Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 189: Tue Jul 17

Images (Altman, 1972): Barbican Cinema, 8.45pm


The feminist horror film collective, The Final Girls, present a season of films with mould-breaking women that challenge notions of femininity, control and hysteria. This 35mm presentation is part of that season. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Underrated film about a lonely woman cracking up and suffering disturbing hallucinations about sex and death. Unlike most of Altman's movies, which parody and reinvent genres, Images stands rather in a loose trilogy with That Cold Day in the Park and 3 Women, in its investigation of madness and its concentration upon a female character. The fragmented style of the film, in which York's mental life is portrayed as substantially as her 'real' life, might have become pretentious; but the director controls things beautifully, proffering credible biographical reasons for her inner disturbances, and borrowing shock effects from the thriller genre to underline the terrifying nature of her predicament. It's brilliantly shot by Vilmos Zsigmond (wtihout a hint of psychedelic trickery in sight), superbly acted, and lent extra menace by the sounds and music of, respectively, Stomu Yamashta and John Williams. 
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the great FilmBar70 trailer. 

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