The Big Departure

Nov 15, 1972

1h 11m

★ 6.0

Overview

This is the only feature directed by the famed French painter and sculptor Martial Raysse. In keeping with the revolutionary spirit of the time, the movie has no plot to speak of and appears to have been largely made up on the spot. We follow the cat man into a bizarre fantasy universe presented in negative exposure that reverses color values (black is white and vice versa) and written words. The cat man steals a car and then picks up a young girl he promises to take to “Heaven.” Heaven turns out to be a country chateau inhabited by several more animal mask wearing weirdoes...

Genres

Drama

Fantasy

Production Companies

Sunchild Productions

The Big Departure Trailers

No Trailers found.

Cast

M. Nature / The Leader

Sterling Hayden

Mona Lisa

Anne Wiazemsky

Caïn

Gilles Raysse

Mme Nature

Lucienne Hamon

Innocence

Alexandre Raysse

Sterling Hayden's Wife

Jackie Raynal

Okacha Touita

Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the "forest." There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York "underground scene" who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.

No Image

6.7

The Death of Abraham Lincoln (In Three Parts)

Jan 1, 1998

An ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation’s sixteenth president.

No Image

4.5

Extra Terrestrial

Jan 1, 2004

“A deadpan video art reworking of 1982's highest-grossing movie, EXTRA TERRESTRIAL peels away layers of sentimental narrative goo from its source, exposing a hard core of anxiety, loneliness and dread. Shifting the focus from character to interior, Ben Russell and Rhyne Piggott mine the landscape of a beige-carpeted ranch style house for new insights into the architecture of suburban alienation.” - Anne Reecer, Cinematexas

No Image

6.0

The Twenty-One Lives of Billy The Kid

Jan 1, 2005

Shot in the abandoned buildings of Gary, Indiana and the cornfields of Western Illinois, The Twenty-One Lives of Billy the Kid presents a fractured historical narrative without any real protagonist, one in which the titular character goes mostly unseen - Billy the Kid as the always-off-screen assailant, as a ghost’s laugh, as a shadow on the road.

6.3

Just Cause

Feb 17, 1995

A Harvard professor is lured back into the courtroom after twenty-five years to take the case of a young black man condemned to death for the horrific murder of a child.

6.7

Untitled 77-A

Jan 1, 1977

The film contains the despair of an artist’s desire for creation on ruthless censorship, rebel, and anxiety in the mid-70s when it was politically and socially depressed.

8.8

Closed Vagina

Nov 3, 1963

Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery protests failed to defeat the neo-imperialist Japan-US Security Treaty. The ritualistic solemnity of the charged sexual scenes contribute to the oneiric qualities of Closed Vagina which Adachi would later insist was an open work, not meant to deliver any kind of deliberate political message. - Harvard Film Archive

6.7

Top Cat and the Beverly Hills Cats

Mar 20, 1988

Beverly hills dowager leaves everything to Benny the Ball because her only rightful heir, her niece Amy, is missing. But that's only if Benny stays alive for 48 hours. If not, evil butler Snerdly and his mad Russian Wolfhound are next in line - and he's quick to pull every trick in the book to do poor Benny in and the troop sets off to rescue Benny and find the lost heir Amy.

7.2

American Torso

Jan 1, 1975

In the final days of the American Civil War, an emigre Hungarian military officer attempts to map the situation of the enemy. Many veterans of the 1848 War of Independence in Hungary fought on the northern side. Experienced Fiala, Boldogh who struggles with homesickness and the reckless Vereczky all experience their enforced emigration in different ways and news of impending peace elicits different reactions from them all.

7.5

Neko Atsume House

Apr 8, 2017

In Neko Atsume no Ie, Atsushi Ito stars as Masaru Sakamoto, a novelist who moves to the countryside to try to combat a bad case of writer's block. While struggling to begin his next novel, Masaru spots a stray cat, which he decides to befriend. Masaru leaves food out for the pretty kitty, and before long his new home is covered in cats.

6.8

Klute

Jun 23, 1971

A high-priced call girl is forced to depend on a reluctant private eye when she is stalked by a psychopath.

8.6

12 Angry Men

Apr 10, 1957

The defense and the prosecution have rested and the jury is filing into the jury room to decide if a young Spanish-American is guilty or innocent of murdering his father. What begins as an open and shut case soon becomes a mini-drama of each of the jurors' prejudices and preconceptions about the trial, the accused, and each other.

7.3

Colossal

Dec 6, 2012

Colossal explores the complexities of grief and the process of grieving as understood through the myth of a Man as he ventures through shifting landscapes ruminating.

0.0

Taglish

Dec 6, 2012

At first, there was Tagalog, Gym Lumbera’s short and, to his mind, unfinished narrative about the infidelity that comes between a husband and wife in their twilight years, shot on film and reflecting his own real-life infidelity.. And then there was a storm, a real storm and not a metaphorical one, that flooded his house and submerged, and subsequently damaged, the only copy of Tagalog. This damaged version, entitled English, became the missing piece that completed the film. The new work is named after Taglish, the bastard hybrid, some say corruption, of Tagalog and English, and has become a meditation on love and language and the ways in which we betray and destroy them.

6.5

Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song

Jul 12, 2010

Sarah is a debt collector who lives among the inhabitants of the village of Guimbal on the island of Panay. She wants to find the young man who appeared to her in a dream and goes to the island of Negros. Here, as she interacts with the inhabitants, Sarah continues her search, gathering memories of life and war, dreams, myths, legends, songs and stories that she takes part in and at times revolve around her. She is the daughter of an ancient mermaid, a revolutionary, a primordial element, a virgin who was kidnapped and hidden away from the sunlight. “The film is a retelling of fragments of the American occupation. Dialogue, shot in the Hiligaynon language, is not translated but used as a tonal guide and a tool for narration. Using unscripted scenes shot where the main character was asked to merely interact with the villagers, I discard dialogue and draw meaning from peoples’ faces, voices, and actions, weaving an entirely different story through the use of subtitles and inter-titles.”

No Image

0.0

Mapang-Akit

Sep 6, 2011

"Mapang-akit" is an offshoot of a documentary project made with an Icelandic filmmaker and uses the outtakes from the Hudas Hudas festival in Antique, where a community bonds over a large effigy of Judas Iscariot during Holy Week. Amidst it is a found story of a man who returns home to his death after pursuing a woman in a neighboring village.

5.8

Karkalou

Mar 1, 1984

An old man, cut off from his future and his past, brings a young taxi driver into his game. The two meet Karkalou, a crazy prostitute, whom the former once loved madly and the latter will soon love.

7.6

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Oct 6, 1961

Holly Golightly is an eccentric New York City playgirl determined to marry a Brazilian millionaire. But when young writer Paul Varjak moves into her apartment building, her past threatens to get in their way.