Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 16: Tue Jan 16

 Nighthawks (Peck, 1978): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm


This 35mm presentation is presented by the Funeral Parade Queer Society. You can full details of their screenings here.

BFI review:
Nighthawks took shape around a teacher character who struggles to come out to his friends and colleagues as he becomes newly acquainted with the underground gay scene. It was the first British feature film explicitly about contemporary gay life, made by out gay people and presenting a powerful portrait of pre-AIDS London. Through it Peck met Paul Hallam, the Nighthawks co-writer who became an important collaborator and confidant.  The film was superficially social-realist in shape, and yet the searching point-of-view camera shots travelling down London’s tungsten-lit roads, plus the strange, plastic, electronic music in the club scenes, lend the work an eerie, almost sci-fi perspective. It powerfully evokes the Ballardian London of the 1970s, a city emptying itself of people while bracing for the onslaught of Thatcherism.
Will Fowler

Here (and above) is an extract.

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