Dark Night, Calcutta (1964)

In Voyage of a Hand, Ruiz constructs another of his concentric labyrinths that hits us right in the multifaceted center of our confusion. We might decide that what we receive was a story full of intentions; or we might decide that it was a spineless joke empty of sense or direction. In any case, it will be difficult to deny the acid sense of humor that animates the film.

Philippe Noiret plays a rich, Parisian banker whose daughter, Carolina, is kidnapped by a ruthless organization. They threaten to have her abused by the sadistic clients of a brothel they run if Father doesn’t pay the ransom on time.

Collage of dramatic scenes, some exaggerated to comic effect, with asynchronous sound from well known classic, operatic, and rock and roll music – with different approaches to love, suffering, and death.

Jim is a small child who lives in an inn run by his parents. The arrival of a strange captain to the Island they live will trouble his existence and tip him into an universe of adventures.

An elderly millionaire manipulates an avant-garde writer and a happily married man.

A mentally unstable woman and her son move to a sprawling mansion in Portugal to grow roses.

An English historian travels to Morocco to work on a study of the painter Delacroix. He hears of a rare series of engravings and embarks on a search for them that takes him through the mysterious streets of the ancient medina. He becomes obsessed with the figure of a beautiful blond woman dressed in white that he sees there. but it appears that she may have died years before.

Walter is told by his boss, Sara, to deliver an urgent letter to Henri de Corinthe. On the way he finds a beautiful woman he had been eying in a nightclub, lying in the road, bound up. He takes her to a villa to get a doctor, and ends up being locked in a bedroom with her. While she is making love to him, he has visions of surrealistic images from René Magritte's paintings. In the morning, the girl, Marie-Ange, has vanished, the villa looks derelict, and his neck is bleeding. Was it all just a nightmare?

Werner Schroeter mixes Stravinsky, Beethoven, Brahms, Maria Callas and Janis Joplin in this delirious biography of the doomed nineteenth-century mezzo-soprano.