Sight & Sound review: This is the
first feature in Africa to be directed by a woman. Set in 1961, at the
start of the Angolan War of Independence, and shot in Congo, the film
tracks the resistance efforts of the Popular Movement for the Liberation
of Angola (MPLA), a militant group whose
leader Mário Pinto de Andrade was also Maldoror’s husband. In part, it’s
about the arrest and brutal torture of a tractor driver, Domingos
Xavier, who lives in a working-class district of the capital city Luanda
and harbours seditious beliefs such as, “There are no whites, no
mulattos, no blacks. There’s only the poor and the rich.” She
gives equal importance to his wife Maria who, carrying along her infant
child, sets out to find him, going from one prison to another,
confronting indifference, lechery, dead ends. In her suffering, she
becomes a kind of Mother Angola. Her doggedness and her heartache are
portrayed with wounding acuity and illuminate Maldoror’s much-quoted
belief that “African women must be everywhere. They must be in the
images, behind the camera, in the editing room and involved in every
stage of the making of a film. They must be the ones to talk about
their problems.” Yet
Maria’s plight is not solely African or colonial; a dogged seeker of
justice, she resembles the desperate women in Zhao Liang’s documentary
Petition (2009). For the director, she evokes “the alone-ness of a woman
and the time it takes to trudge… It could be any woman, in any country,
who takes off to find her husband.” Sukhdev Sandhu
This is part of the Andrzej Zulawski season at the Garden Cinema. This film is also being shown on September 16th and October 13th. The screening on the September 1st will be introduced by Garden Cinema team member, writer, and filmmaker Sarah Grice. Chicago Reader review: Polish-born director Andrzej Żuławski was a master at depicting worlds divorced from traditional moral order, whether the Nazi-occupied Poland ofThe Third Part of the Night(1971), the supernatural Berlin ofPossession(1981), the strange planet ofOn the Silver Globe(1988), or the sweetly absurd universe of his final film,Cosmos(2015). Few filmmakers have rendered so palpably the experience of losing one’s grip on reality, and with the 1975 French dramaL’Important C’Est D’Aimer, Żuławski marries this lifelong subject to a romantic sensibility unlike anything else in his body of work. The title can be translated as “the important thing is to love,” and Żuławski presents love as an all-consuming force, similar to madness or addiction. The film is deliberately overstylized—with outsize performances, lush music (by Georges Delerue), and delirious camera movements—yet the grandeur reflects the intensity of the characters’ experience. Żuławski considers a relationship between two lost souls. Servais (Fabio Testi) is a former war photographer now shooting pornography and working for tabloid magazines; Nadine (Romy Schneider) is a onetime starlet now slumming in sexploitation films. Servais falls for Nadine after taking her picture on a movie set and, to prove his devotion, borrows money from the gangster who finances his porno shoots to produce an avant-garde staging ofRichard IIIthat will star Nadine and, she hopes, jump-start her career. During the production, Servais gets closer to the actress but keeps his beneficence a secret; he also gets to know her husband, a mentally unbalanced cinephile (pop singer Jacques Dutronc in one of his first serious roles) whom Nadine pities more than she loves. The growing attraction between Servais and Nadine comes to destroy all three characters, who regret how they’ve failed to live up to their ideals. They try to reclaim their dignity, but only too late, after the stage production flops and Servais is hunted down by the gangster. Żuławski boldly mixes sensationalist elements with high art, defamiliarizing all of them. Scenes of Shakespeare follow S-M porno shoots; protestations of romantic yearning come between depictions of graphic violence. The director connects these disparate pieces with a uniform emotional potency; no matter what takes place onscreen, the characters respond with deep, sometimes terrifying feeling. Also shining throughL’Important C’Est D’Aimeris a genuine sense that love enables us to transcend the most degrading experiences. Thanks in part to towering performances from Testi and Schneider, the film makes one believe that the characters’ love is a matter of life and death. JR Jones Here (and above) is the trailer.
BFI introduction: Hailed by Ingmar Bergman as ‘a work of genius’, Watkins’ film
fragments the difficult formative years of the Norwegian painter’s life
into a vivid, intensely subjective exploration of memory, illness,
sexuality and artistic creation. Blending interviews, direct address,
documentary techniques and impressionistic montage, the film evokes both
the emotional turbulence of Munch’s work and the social and emotional
conditions that shaped it. James Bell
Time Out review: Peter Watkins' biography of the formative
years of the pioneer Expressionist easily vindicates its running time.
As Munch moves through his youth, quiet and alienated, we realise that
he too was eluded by any lasting intimacy: a long, abortive affair with
an older woman joins the ubiquitous ghosts of a childhood scarred by
sickness and death. In the end it's the paintings which do Munch's
talking for him, both directly and through the prefigurations and
echoes in the film's set pieces, a fuzzed, mutely anguished procession
of half-profiles and silently helpless groups with numb, naked eyes.
It's a remarkable film. Giovanni Dadomo Here (and above) is a clip from the film.
This film is part of the Peter Watkins season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
BFI introduction: Watkins’ monumental account of the 1871 Paris Commune stages
revolutionary history as if covered by live television, with rival
broadcasts interviewing workers, soldiers and citizens. Shot in a
disused warehouse and developed collaboratively with its
non-professional cast, the film reveals uncomfortable connections
between the suppression of the Commune and contemporary inequalities.
Hailed as the culmination of Watkins’ life’s work, it is an unmissable
work that deserves to be seen on the big screen. James Bell
Time Out review: What looks likely to be the final film from the director of ‘The War
Game’ returns in style to Peter Watkins’ first feature, the provocative and
committed ‘Culloden’. He adopts a similar framing device – the
television presentation of a historical event – to explore the rise and
fall of the 1871 Paris Commune. Around 200 citizens from the relevant
districts reconstruct the events in a film that rigorously interrogates
media authority, political power and personal responsibility. Fluidly
shot in crisp monochrome, it builds a remarkable sense of popular
participation (reflected in its communal making) in a seminal historical
moment and deals head on with both how one makes a revolution actually
work and similarly how it is betrayed by hierarchical interests.
Chicago Reader review: This
is an experimental film in the original rather than fashionable sense
of that term—a 1980 adaptation by Michelangelo Antonioni of Jean
Cocteau's play The Eagle Has Two Heads that
reunites the filmmaker with Monica Vitti in the starring role as a
widowed queen who falls in love with an anarchist poet sent to
assassinate her. What makes this experimental is neither the play nor
the performances, but the fact that Antonioni shot it in color video
(later transferred to 35-millimeter), regarding the medium not as
“television” but as a new kind of cinematography, and associating each
character with a different color as part of his visual exploration. The
choice of the Cocteau play seems more arbitrary than inevitable, which
raises the form-versus-content issue even more than in most Antonioni
features. The results are singular, to say the least. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here(and above) is an extract.
BFI Southbank introduction: Prophetic in its depiction of surveillance culture and the erosion of
civil liberties, Watkins’ drama constructs a portrait of Denmark’s
‘model society’ in crisis during a NATO summit that is overshadowed by
strikes in a Copenhagen shipyard, terrorism and mounting social unrest.
Blending staged drama with the texture and immediacy of television
reportage, the film follows the state’s increasingly authoritarian
response to dissent. James Bell
Time Out review: A thinly disguised commentary on Japan's post-war history, using
ceremonial family gatherings (mainly weddings and funerals) as a key to
the changes in Japanese society: individual characters represent
specific political factions, just as events in the narrative mirror the
twists and turns in the country's domestic and foreign policies. However
dense the allegory, though, Oshima keeps it very accessible to his
audience by stressing individuals' feelings as much as ceremonies; their
dreams, aspirations, frustrations and agonies are all too familiar. A
significant political film for the time. Tony Rayns
This is part of the Andrzej Żuławski season at the Garden Cinema. Full details here.
This screening will be introduced by writer Michael Brooke. The screenings on September the 11th and 27th will feature a video introduction by Andrzej Jaroszewicz, camera operator on The Devil and frequent collaborator of Andrzej Żuławski.
Garden Cinema introduction: During
the Prussian army's invasion of Poland in 1793, a young Polish
nobleman, Jakub, is saved from imprisonment by a stranger, who in return
wants to obtain a list of his fellow conspirators. Following his
mysterious savior across the country, Jakub sees the overall chaos and
moral corruption, including his father's death and the betrayal of his
friend who stole his fiancee. Becoming apparently demented by what he
has seen, he commits a number of seemingly motiveless and gory killings. An
allegory for the political crisis in Poland during 1968, when communist
leaders created riots to punish student, the film was shelved upon
completion by the government. It was accused of excess of violence and
erotic scenes, but the political undertones of Żuławski’s film were more
objectionable to the government. The film had to wait 16 years for its
cinema premiere and was not released to the public until 1988. Before
this happened, however, Żuławski was forced to leave Poland, deprived of
the chance to make films in his country, he left for France to continue
his career there.
Time Out review: This is Oshima's post-1968 analysis of the failure and disillusionment
of the student Left, and it's among his most biting and cautionary
films. Like Death by Hanging and other movies, it starts with a
riddle (the real or imaginary disappearance of a student militant), and
then follows through all the implications with a remorseless logic.
Another student sets out to trace the missing boy, fearing that he
committed suicide; his only leads are conversations with the militant's
estranged girlfriend and a roll of film shot by the boy just before he
vanished. But it's less a mystery thriller than a series of provocative
questions. What is militancy? Does 'struggle' mean violence? Is it
really possible for an individual to identify with the interests of a
group? And what part do sexual problems play in determining the feelings
and actions of young people? Tony Rayns
BFI Southbank introduction: A woman is given a video camera and decides to record everything in her
life. However, the ever-present camera reveals the dark secrets of her
marriage and triggers an existential crisis. The final big-screen
appearance by Vitti – and the only film she wrote and directed – sees
her give a vulnerable and heartbreaking portrayal of a woman on the
verge.
This film is part of the Peter Watkins season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
BFI introduction: Peter Watkins’ vast portrait of August Strindberg examines the Swedish
playwright not simply as a literary figure, but as a lens through which
to explore class, nationalism and artistic freedom. Produced as part of a
video production course for the Swedish Folk High School, the project
took Watkins and 24 students two years to complete, and combines
dramatised scenes with discussions between performers and crew,
continually interrogating its own methods of representation. James Bell
Time Out review: Coming-of-age stories don’t get much bleaker than Nagisa Ôshima’s
tale of a preadolescent who assists his itinerant family in moneymaking
scams. But it’s the kind of cynicism that invigorates and energizes—a
bracing dose of misanthropy that is nonetheless suffused with robust
empathy for its hardened juvenile protagonist. Based on an actual
incident, the film follows ten-year-old Toshio (Tetsuo Abe), his father
(Fumio Watanabe), his stepmother (Akiko Koyama) and his infant brother
(Tsuyoshi Kinoshita) as they trek across Japan, stopping in each new
location to fake traffic accidents and extort money from stunned
drivers. It’s a true nomad’s life, with high highs (a night spent in a luxury
hotel with copious food and geisha attendants) and very low lows (Dad
beating Mom for refusing to get an abortion). Though filmed in teeming
real-world locales in what occasionally seem like clandestine
circumstances, the movie has the feel of the science-fiction stories
that Toshio tells to his sibling. Ôshima often situates his characters
at the edges of a rigorously composed widescreen frame that emphasizes
the oppressive architecture of a rapidly modernizing nation. He also
employs visual distortions like monochrome tinting and image squeezing
to suggest the skewed perspective of his corrupted young lead. Happiness and contentment are not in the cards for Toshio, and Ôshima
never sentimentalizes his existence nor lets him off the hook for his
crimes. But still we feel, deeply and profoundly, for this lost soul. Keith Uhlich
BFI Southbank introduction: Taking the personal and the political into bleak environs, Watkins’
futuristic chamber piece sees an enforced family reunion unfurl in an
underground shelter next to a nuclear waste station. It’s an unsettling
portrait of a near future. The film screens with a short that sees
pirates and social outcasts fight property developers in a flooded
future East London.
This film also has its London premiere at the Prince Charles on August 4th. Details here.
Time Out review: New Yorker Adolpho Rollo (Steve Buscemi) is your classic head-movie auteur. In
his mind he's creating deathless classics of the screen. Back in the
real world, he can't pay the rent on the downtown grothole he calls
home. He knows he must be getting really desperate when he puts a script
'Unconditional Surrender' - 500 pages of angst-drenched gobbledygook -
up for sale and attracts the attentions of one 'Joe' (Seymour Cassel), a
warm-hearted minor gangland figure. Director Rockwell's affectionate
screenplay pits innocence against experience, artist against philistine,
but unexpectedly weighs sympathies towards Cassel's force-of-nature mob
mentor, who's soon giving his po-faced protégé a life-lesson
masterclass in generosity of spirit, wooing the girl-next-door (Beals),
and seat-of-the-pants petty crime. Rockwell's wonderfully unassuming
movie throws a big hug around youthful ambition, b/w filmstock, and the
glowing screen charisma of Cassel. An unheralded gem. Trevor Johnston
BFI introduction: A young Sicilian woman flees her repressive family for London, finding
liberation amid a more permissive environment. Vitti effortlessly blends
humour and dramatics as Assunta, who attempts to track down and murder
the boyfriend who abandoned and dishonoured her. The film follows her as
she travels around the country, gradually discovering the joys of
women’s liberation and self-fulfilment.
Peter
Mandelson’s grandfather Herbert Morrison, deputy Prime Minister in
Clement Attlee’s landmark post-War Labour government, famously carried
his Desert Island Discs choices in his wallet, expecting the call to
appear on the programme.It wasan invitation that sadly was never extended to himandI thought of that tale when I wasactuallyasked to contributeto the most famousof all moviepolls, run by Sight & Sound magazine, the latest of which was in 2022. All those years of trawling the previous decades choiceswith rapt fascination, readingthe articles on the canonand the time keeping thatrunning list of my ten all-time favourites that wereinevitablemixed up withthegreatest in my headwas not wasted. Now,though,I was going to be forced to think about it and make a definitive list. Othersweredoing the same,prompting responses varying widely from“it’s a bit of fun” to “it’s agony”.
The
more I thought about it the more I wanted my contribution to be just
that, a genuine heartfelt one, made up of the films I desperately wanted
people to seebut had not been consideredin the previous voting,and modestlyhoping fora re-evalutionof the choices.I made two rules.All ofthe films in my list(reproduced below) would deserve to bepart oftheSight&SoundGreatest poll conversation andallthe choiceswould not havereceived a single vote in the previous 2012 poll.
Some in this list are simply neglected favourites but in other cases thereareverygoodreasonssome ofthese
films have been overlooked. Jean Grémillon, for instance, faded from
view after an ill-fated directorial career, and has only resurfaced in
the last decade with devoted retrospectives and DVD releases. The
heartbreaking Remorques is one of his masterpieces. The Alfred Hitchcock melodrama Under Capricorn, which quickly disappeared afterbombing at the box officeand thesubsequentdissolving of the director’sproduction company,deserves high rank in the Master’s work but languishesin limbo, only seen at major retrospectives.The Exiles and Spring Night, Summer Night are bothoncelost American independent classics only just receiving their due after recent rediscovery.White Dog,after a desultory release overshadowed bymisguidedaccusations of racism, was not in circulation for many years.Warhol's Vinly, based on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, wasshownin 2013from(fortuitously I later discovered)16mm in an ICA gallery and feltthrillinglyauthentic,thesoundof thewhirring projectorand the artist’s singular framingcombining to create a mesmeric experience. Here is the full list:
Remorques/Stormy Waters (Jean Grémillon, 1941)
Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949)
The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)
La Baie des anges/Bay of Angels (Jacques Demy, 1963)
Vinyl (Andy Warhol, 1965)
Spring Night, Summer Night (Jospeh L. Anderson, 1967)
Heroic Purgatory (Yosgishige Yoshida, 1970)
Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)
White Dog (Sam Fuller, 1982)
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2005)
Seven from the list have been shown in a London cinema since the poll
appeared and now the Jacques Demy film gets anothert screenings at the Prince Charles Cinema.
Time Out review: Jacques Demy's second feature has a ravishing Jeanne Moreau, ash-blonde for the
occasion and dressed all in white, as a compulsive gambler who doesn't
care what happens to her so long as she has a chip to start her on the
roulette tables. Ostensibly the subject is gambling, but the real theme
is seduction - with Moreau casting a spell on Claude Mann that turns him every
which way - and this is above all a visually seductive film. Shot mainly
inside the casinos and on the sunstruck promenades of Nice and Monte
Carlo, it is conceived as a dazzling symphony in black and white.
Moreau's performance is magnificent, but it's really Jean Rabier's
camera which turns the whole film into an expression of sheer joy - not
only in life and love, but things. Iron bedsteads make arabesques
against white walls; a little jeweller's shop becomes a paradise of
strange ornamental clocks; a series of angled mirrors echo the heroine
as she runs down a corridor into her lover's arms; roulette wheels spin
to a triumphant musical accompaniment; and over it all hangs an aura of
brilliant sunshine. Tom Milne
Here (and above) are the evocative opening credits.
This film, which also screens on August 2nd, is part of the Peter Watkins season at BFI Southbank. Full details here. Tonight's presentation features an introduction by season co-curator William Fowler.
Time Out review: An amateur film-maker headhunted by the BBC’s Huw Weldon in 1963, Peter Watkins
presented his new boss with a list of ‘films which ought to be made’.
Top of that list was a documentary on the effects of thermo-nuclear war –
about which, Watkins believed, there was a conspiracy of silence. As it
turned out, he was right. Weldon persuaded him to tackle Culloden first
– the English rout of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Highland uprising, 1746. If
there was some safety in history, no-one told Watkins. He treated it as
a piece of live reportage, recreating the battle and interviewing the
participants, from the generals down to the cannonfodder. Charles Stuart
emerges as an arrogant fool, a disaster for his followers, but the
English Duke of Cumberland is indicted of something we might now call
‘ethnic cleansing’, genocide. Shot for just £3,000, ‘Culloden’ (1964)
was a triumph, a trailblazer which still exerts considerable influence –
and it enabled Watkins to make ‘The War Game’ (1965), which applied a
similar ‘you-are-there’ approach, this time to a projected nuclear war. A
subtitle might have been: ‘Learn to Start Worrying and Loathe the
Bomb’. Exposing the gross inadequacy of civil defense strategies
and near-universal ignorance about the power of the H-bomb, the film
proved far too frightening for the BBC, who declined to broadcast it
after consulting with the Home Office and Number 10. Watkins resigned in
protest, and embarked on an itinerant independent career. ‘The War
Game’ was screened in cinemas, and latterly in schools, but it wasn’t
until 1985 that the BBC transmitted it on TV for the first time anywhere
in the world. Released on DVD with critical commentaries, and an
earlier Watkins short apiece, these remain dynamic, disturbing,
committed films from a revolutionary film-maker. Tom Charity
This screening is presented by A Nos Amours, with am introduction by David Thompson. A Nos Amours is a collective founded by Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts
dedicated to programming, promoting, understanding and enjoying
over-looked, under-exposed or especially potent cinema.
BFI introduction: This restoration finally allows modern audiences to see Maurice
Pialat’s landmark series, which he regarded as his finest work, in all
its glory. Set during the tumult of the First World War, Pialat’s film
focuses on the lives of three boys who were sent for safety to the
countryside by their respective parents. Opening in 1917, the drama
finds Hervé, Michel, and Albert having mostly forgotten their real
parents, after spending years with Albert Picard, his wife and two
children. As they grow up, they witness the impact of war and the subtle
changes of life in the village. Working mostly with non-professional
actors, Pialat’s film is striking for its naturalism, creating an
immersive portrait of life in and around the country village. A key
location in the drama is the school, with its stern yet understanding
teacher played by the filmmaker. Unseen for years, La maison des bois
should now sit alongside Ken Loach’s equally bold Days of Hope (1975) as
one of the finest achievements of 1970s television. Ian Haydn Smith, writer and curator
Chicago Reader review: Maurice Pialat’s 1971 TV miniseries, set in a rural French community
toward the end of World War I, is bracingly devoid of sentimentality,
building emotion through accretion of details and an unvarnished yet
ultimately generous view of humanity. A gamekeeper (Pierre Doris), his
wife (Jacqueline Dufranne), and their two grown children welcome three
displaced Parisian boys into their secluded home in the forest. One of
the youngsters (Herve Levy), troubled by his parents’ mysterious
absence, begins acting out, but his warmth and spontaneity disarm many
of the locals—including the gamekeeper’s boss, an aloof marquis with
some dark secrets of his own. Andrea Gronvall
Harvard Film Archive introduction: After two false starts and a large part of the budget spent,
Pialat reworked the concept and the script for the third time,
assembling a few professional teenage actors and filling in the
rest of the cast with amateurs culled from Lens, the same province of
Naked Childhood. While much of the wandering narrative was
scripted as they shot—often from the teenagers’ actual
conversations of the day before—at other times the actors would
just be hanging out and not realize they were being filmed. Pass
Your Exams First follows no single character or primary focus,
as if, like its confused subjects teetering on the edge of maturity
and responsibility, it is experimenting with various paths without
knowing quite where any of them will lead. The most comic entry in
Pialat’s oeuvre, the film follows the group’s antics in school,
at home and on holiday, and at the only hot spot, the town’s actual
café. With limited options at a time of shifting traditions and
economies, they engage in fleeting couplings, contradictory opinions,
vague dreams and their own false starts. Presciently inscribed by the
hand of Pialat, their lives remain a series of question marks …
awkwardly, ambivalently, precisely rendered question marks.
This screening is presented by A Nos Amours, with an introduction by David Thompson. A Nos Amours is a collective founded by Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts
dedicated to programming, promoting, understanding and enjoying
over-looked, under-exposed or especially potent cinema.
This film is also being shown on August 17th and 20th. Details here.
Once you've seen this film you might want to read critic Nick
Pinkerton's take on this troubling movie here from the Reverse Shot
website here.
Chicago Reader review: A 15-year-old French girl (Sandrine Bonnaire,
extraordinary) finds refuge from her troubled family in a series of
casual sexual encounters. The subject invites a certain social-worker
condescension (it's the stuff of TV movies), yet Maurice Pialat's
mise-en-scene allows us no comforting distance from the characters. His
ragged long takes plunge us straight into the action and hold us there,
as if we, too, were combatants in this family war. His unorthodox
dramatic construction rejects the symmetry of classical plotting, and
the narrative has a quirky, self-propelling quality that allows for some
astonishing things to happen. Pialat himself plays the father, whose
disappearance sets the action in motion and whose reappearance makes it
explode. Dave Kehr
BFI introduction: Peter Watkins’ extraordinary satire imagines a near-future Britain in which a
manufactured pop idol is used by the authorities to distract the public
into ‘fruitful conformity’. Casting Manfred Mann’s Paul Jones as the
emotionally hollow Steven Short, alongside 1960s icon Jean Shrimpton,
Watkins anticipated the growing entanglement of celebrity culture,
advertising and political manipulation. It’s one of the key British
films of the era.
Time Out review: One of Nagisa Oshima's most teasing and provocative collages, inspired by the
student riots of '68 and contemporary 'youth culture' generally. The
main thread running through it is the relationship between a passive and
vaguely effeminate young man and an aggressive and vaguely masculine
young woman. They meet when he steals books and she poses as a shop
assistant who catches him in the act; they spend the rest of the movie
trying to reach satisfactory orgasms with each other. Their route takes
them through a dizzying mixture of fact and fiction, from an encounter
with a real-life sexologist to involvement in a 'fringe' performance of a
neo-primitive kabuki show. The logical connections are there, but
they're deliberately submerged in a welter of contrasting moods, styles
and lines of thought. Tony Rayns
This 35mm presentation features an introduction by Charles Drazin, writer and film historian.
BFI introduction: Ernest Bliss is rich but miserable. His doctor diagnoses an excess of
self-indulgence and prescribes a dose of hard work to sharpen his zest
for life. Through his pursuit of happiness, Ernest finds romance and a
social conscience. The role of Bliss was tailor-made for Grant’s suave
but bluff screen persona, while Hollywood import Mary Brian is a worthy
co-star, with excellent support from an ensemble of solid British
talent. This BFI National Archive print runs close to the original
British release, while all other copies currently available are of the
62-minute American-release cut.
