and horny platoon; and a nameless, faceless tribe.

Disappearance has another meaning in Sanchez’s native Mindanao, where a decades-old conflict between the government and secessionists fighting for an Islamic state has made the region infamous for its kidnappings. Sanchez took inspiration from an incident in which a friend living abroad visited an exhibition, and found a photo of him labeled as one of the disappeared. JUNGLE LOVE is permeated with this sense of the uncanny, as narratives and identities fracture and fuse into one another in the reckless, lonely places people go to escape themselves.

As a companion to our Anti-Valentines series, Spectacle finds company among the denizens of the streets: star-crossed hustlers, runners, cons, pushers, and peddlers. Taking a dimly romantic perspective of its subject, the films are mostly about a kind of damp, guttural love — a love marked by its elusiveness, its conflation with co-dependency, its ability to hurt.

Among the work is DUFFER, a staggering recent rediscovery about a bisexual London hustler torn between a loving prostitute and a wretched sadist. In THE DEVIL QUEEN, one of the first films about drug pushing in Rio’s favelas, a gang war erupts after a ruthless queen tries to frame a common criminal to take the fall for his boyfriend. For this series, German cult classic SUPERMARKT also returns to Spectacle, following a young hood rolling through the gutters of the Reeperbahn turning tricks and plotting heists. Leonardo Favio’s CHRONICLE OF A BOY ALONE is sort of an Argentinian take on ZÉRO DE CONDUITE, following a street kid who escapes reform school and returns to the streets. In THE ROSE SELLER, a fictional narrative is formed around incredible performances by impoverished Colombian youths selling drugs to the party-going leisure class. And A VIOLENT LIFE, which just barely predates Pier Paolo Pasolini’s directorial career, is an unheralded adaptation of his controversial novel of the same name, featuring the similarly-themed ACCATONE’s then-unknown star, Franco Citti.

Special thanks to The Shangri-Las for the inspiration.

CHRONICLE OF A BOY ALONE
aka Crónica de un niño solo
Dir: Leonardo Favio, 1965
Argentina, 79 mins.
In Spanish with English Subtitles

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 16 – 7:30 PM

Leonardo Favio was a popular Argentine singer and film director with a long-standing affiliation with a third-position corporatist political movement known as Peronism. In 1976, after the last military coup of the Dirty War—a period of state terrorism that led to the disappearance of tens of thousands of alleged dissidents—Favio fled Argentina and spent 11 years in exile. He returned to massive national popularity and recognition by Argentine film critics, and in 2010 the current Peronist-oriented president Cristina Kirchner appointed him Ambassador of Culture. He died two years later in 2012.

In 1965, while Argentina was in a nearly two-decade long state of exception during which the elections were staged by the military and Peronism was officially outlawed, Favio made his directorial debut, CHRONICLE OF A BOY ALONE. Banned for 30 years on suspicion of being an intentional wholesale critique of the military junta, CHRONICLE follows 11-year old Polin, who is sent to an orphanage where the children are abused and berated by the tyrannical staff. The institution functions as a sort of reform school where the children are conditioned to live normal, obedient lives. Virtually every adult figure is fascistic, and Polin is driven to act out against his oppressors. After a brief stint in prison, he escapes and returns to the slum where he grew up, only to discover that for those that society has deemed dispensable, freedom exists as only a name.

Although it is occasionally compared to Truffaut’s 400 BLOWS and Vigo’s ZERO FOR CONDUCT, CHRONICLE is far more brutal. There is no redeeming humanity in the authoritarian adults, no whimsical soundtrack, and no promise of salvation. Like Truffaut and his iconically ambiguous closing freeze-frame, Favio ends CHRONICLE with Polin gazing directly into the camera. But unlike Antoine Doinel, who experiences an uncertain freedom when he reaches the sea, Polin is carried off by a policeman, and his gaze is certain. Certain that he will never be free.

DUFFER
Dir. Joseph Despins & William Dumaresq, 1971
UK, 72 min.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 3 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 11 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 15 – 7:30 PM

Note change in showtimes: the February 21 show has now been rescheduled for Saturday, February 15 at 7:30 pm.

A revelatory, recent re-discovery, DUFFER is an independent British psychodrama that plays like an unholy melange of Hubert Selby Jr. and David Lynch. In his only acting role, Kit Gleave plays the title character, a wayward hustler who wanders the London streets between two lovers: Your Gracie (Erna May), a tender, matronly prostitute, and Louis-Jack (co-director and writer William Dumaresq), a wretched sadist who’s determined to control Duffer by having him bear his child. (You’ve read correctly.) As he contemplates love and codependency, Duffer’s world grows increasingly unhinged, culminating in a number of whimsical and disturbing episodes traversing gutters, bedrooms, and back alleys.

Narrated entirely in voiceover, with Dumaresq himself reading in the voices of the characters, DUFFER is delivered in an amiable cadence that, like the literary voices of Humbert Humbert or the narrator of Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart,” belies the gradual exposure of paranoid fissures. It might be simply described as a dark comedy, but the rough and wistful DUFFER contemplates the darkest recesses of the aching heart and disturbed mind.

Special thanks to Joseph Despins and James King.

A RAINHA DIABA
aka The Devil Queen
Dir. Antonio Carlos da Fontoura, 1974
Brazil, 99 min.
In Portuguese with English subtitles

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18 – 7:30 PM
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 25 – 10:00 PM

It was six years between Antonio Carlos da Fontoura’s stunning debut, COPACABANA ME ENGANA, and it’s follow-up, A RAINHA DIABA. If the former film bears the stylistic tropes of François Truffaut, then it might be said that the later was clearly influenced by weed. In a stunning change-up, the gritty, black-and-white, often loosely-choreographed cinematography is abandoned in favor of a shocking explosion of bright color to tell the story of The Devil Queen, a ruthless, pansexual, drug-pushing queen who runs Rio de Janeiro’s favelas with a velvet-gloved fist.

A RAINHA DIABA is loosely based on the persona of Madame Satã (“Madam Satan,” a name adapted from the Cecil B. DeMille film), ex-slave, drag performer, self-described homosexual, biological father of seven, convicted murderer, and legendary cabaret performer who was an outlaw hero in Rio’s 1930’s underground. Fontoura’s contemporary seventies riff is also shaped by the director’s admission that every time he smoked a joint, he wondered about the bloodshed that came with it. And the movie has no shortage of it, in garish, Hershchell Gordon Lewis red, chronicling the war that erupts in the streets after The Queen and his henchmen attempt to frame a small-time street hustler to take the fall for his boyfriend. Milton Gonçalves dominates the title role with a ruthless, wry performance that garnered him Brazil’s preeminent Best Actor award. And Odete Lara (star of COPACABANA ME ENGANGA and Glauber Rocha’s ANTONIO DAS MORTES) is also spectacular as the hustler’s nightclub singer girlfriend.

Just as COPACABANA predates Scorsese’s soundtracks and self-styled tough guys (motifs further developed here), A RAINHA DIABA is startlingly prescient of Pedro Almodóvar’s subject matter and kitschy aesthetic approach, populated with a cast of hustlers, street walkers, addicts, and outcasts that would make fine Warhol superstars. (Come to think of it, this film also predates the Scorsesean montage where people run around with guns and slaughter each other over a thin wire of searing, acid-rock guitar.) A RAINHA DIABA was one of the first films to chronicle the culture of drugs and criminality that existed in Rio’s favelas, but it forgoes the neorealist approach in favor of a nicely toasted version of Late Cinema Novo expressionism; there are oblique feats of subtly fried cinematography that appear as if they were processed not through the camera lens, but somehow willed into existence by tetrahydrocannabinol itself.

Basically, if you like weed, drag, and violence, then good news from Earth: you have a higher purpose this month.

[Trigger warnings: drug use, violence, sexual slurs, and a disturbing scene of torture.]

SUPERMARKT
Roland Klick, 1974
Western Germany, 80 min.
In German with English subtitles

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 16 – 5:00 PM

Two years after packing the house during our Roland Klick retrospective, SUPERMARKT returns to Spectacle.

A growing cult classic among upcoming German filmmakers and writers, Klick’s gritty masterpiece follows a young hood through the gutters of the Reeperbahn as he and other smalltime crooks plot a shopping mall heist to escape their welfare existence. Pitched somewhere between REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE and TAXI DRIVER, this hugely stylized movie includes stunning photography by Jost Vacano (DAS BOOT, nearly all Paul Verhoeven movies), who essentially invented the steadicam on SUPERMARKT’s set—two years later Garrett Brown would introduce his version on BOUND FOR GLORY to enduring fanfare. The proof is on screen, and audiences are treated to some richly choreographed, visceral sequences that veer between bare-knuckle social realism and sleekly orchestrated action.

Initially achieving a degree of commercial success, Klick was ostracized by the contemporary Young German Cinema filmmakers, whose smear campaigns essentially saw him written out of German film history both at home and abroad. Though we formerly described Klick as ripe for rediscovery, it’s now underway: earlier this year, Klick was the subject of a documentary premiering at the Berlin Film Festival and shot partially at Spectacle during its 2011 retrospective.

Special thanks to Frieder Schlaich, Alex Jovanovic, and Filmgalerie 451.

THE ROSE SELLER
aka La vendedora de rosas
Dir. Victor Gaviria, 1998
Columbia, 118 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 9 – 5:00 PM
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18 – 10:00 PM

Victor Gaviria became internationally known in 1988 for his Palme d’Or-nominated homage to Italian neorealism, RODRIGO D. NO FUTURE, which portrayed life in the slums of his hometown of Medellín, the second largest city in Colombia and one-time base of operations for Pablo Escobar’s powerful drug cartel. Ten years later, Gaviria returned to Medellín, this time to give expression to the daily struggle of a group of teenage boys and girls who live in the city’s peripheral shantytowns and survive through the informal economy, selling drugs and roses to clubgoers and the city’s leisure class in the Carrera 70 and La Bolera districts.

Gaviria used Hans Christian Andersen’s short story “The Little Match Girl” as a narrative framing device, expanding the temporal scope of the original story and significantly complexifying it, while retaining and adapting many details from Andersen’s tale, replacing the titular matches with sparklers and having the young protagonist’s vision of her grandmother be occasioned by a glue high. In a statement smacking of Christian charity, Gaviria described this framing device as a means of lending universality to the particular and untold story of the street children of Medellín, “a way for them to become complete people, in the sense of being recognized.”

Of course, despite Gaviria’s charitable gesture of granting the teenagers a way to temporarily direct their lives away from petty crime and the fleeting relief of cheap drugs, it did not fundamentally change the material conditions of their lives. After two years of getting to know the children and writing the script with them, and after the ensuing sixteen-week shoot, Gaviria nonetheless left, and the twin forces of poverty and state repression claimed the fates of his beneficiaries. Many of the teenagers died within a few years of the film’s production, and star Leidy Tabares was sentenced to 26 years in prison in 2003.

UNA VITA VIOLENTA
aka A Violent Life
Dir. Brunello Rondi & Paolo Heusch, 1961
Italy, 103 min.
In Italian with English subtitles

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 17 – 10:00 PM

Virtually forgotten, A VIOLENT LIFE is Brunello Rondi & Paolo Heusch’s adaptation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1959 novel, one completed before Pasolini had begun directing his similarly-themed first film, ACCATTONE. Franco Citti, who also stars in that and other Pasolini films, plays Tommaso, a young hood living on the outskirts of Rome, flirting with Fascists and Communists, stealing garbage, assaulting strangers, visiting prostitutes and going to the movies. When he falls in love with a young woman, his life takes an unexpected turn.

A VIOLENT LIFE is an exceptional film overshadowed mostly by Paoslini’s subsequent success as director. In the U.S., co-director Bruenllo Rondi is an unsung figure in Italian cinema. He was a career-spanning collaborator of Fellini who served as both writer and artistic advisor on 8 ½ and LA DOLCE VITA while also writing scripts for Rosselinni (THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS, EUROPA ‘51) and De Sica (A PLACE FOR LOVERS). His directorial career is almost entirely ignored: after UNA VITA VIOLENTA, he went on to direct the neo-realist exorcism movie IL DEMONIO. Following their dismal critical and commercial receptions he returned primarily to scriptwriting before helming a string of exploitation films in the 1970s.

I make bitter films. I hate mainstream society.

This January, Spectacle brings you two brutally honest documentaries from Japanese master Kazuo Hara. These intimate films present two unflinching portraits: one of the artist (and his failed love life) himself, and another of the horrors of World War II, 40 years later. Preceding the culture of reality TV and selfies by several decades, Hara puts a mirror up to himself, and his culture, without imposition or expectation.

Special thanks to Tidepoint Films

EXTREME PRIVATE EROS: LOVE SONG 1974
Dir. Kazuo Hara, 1974
Japan, 98 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles

TUESDAY, JANUARY 7 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 12 – 5:00 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 27 – 10:00 PM

Shot over several years, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, a documentary about Hara’s ex-lover was a clarion call against a historically reserved Japanese culture. The film follows Miyuki Takeda, Hara’s ex and father of his son, as she navigates new relationships (first with a woman, and then with an American GI in Okinawa), raises her son, and explores life in 1970s Japan as an outspoken feminist. But the film isn’t just a portrait of the vulnerabilities of a radical feminist single mother, in a time when that wasn’t heard of; Miyuki often takes the opportunity of being filmed by her ex to let loose with what she really thinks about him as a partner, as a lover, and as a filmmaker.

As well as a portrait of two complicated, damaged people, the film is a portrait of Okinawa as a dysfunctional city, damaged by two decades of American military presence. Hara films the GI bars and the underage prostitutes that frequent the bars for business. Hara takes a detour into the life of a 14-year-old “Okinawa girl” Chichi, whose life converges and diverges from Miyuki’s story in intriguing ways.

Released around the same time as the groundbreaking PBS series An American Family (and predating the similarly-themed Sherman’s March by a decade), Extreme Private Eros takes a long, hard look at gender roles, romantic relationships, and what it means to be a family in 1970s Japan. Hara’s out-of-sync sound and hand-held photography are disorienting and intimate at the same time, giving the feel of an experimental film to a film with very real content. The results are bitter and sometimes hard to watch, but always compelling.

THE EMPEROR’S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON
Dir. Kazuo Hara, 1988
Japan, 122 min.
In Japanese with English subtitles

TUESDAY, JANUARY 7 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 12 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 27 – 7:30 PM

[TRIGGER WARNING: Wartime violence and atrocities]

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On is a more plainly political, but no less revealing, portrait of Japan since World War II. Kenzo Ozukaki was tireless in his campaign against the commonly held idea in Japan that Emperor Hirohito was not responsible for war atrocities during World War II, even getting arrested in the process. Ozukaki ambushes former soldiers into giving him the answers that he is obsessed with finding. His obsession is unsettling; even people who agree with him politically seem unwilling after a certain point to stand in solidarity with Ozukaki, as his methods get more outrageous, and eventually violent.

The film became surprisingly popular in Japan, earning Hara the New Director Prize from the Directors Guild of Japan (and only 16 years after his first film Goodbye CP!) and drawing relatively large crowds for such controversial and alienating subject matter. Errol Morris has put The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On in his top 5 films of all time, high praise from a master of the documentary film (Michael Moore likes it too, if that’s more your speed). Through the entire movie, Hara remains a silent witness to Ozukaki’s increasing fanatacism and devotion to the only version of the truth he can possibly accept; but when is silence irresponsible? When are those in charge responsible for things they let happen? When is inaction morally indefensible?

The region of Emilia-Romagna in Northern Italy prides itself on its contributions to cinema. From a website promoting tourism in the region: “Emilia-Romagna has always had a strong cinematographic tradition, with a place of honour in the history of cinema for having spawned major filmmakers like Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra, Cesare Zavattini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pisolini [sic], Valerio Zurlini, Pupi Avati, Florestano Vancini and Liliana Cavani.”

Naturally, for the Emilia-Romagna tourism board these names are nothing but ornaments. The irreverent temperaments and iconoclastic impulses of Fellini, Pasolini, and Bertolucci are well known, and there are other transgressive figures among those listed who would scoff at being held up as exemplars of their region’s cultural heritage. Liliana Cavani was branded an enemy of the church when her early Galileo biopic was banned by the Italian authorities, and reviled even more for the Nazi eroticism in The Night Porter a few years later. Why is old-guard communist Valerio Zurlini included? Probably not because of his forgotten anticolonial prison film Seduto alla sua destra (released in the US as Black Jesus and retitled Super Brother for a VHS release) about Patrice Lumumba’s capture and torture by the Belgian authorities. The tourism bureau omitted Marco Bellocchio from its list, maybe because they forgot about him, or maybe because the intense anticlericalism and Maoism of his early films, such as China is Near and Long Live Red Proletarian May Day, make him an unsavory figure.

It is these three punks and pranksters, these black sheep and street-urchins, these thorns in the side of self-respecting Italian society whom the Spectacle Theater wishes to present to you, but through an entirely different set of films than those mentioned above. Liliana Cavani’s I Cannibali presents us with a near-future Milan where radicals are being killed in the street left and right, and exceptional legislation is passed to prevent their burial. Valerio Zurlini’s Desert of the Tartars in turn buries us in the absurdity of an imperial military outpost paralyzed by an eternal expectation of barbarian invasion, an obscure threat that is never realized. Marco Bellocchio’s In the Name of the Father is an Italian If… in which a Catholic boarding school and its administration are thoroughly disrespected and ridiculed by an utterly ungovernable student body led by a coldly calculating vanguard, and paternal authority in all its guises is literally slapped around from the first minute onward. Finally, Bellocchio’s Slap the Monster on Page One brings us back to Milan, where the streets are illuminated by erupting petrol bombs, and where student protesters, militant workers, and leftists of all stripes are being systematically criminalized by a powerful right-wing sensationalist newspaper helmed by an inscrutable but ultimately impotent Gian Maria Volonté.

THE YEAR OF THE CANNIBALS
a.k.a. I cannibali
Dir. Liliana Cavani, 1969
Italy, 95 mins.
In Italian with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 5 – 5:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22 – 10:00 PM

Liliana Cavani is probably best known for her portrayal of a complex erotic relationship between a former SS officer and a concentration camp survivor in her 1974 film The Night Porter. Largely overlooked however is her 1969 feature, The Year of the Cannibals, which investigates a different kind of obscene authority and the “natural rebellion” it provokes.

In this loose adaptation of Antigone set in a near-future Milan, the State has forbidden the removal of the bodies of rebels that litter the streets. As a result, the corpses are stepped over and ignored by the citizens, reminding us how a comfortable private existence in the metropolis everywhere means turning a blind eye to misery. Britt Ekland (The Man with the Golden Gun) and Pierre Clémenti (Pigsty, The Conformist) band together as vigilante body-snatchers in defiance of the decree, and ultimately face repression and execution. A radical chic romp that recalls A Hard Day’s Night and Clémenti’s work with Groupe Zanzibar, The Year of the Cannibals also offers a sober early analysis of the notorious “years of lead” in Italy, characterized by witch-hunts and wholesale incarceration of suspected militants.

“I intended to use the language of myth and universal symbols to avoid the revolutionary speeches that had become a cliché by 1969-1970. … [The Year of the Cannibals] is not the chronicle of a revolution, … but the spectral analysis of reality beyond the various episodes that characterized the demonstrations. I believe it is a comprehensive analysis, and primarily a discourse of generations.”
-Interview in Écran #26, June 1974

SLAP THE MONSTER ON PAGE ONE
a.k.a. Sbatti il mostro in prima pagina
Dir. Marco Bellocchio, 1972
Italy, 90 mins.
In Italian with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 19 – 5:00 PM
MONDAY, JANUARY 20 – 10:00 PM

At Il Giornale, Milan’s equivalent of The New York Post, editor-in-chief Gian Maria Volonté is in charge of engineering the headlines for maximum effect: A story about a self-immolation is sensitive material (“You can’t say ‘desperate’ and ‘unemployed’ … It’s a provocation!”) and has to be dealt with tactfully (“Dramatic Suicide of an Immigrant”), while criminal fanatics should be treated with the utmost severity (“The Circle is Closed: Fascists and Left Extremists United by TNT“).

When a high school student is found strangled in the woods, Volonté’s misinformation machine kicks into high gear to mythologize her as the very image of saintly innocence and chastity and to cast her classmates as a diabolical anarcho-Maoist conspiracy bent on chaos and corruption. With the elections closing in, a mysterious Christian Democrat candidate controls the newspaper’s editorial direction remotely from his kitsch-baroque office, engineering a defensive mass-hysteria over red guerrillas and provocateurs lurking in the shadows and threatening to dismantle civilization by force of Molotov cocktails and rock-n-roll.

Made in the early years of the massive proletarian and youth movements that erupted in Italy in the late 60s, Slap the Monster on Page One is both a partisan self-critique and a response to the climate of fear and repression generated by the reaction.

IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER
a.k.a. Nel nome del padre
Dir. Marco Bellocchio, 1971
Italy, 115 mins.
In Italian with English subtitles.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22 – 7:30 PM

“To ridicule, with farcical overtones, the hypocrisy of our religious institutions and their representatives: the confessors, the exorcists, the spiritual terrorists, those specialists in the fear of God, always trying to traumatize us. We hope that the audience will erupt in a liberating laugh, managing to be ironical about their own fears, their existential traumas! I wish I had the power to erase all priests and all churches!”

This could be a description of Bellocchio’s purpose in making In The Name of the Father, but it is spoken by Franco, a student at an unnamed Catholic boarding school where he—as part of a small intellectual vanguard—hopes to incite the rest of the already insubordinate student body to open rebellion. Another member, the rigorous and aristocratic Transeunti, is desperate to overcome the paralyzing mediocrity he sees permeating the school, and dreams of restoring a decaying institution whose former authority and social significance have almost completely eroded with the expansion of capitalist social relations and their norm-liquidating power.

The conflict between the administration and the students is supplemented by that between the students and the kitchen staff, a group of marginals, invalids, and former drunks whom the school has given the chance to redeem themselves through labor. Lou Castel, the star of Bellocchio’s debut feature Fists in the Pocket, is foremost among them in antagonizing the bourgeois students, spitting in their soup and sabotaging Franco and Transeunti’s didactic play.

Never before has paternal authority been so thoroughly discredited and revealed in its impotence. Dads, priests, wardens, and even God himself get their share of contempt heaped on them. In a scene reminiscent of the most beautiful shot in Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct, the boys in single file march up to a bust of the school’s founder and hawk loogies at him, drenching his face in mucus in slow motion.

THE DESERT OF THE TARTARS
a.k.a. Il deserto dei tartari
Dir. Valerio Zurlini, 1976
Italy, 140 mins.
In Italian with English subtitles.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 5 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, JANUARY 19 – 7:30 PM

“The older a nation’s history is, the more legends spring up. In the end, we don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.”

Largely overlooked director Valerio Zurlini’s The Desert of the Tartars is an allegory of the disintegration of Empire.

It is 1901. Lieutenant Drogo (played by frequent Costa-Gavras collaborator Jacques Perrin) graduates from the military academy and is immediately dispatched to the most remote fortress on the northern border of an unnamed empire to guard against a mythical impending barbarian invasion. The only sign of human presence in the desert beyond the border has been a group of mysterious horsemen glimpsed fifteen years prior by Captain Hortiz (Bergman favorite and exorcist Max von Sydow), and the only officer who has seen any action is the ancient and distinguished Colonel Nathanson (Fernando Rey of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The French Connection).

Years pass in performing pointless drills, maintaining the most painstaking decorum, and undertaking futile land-surveying missions in the surrounding desolation. Doctor Rovin (Jean-Louis Trintignant of The Conformist, My Night at Maude’s, and Z) has discovered rare bacteria living in the fortress’s walls, which ultimately lead to Lieutenant Drogo’s ill health and pathetic withdrawal from the fortress.

Described as “the grandest and most lavish existentialist parable ever made” (Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice), The Desert of the Tartars is about the historic necessity of empires to define themselves in opposition to an external threat, and the inevitable autoimmunitary destruction that threatens them from within.