This screening will be preceded by a talk by Professor Ginette Vincendeau (King’s College), author of Brigitte Bardot (BFI, 2019) and of the forthcoming BFI Classic on Godard’s Le Mépris, who will reflect on the controversial legacy of the iconoclastic star in the era of ‘cancel culture’. The film is also being shown on March 29th. Details here. Here's all the information on the Bardot season at the cinema.
Cine Lumiere introduction: A dazzling poem of sumptuous, shimmering images, A Very Private Affair (Vie privée) was long considered one of the most beautiful colour films ever made, with its unique impressionist
texture and luminosity together with its astonishing camera movements.
Louis Malle did not want to make a documentary about Brigitte Bardot,
but a film. He said, “Explaining the Bardot myth… is the business of sociologists, not storytellers”. In the film, Jill, a young woman from Geneva, arrives in Paris and
quickly becomes a dancer, actress, and sex symbol. She is adored but
also hounded day and night by photographers and fans. She has no
privacy… A Very Private Affair (Vie privée) was invisible for almost thirty years and restored in 2023.
This film is part of a min-season of Cuban cinema at the ICA. Details here.
New York Times review: An
openly tendentious tour de force considered by many as Cuban cinema’s
peak accomplishment, Humberto Solás’s Lucía (1968) is a
landmark film. Solás, who
died 10 years ago,
was in his mid-20s when he made Cuba’s most elaborate and expensive
movie yet — and perhaps ever. A 2-hour-40-minute black-and-white
pageant, Lucía dramatizes the situation of three oppressed
women, all named Lucía, at cusp moments of Cuban history — the
1890s war of independence, the early 1930s uprising against the
dictatorship of Gerardo Machado and the post-revolutionary ’60s. Each
story has its own style, and each Lucía represents a different
social class. The Lucía of 1895 (played by the stage diva Raquel
Revuelta) is a woman from an aristocratic Havana family who, losing
her youth, embarks on a passionate affair with a handsome Spaniard. A
story of love and betrayal is set against the war between the Spanish
and the Cuban guerrillas known as mambises, many former slaves; the
sequence is reminiscent of but even wilder in its orchestrated tumult
than Luchino Visconti’s operatic costume dramas. Like the lovers in
Visconti’s Senso, the protagonist cannot will herself outside
of history. The
second Lucía (Eslinda Nuñez, who played the object of the
antihero’s fantasies in “Memories
of Underdevelopment”)
is the daughter of a bourgeois family. Unlike the first Lucía, she
tries to engage rather than escape, giving herself to an idealistic
young opponent of the Machado regime. Although not without violence,
this section is tender and even dreamy — episodes of street
fighting punctuate a “new wave” love story. Hauntingly beautiful,
Ms. Nuñez could double for Delphine Seyrig in “Last Year at
Marienbad.” But despite her character’s political commitment, she
is marginalized as a woman even as her intellectual lover is
betrayed. The 1930s revolution is incomplete. The
third Lucía is the Castro equivalent of a Soviet positive heroine —
not unlike Adela Legrá, the captivating untrained actress who plays
her. An illiterate peasant, this Lucía leaves a female work brigade
for love of a self-regarding, insanely proprietary truck driver.
Having traded labor for servitude, she must learn to assert herself
against the traditional macho husband who tells her, “I am the
Revolution.” Reminiscent of the Italian film farces of the ’60s,
the episode employs a rollicking version of the ballad “Guantanamera”
to comment on their conjugal struggle and end the movie on a note of
triumphant ambiguity.
This film is part of the Cuban film season at the Garden Cinema. Full details here.
The
screening will be followed by a Q&A with special guests from Cuba,
distinguished cinema actors Mirtha Ibarra and Eslinda Núñez.
Garden Cinema introduction: This
film heralded a new genre of sociocritical comedy in Cuba and was the
debut feature of director Juan Carlos Tabio. It is full of Cubanisms –
popular everyday problems, language and attitudes of that era and a
range of characters from an idealist architect to an opportunistic
bureaucrat. Gloria
wants her adult daughter to find a husband, who she considers a “good
match”, and engineers a chain of house swaps to move to a “better
neighbourhood” to make things go her way - but her daughter has
different ideas and to love who she wants. It examines the desire to get
ahead in a society that says everyone is equal but also celebrates the
resourcefulness with which people solve their own problems.
Time Out review: The most dementedly elegiac thriller you've ever seen, distilling a lifetime's enthusiasm for American and French film noir,
with little Chinese about it apart from the soundtrack and the looks of
the three beautiful leads. It started out as a homage to Martin
Scorsese and Jean-Pierre Melville, but the limitless arsenal of guns and
rocket-launchers appears somehow to have got in the way.
Exquisitely-tailored contract killer Jeff (Chow Yun-Fat, Hong Kong's
finest actor) accidentally damages the sight of nightclub singer Jennie
while blasting a dozen gangsters to kingdom come. He befriends the
near-blind girl, and decides to take One Last Job to finance the cornea
graft she needs. Meanwhile he is stalked by a misfit cop (Danny Lee), who
eventually falls in love with him and winds up fighting alongside him.
There are half-a-dozen mega-massacres along the way, plus extraordinary
spasms of sentimentality, romance and soul searching. The tone is
hysterical from start to finish, but John Woo's lush visual stylings and
taste for baroque detail give the whole thing an improbably serene air
of abstraction. Tony Rayns
Time Out review: A delightfully touching comedy, Milos Forman's first in America and far better than his later One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Ragtime,
this deals with the attempts of a middle-aged, middle class American
couple to trace and lure back their runaway daughter. Scenes of their
search are intercut with sequences at a musical audition for
disillusioned youth, and Forman's wry but sympathetic humour derives
largely from the incongruities he observes in both situations: deserted
parents, concerned and conservative, getting stoned in an effort to
understand why kids smoke dope; a rosy, virginal young girl singing a
quiet folk song in praise of fucking. Never taking sides, but allowing
both factions engaged in the generation gap war plenty of space and
generosity, its gentle wit has aged far more gracefully than the
hectoring sermons of most youth movies churned out in the late '60s and
early '70s. Geoff Andrew
This film is part of the Cuban film season at the Garden Cinema. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: A short feature (1984) by Cuba’s Tomas Gutierrez Alea (Memories of Underdevelopment).
It seems to have been part of an official government assault on the
problem of “machismo” in Cuban society, though Alea is able to lighten
the schematism inherent in propaganda films with a fairly open shooting
style and attractive performances. Assigned to do a documentary on women
working in jobs traditionally held by men, a famous Cuban writer finds
himself falling in love with his principal subject, a feisty female
dockhand, but is ultimately unable to accept her independence. Dave Kehr
This is a 'Machine That Kills Bad People'* screening
ICA introduction:
Leslie Thornton, Peggy and Fred
in Hell (The Prologue), 1984, 21 min.
Lucile
Hadzihalilovic, Innocence, 2004, 122 min.
Leslie
Thornton's Peggy and Fred in Hell maps a surreal,
apocalyptic realm littered with the detritus of a pop culture
bursting at the seams. Castaways in this semiotic wilderness, the
protagonists Peggy and Fred have been, in Thornton words, "raised
by television," their experience shaped by a palimpsest of
science and science-fiction, new technologies and obsolete ones,
half-remembered movies and the leavings of history.
In
a different kind of hell, Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s debut
feature Innocence unfolds in a girls' boarding
school, ostensibly at the start of the twentieth century. Based on a
1903 novella by Frank Wedekind, Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily
Education of Young Girls,Innocence begins with
the arrival of the youngest girl – in a wooden coffin.
Investigating the socially-conditioned origins of female sexual
knowledge, Hadzihalilovic uses dreamlike images to explore the
metamorphosis from girl to woman.
This screening is
accompanied by a commissioned essay by Chris McCormack.
Time Out review: Is this a horror movie or a grim fairy tale? Dedicated to her colleague, confrontationalist director Gaspar Noé, and sourced from a work by dark expressionist Frank Wedekind,Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s stunning debut describes the purgatorial existence of schoolgirls in a sequestered rural college. In their crisp white gym shifts andpigtail ribbons colour-coded by age, these prepubescent model pupils are self-policing, save for a lone crippled mistress and a ballet teacher and the hovering threat of their ‘graduation’ ceremony in the mysterious house through the dark wood from whence none ever return. Meticulously shot byBenoît Debiewith the chromatic richness of the pre-Raphaelite painters – you can almost smell the moss and decay – and miraculously acted by its predominately young cast, Hadzihalilovic’s film may make for a finally problematic feminist fable, but its unique vision conjures memories of the terrible beauty of Franju’s surreal work and Laughton’s supreme symbolist invocation of childhood, ‘The Night of the Hunter’. Wally Hammond
*The
Machine That Kills Bad People is, of course, the cinema – a medium
that is so often and so visibly in service of a crushing status quo
but which, in the right hands, is a fatal instrument of beauty,
contestation, wonder, politics, poetry, new visions, testimonies,
histories, dreams. It is also a film club devoted to showing work –
‘mainstream’ and experimental, known and unknown, historical and
contemporary – that takes up this task. The group borrowed their
name from the Roberto Rossellini film of the same title, and find
inspiration in the eclectic juxtapositions of Amos Vogel’s
groundbreaking New York film society Cinema 16.
The
Machine That Kills Bad People is held bi-monthly in the ICA Cinema
and is programmed by Erika Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, Maria Palacios
Cruz, and Ben Rivers.
Guardian review: At the age of 87, that remarkable Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda
has directed a movie with terrific gusto and a first-rate lead
performance from Robert Więckiewicz. It’s a full-tilt biopic tribute to
the trade-union leader Lech Wałęsa, founder of the Solidarity movement:
bullish, cantankerous, with an exasperating charm and the gift of the
gab. Wałęsa’s defiance of Poland’s Soviet masters removed the very first
brick from the Berlin Wall. Famously, Wałęsa was the one subversive
trade-union leader whom Margaret Thatcher felt able to love: Arthur
Scargill did not enjoy the same admiration. Wałęsa:
Man of Hope is a belated companion piece to his Man of Marble (1977)
and Man of Iron (1981), respectively about a Stakhanovite bricklayer and
his son in Poland; it discloses now an unexpected trilogy, and somehow
suggests, in retrospect, that the heroic “Man” of those first two films
really was Wałęsa all along. The almost Napoleonic career of Wałęsa
looked at the time like a kind of miracle; Wajda sets out to examine how
that miracle came about. Wałęsa starts as a shipyard
electrician, devoted to his young wife Danuta, (Agnieszka Grochowska),
and to their growing family, and radicalised by the Gdańsk shipyard riot
of 1970. Amusingly, Wajda suggests that Wałęsa’s luxuriant moustache
made him famous and recognisable: the anti-Stalin in the cause of
freedom. His activism moreover coincided with the sensational arrival of
the charismatic new Polish Pope John Paul II; the Catholic Wałęsa was a
key political beneficiary. It’s an invigorating and very enjoyable film
from a director who shows no sign of slowing down. Peter Bradshaw
Time Out review: Andrzej Wajda's remarkable sequel to Man of Marble welds newsreel footage
of the Solidarity strike to fiction in a strong investigative drama. A
disillusioned, vodka-sodden radio producer is bundled off to Gdansk in a
black limousine. His mission: to smear one of the main activists - who
also happens to be the son of the hapless 'Marble' worker-hero. But,
tempered by bitter experience of the failed reforms of '68 and '70,
these new men of iron are more durable than their fathers, not as easily
smashed. Media cynicism, censorship and corruption are again dominant
themes, this time anchored through the TV coverage of the strike, though
the conclusion hints with guarded optimism at a possible rapprochement
between workers and intelligentsia. An urgent, nervy narrative conveys
all the exhilaration and bewilderment of finding oneself on the very
crestline of crucial historical change; and for the viewer, all the
retrospective melancholy of knowing that euphoria shattered by
subsequent events.
This film is part of the Big Screen Classics season at BFI Southbank. Details here.
Time Out review: Four sequels and a TV series bred contempt, but this first visit to
Pierre Boulle's planet, bringing a welcome touch of wit to his rather
humourlessly topsy-turvy theory of evolution, remains a minor sci-fi
classic. The settings (courtesy of the National Parks of Utah and
Arizona) are wonderfully outlandish, and Franklin Schaffner makes superb use of
them as a long shot chillingly establishes the isolation of the crashed
astronauts, as exploration brings alarming intimations of life (pelts
staked out on the skyline like crucified scarecrows), and as discovery
of a tribe of frightened humans is followed by an eruption of jackbooted
apes on horseback. The enigma of the planet's history, juggled through
Charlton Heston's humiliating experience of being studied as an interesting
laboratory specimen by his ape captors, right down to his final
startling rediscovery of civilisation, is quite beautifully sustained. Tom Milne
ICA introduction: Mi Vida Loca a.k.a. My Crazy Life, centres on a group of young Latina women who navigate friendship, rivalry, and responsibility amidst the street gangs of Los Angeles in the early 1990s. Shot in the real streets, porches, and apartments of Echo Park the film paints a picture of a close-knit community with its own conflicts, rules, and pressures. After the success of Gas Food Lodging writer/director Allison Anders delivered a new take on the female-led romance/drama by embracing the story of young Chicanas in an urban setting as colourful and vibrant as the songs on the film’s soundtrack. Organised into three connected chapters and using a mix of professional and non-professional actors, Anders unflinching eye and commitment to reality led Hal Hinson of The Washington Post to praise the “extraordinary powers of observation…each segment is richly detailed and vivid…the stuff of life.” Out of circulation in the UK for decades, Lost Reels presents an extremely rare 35mm screening of this unique drama by special arrangement with HBO and it will be followed by an in-person Q&A with writer/director Allison Anders.
Chicago Reader review:A funky independent feature by Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging), set in the Los Angeles barrios and concentrating on the friendships between working-class women there. The stylistic boldness may get a little top-heavy in spots, but in general this is funny, insightful, and imaginatively told. The cinematographer, interestingly, is Rodrigo Garcia, son of writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez.Jonathan Rosenbaum
ICA introduction: One of the quintessential American indies of the nineties, writer/director Allison Anders elicits detailed performances from an engaging cast and astutely observes the quiet challenges of small-town life. Beautifully written, directed and photographed, the film was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 42nd Berlin International Film Festival and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1992. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, “subtly etched characters, effortlessly fine performances, and a moving story that is not easily forgotten.” Tonight’s screening from Lost Reels is a rare 35mm presentation of this evocative, lyrical film followed by an in-person Q&A with writer/director Allison Anders.
Time Out review: Nora (Adams) waits tables and scrapes by, single-handedly raising two teenage daughters in a clapped-out trailer. Romance seems as scarce as rain in her New Mexico backwater: Nora and elder daughter Trudi (Skye) know what it means to be left high and dry, and even young Shade (Balk) suffers rejection at the hands of dreamy Darius (Leitch). But hopes of love die hard, and there's escapism to be found at the local Spanish fleapit. Shade decides to go father-hunting, but an attempt at match-making and the hunt for her long-absent dad (Brolin) yield decidedly mixed results. Far from gloomy fare, this debut from an American independent offers humour, wry observation and sympathetic characterisation. Without patronising her characters, writer-director Anders captures the frustrations of both generations, and the concluding optimistic note isn't forced. Delightfully oddball and strangely sane.
Guardian review (in full here): Andrzej Wajda’s queasily compelling film from 1975, adapted by him from a
novel by Wladysław Reymont, is an expressionist comic opera of toxic
capitalism and bad faith, carried out by jittery entrepreneurs whose
skills include insider trading, worker-exploitation and burning down
failing businesses for the insurance. It is set in late 19th-century
Łódź, a supposed promised land of free enterprise, whose night skies are
shown by Wajda as more or less permanently red with factories set
ablaze. Peter Bradshaw
This is a 35mm screening . It is part of the Funeral Parade Queer Film Society strand (you can find full details here) and will be introduced by Sarah Cleary.
The year is 1977, the Queen's Silver Jubilee is fast approaching, and DJs Chris (Valentine Nonyela) and Caz (Mo Sesay) are bringing the sounds of soul, disco, and funk to London’s airwaves with Soul Patrol, the pirate radio station they operate from an East End garage. After the death of their friend, who is killed during a night-time cruise in the park, the pair find themselves implicated in the murder when Chris comes into possession of a cassette tape which contains a recording of the killer’s voice. Meanwhile, Caz is falling head over heels for punk rocker Billibud (Jason Durr), even as omnipresent homophobia and racial tensions threatThe year is 1977, the Queen's Silver Jubilee is fast approaching, and DJs Chris (Valentine Nonyela) and Caz (Mo Sesay) are bringing the sounds of soul, disco, and funk to London’s airwaves with Soul Patrol, the pirate radio station they operate from an East End garage. After the death of their friend, who is killed during a night-time cruise in the park, the pair find themselves implicated in the murder when Chris comes into possession of a cassette tape which contains a recording of the killer’s voice. Meanwhile, Caz is falling head over heels for punk rocker Billibud (Jason Durr), even as omnipresent homophobia and racial tensions threaten to pull the young lovers apart. A unique blend of thriller, social realism, and the ‘hangout movie’, Young Soul Rebels is vibrant celebration of music and youth culture, as well as a vital comment on the UK’s deep-seated divisions.en to pull the young lovers apart. A unique blend of thriller, social realism, and the ‘hangout movie’, Young Soul Rebels is vibrant celebration of music and youth culture, as well as a vital comment on the UK’s deep-seated divisions.
This presentation is part of the Andrzej Wajda season at BFI Southbank and features an introduction by film critic and scholar Michał Oleszczyk.
Time Out review:Culture shocks: Andrzej Wajda's credit appears over New York; John Gielgud's lips move and a disembodied Pole speaks his lines. Such incongruities are never quite integrated within this parable about a prodigal elder's attempted return to the fold. Gielgud is the eponymous international maestro whose encounter with a young violinist stirs memories of a provincial Polish debut - and an old debt - prompting him to celebrate his jubilee with his long-abandoned ain folk. His reception incorporates simmering jealousies and personality clashes (and Wajda's sly digs at the star system of socialist culture), but the film only really lives in fits and starts. Paul Taylor
This screening is part of the Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned season at the ICA Cinema (full details here) and will be introduced by the season curator
Time Out review: In 1968, Godard began work on a film in America (One AM or One American Movie) dealing with aspects of resistance and revolution. Dissatisfied with what he had shot, he abandoned the project. Pennebaker here assembles the Godard footage, together with his own coverage of Godard at work (One PM standing for either One Parallel Movie or One Pennebaker Movie). Although it may be dubious to show stuff that Godard had rejected, the film does manage to convey how he got his results. You can draw your own conclusions about his approach and why he abandoned the film.
This screening is part of the season at the ICA Cinema devoted to Werner Schroeter. You can finds all the details here.
ICA introduction: Using the modest sum in prize money that Willow Springs had
garnered, Schroeter began work on what would be one of his most
uncompromising films to date and an unofficial final part to a trilogy
of films alongside Willow Springs and The Death of Maria Malibran. With
international co-production extending his cast of regular collaborators
like Ingrid Caven and Magdalena Montezuma to include arthouse stalwarts
like Bulle Ogier and Udo Kier, the film encompasses four parts weaving
together high and low culture in a richly textured tapestry of
underground filmmaking. The screening is preceded by an introduction from Anneke Kampman.
Venice film festival review: A multilingual film, the summary of Schroeter’s early films: four
episodes about great feelings and emotions, about the search for luck,
about destiny and mortality, taking place in Cuba, France and Bavaria.
Beautiful dreamlike variations on classic genres, from kitschy Mexican
melodrama to poetic realism of French art films to Bavarian Heimatfilm
in dialect. As Schroeter said: “It starts with an introduction conceived
like a romantic poem about the general theme of the film: Death”. Les Flocons d’or was
Schroeter’s last “super underground film” for which he could combine a
unique international cast. Andréa Ferréol gambols erotically with
three dogs and recites Poe’s The Raven; Magdalena Montezuma incarnates
an angel of death; Bulle Ogier personifies “The Murderous Soul”; and Udo
Kier carries a flower into the forest, like Schroeter’s hero Novalis,
before repeatedly bashing his head into a rock.
Chicago Reader review: Kathryn
Bigelow’s heart-stopping Iraq war drama (2009) follows a U.S. army bomb
squad around Baghdad as it defuses IEDs, a job that places the men in
potentially deadly situations a dozen times a day. After the squad’s
explosives expert is killed in action, he’s replaced by a shameless
cowboy (Jeremy Renner) whose needless risk-taking infuriates his two
partners (Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty). He’s a true warrior, but
Bigelow defines that in terms of addiction; as one of the other soldiers
points out, he doesn’t mind endangering them to get his daily
“adrenaline fix.” The war has already produced some excellent fiction
films (The Lucky Ones,In the Valley of Elah),
but this is the first to dispense with the controversy surrounding the
invasion and focus on the timeless subject of men in combat. It’s the
best war movie sinceFull Metal Jacket. JR Jones
This presentation is part of the Andrzej Wajda season at BFI Southbank and also screens on March 10th (with an introduction by journalist Carmen Gray). You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Andrzej Wajda has spent much of his long career dramatizing major events
in Polish history, and this poignant feature depicts the circumstances
surrounding the Soviet Union’s massacre of thousands of Polish officers
in the spring of 1940. The film opens with a striking scene that
underlines the plight of Wajda’s people in World War II: as hundreds of
Poles cross a bridge to flee invading German troops, others run toward
them to escape the advancing Russian army. The rest of this feature
follows a handful of families over five years as they suffer through the
Nazi occupation and the Soviet occupation that succeeded it. Joshua Katzman
This film is part of the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Southbank. This screening will be introducedby writer and editor Laura Staab and the film is also being shown on March 8th. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Kelly Reichardt's masterful low-budget drama tells a story a child could
understand even as it indicts, with stinging anger, the economic
cruelty of George Bush's America. Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain)
is impressively restrained as Wendy, a young homeless woman who's
living in her car with her beloved mutt, Lucy. After the car breaks down
in an Oregon hick town, she makes the mistake of tying Lucy up outside a
grocery store before going in to shoplift, and when she gets busted and
taken to the local police station, the dog disappears. Reichardt (Old Joy)
and co-writer Jonathan Raymond began working on the story after hearing
conservative commentators bash the poor in the wake of Hurricane
Katrina, and their movie is a stark reminder of how easily someone like
Wendy can fall through our frayed safety net. The climax is a
heartbreaker, and in its haunting finale the movie recalls no less than
Mervyn LeRoy's Depression-era classic I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang. JR Jones
Time Out review: Victor Erice's remarkable one-off (he has made only one film since, the generally less well regarded El Sur)
sees rural Spain soon after Franco's victory as a wasteland of
inactivity, thrown into relief by the doomed industriousness of bees in
their hives. The single, fragile spark of 'liberation' exists in the
mind of little Ana, who dreams of meeting the gentle monster from James
Whale's Frankenstein, and befriends a fugitive soldier just
before he is caught and shot. A haunting mood-piece that dispenses with
plot and works its spells through intricate patterns of sound and image. Tony Rayns
Time Out review: 'Man, I was what you call ragged... I knew
I was gonna hell in a breadbasket' intones the hero in the great
opening moments of The Loveless,
and as he zips up and bikes out, it's clear that this is one of the
most original American independents in years: a bike movie which
celebrates the '50s through '80s eyes. Where earlier bike films like The
Wild Onewere forced to concentrate on plot, The Loveless deliberately
slips its story into the background in order to linger over all the
latent erotic material of the period that other films could only hint at
in their posters. Zips and sunglasses and leather form the basis of a
cool and stylish dream of sexual self-destruction, matched by a Robert Gordon
score which exaggerates the sexual aspects of '50s music. At times the
perversely slow beat of each scene can irritate, but that's a reasonable
price for the film's super-saturated atmosphere. David Thompson
This is a 35mm screening and part of the season at the ICA Cinema devoted to Werner Schroete. You can finds all the details here.
Rowe Reviews review: An experimental art film that is sure to only appeal to the more
adventurous viewer who is a fan of opaque and mysterious works of art,
Werner Schroeter’s Death of Maria Malibran provides little conclusions
through its running time but never-the-less it's a harrowing portrait
that challenges the fundamental ideals of what cinema can be. The film
is a fever dream of emotion and subtle energy, being dreamlike as it
uses a vibrant orchestral score and operatic performance art to deliver
an expressionistic art piece that confounds as much as it intrigues. The film is simply stunning, with cinematography, art direction, and
lighting which combine to create an intoxicating experience that feels
very much like an operatic stage play while still giving off an almost
supernatural vibe of mystery and intrigue. The film starts off full of
Romanticism but as it progresses it becomes clear The Death of Maria
Malibran is one of ironic romanticism and subversive style, routinely
having sound and image intentionally out of sync which creates a playful
perversion, something that becomes darker and darker as the film
progresses, dehumanizing these romanticized, picturesque woman of
bourgeois society. While trying to easily define Schroeter's film in
any easily discernible way feels like a fools errand, The Death of Maria
Maliban is a film which uses opera as a device to expose the ugliness
and cruelty that exists in bourgeouis society, one that is driven by
status and the collective ideals. Characters routinely speak in a way
that makes little sense and many of the characters become
undifferentiable as the film progresses, as if to suggest that language
itself has little meaning, as one's actions are the deriving force of
morality and personal characters. Schroeter routinely injects the film
with upbeat, vapid pop-style songs throughout, another bizarre but
expressionistic decision which speaks to the vapid nature of society.
While many of these observations could be completely off-base, The
Death of Maria Maliban as a whole feels like an indictment on the
selfish, abusive constructs which society as a whole can create, one
which routinely tears down the individual for the sake of the
collective. Conformity and lack of individuality feel like a major
aspect of this film, with the bourgeois characters essentially
attempting to destroy the young Maria Maliban for having a different
perspective than their overall ideals. Featuring so much to think
about, consider, and attempt to deconstruct, Werner Schroeter's The
Death of Maria Maliban is a film you experience more than attempt to
define, being an expressionistic fever dream that is not quite like
anything I've ever seen.
Nickel Cinema introduction: Shot on consumer-grade video and circulating for decades as a
near-mythic underground tape, Blonde Death follows the runaway odyssey
of Tammy, a teenage misfit fleeing an abusive home with two queer
outsiders who christen themselves her new family. Their improvised road
trip blends impulsive romance, petty crime, and manic self-invention,
gradually collapsing into violence as the trio drifts further from
stability. The film’s messy exuberance is threaded with a growing sense
of doom, capturing the volatility of youth pushed to the margins. A
seminal artifact of queer DIY cinema, Blonde Death fuses melodrama,
punk energy, and camp excess with unexpectedly sharp social commentary.
Director James Robert Baker — better known for his incendiary fiction —
uses the limitations of shot-on-video production to amplify the film’s
immediacy and emotional rawness. The result is a rare, transgressive
work whose jagged form reflects the precarity, rebellion, and
desperation of its characters, standing at the intersection of outsider
art and queer counterculture.
Screen Slate review: If
an angry gay anarchist reimagined Badlands for
the 80s, what might we expect of its impressionable yet fiercely
loyal protagonist? Would her family move to Orange County to start a
Christian ministry? Could her relationship with her bad-to-the-bone
boytoy be complicated by the release of his prison bunkmate? Might
the musical refrain of Carl Orff's "Gassenhauer" be
replaced by The Angry Samoans' "My Old Man's a Fatso"? And
what if the whole thing was shot on video for $2,000? These questions
are answered in Blonde
Death (1984),
which deserves a place alongside Bill Gunn's Personal
Problems as
a recently revived shot-on-video feature worthy of serious
consideration within the cinematic canon. Its director, James Robert
Baker – credited here as "James Dillinger" – is best
known for his transgressive gay fiction like Boy
Wonder (1985)
and Tim
and Pete (1993),
the latter about rekindled former lovers on a death trip to
assassinate the American New Right. Around the time of Blonde
Death's
production, Baker was an award-winning yet unproduced UCLA
screenwriting grad, and this, his only feature, was realized under
the auspices of Hollywood-based media arts center and video gallery
EZTV. The result is a tightly structured, character-driven satire
buoyed by pitch-perfect casting of unknown actors, including Sara Lee
Wade as Tammy "the teenage timebomb," who narrates in an
earnest voiceover with a singsong southern drawl. Tammy's parents
espouse strict Christian values, but her potentially closeted father
has a spanking fetish, and her stepmother, we learn, is scheming to
murder him with poison Tang to inherit money to open a new church
with her lover. When both are out of town, Tammy is aggressively
courted by a one-eyed lesbian, but she instead falls into the thralls
of a hunky home invader, with whom she plots to rob Disneyland to
start a new life. (The eventual heist is shot guerrilla style within
the Magic Kingdom.) But their plans receive a mixed blessing with the
arrival of Tammy's new squeeze's prison lover, who is embraced as a
third partner—but may be a homicidal maniac. Blonde
Death is
rich with cultural clutter: doomsday churches, singing
televangelists, pill-popping, Mickey Mouse, and knotty sexual
confusion. But Baker is uniquely talented at tying satire back to his
characters, weaving a consistently engaging tapestry of transgressive
societal commentary. And alongside the affinities with John Waters's
oeuvre, Mudhoney,
and Baby
Doll, Blonde
Death feels
equally of a piece with the Abject Art of fellow Angelenos Paul
McCarthy and Mike Kelley, or Bruce & Norman Yonemoto's
videographic deconstructions of Hollywood mythmaking and melodrama.
The result resists easy placement within the continuum of independent
80s cinema or video art; and while it seems like a tragic and unfair
twist of fate that Baker's feature filmmaking career never took
flight, such an outsider position seems to befit this perverse,
uncompromising, and deeply felt work. Jon Dieringer
Chicago Reader review: Mickey Rourke as a private investigator hired by a mysterious client
(Robert De Niro) to track down a missing person. Deliberate
mystification in all this, with imponderable flashbacks and assorted
voodoo distractions, though director Alan Parker (Midnight Express)
drops so many ironic cues along the way that when the surprise ending
finally comes, it isn’t. Parker directs everything for maximum visual
impact but can’t manage to tie the scenes together: there’s no pacing,
no development, only alternating passages of disaffected ramble and
hysterical rant. The semiautistic styling may be congenial to his
perennial themes (of personal entrapment and the self under siege), but
for all the supernatural bloodletting and explosions of technique, the
film remains distant and closed (1987). Pat Graham
Barbican introduction to this film in Iranian Masterpieces season: The final cinematic work of director Ebrahim
Golestan, this political satire places the ills of a society under a
comic magnifying glass. A Monty Python–esque allegory about the corrosive impact of oil exports on Iranian life, following a villager who discovers a hidden fortune, becomes rich overnight, and swiftly transforms into a tyrant.The film’s troubled history began even before its release. Golestan
felt compelled to conceal the story during production, aware of how his
intentions may be skewed. When it finally reached cinemas, the film was
banned after 2 weeks. The questions remained – were they
misinterpretations, or simply interpretations? Featuring several major stars of the era, including comedian Parviz Sayyad and Mary Apick.
Golestan re-edited the film but the director’s version was never
publicly screened… until now. This screening marks the world premiere of
the brand-new restoration of the film’s director’s cut.
Chicago Reader review: Having moved to London in 1967, the distinguished Iranian writer,
translator, producer, and director Ebrahim Golestan returned to his
homeland to make this unpleasant allegorical comedy (1972), his second
and final feature to date. A bitter satire about the shah’s corrupt
regime, it centers on a poor peasant who plunges into a hidden cave,
discovers a cache of valuable antiques, and becomes a grotesque nouveau
riche tyrant. Golestan tackled a related theme in his exquisite 1965
short The Iranian Crown Jewels (see listing for “Documentaries by
Ebrahim Golestan”), which was commissioned and then banned by the
shah’s cultural ministry, but that film attacked the very elitism that
subsumes this one. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out review: This first feature follows Mike (Favreau) as he gets back into the
dating game after the abrupt and unwelcome termination of a six-year
relationship. An out-of-work New York actor looking for a break in LA,
he's dragged out of his mope by pals Rob (Livingston), Charles (Desert),
Sue (Van Horn) and, especially, the irrepressible Trent (Vaughn), who
insists they chase down some honeys in Vegas. Wiser, and poorer, they
return to trawl the Angelino hotspots. Love it and loathe it, this film
wants it both ways. We're supposed to be appalled at the callous
chauvinism of the predatory male, but also to get off on his jive, sharp
suits and cool car. We do, too. It's a bit smug, a bit smarmy, but you
should still see this movie, and here are ten reasons why: (i) Vince Vaughn - a louche, lanky ego salesman, he's the definitive '90s lounge lizard. (ii) Jon Favreau
- a subtler actor than Vaughn, he spends the entire picture sulking,
and still has you pulling for him. Plus, he wrote the script, and (iii)
this is the most quotable movie since Clueless. (iv) It boasts
the best answerphone gag in the history of the movies. Bar none. (v-x)
Ninety minutes spent learning how not to pick up girls. This is what the
movies were made for, isn't it? Tom Charity
This presentation is part of the Andrzej Wajda season at BFI Southbank and also screens on February 15th. You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review: One
of the first works of the Polish New Wave, Andrzej Wajda's 1958 film is
a compelling piece, although it's been somewhat overrated by critics
who considered its story of a resistance fighter's ideological struggle
as a cagey bit of anti-Soviet propaganda, and hence automatically
admirable. Following the art cinema technique of the time, Wajda tends
toward harsh and overstated imagery, but he achieves a fascinating
psychological rapport with his lead actor, Zbigniew Cybulski—who was
known as Poland's James Dean. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: On her first day of active duty, rookie NY cop Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis)
surprises a supermarket robber and blows him away. Suspended for
shooting an unarmed suspect (his gun has mysteriously disappeared),
Megan is later seducedby charming commodities-broker Eugene Hunt
(Ron Silver). Then dead bodies start turning up all over town, killed with
bullets fired from her gun and etched with her name. Detective Nick Mann
(Clancy Brown) takes Megan under his wing, but even when Hunt virtually
confesses to the crimes, the disturbing cat-and-mouse games have just
begun. Curtis gives her most complex performance to date as the reckless
Megan, whose obsessive behaviour and over-reactions have more to do
with turning the tables on violent men than balancing the scales of
justice. Short on plausibility but preserving the psycho-sexual
ambiguities throughout, Kathryn Bigelow's seductively stylish, wildy fetishistic
thriller is proof that a woman can enter a traditionally male world
and, like Megan, beat men at their own game. Nigel Floyd
