Actor

Viva

4: briefs
13:00: average
52 min: in total

On film.briefs4

Lions Love

Agnès Varda · 1969

Lions Love (1969), directed by Agnès Varda, is an English-language French arthouse comedy filmed in Los Angeles. It follows a fictional throuple — played by Viva, Gerome Ragni, and James Rado — hosting filmmaker Shirley Clarke in their Beverly Hills home. Blending scripted scenes, documentary insertions, and meta-cinematic interventions, the film interrogates authorship, countercultural commodification, and the gendered labour of collaboration. With a score by Joseph Byrd and editing by Robert Dalva, it sustains a deliberate tonal ambiguity, refusing satire or nostalgia in favour of structural scrutiny. Though demanding and referential, it rewards attentive viewing as a precise, unsentimental portrait of a pivotal cultural moment.

13:00

Midnight Cowboy

John Schlesinger · 1969

Midnight Cowboy follows Joe Buck, a Texan who arrives in New York dressed as a cowboy to become a male prostitute, and Ratso Rizzo, a sickly con man who becomes his reluctant partner in survival. Set against the grimy, unglamorous backdrop of late-1960s Manhattan, the film charts their slow descent into mutual dependence, not friendship. With restrained performances, unsentimental cinematography, and a script that trusts silence over exposition, it renders marginality as lived reality rather than social commentary. It won Best Picture despite its X rating — the only film to do so — and remains a benchmark of American dramatic realism.

13:00

The State of Things

Wim Wenders · 1982

Wim Wenders’ 1982 Golden Lion winner follows a film crew stranded in Portugal when funding and film stock run out. Director Friedrich Munro travels to Los Angeles to find his missing producer, navigating a landscape of mobile homes, unpaid debts, and suspended creativity. Shot across Portugal and California with a mix of black-and-white and colour, and featuring cameos from Fuller, Corman and Kramer, it is a self-aware, deliberately unhurried meditation on the material conditions of filmmaking—and the quiet endurance required when nothing moves forward.

13:00

Paris, Texas

Wim Wenders · 1984

A man wanders out of the Texas desert after four unexplained years, and Wim Wenders spends 147 patient minutes on what it costs him to reclaim a son and finally speak to the wife he left behind.