This is part of a great Eric Rohmer season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Eric Rohmer’s least typical and least popular film also happens to be
his best: a wonderful version of Chretien de Troyes’ 12th-century epic
poem, set to music, about the adventures of an innocent knight.
Deliberately artificial in style and setting—the perspectives are as
flat as in medieval tapestries, the colors bright and vivid, the musical
deliveries strange and often comic—the film is as faithful to its
source as it can be, given the limited material available about the
period. Rohmer’s fidelity to the text compels him to include narrative
descriptions as well as dialogue in the sung passages. Absolutely
unique—a must for medievalists, as well as filmgoers looking for
something different. This film also features the acting debut of the
late and very talented Pascal Ogier. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Sophisticated British comedy starring matinee idol Ivor Novello as a railway Romeo with an introduction to the film by Michael Williams, author of Ivor Novello: Screen Idol. This is a 35mm presentation from the BFI National Archive,
BFI introduction: Train attendant Gaston has a girl in every city and juggles them with
farcical results. Ivor Novello effortlessly made the transition from
silent to sound stardom and this romantic comedy demonstrates how
perfectly he suited the genre. Litvak directs with a light touch and
more than a nod to the tradition of European filmmaking that provided
his training. The Continental feel is cemented by the cinematography of
Günther Krampf and Alfred Junge’s art direction, including a replica of a
luxurious train on the set at Shepherd’s Bush. It’s a film so lavish,
even the jewelry gets a credit.
Garden Cinema introduction to new 'London Reviewed' season in association with the London Review of Books: LRB Screen returns
to the Garden Cinema with a new series exploring visions of London
created by non-British filmmakers: films in which the city is a key
player, rather than a backdrop; in which its buildings, streets, parks
and rivers cast a distinctive shadow over the drama; in which a fresh
encounter makes the city unfamiliar and mysterious again. London Reviewed begins in perhaps the only way it could, with Blow-Up,
Antonioni’s classic countercultural take on (mis)perception and
(un)reality in the swinging 1960s. Adapted by the great Marxist
playwright Edward Bond from a short story by the cult Argentinian writer
Julio Cortázar, the film follows a fashion photographer (Hemmings,
channelling David Bailey) who thinks he might have unintentionally
photographed a murder. Moving from the heart of the zeitgeist to a South
London park that proves pivotal, its richness in social, cultural and
architectural detail makes it one of the defining works of the decade. Introducing
the film, and discussing it afterwards with regular host Gareth Evans,
will be Miles Aldridge, the acclaimed fashion photographer and artist.
Born two years before the film’s release, Aldridge grew up in the heart
of the cultural scene it portrays and has since created his own highly
distinctive photographic signature.
Chicago Reader review: Michelangelo Antonioni’s sexy art-house hit of 1966, which played a
substantial role in putting swinging London on the map, follows a day
in the life of a young fashion photographer (David Hemmings) who
discovers, after blowing up his photos of a couple glimpsed in a
park, that he may have inadvertently uncovered a murder. Part erotic
thriller (with significant glamorous roles played by Vanessa
Redgrave, Sarah Miles, Verushka, and Jane Birkin), part exotic
travelogue (featuring a Yardbirds concert, antiwar demonstrations,
street mimes, one exuberant orgy, and a certain amount of pot), this
is so ravishing to look at (the colors all seem newly minted) and
pleasurable to follow (the enigmas are usually more teasing than
worrying) that you’re likely to excuse the metaphysical pretensions
— which become prevalent only at the very end — and go with the
60s flow, just as the original audiences did. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is a 16mm presentation in the Celluloid on Sunday strand at the ICA.
Time Out review: 'There are many ways to tell a story, realism is just the most dull.' That, at any rate, is the ethos of the writers of The Love Judge,
a TV show set in a California divorce court. Here circus lesbians vie
with schizophrenic opera divas and stripper nuns for truth, justice and
alimony. The writers' lot seems mundane in comparison, though these
maladjusted under-achievers are a colourful group: Mark (Chester) is
still grieving for his lover who died a year ago of AIDS, but he's in
with a chance for a production job and is besotted with Bill (Arquette).
Jeremy (Wilborn) says Bill's a lost cause, and Leslie (Douglas) agrees
with him; she prefers Ben, the photocopy repairman. Meanwhile, the boss,
Jo (Beat), is incensed to find her new sofa despoiled with sperm stains
every morning. While Glatzer's debut boasts a good number of campy,
enjoyable scenes (notably 'extracts' from The Love Judgefeaturing the likes of Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov) and a stand-out performance from Jackie Beat,
it's a surprisingly well structured, carefully nuanced affair (taking
place over a working week, and, except in the extracts, never leaving
the office). A genuinely moving comedy. Tom Charity
This great, late Fritz Lang film is part of the Jacques Rivette season at the ICA Cinema. You can find the details here.
"What, then, is this film really? Fable,
parable, equation, blueprint? None of these things, but simply the
description of an experiment." – Jacques Rivette
The subject of one of Rivette's most famous and decidedly inscrutable essays for Cahiers du cinéma, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is at its heart, as Rivette elucidates, a treatise on the very concepts of innocence and guilt.
Chicago Reader review: Fritz Lang’s last American film, shot in a stripped-down, almost
anonymous style that seems to befit its bitterness and disillusion.
Reporter Dana Andrews has himself framed for the murder of a stripper in
order to expose the incompetence of the police and the fallacy of
capital punishment. But after he’s sentenced, the evidence that will
clear him is lost when his editor is killed in an accident. Once he’s
raised the standard social issues, Lang destroys them all with a
shatteringly nihilistic conclusion. Joan Fontaine is the Lang heroine to
end (literally) all Lang heroines, at least in Hollywood. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Although Andrei Tarkovsky regarded this 1972 SF spectacle in 'Scope as
the weakest of his films, it holds up remarkably well as a soulful
Soviet “response” to 2001: A Space Odyssey, concentrating on the
limits of man's imagination in relation to memory and conscience. Sent
to a remote space station poised over the mysterious planet Solaris in
order to investigate the puzzling data sent back by an earlier mission, a
psychologist (Donatas Banionis) discovers that the planet materializes
human forms based on the troubled memories of the space
explorers—including the psychologist's own wife (Natalya Bondarchuk),
who'd killed herself many years before but is repeatedly resurrected
before his eyes. More an exploration of inner than of outer space,
Tarkovsky's eerie mystic parable is given substance by the filmmaker's
boldly original grasp of film language and the remarkable performances
by all the principals. In Russian with subtitles. 165 min.
Jonathan Rosenabum
This 35mm presentation also screens on June 5th. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Peter Greenaway’s programmatic and schematic 1989 dark comedy about
conspicuous consumption isn’t very funny, although it offers a nearly
unbroken string of obnoxious verbal abuse—misogynist, racist,
scatological—from a crook (Michael Gambon) who runs an expensive gourmet
restaurant. Similarly, it isn’t very erotic, although it features a
great deal of nudity, and there’s also fair amount of unpleasant (if
otherwise affectless) violence. The film is mainly set in the canyonlike
rooms of the restaurant—immaculately lit and shot by master French
cinematographer Sacha Vierny in ‘Scope, with elaborate color coding,
extended tracking shots, and a striking neoclassic score by Michael
Nyman. Greenaway has suggested that this is supposed to be an attack on
Thatcher England, but while his film certainly has the nastiness of
satire, it doesn’t have much political focus; petty malice rather than
anger is the main bill of fare, with deep-dish notations about food and
sex thrown in for spice. Jonathan Rosenbaum
