Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 225: Tue Aug 13

No1 The Long Goodbye (Altman, 1973): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.45pm

This Robert Altman neo-noir screens as part of the BFI Passport to Cinema season and is also being shown on August 13th. More details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Robert Altman's antiheroic rewrite of Raymond Chandler. Elliott Gould plays Marlowe as a chain-smoking nebbish—an innocent child of the 40s set down in what Altman sees (problematically) as the grown-up, shades-of-gray world of the 70s. The film is so inventive in its situations and humor that its shortcomings—the blunt ideas at its core—don't become apparent before several viewings. Somewhere deep down inside, there's a screenplay by Leigh Brackett (The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo); Altman has lost it in his improvisation, but it does give this 1973 film a firm, classical shape that eludes his other work. With Sterling Hayden, Mark Rydell, and Nina Van Pallandt.
Dave Kehr

Here is the trailer.

****

No2 Mulholland Dr. (Lynch, 2001): ICA Cinema, 7pm

Mulholland Dr is my personal favourite of all Lynch movies. An audacious exercise even by the director's standards, a great movie about Hollywood and one that has much more emotional resonance than most of his work.

Here is the trailer.

Throughout August the ICA Cinematheque is hosting a series of Tuesday night screenings exploring the concept of the psychogenic fugue state and its relationship to classical cinema narratives, ranging from the pioneering Technicolor fantasy constructions in The Wizard of Oz to the surreal identity-splitting work of David Lynch.

The psychogenic fugue is a unique form of amnesia in which the subject, when faced with an unbearable traumatic situation, retreats into a fictional narrative, a fantasy of their mind’s creation, to avoid the horrors of reality. Often discussed in relation to psychoanalytic thought, the notion of the fugue state as extended daydream or fantasy construction has a particular resonance with the escapist lure of the cinema experience, where spectators are invited to disassociate from reality and immerse themselves in an audio-visual narrative.

In this season each film consciously holds to light the mechanics of fantasy construction, emphasizing the parallels between these psychological daydreams and the filmmaking process itself.

Each screening will be accompanied by supplementary reading materials and a brief introduction from ICA Film & Cinema Co-ordinator James King that encourage the audience to engage in radical and alternative readings of these established works.