Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 176: Tue Jun 25

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.


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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.

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