Country:France

Director:Luis Bunuel

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Just before boarding a train, much to the surprise of his fellow passengers, a man pours a bucket of water over a young girl on the platform. Over the next few hours he explains (and we see in flashback) how he became obsessed by her (so much so that he failed to notice that she was played by two very different actresses, possibly representing different sides of her personality), and how she tantalised him, but would never allow him to satisfy his desire for her... The prominent parallel device is an ideally surreal cleavage that forever seperates us from the closure we think we want.

Country:France

Director:Luis Bunuel

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Buñuel’s penultimate film, made when he was 74 years old and considering retirement, was a summation of sorts: He said "Chance governs all things; necessity, which is far from having the same purity, comes only later. If I have a soft spot for any one of my movies, it would be for The Phantom of Liberty, because it tries to work out just this theme." The film contains short incidents and scenarios collected from throughout Buñuel's life, arranged in the style of a surreal game where seemingly disconnected ideas are linked by chance encounters.

Country:France

Director:Luis Bunuel

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Six outwardly respectable bourgeois friends planning to formally convene for dinner experience a succession of delays, interuptions, detours, rearrangements and a few highly unusual occurrences that thwart their attempts to have a meal together. A complex, shifting, virtually plotless web of dreams within dreams, in which a maniacal third world reality is always threatening to intervene and wreack havoc on these protected environs. This was Bunuel at his most blithe yet none the less subversive for that.

Country:United States of America

Director:George Romero

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Romero trenchantly captures the now too familiar tone and rhetoric of world panic. The Dead have apparently conquered the earth, leaving just small bands of isolated people strategically hidden. One community made up of both scientific and military personnel, hiding in a bunker, tries to get in contact with other survivors of the zombie infestation, but find themselves quite alone in this new world.

Country:United States of America

Director:George Romero

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Romero’s penchant for outlandish satire becomes more pronounced while the acuity of his social commentary is undiminished. TV station workers Stephen and Francine decide to run as the urban situation worsens and, after meeting Roger and Peter (two special policemen ordered to relocate survivors into rescue stations), steal a helicopter and fly west in an attempt to find a safe place. They find paradise in the form of a deserted mega-mall shopping center where they hole up and discover that the dead surely delight in doing what they did most while alive: go shopping!

Country:United States of America

Director:George Romero

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

The dead come back to life and eat the living. This was the premise for a simple low budget film independently produced in far-from-Hollywood Pittsburgh, Pa. by a resourceful man named George Romero.

Country:Mexico

Director:Alejandro Jordorowsky

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Jordorowsky daringly blends resplendant ritual, outright kitsch and provocative excess. A Christlike figure wanders through bizarre, grotesque scenarios filled with alternately religious and sacrilegious imagery. He meets a mystical guide who introduces him to seven wealthy and powerful individuals, each representing a planet in the solar system.

Country:Mexico

Director:Alejandro Jordorowsky

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

This psychedelic and allegorical western saga prompted a new approach to exhibition of independent and alternative cinema. It is honored as the first midnight movie (films which play continuously for years in weekend midnight screenings). The title refers to a mole who after determinedly burrowing through the ground reaches the surface of the earth only to be blinded by the sun. At the outset, the gunfighter known as El Topo and his young son ride through a desert to a village, whose inhabitants have been massacred.

Country:United Kingdom

Director:Lindsay Anderson

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Mick Travis is now a reporter who is about to shoot a documentary on Britannia Hospital, an institution which mirrors the downsides of British Society. It's the day when Her Royal Highness is to visit the hospital to inaugurate a new wing, where advanced and sinister scientific experiments led by Prof. Millar (returning from O Lucky Man!) will be demonstrated Everybody in the hospital, from the cooks who refuse to cook, to the painters who couldn't care less to get their job done, to an African cannibalistic dictator

Country:United Kingdom

Director:Lindsay Anderson

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Mick Travis progresses from coffee salesman to personal assistant to a corporate mastermind in this sprawling surreal allegory. Travis learns the amoral lesson, reinforced by songs from a commentator/singer, Alan Price, that he must abandon his principles in order to succeed, but unlike the other characters he meets he must retain a detached idealism that will allow him to distance himself from the evils of the world. Juxtaposed with Travis' experiences, 1960s Britain is seen retreating from its imperial past while retaining world influence by means of corrupt dealings with foreign dictators.