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.
BFI introduction: In 1950s Rome, three girls use all their wiles to trick their reluctant
boyfriends into marriage. This early and little-seen Vitti film
showcases a battle of the sexes in which only one side will triumph. A
female-driven comedy of errors, it highlights Vitti’s nascent star power
as she and the other women struggle with contemporary Italian sexual
mores.
Time Out review: Peter Watkins' films are compulsively interesting almost in spite of themselves. His oeuvre may be characterised as a progression from polemical hysteria towards
formal paranoia, yet it is impossible to deny his films their emotive,
affective power, derived from an innovatory manipulation of technique. Culloden (made for TV) exhibits Watkins' virtues and vices in about equal
proportions, but takes on a critical centrality as an initiator of the
'drama-doc' strain of British TV. These quasi-newsreels of the past and
future, feeding off the documentary tradition to bolster the 'realism'
of their speculative fictions, and usurping the medium's primary
resources for capturing 'actuality' to present reconstructions,
effectively efface their artifice by playing on the 'integrity' of
certain strategies of representation. Yet Watkins must still here rely
on an omniscient/propagandist commentary to convey the contextual
discourses around his 'horror movies': a problem superseded in his
later, similar, but increasingly worrying work. Paul Taylor
Chicago Reader review: One of Nagisa Oshima’s very best, this Japanese feature from 1968 is
concerned with the death penalty and the public’s understanding of a
rape and murder committed by a Korean youth. The inventive staging is
not merely dazzling but purposeful: a group of Japanese officials
discovers, through a fantasy conceit, that the Korean prisoner refuses
to die because the issues of his crime and his punishments aren’t
understood, and the film works through a series of imaginative
reconstructions of the events leading up to the rape and murder. (The
issue of Japanese persecution of Koreans is also pertinent to the
proceedings.) The results are Brechtian in the best sense: entertaining,
instructive, gripping, mind-boggling, often humorous, and very much
alive. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This 35mm presentation is also being screened on July 15th and September 12th. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Sergio
Leone's comic, cynical, inexplicably moving epic spaghetti western
(1966), in which all human motivation has been reduced to greed—it's
just a matter of degree between the Good (Clint Eastwood), the Bad (Lee
Van Cleef), and the Ugly (Eli Wallach). Leone's famous close-ups—the
"two beeg eyes"—are matched by his masterfully composed long shots,
which keep his crafty protagonists in the subversive foreground of a
massively absurd American Civil War. Though ordained from the beginning,
the three-way showdown that climaxes the film is tense and thoroughly
astonishing. Dave Kehr Here(and above) is the trailer.
Chicago Reader review: Sam Peckinpah's notorious western depicted an outlaw gang, made obsolete
by encroaching civilization, in its last burst of violent, ambiguous
glory. By 1969, when the film was made, the western was experiencing its
last burst as well, and in retrospect Peckinpah's film seems a eulogy
for the genre (there is even a dispassionate audience—Robert Ryan's
watchful Pinkerton man—built into the film). The on-screen carnage
established a new level in American movies, but few of the films that
followed in its wake could duplicate Peckinpah's depth of feeling. With
William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O'Brien, Warren Oates, Ben
Johnson, Strother Martin, and Albert Dekker; scripted by Walon Green and
Peckinpah from a story by Green and Roy N. Sickner, and photographed by
Lucien Ballard. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: Cult British filmmaker Peter Watkins made the 1971 pseudo-documentary
‘Punishment Park’ as a reaction to the ‘revolutionary’ events in the
United States in the late ’60s, in particular the wave of
anti-Vietnam-fuelled activism, as well as protests against the
suppression of the Black Panther movement and the shooting by the
National Guard of students at Kent State University. Intended as an
analysis and illustration of (US) state terrorism, the film imagines a
futuristic correction facility out in the Mojave desert, where ‘security
risks’ are gathered and sentenced by an unconstitutional court to
potentially fatal punishments involving forced treks, without water,
through the desert. Seen today, the film can be viewed in a number of
ways. Firstly, it’s a prime example of Watkins’ innovative, radical
approach to filmmaking. His use of fictional scenarios to examine actual
political events and practices – here the reactionary tendencies of
the Nixon era – has a hyper-Swiftian effect, whereby artistic
exaggeration highlights the real to an intense degree. Likewise, his
considered use of non-professionals as actors – real National Guardsmen,
draft protesters and black activists – intensifies the emotional
atmosphere, the sense of immediacy and the processes of audience
identification. Interestingly, the improvised outpourings – ‘the US is
as psychotic as it is powerful!’ screams one defandant – now seem very
much like historical documents themselves. Finally, and more
problematically, there’s the question of whether Watkins’ film succeeds
as pure, tensely-structured, drama – will the two groups of dissidents
survive? Will they tear themselves apart in trying to do so? Personally,
I think not. But this is fascinating, gut-wrenching and
thought-provoking filmmaking all the same. Wally Hammond
A very rare screening for this wonderful independent movie that was Steve Buscemi's directorial debut. The film is also being shown on August 27th.
Time Out review: Tommy Basilio (Steve Buscemi), a no-hoper living in suburban Long Island, is
not exactly happy. He's been sacked for 'borrowing' money from the
garage owned by his buddy Rob (Anthony LaPaglia), with whom Tommy's girl Theresa
(Elizabeth Bracco) has now taken up. His family tend to regard him as a black
sheep, while Jerry (Daniel Baldwin), Theresa's volatile brother-in-law, is
anxious about Tommy hanging around his teenage daughter Debbie
(Chloe Sevigny). Small wonder Tommy takes to getting legless with troubled
family man Mike (Boone), trying to pick up anyone in a skirt, and
generally making a nuisance of himself in the unprepossessing Trees
Lounge bar. Buscemi's semi- autobiographical first feature as
writer/director is a beautifully low-key, disarmingly perceptive
blue-collar character-study, reminiscent of vintage Cassavetes in its
sociological and emotional authenticity. If nothing here is quite as
risky or inspirational as the late indie king's nerviest masterpieces,
there's still much to savour: a cherishably naturalistic, extremely
witty script packed with tasty trivialities and non sequiturs; top-notch
performances from a superb cast; a smattering of subtle sight-gags; and
sufficient drama to ensure that the overall understatement never
outstays its welcome. Crucially, despite the loose narrative structure
and amiable air of inconsequentiality, it's all held together, and lent
poignancy, by Buscemi's Tommy: irresponsible, selfish even, but endowed
with enough scrawny charm to allow us to care about his need, and
capacity, for some kind of redemption. Geoff Andrew
Time Out review: Coolly received by comparison with the more immediately accessible James
Bond films which were then at the height of their popularity, Modesty Blaise
is, like Rolls-Royces, built to last. Modelled on the cartoon strip, it
plays the game up to the hilt with its op-art sets, its extravagant
conceits, its outlandish violence, and its arch-fiend Gabriel (Bogarde
having a ball in silvery wig and sinister glasses) daintily dreaming up
ever more monstrous fancies. But under the non-stop stream of jokes lies
a bitter edge of malice, directed not only against the genre itself but
against a society which trusts its politicians and its generals. Tom Milne
Chicago Reader review: The 1924 film in which F.W. Murnau freed his camera from its stationary
tripod and took it on a flight of imagination and expression that
changed the way movies were made. Cameras had tracked and panned before,
but never to such a deliberate and spectacular degree. Emil Jannings is
the hotel doorman whose life is ruined when he is shunted to
semiretirement as a lavatory attendant and his beautiful uniform is
taken away from him. The film was a great international success and
secured a Hollywood contract for its German director—although a
president of Universal, according to legend, complained that the story
made no sense because everyone knew that washroom attendants made more
money than doormen. Dave Kehr
