Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 164: Thu Jun 13

TAKE YOUR PICK 

1 White of the Eye (Cammell, 1987): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.30pm

THE HORROR SHOW VOD service launches Friday 14th June and to celebrate there will be an exclusive launch event at the Prince Charles cinema tonight.

Kim Newman (keeper of Empire Magazine’s video dungeon and author of Nightmare Movies) will introduce his own selection of a very rare 35mm screening of Donald Cammell’s classic serial killer horror WHITE OF THE EYE

There will also be a short film accompaniment; HIM INDOORS starring League of Gentleman’s Reece Shearsmith, introduced by director Paul Davis, and horror-themed stand-up comedy from Perfect Movie host Richard Sandling (winner of So You Think You’re Funny in 2007).

The Guardian’s Damon Wise will be conducting on-stage interviews with Kim Newman as well as with Him Indoors director Paul Davis.

Time Out review:
Donald Cammell transforms a stalk'n'slash thriller into a complex, cubist kaleidoscope of themes and images. Paul and Joan White (Keith and Moriarty) lead a happy enough life in a quiet Arizona mining town, until Paul suddenly finds himself chief suspect in a police investigation of a series of violently misogynistic murders. Matters are complicated by the reappearance of Joan's gun-crazy ex-husband (Rosenberg). A determinedly offbeat murder mystery, delving into dotty Indian mysticism and throwing up symbols, red herrings, and Steadicam flourishes for the asking, this nevertheless remains oddly effective. Imbued with a brooding, oppressive atmosphere and coloured by vivid performances, though often murkily motivated, it is genuinely nightmarish in its portrait of relationships where love is blinding and the past casts an intolerably heavy spell.

Geoff Andrew

Here is the trailer.

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2 Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972): Renoir Cinema, 7.30pm

This is the latest screening from the A Nos Amours film club, a collective founded by film-makers Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts dedicated to programming over-looked, under-exposed or especially potent cinema. 

Here is their introduction: This time À Nos Amours presents a 35mm screening of Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972), which will be introduced by novelist, essayist, journalist Will Self. 

Takovsky’s adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel takes the premise of a powerful force on a distant planet that can materialise dreams and memories and creates from it a remarkable work of cinema. There are no monsters from any ‘beyond’ here: the truths Tarkovsky and the crew discover are folded from life, regret and consciousness itself.


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


Here is an extract. 


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