We're starting July with the latest movies and TV series.

TV SERIES:
OVER 4,500 STILLS

Love, Death & Robots: S3 • E9 - 2022

Love, Death & Robots is one of our favorite TV series in recent years. Season 3, available on Netflix since May, consists of nine animated shorts featuring fantastical, fantasy worlds populated by creatures.

We were particularly fascinated by the ninth episode, Jibaro, which shows a very rich and beautiful universe. Directed by Spanish director, artist, and animator Alberto Mielgo, who also directed the third episode of the first season, Jibaro is a reinterpretation of the classic folk tale of the mermaid: it tells the story of the macabre and poetic dance between a siren and a knight.

A group of conquistadors and priests meet a siren covered in gold and jewels who emerges from a lake in the jungle. Her call leads them all to madness and death, except for the deaf knight Jibaro, who manages to escape. Intrigued, the siren stalks him, and when Jibaro realizes her presence, an intense and violent dance of seduction and power begins. After a bloody kiss, Jibaro throws her body into the river and tries to escape with her jewels. But when the knight drinks the water stained with the mermaid's blood, he recovers his hearing and becomes vulnerable to the mermaid's final call...

As you can see, the episode is visually stunning and seems to be partially live action, thanks to the hyperrealism of the textures and especially of the movements. In a promotional video from Netflix, director Alberto Mielgo explains how they did it: they actually shot with real characters, dancers and choreographers to record their emotions and body mechanics before modeling and designing the entire world of Jibaro.

As Alberto Mielgo says in this video, "Jibaro is like a brutal disaster," but what a beautiful brutal disaster.

Love, Death & Robots, S3 • E9, 2022

Prehistoric Planet - 2022

Prehistoric Planet is a 2022 British-American series about dinosaurs and pterosaurs recreated with computer-generated imagery. The series consists of five episodes, each focusing on a part of the globe and its ecosystem in the Late Cretaceous period: Coasts, Deserts, Freshwater, Ice Worlds and Forests.

Prehistoric Planet, S1 • E2, 2022

Prehistoric Planet, S1 • E4, 2022

Obi-Wan Kenobi - 2022

American television miniseries Obi-Wan Kenobi now completes our collection of movies and TV series of the Star Wars franchise. Set ten years after the events of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, the series follows Kenobi as he attempts to rescue Princess Leia, kidnapped by the Galactic Empire.

Obi-Wan Kenobi, S1 • E1, 2022

MOVIES:
OVER 13,000 STILLS

Peter Greenaway

Four films by Welsh director, screenwriter and artist Peter Greenaway are now on Flim: A Zed & Two Noughts, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Prospero's Books and The Baby of Mâcon.

Peter Greenaway is known for his numerous references to Renaissance and Baroque painting, for his unsettling, extravagant and artificial esthetics saturated with details, textures, costumes and colors, and for his experimental and visual research, to the point that his works are sometimes criticized for being too interested in a formalist approach at the expense of emotion and narrative. Whatever the criticism, Peter Greenaway’s work is both very raw and very oneiric, always drawing parallels between costume and nudity, pleasure and pain, life and death, animals and humans…

A Zed & Two Noughts - 1985

So let us start with A Zed & Two Noughts. This film, which tells the story of two zoologist twins, Oswald and Oliver, who, after losing their wives in a car accident, become increasingly obsessed with images of growth and decomposition, is a veritable bestiary. There are animals in all forms, dead or alive: ads with tiger, photographs of atrophied monkeys, animal documentaries, figurines, still lives with shrimps, zebra patterns, butchered crocodiles, extreme close-ups on flesh textures reminiscent of Flemish painting, etc.

A Zed & Two Noughts, 1985

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover - 1989

Flemish painting is indeed very important in Peter Greenaway’s work, as in A Zed & Two Noughts or in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. In this crime art film, the director is inspired above all by the style of Peter Paul Rubens: red and flesh-colored palettes, vibrant touch and nude scenes, abundance of baroque details. By the way, the restaurant where the action takes place is called Le Hollandais (French for The Dutchman).

Peter Greenaway is interested in everything to do with life and humanity in its triviality, and gives food a very important place. Food is always filmed in a disturbing way: details, textures, colors, everything is exacerbated to provoke disgust and a visual overdose in the viewer. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover ends with a cannibalism scene in which the jealous husband is forced by his wife to eat the cooked body of her lover, whom he has killed. We recommend you to search for "food" or "feast" inside Peter Greenaway's page, then you will discover this director's obsession for everything related to the living and the dead.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, 1989

Prospero's Books - 1991

As for Prospero's Books, a very personal adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest, the numerous nude scenes recall Renaissance paintings or Renaissance drawings and its mythological figures. In this film and in the phantasmagorical and violent The Baby of Mâcon, many shots are filmed in the manner of tableaux vivants with the sumptuous costumes and the static and theatrical poses.

The Baby of Mâcon is, in fact, a costume drama set in mid-17th century France. It tells the story of an ugly old woman who gives birth to a child while the city is struck by famine and sterility. Some scenes mixing sex and violence remind us of some very disturbing and transgressive scenes from Midsommar.

Prospero's Books, 1991

The Baby of Mâcon - 1993

But if this mystical and mythical story is filmed with the viewer's eye like a play, Prospero's Books is perhaps the film in which Peter Greenaway pushes visual and formal research the furthest. He combines different art forms such as mime, dance and opera, but he also uses a lot of collages and superimpositions with animation and digital images.

In a few words, Peter Greenaway is an "image maker" who combines cinema, painting, installation and video art: Peter Greenaway's films are, in a sense, total works of art.

The Baby of Mâcon, 1993

Federico Fellini

We have added three movies directed by Federico Fellini from three decades: Juliet of the Spirits (1965), his first feature-length color film, which shows the phantasmagorical, mystical and surreal world of Giulietta, a 40-year-old woman, after she meets the glamorous and eccentric neighbor Suzy; Amarcord (1973), one of Fellini's most famous films, but also his most political, as it tells the rise of Fascism in Italy in the 1930s through the eyes of Titta, a child who embodies Fellini himself; and The Voice of the Moon (1990), his last film before his death in 1993, which tells the story of Ivo Salvini, a dreamer who hears the voice of the Moon and wanders through a strange and dreamy countryside made of advertising, fascism, rock music, Catholicism and pagan rituals.