Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 110: Sat Apr 21

Kuroneko (Shindo, 1968): Masonic Temple Cinema, Andaz Hotel, Liverpool St, 12.30pm


This screening is part of the East End Film Festival which runs from April 11th to 29th. You can find full details of the season here. The days starts at 12.30pm with The Uninvited (Allen, 1944), which will be followed by a panel discussion where The Final Girls, who have organised the event, will dive into what are the cinematic archetypes for female ghosts, and their hidden feminist power.


Time Out review of The Uninvited:
Set in a distinctly Hollywoodian but nevertheless persuasive Cornwall, this is an impressive supernatural thriller, not unlike 
Rebecca in its use of an eerily atmospheric house and a sense of morbid brooding about the troubled past. Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey are the siblings who buy the old house, only to find it haunted and exerting a sinister influence over the previous owner's granddaughter (Gail Russell). Allen's direction tightens the screws of tension to genuinely frightening effect, aided by an intense performance from Russell as the girl who believes herself haunted by the malevolent ghost of her mother, and by beautiful camerawork in the noir style from Charles Lang. The real strength of the film, though, is its atypical stance part way between psychology and the supernatural, achieving a disturbingly serious effect.

Geoff Andrew

Here is the trailer. 


*********************

Chicago Reader review of Kuroneko:
Samurai soldiers rape and murder a woman and her daughter-in-law living alone in a house near the forest, but a black cat licking at their abandoned bodies spells trouble for the perpetrators: years later, as the same men happen one by one through the forest, each is seduced by two ghostly women and led to his doom. Kaneto Shindo directed this hypnotic Japanese chiller (1968), whose bold visual simplicity—the high-contast black-and-white photography; the dramatic compositions; the austere, kabuki-style staging—may leave you unprepared for the occasional bursts of kinetic, howling violence. Based on a Japanese folktale, the movie capitalized on the public appetite for period ghost stories (e.g. Masaki Kobayashi's 
Kwaidan
), and it's a classic of the genre—eerie, erotic, and unnerving.
JR Jones



Here (and above) is the trailer.

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