TAKE YOUR PICK
1 Sorcerer (Friedkin, 1977): Roxy Bar & Screen, London Bridge, 8pm
Now
here's a proper treat. Savage Cinema film club gives us a rare chance
to see a cult movie that has been one of the most difficult to see in
recent years.
Here's the Savage Cinema introduction: After a long hiatus, Savage Cinema return to Roxy Bar & Screen with a
special screening of one of the most relentless, underrated thrillers
of the 1970s: William Friedkin's SORCERER (1977). A new
restoration of the film is to be released next year, but here's your
chance to catch the film early and join the ever-growing cult behind
what Friedkin himself considers his greatest film.
Adapted from Georges Arnaud's novel The Wages Of Fear and loosely
based on Henri-Georges Clouzot's film of the same name, Sorcerer is a
white-knuckle explosive thriller about four outcasts on the run from
around the world, including an American getaway driver played by Roy
Scheider. The four are teamed together to illegally transport two trucks
full of highly combustible nitroglycerine across the South American
jungle, with the promise of new identities upon completion of the job.
That is, if they escape the jungle with their lives...
Rarely seen in its original cut in the UK (over 30 minutes were cut
out of its British cinema release), our screening will be augmented by
rare screenings of two television episodes directed by Friedkin: the
harrowing Nightcrawlers, directed for The New Twilight Zone in 1986; and
OFF SEASON (1965), the last episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, as
well as Friedkin's first directorial credit. In addition, we'll be
celebrating the composers of Sorcerer's fantastic score by playing the
best of Tangerine Dream's film music in the bar before and after the
film.
Here is the trailer.
**********************************
2 Taste of Cherry (Kiarostami, 1997): Room B20, Birkbeck College, Malet St, W1.
This is part of the summer film season at Birkbeck College. Here is the introduction:
In this series we will watch three films in which the main protagonist is an itinerant or a wanderer. Whilst there is a great deal of journeying in cinema, this series distinguishes itself from the main stream genre of the road movie -whose forward propulsion mimics or can be seen as a metaphor for both the film itself rushing through the projector,and for narrative itself as linear journey rushing toward resolution and/or death. In the classical Hollywood journey/odyssey genre film the protagonist is often the active (often male) agent who mobilises the (often) linear trajectory of the films’ structure.
In this series we are interested in films that wander, meander, loop and weave - films that explore aimlessness, waiting, 'dead time', margins and associative oblique trajectories, films whose movement follows a different pattern, structure and logic creating a disorganised mobility that allows us to ask the question: can the cinematic produce nomadic subjectivities and what can that mean politically, psychically, formally, affectively, aesthetically?
After the screening there will be a panel discussion chaired by Amber Jacobs with Dr Rosalind Galt and Professor Laura Mulvey.
Chicago Reader review:
A middle-aged man who's contemplating suicide drives
around the hilly, dusty outskirts of Tehran trying to find someone who
will bury him if he succeeds and retrieve him if he fails. This
minimalist yet powerful and life-enhancing 1997 feature by Abbas
Kiarostami (Where Is the Friend's House?, Life and Nothing More, Through the Olive Trees)
never explains why the man wants to end his life, yet every moment in
his daylong odyssey carries a great deal of poignancy and philosophical
weight. Kiarostami, one of the great filmmakers of our time, is a master
at filming landscapes and constructing parablelike narratives whose
missing pieces solicit the viewer's active imagination. Taste of Cherry
actually says a great deal about what it was like to be alive in the
1990s, and despite its somber theme, this masterpiece has a startling
epilogue that radiates with wonder and euphoria. In Farsi with
subtitles.
Jonathan Rosenabaum
Here is the trailer.
No comments:
Post a Comment