Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 291: Sun Oct 18

Variety (Dupont, 1925): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 2pm


59th LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (7th-18th October 2015) DAY 12
 

Every day (from October 7 to October 18) I will be selecting the London Film Festival choices you have a chance to get tickets for and the movies you are unlikely to see in London very soon unless you go to see them at the Festival. Here is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't worry if some of the recommended films are sold out by the time you read this as there are always some tickets on offer which go on sale 30 minutes before each screening. Here is all the information you need about the best way to get tickets.

London Film Festival introduction:
Here, at last, is the restoration for which all true fans of Weimar cinema have been waiting. Varieté is arguably the least well known of the great German silents, having been scarcely available for so long. A heady cocktail of destructive passion, frank eroticism and seedy showbiz glamour, it stars Emil Jannings as Boss, a middle-aged circus acrobat whose life is derailed by an adulterous affair with a seductive stranger (Lya de Putti). But it’s famed, above all, for Karl Freund’s vertiginously mobile, frequently subjective camera, which breathtakingly captures the aerial exploits of Boss and his fellow trapeze artists. To those who know Dupont as the director of Piccadilly (made three years later in Elstree), his spectacular German masterpiece will come as a revelation.
Margaret Deriaz


Here (and above) is a video essay on the film by Kristin Thompson.

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