This silent film will be introduced by BFI curator Bryony Dixon and feature live musical accompaniment by Neil Brand.
Chicago Reader review: Before Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, before John Wayne and John
Ford, Lon Chaney and director Tod Browning forged an ongoing
collaboration–nine films from 1920 to ’29–whose macabre stories and
carny/underworld settings mocked the bright lights of the Jazz Age.
Their most delirious project was The Unknown (1927), a perverse
melodrama about an armless circus performer (Chaney) and a beautiful
bareback rider (18-year-old Joan Crawford) with a phobia of men’s hands.
With its undercurrents of frigidity and castration anxiety, the story
was excellent material for Browning, and the film races along with the
awful momentum of a bad dream. Don Druker
This 35mm presentation also screens on June 6th. (Full details here).
Time Out review: 'Despite
its typically painstaking attentions to elaborate set dressings and
assignations of quirk, The Life Aquatic meanders and stalls in its
journeys with ocean explorer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray),
a down-at-heel Cousteau-manqué pursuing a filmed revenge mission
against the jaguar shark who devoured his best friend. Suffused with
lush yet faded primary colours like a 30-year-old Kodak snap and spiced
with Henry Selick’s stop-motion animations and a starry (if often idle)
cast of supporting players, ‘The Life Aquatic’ is a beautifully
appointed but airless dollhouse-by-the-sea, populated by wistful
figurines in their matching little red caps and Team Zissou Adidas, and
scored to Seu Jorge’s deckside acoustic renditions of Bowie songs in
Portuguese. The movie pokes along in a manner at once listless and
affable, like a series of semi-improvised outtakes that didn’t quite
gel. And yet the director magically conjures emotional dividends in the
film’s invigorating last moments, which wordlessly celebrate an
underrated and truly Andersonian virtue: solidarity.' Jessica Winte
This 35mm presentation also screens on May 25th (Full details here).
Chicago Reader review: Bill Forsyth, director of the frail and strenuously charming Gregory’s Girl,
more or less gets his act together with this fable of an American
executive (Peter Riegert) who succumbs to the mooniness of the Scottish
fishing village he has been sent to buy for his company. The languorous,
almost extinguished rhythms and the casual placement of the gags make
more sense in this explicitly dreamy context, and even if Forsyth’s
visuals are slack and prosaic, his direction of actors is eccentric and
personal enough to create a coherent style. The thematics are rather
cloying, but the mood—profoundly relaxed, bemused—eventually conquers.
With Burt Lancaster as a stargazing magnate and Denis Lawson as the
hustling local innkeeper. Dave Kehr
This film (also screening on May 28th) is part of the Muriel Box season at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details of the season here.
BFI introduction: A host of female stars bring to life the many facets of womanhood, as a
man in his dotage recounts his many affairs, illustrating that it takes a
lifetime to understand the mysteries of the fairer sex. Directed from
her own original story, this film is perhaps the ultimate expression of
Muriel Box’s feminist ideals, conveying the message that a happy
marriage is an equal partnership.
This film is part of the Wes Anderson 35mm season at the Screen on the Green (details here) and is also screening on May 13th. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Shot on Super 16-millimeter and set mainly inside a 15-mile radius, this fairy-tale period piece (2012) is Wes Anderson’s most intimate film sinceBottle Rocket(1996) and maybe his most deeply felt overall. It takes place in 1965 on a fictional island called New Penzance, where a 12-year-old orphan runs away from scout camp with a morose girl he considers his soul mate. A group of adults—the girl’s parents (Bill Murray, Frances McDormand), the boy’s scout master (Edward Norton), a local sheriff (Bruce Willis)—organize a search and in the process coalesce into a little family of lonely depressives. As usual, Anderson’s densely imagined mise-en-scene contains many allusions to movies, music, and literature (Benjamin Britten’s orchestral work being a key touchstone); what’s different this time is that most of the cultural references grow naturally from the characterization. Ben Sachs
This 35mm screening is part of the Genesis Cinema 24th Birthday season. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Written and directed by Harmony Korine, who wroteKids,
this poetically disjointed narrative (1997) also follows young people
engaged in nihilistic activities and has an ambiguous relationship to
both documentary and fiction filmmaking—but none of the earlier movie's
prurience or condescension. Killing cats is a pastime and source of
income for two boys (Jacob Reynolds and Nick Sutton) who sniff a lot of
glue in a town identified as Xenia, Ohio. Much of their behavior and the
behavior of other people in the movie was surely guided if not
predetermined by Korine, yet few of the performers appear to be actors
in scripted roles. In one scene a woman (who was previously shown
mothering a doll) shaves off her eyebrows. Filling one hand with shaving
cream and trying to use the other to keep her bangs out of the way as
well as wield a razor, she exhibits a startling absence of intelligence.
Crooned ballads and metal music enhance scenes of perversely enchanting
power, and a voice-over tells us in gory detail how a tornado
devastated Xenia years before, as if to explain the strangely passive
violence in a town where everyone's reason for existence seems to be
breaking taboos. The director of photography is Jean Yves Escoffier. Lisa Alspector
This film also screens on May 20thand here are the details of the season devoted to Dario Argento at the cinema in May.
Horror
films expert Kim Newman hailed Inferno in his seminal Nightmare Movies book
as Dario Argento's greatest work, his "masterpiece".
Empire review: Defiantly
refusing to make narrative sense, this revolves around two evil houses -
one in Rome, one in New York - and the witch-like goddesses who haunt
them. A succession of unfortunate mortals become intrigued by the
mysteries surrounding the houses, and mainly come to bad ends in
sequences staged by Argento with all the imaginative flair of Busby
Berkeley dance routines. Argento
goes overboard with the vivid camera work, and anyone expecting a story
is doomed to extreme frustration. There is, surprisingly, an unusual
degree of cynical humour to the proceedings and the requisite collection
of blankly beautiful actresses. The kind of film that starts off with a
climax and builds to a plateau of surrealist delirium that, one way or
another, will have you shrieking. Kim Newman
This 35mm presentation is part of the Nina Menkes season at BFI Southbank. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Unfolding with the awful clarity of a nightmare, this 2007 drama delves
into the troubled psyche of a remote Russian beauty (Marina Shoif) who
spends her days dully working a roulette table in LA’s Koreatown and her
nights lying beneath a sweating, mechanically pumping lover. Everywhere
she looks are images of male violence (cops brutalizing a kid on the
street, U.S. forces bombing Fallujah on TV), and every time she comes
home, a serpent curls menacingly in the hallway of her hotel. Director
Nina Menkes (The Bloody Child, Magdalena Viraga) supplies a
rudimentary plot—traumatic memories of the woman’s abusive father,
complications involving her psychotic sister—but the film’s real pull is
its dreamlike sense of perpetual strangeness, created largely by the
crisp black-and-white photography. JR Jones
Lost Reels, an independent film organisation dedicated to bringing forgotten, lost, or unavailable films back to UK cinemas, launches a series of classics, curios and forgotten gems on
16mm with the inspired pairing of Ray Harryhausen’s golden age
stop-motion sci-fi / horror masterpiece and Bert I. Gordon’s
unintentionally hilarious cult classic.
Lost Reels introduction to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms: Having served his apprenticeship as King Kong (1933) animator, Willis O’Brien’s assistant on Mighty Joe Young (1949), Ray Harryhausen’s first solo effort was The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, produced
by Warner Brothers and based on a short story by his friend science
fiction writer Ray Bradbury. The film was a huge success and is largely
responsible for a whole sub-genre of monster-on-the-loose films. The
role of military authority figures, and the trope of the aging scientist
and his brainy attractive daughter were replicated in Them! the following year and many other 1950s sci-fi/horror films including Harryhausen’s follow-up, It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955). What makes Beast
most remarkable is the creature itself and how Harryhausen imbues it
with a real personality, even pathos. Scenes such as the lighthouse
attack are beautifully conceived and staged, and the New York City
rampage and amusement park climax are high water marks for the stop
motion technique even today. Among the capable and pleasant B-movie cast
keep an eye out for a young Lee Van Cleef in a small role as a police
marksman during the fiery rollercoaster climax.
Lost Reels introduction to Empire of the Ants: H.G. Wells wrote a story called Empire of the Ants but it bears
little resemblance to this tale of a devious estate agent (Joan
Collins) trying to sell dodgy condos to an unsuspecting tour group prior
to an attack by giant ants. Starting with a classic disaster movie set
up (unlikeable characters assemble so the audience can decide who to
root for when the killings begin) it becomes a prototype for Jurassic Park (1993), when the condo tour goes horribly wrong. As the ants attack to faux-Jaws (1975) music and Them! sound
effects, scenes include an elderly couple leaving the relative safety
of the group for a flimsy outdoor cabin, “We’ll be safe in there” they
say (guess what happens), and as marauding ants close off escape routes
for another group, one of them screams, “They’re herding us like
CATTLE!” The hilariously inept special effects only add to the film’s
appeal (they actually look better in 16mm than higher definition
formats) and the cast heroically play it straight even when ‘fighting’
thin air overlayed with badly superimposed ant footage or unconvincing
ant puppets. A ludicrous third act twist reinvigorates the film just as
it threatens to drag, cementing the film’s status as an accidental cult
classic. The final scene featuring the beleaguered survivors is
priceless.
This film is also being screened at BFI Southbank on May 12th (details here). Tonight's presentation features an introduction by director Dario Argento, and here are the details of the season devoted to him at the cinema in May.
BFI review: Four decades ago, Italian
genre master Dario Argento brazenly subverted expectations by abandoning
the giallo tradition upon which he had built his reputation, launching
headlong into a fantastical tale of the supernatural. The resulting film
remains not just one of the director’s most celebrated works, but a
defining classic of horror cinema. American ballerina Suzy Bannion
arrives in Germany to study at the prestigious Tanz Dance Academy. But
as a series of murders and a variety of other inexplicable events begin
to pile up, Suzy realises her new school houses a terrifying secret.
Dripping in dark imagination, Suspiria ranks as one of Argento’s most
visionary works – its garish colour palette and bravura set pieces
adding to a frenzied sense of dread. Michael Blyth
This film (also screening on May 1st) is part of the Muriel Box retrospective at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details of the season here.
BFI introduction: Muriel Box was the first woman to win the Oscar™ for Best Original Screenplay
(shared with her husband Sydney), for this story inspired by her
fascination with new methods of therapy. When a young pianist attempts
suicide, her treatment by hypnosis reveals what is behind the ‘seventh
veil’ of her subconscious and helps her choose between the four men who
are in love with her.
Time Out review: When philandering Mafia hitman 'Cucumber' Frank de Marco is killed by
his boss Tony 'The Tiger' Russo, his widow Angela (Pfeiffer) decides to
abandon her stockbroker-belt home (bursting with stolen goods) and start
anew with a job and a dingy room on the Lower East Side. Easier said
than done: obsessively amorous Tony (Stockwell) courts her with a
vengeance, while FBI agent Mike Downey (Modine) suspects that she
planned Frank's death with Tony. If the slim plot of Demme's romantic
black comedy lacks the outrageous panache and exhilarating twists of Something Wild,
the film nevertheless delights through its sheer good-humoured glee in
all that is kitsch or off-the-wall, and its wealth of inventive
incidental details. While it's all relentlessly shallow, the
performances, music and gaudy visuals provide a fizzy vitality for which
many other directors would give their right arm. Amazingly, for all its
hip anarchy, it's finally an oddly old-fashioned slice of
entertainment. Preston Sturges might have approved. Geoff Andrew
This film is part of the Nina Menkes season at BFI Southbank. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: One of the most jarringly original independent films of the
1990s, Nina Menkes’ lost underground classic reemerges in a gorgeous new
restoration. In a neon-soaked dream vision of Las Vegas, a disaffected
blackjack dealer (played by the director’s sister Tinka Menkes) drifts through
a series of encounters alternately mundane, surreal, and menacing, while death
and violence hover ever-present in the margins. Awash in lush, hallucinatory
images, Queen of Diamonds is a haunting study of female alienation
that “may become for America in the 90s what Jeanne Dielman was for
Europe in the 70s—a cult classic using a rigorous visual composition to
penetrate the innermost recesses of the soul” Berenice Reynaud
This film (also screening on May 28th) is part of the Muriel Box retrospective at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details of the season here.
BFI introduction: Undoubtedly one of the most visually exciting and joyous British films
of the 1950s, this was also an early depiction of the perils of reality
TV. The casting of Finch and Kendall as the theatrical couple is
inspired – their caustic banter rivalling the best Hollywood screwball
comedies. The vibrant Technicolor sets and costumes show up television
as dull and stilted, persuading audiences that cinema was the superior
entertainment medium.
This 35mm presentation (also screening on May 14th) is part of the Big Screen Classics season. Full details here. Today's screening will include a live piano accompaniment by Costas Fotopoulos.
Chicago Reader review: Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 silent classic is more famous for its original
eight-hour version than for this cut that MGM carved out of it (though
apparently there were several prerelease versions, which Stroheim
screened privately for separate groups). The studio junked the rest of
the footage, and apart from a reconstruction cobbled together recently
with production stills and the shooting script, the release version is
all that remains today. But even in its butchered state this is one of
Stroheim’s greatest films, a passionate adaptation of Frank Norris’s
great naturalist novel McTeague in which a slow-witted dentist
(Gibson Gowland) and the neurotic woman he marries (the great ZaSu
Pitts) are ultimately destroyed by having won a lottery. Stroheim
respected the story enough to extend it imaginatively as well as
translate it into cinematic terms, and he filmed exclusively on location
(mainly San Francisco, Oakland, and Death Valley). Greed remains one of the most modern of silent films, anticipating Citizen Kane
in its deep-focus compositions and Jean Renoir in the emotional
complexity of its tragic humanism. Jean Hersholt costars. Essential
viewing. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This film is part of the Wes Anderson 35mm season at the Screen on the Green (details here) and also being shown on May 10th.
Chicago Reader review: Tony hipster Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums) takes a left
turn into stop-motion animation with this 2009 adaptation of the Roald
Dahl children's book, and the result is an instant classic. The material
allows Anderson to neutralize the most irritating aspects of his work
(the precociousness, the sense of white-bread privilege) and maximize
the most endearing (the comic timing, the dollhouse ordering of invented
worlds). Like the rest of his movies, this one is essentially
infantile—but when you're telling the story of a ne'er-do-well fox
conspiring against a trio of nasty farmers, who cares? Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale)
collaborated with Anderson on the script; among the voice talents are
Bill Murray, Meryl Streep, Michael Gambon, Willem Dafoe, and George
Clooney, perfect as the roguish hero. JR Jones
Chicago Reader review: Jean Renoir's 1951 masterpiece, his first film in color. The story
concerns a group of English colonialists living on the banks of the
Ganges, but beyond that the film describes how the European mind
gradually succumbs to the eternal perspectives of India. Renoir's images
flow with the same still motion as his metaphorical river: entering or
leaving the frame is a matter of life and death, but in the end it is
the same. For Andre Bazin, this was the Rules of the Game of Renoir's
postwar period, a film in which “the screen no longer exists; there is
nothing but reality." Dave Kehr
This
35mm presentation is part of a John Cassavetes/Gena Rowlands season at the Prince
Charles Cinema, with some of his greatest films being shown and all but one presentation from
prints. You can find the full details here. Faces also screens on 24th May and 9th June. Chicago Reader review: John
Cassavetes's galvanic 1968 drama about one long night in the lives of
an estranged well-to-do married couple (John Marley and Lynn Carlin) and
their temporary lovers (Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel) was the first
of his independent features to become a hit, and it's not hard to see
why. It remains one of the only American films to take the middle class
seriously, depicting the compulsive, embarrassed laughter of people
facing their own sexual longing and some of the emotional devastation
brought about by the so-called sexual revolution. (Interestingly,
Cassavetes set out to make a trenchant critique of the middle class, but
his characteristic empathy for all of his characters makes this a far
cry from simple satire.) Shot in 16-millimeter black and white with a
good many close-ups, this often takes an unsparing yet compassionate
"documentary" look at emotions most movies prefer to gloss over or cover
up. Adroitly written and directed, and superbly acted—the leads and Val
Avery are all uncommonly good (and the astonishing Lynn Carlin was a
nonprofessional discovered by Cassavetes, working at the time as Robert
Altman's secretary)—this is one of the most powerful and influential
American films of the 60s. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is the trailer.
This film is part of the Sam Peckinpah season at the Prince Charles. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: By far the most underrated of Sam Peckinpah's films, this grim 1974 tale
about a minor-league piano player in Mexico (Warren Oates) who
sacrifices his love (Isela Vega) when he goes after a fortune as a
bounty hunter is certainly one of the director's most personal and
obsessive works—even comparable in some respects to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano
in its bottomless despair and bombastic self-hatred, as well as its
rather ghoulish lyricism. (Critic Tom Milne has suggestively compared
the labyrinthine plot to that of a gothic novel.) Oates has perhaps
never been better, and a strong secondary cast—Vega, Gig Young, Robert
Webber, Kris Kristofferson, Donnie Fritts, and Emilio Fernandez—is
equally effective in etching Peckinpah's dark night of the soul. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This film (also screening on May 18th and 30th) is part of the Muriel Box retrospective at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details of the season here. Tonight's screening is introduced by director Caorl Morley.
BFI review: With The Passionate Stranger, romantic fiction is the target of the satire: Italian handyman Carlo (Carlo Giustini) is employed by an affluent Home Counties couple: wheelchair-bound scientist Roger Wynter (Ralph Richardson) and his wife Judith (Margaret Leighton),
a successful novelist suffering a bout of writer’s block. Carlo’s
arrival gets Judith’s creative juices flowing and she quickly produces a
lurid potboiler in which Carlo and her fictional surrogate enjoy an
illicit affair and plot to bump off her inconvenient spouse. When Carlo
starts reading the manuscript around the 20-minute mark, the film goes
into the fictional universe – and switches from black and white to
colour – retelling the whole of Judith’s novel in a rapid-fire 45
minutes. After this, back in monochrome ‘reality’, Carlo now erroneously
interprets the novel as a statement of Judith’s true feelings – with
amusingly farcical consequences. The collision of heightened fantasy and the humdrum realities of 1950s Britain recall the comic peaks of Preston Sturges’ Unfaithfully Yours
(SSIFF’s 2003 retrospective showcased all of the films Sturges wrote or
directed). But Box’s picture is really a true original, one of the most
fascinatingly complex and accomplished British films made up to that
point. Its status as a forgotten curio now seems as inexplicable as it
is unjust: if the San Sebastian Box focus yields no other consequence
than the rediscovery of The Passionate Stranger, the retrospective will
have been emphatically worthwhile. Neil Young
Picturehouse Central introduction: We’re thrilled to be playing host to a very special, star-studded celebration of classic folk horror The Wicker Man, arriving newly restored in 4K to mark its 50th Anniversary. Presented by Edith Bowman, this special event will give you the chance
to enjoy the FINAL CUT of the film on the big screen alongside an
introduction with actress Britt Ekland, associate musical director from
the film Gary Carpenter, the family of the director Robin Hardy, and
some famous fans of the film: acclaimed writer/actor Reece Shearsmith,
Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro via video message, plus more
special guests to be announced! There will also be an exclusive musical
performance by Broadside Hacks, covering 4 tracks from the iconic
soundtrack.
Time Out review: All those sacrifices to the
cinema gods must have worked, because after a yearlong worldwide search,
the final cut of ‘The Wicker Man’ has been found. The thrill of seeing
the 1973 cult classic on the big screen is reason enough to drop
everything and go – but doubly so with this longer version, which deeply
enhances the film’s eerie pagan weirdness. That creepiness is what made distributors delete some of the film’s
most evocative scenes: a sermon at the start, the ‘Gently Johnny’ song
segment with snail-on-snail action and more of Christopher Lee’s
splendid Lord Summerisle. The print quality is variable and much of the ‘new’ material has
appeared on DVDs previously. Whole websites have been dedicated to
spotting the differences, so fans will keep debating about which version
is ‘definitive’. What an incredible treat, though, to see it all in one
place, in the cinema, as director Robin Hardy intended. ‘The Wicker
Man’, as a British classic, has it all: ‘Carry On’-style gags, a
haunting folk soundtrack, spectacular Scottish landscapes, Edward
Woodward’s stiff-upper-lip sense of duty, a critique of organised
religion and that still-harrowing ending. Kathryn Bromwich
Chicago Reader review: The most intellectually heroic of Jean-Luc Godard's early features
(1966) was inspired by his reading an article about suburban housewives
day-tripping into Paris to turn tricks for spending money. Marina Vlady
plays one such woman, followed over a single day in a slender narrative
with many documentary and documentarylike digressions. But the central
figure is Godard himself, who whispers his poetic and provocative
ruminations over monumentally composed color 'Scope images and, like
James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, continually
interrogates his own methods and responses. Among the more memorable
images are extreme close-ups of a cup of coffee, while another
remarkable sequence deconstructs the operations of a car wash. Few
features of the period capture the world with as much passion and
insight. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This film is in the Queer East Film Festival. Full details here.
Genesis Cinema introduction: Presented in 4K restoration, this rediscovered classic dramatizes the mythology of Sa Bangji, an intersex person who according to historical records lived during Korea’s Joseon Dynasty. Taken in by a kindly benefactor, Sa Bangji lives in a monastery that is one day visited by a young widow, Lee So-sa, who is in mourning following the death of her husband. The pair’s meeting seems predestined, with the erotic attraction between Sa Bangji and Lee So-sa soon evolving into something far more transcendent – and dangerous. Lee Hye-young gives an incredible performance as the hero-heroine in this unsettling and provocative work, a film that refuses to shy away from the horrendous stigmatization faced by its character. While aspects of the film – its stylised depiction of female actors and sex – identify it as a product of its time, Sa Bangji is undeniably a milestone in screen representations of intersex people.
This film is in the Queer East Film Festival. Full details here.
Time Out review: When Park Ki-Hyung declined to make a sequel to his surprise hit Whispering Corridors,
producer Oh had the smart idea of offering the challenge to two recent
graduates from the Korean Film Academy who had already collaborated on
the excellent shorts Seventeen and Pale Blue Dot. They
came up with a very different take on a haunting in a high school for
girls: a convoluted tale of teenage lesbian feelings, telepathy, sexual
rivalry, spirit possession and unwanted pregnancy. Intricately
structured and made with great technical brio, the film falters in its
final reel in which the entire school is terrorised by the spirit of a
wronged girl driven to suicide. But when it forgets about grandstanding
and concentrates on the intimate feelings of its protagonists, it's
quite something. Tony Rayns
Chicago Reader review: As much a lesson in medical history as political history, Spanish
director Albert Serra’s retelling of the final days of the Sun King
relates the monarch’s treatment in meticulous and fascinating detail.
The film focuses almost exclusively on the dying king’s relationship to
his doctors (which Serra based on court records), and from their
interactions one gains a vivid sense of the superstitions and limited
scientific knowledge that determined medical practices in the early 18th
century. Reminiscent of the historical dramas that Roberto Rossellini
created for television in the 1970s, Serra’s movie immerses viewers in
the day-to-day life of the period, making narrative a secondary concern.
Yet the story never feels aimless, thanks to Serra’s skillful parceling
of observations and the refined performances of the ensemble cast. At
the center of it all is Jean-Pierre Léaud’s commanding and achingly
vulnerable turn as Louis, which ranks among the actor’s best work. Ben Sachs Here (and above) is the trailer.
This 35mm presentation is part of the Big Screen Classics season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details via this link. The film will be introduced by Jelena Milosavljevic, Events Programmer at the cinema.
Code Unknown is
one of the richest achievements of modern European art cinema. Director
Michael Haneke places his typically forensic gaze on modern western
society and finds it wanting but the way he does so is cinematically
innovative. Implicating the audience and challenging the expectations of
the viewer is the aim here and the director succeeds, leaving mysteries
which will have filmgoers arguing long after they have left the cinema. Chicago Reader review: 'Aptly
subtitled “Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys,” the best feature to
date by Austrian director Michael Haneke (2000, 117 min.) is a
procession of long virtuoso takes that typically begin and end in the
middle of actions or sentences, constituting not only an interactive
jigsaw puzzle but a thrilling narrative experiment. The second episode
is a nine-minute street scene involving an altercation between an
actress (Juliette Binoche), her boyfriend's younger brother, an African
music teacher who works with deaf-mute students, and a woman beggar from
Romania; the other episodes effect a kind of narrative dispersal of
these characters and some of their relatives across time and space. I
couldn't always get what was happening, but I was never bored, and the
questions raised reflect the mysteries of everyday life. The title
refers to the pass codes used to enter houses in Paris—a metaphor for
codes that might crack certain global and ethical issues.' Jonathan Rosenbaum
ICA introduction: Winner of the prestigious Golden Leopard award for Best Film at the
Locarno International Film Festival in 2013, Story of My Death is a
baroque reflection on pleasure and erotic desire dramatised from an
imagined meeting between the ageing Casanova and Count Dracula. Serra’s
deliciously eccentric film mines history to blend the mythical with the
everyday, charting the transition from the Age of Enlightenment to that
of Romanticism – marking a clash between an eighteenth century of
rationalism and sensuality against a nineteenth century founded upon
repression and violence.
New Yorker review: In Story of My Death, Serra mines a clever conceit for its vast
historical reach; his frozen images seem to bend and break with spidery
cracks under the tension of their inner conflict. His fusion of
pre-modern bodies and minds plays like a living archeology of forces
that are still potent and still repressed—perhaps now even more than
ever. I won’t spoil the resolution of the quiet but vast Kulturkampf_ _at the heart of the movie, but its muted whimsy and dark mystery reaches deeply and chillingly into modern times. Richard Brody
This 35mm presentation will be followed by a Q&A with composer Howard Blake.
BFI introduction: Strasbourg, 1800. Two French officers engage in a duel following a minor
disagreement. What both cannot see is that this seemingly trivial
incident will have a marked effect on both their lives, as well as those
around them. Ridley Scott’s visually ravishing debut feature is adapted
from a Joseph Conrad story and features an early score by Howard Blake,
which conveys the intensity of the two officer’s obsessive and
destructive quest.
