Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 162: Wed Jun 20

The Needle (Nugmanov, 1988): Regent Street Cinema, 7.30pm


This 35mm screening is part of the Kino Klassika 'Youth on the March: the rise of the Soviet New Wave' season, tracing the clash of generations from the thaw to Perestroika, and curated by renowned film critic and journalist Konstantin Shavlovsky. Unlike the classic films of the French New Wave, these films are still unknown outside Russia. Most will be shown for the first time, certainly for the first time in their original formats. Full details of the season can be found by clicking here.

Senses of Cinema review:
The Needle
was the seminal example of a postmodern, punk, neo-romantic perestroika-era cinema that defined the “late-Soviet New Wave” and facilitated the entry of a domestic underground youth culture into the mainstream. Part of the film’s appeal was that it broke the taboos of representing drug addiction, while featuring a countercultural milieu of rock music, slackers and mafia-types in the almost complete absence of Soviet authority save for the schizophrenic mumblings of popular television. Any semblance of socialist realism or, indeed, narrative logic is absent. Meaning, genre and structure are overwhelmed by playful languidness and a tone of universal apathy.

Greg Dolgopolov

Here (and above) is an extract.

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