The film describes a few days in the life of the writer Robert Harmon and his sister Sarah. The decadent life of Robert is made of alcohol, cigarettes, and short-time relationships with women; women he interviews for a book, he spends a weekend with at a casino or fall in love with for the fun of an evening. Having no constraints, he his unable to be responsible for anything including the care of his son, leaving him alone in an hotel room and teaching the 12-years old boy how to drink. His life is made of his own phantasms as an artist. His sister is divorcing from her husband because of her exuberant and insane behavior. She scares her daughter Debbie who prefers to stay with her father, a decision that hurts Sarah very deeply and reinforces her nervous breakdown. Most of the movie takes place in the house of Robert. We watch Robert and Sarah struggling with their own lives. As the movie progresses, the house gets empty little by little...

The problem with this film is it is in sound and anyone who knows Eisenstein will know that he and John Gilbert were the two people most afraid of the element of sound in film. Basically with Ivan Groznyj parts one and two Eisenstein has tried to make a silent film with sound. No that's not a contradiction, well not for Eisenstein. Here is a man whose art has passed him by and he has never come to terms with it. The most impressive aspects of the film is its visuality which is often sublime but just as often fails to succeed because it is overlaid by sound which Eisenstein both ignores and neglects to varying degrees. Hence we have a film made in the 1940s which looks 20 years older with acting styles that are even more antiquated. Eisenstein, along with the likes of Pudovkin, resented the audio component of film because it detracted from the poetry of the visual image and would align film too closely with drama. He concluded the cinema would merely become a series of filmed plays. Eisenstein obviously believed his criticism for it is Ivan Groznyj I & 2 which betrays a theatricality that had long been overcome in mainstream American and English cinema. So Eisenstein merely uses his actors as props and stages the drama in broad strokes of sweeping gesture and concentrated stares. Not unlike the type of production one will see on the stage. Eisenstein was truly a poet but by the time he made this film cinema had progressed markedly. There were new and more gifted filmmakers doing more than he was now capable of as they embraced the devices at their disposal and set about crafting art with a subtlety and novelty in which he was sadly lacking.

Charlotte 'Charlie' Newton is bored with her quiet life at home with her parents and her younger sister. She wishes something exciting wold happen and knows exactly what they need: a visit from her sophisticated and much traveled uncle Charlie Oakley, her mother's younger brother. Imagine her delight when, out of the blue, they receive a telegram from uncle Charlie announcing that he is coming to visit them for awhile. Charlie Oakley creates quite a stir and charms the ladies club as well as the bank president where his brother-in-law works. Young Charlie begins to notice some odd behavior on his part, such as cutting out a story in the local paper about a man who marries and then murders rich widows. When two strangers appear asking questions about him, she begins to imagine the worse about her dearly beloved uncle Charlie.

Summary
Two elderly parents Shukishi (Chishu Ryu) and Tomi Hirayama (Chieko Higashiyama) from the small seaside town of Onomichi in southwest Japan pay a visit to their busy children in Tokyo — a journey that, before the introduction of the bullet train, took almost a day. After the arduous journey, they find themselves neglected by their children. The children genuinely wish to spend time with their parents, and do to an extent, but as they have lives and families of their own they find it difficult to maintain a balance between the two. Only the couple's widowed daughter-in-law Noriko, played by Setsuko Hara, goes out of her way to entertain them.
(source: Wikipedia)

Cast
Chishu Ryu
Chieko Higashiyama
Setsuko Hara

-Guy-Marc Hinant "extension de l‘anthologie des musiques électronique, concrète et bruitiste" (dj set)
- Gabriel Séverin lecture de textes de littérature brute
Gabriel Séverin est actif depuis bientôt deux décennies dans le monde de l’électronique (Silk Saw, Jardin d’Usure, Ultraphonist, Rob(u)rang, Dead Holywood Stars). Artiste sonore, musicien touchant à plusieurs disciplines, il s’attache souvent à chercher du côté des avant-gardes oubliées et obscures.