Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 18: Sun Jan 18

Goodbye to Langauge 3D (Godard, 2014): Rio Cinema, 4.30pm

A rare chance to see director Jean-Luc Godard's latest, and much-discussed film. There are a number of articles about this film circulating, one of the most interesting by David Bordwell which you can read here. The film is screening in a double-bill at the Rio with Godard's Detective (1985), which starts at 2.30pm.

Goodbye to Language review:
Yes, the rumours were true – Jean-Luc Godard has made a feature in 3D, but it’s not 3D as Michael Bay would recognise it. While JLG’s latest disquisition on language, politics and the image very much follows on from his recent features, Goodbye to Language pushes his formal explorations into exciting new territory. There’s a hint of a narrative, involving a married woman and a single man, but this is above all an essay in fragmentation, taking in wordplay, literary and musical quotation, toilet humour, abundant allusion to science fiction – and even a mischievous moment of costume drama. Often using electrically saturated colours, Godard flouts illusionism with some visual flourishes that are all the more magical for their lo-fi simplicity. All this, and a charismatic debut from the film’s true star – a dog named Roxy. Godard is as provocative as ever, but it’s a long time since we’ve seen him so exuberant.
Jonathan Romney

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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Detective review:
Jean-Luc Godard's 1985 deconstruction of film noir has the lightness and comic zip of some of his 60s features, though the mix of elements isn't quite as rich. The action is largely restricted to a Parisian hotel, where house detective Laurent Terzieff and his skulking assistant Jean-Pierre Léaud make a halfhearted attempt to solve a two-year-old murder; fight promoter Johnny Hallyday tries to train his new discovery on a minimal budget; married couple Nathalie Baye and Claude Brasseur struggle to work out the kinks in their relationship; and Mafia chieftain Alain Cuny discusses philosophy with a tiny French schoolgirl. The finely layered Dolby sound track is full of such wonderfully Godardian experiments as moving the background score to the foreground while the voices cower beneath blasts of Schubert, Wagner, and Ornette Coleman.
Dave Kehr

Here is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 17: Sat Jan 17

Claire's Knee (Rohmer, 1970): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.45pm

This film, part of the Eric Rohmer season, also screens on 19 January. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
The penultimate entry (1970, 106 min.) in Eric Rohmer's series of “Six Moral Tales,” and the loveliest, most crystalline of the lot. With his serenely precise plot structures and camera placements, Rohmer is the greatest logician of the movies; he treats the mysteries of love as if they were math problems, but with such generous concern that he never betrays the humanity of his characters. And so it is appropriate that the hero of his masterpiece is a man who focuses all his learning—cultural, moral, philosophical—on the apparently trivial problem of whether or not to touch the knee of a teenage girl he has met on a vacation. With Jean-Claude Brialy, Beatrice Romand, and Aurora Cornu.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 16: Fri Jan 16

Re-Animator (Gordon, 1985): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm

This film, part of the Cult starnd at BFI Southbank, also screens on 15 January. Full details here.

Time Out review:
When cleancut med student Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) advertises for a roommate, little does he suspect how spectacularly his life - and the laws of creation - are about to be turned upside down. He soon wishes he'd heeded the caution of girlfriend Megan (Barbara Crampton), who can obviously spot a crazed re-animator when she sees one. In no time at all, Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) has brought Dan's dead cat twitching back to life with a syringe full of green gloop. The dean (Robert Sampson) fails to see the beneficial side and expels Dan and West, who promptly turn Burke and Hare in the university morgue. Mayhem ensues as the dead run amok. Dr Hill (David Gale), a rival for Megan's affections, loses his head - and then finds it again. The injection of humour into HP Lovecraft's 1922 tale is what saves this splatterfest from being mere fodder for gorehounds.
Nick Roddick

Here (and above) is the opening to the film.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 15: Thu Jan 15

City of Lost Souls (Von Praunheim, 1983): Barbican Cinema, 8.30pm

Here is the Barbican introduction:
This underground, trans-spectacular punk musical from 1983 centres on a group of American ex-pats in bohemian West Berlin.

These various ‘lost souls’ are drawn into the orbit of one Angie Stardust, a black singer and drag artist from Harlem, and the cast of unapologetic misfits includes: the glamorous Southern transvestite Tara O’Hara, sexual trapeze artists Tron von Hollywood and Judith Flex, a quasi-cult leader and practitioner of erotic black magic, Gary Miller, and Lila, a trashy, spotlight-seeking Southern blonde played by celebrated punk singer Jayne County.

Directed by Rosa von Praunheim, the film is a hysterical, historical document of a particular time and place. Emerging as a genuine cult classic it is screening here from a recent re-master.

We are pleased to be joined by Juliet Jacques, journalist, cultural critic and author of Trans: A Memoir (Verso, 2015) to introduce this screening. 

Chicago Reader review:
West German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim (Red Love, Army of Perverts) lights out for the territory again, the sexual terra incognita of underground Berlin. It's a musical that takes place mostly in a hamburger joint and a hotel, with an all-glitter-dust assortment of uninspired talents (American expatriates stranded in Berlin) waiting for their big break on the nightlife scene. With Jayne County, Angie Stardust, and La Habana (1983).Pat Graham

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 14: Wed Jan 14

Valley Girl (Coolidge, 1983): ICA Cinema, 8pm

This evening's entertainment is part of the London Short Film Festival and full details of all the screenings in the season can be found here. Jennifer Reeder will screen four of her short films before the ICA shows her movie choice, Valley Girl, after which she will lead a discussion on the movie.

Here is the ICA introduction:

Jennifer Reeder is a filmmaker and visual artist from Ohio. She constructs very personal narratives about landscapes, coincidence and trauma. Reeder's work draws on influences from the John Hughes canon of eighties and nineties teen films, and specifically on one of her own adolescent favourites, Valley Girl.

And I Will Rise, If Only To Hold You Down (2012, 25 mins.)
Girls Love Horses (2013, 13 mins.)
A Million Miles Away (2014, 28 mins.)
Seven Songs About Thunder (2010, 20 mins.)

Valley Girl (Martha Coolridge, US 1983, 99 min): A young Nicholas Cage is a punk from the city, who meets Julie, a girl from the valley. They are from different worlds and find love, in spite of her shallow friends. Includes a new wave soundtrack including The Plimsouls, Sparks, The Psychedelic Furs, Modern English, and Men At Work.
Jennifer Reeder will intro and discuss the film, over 30 years since its release.

Chicago Reader review:
Director Martha Coolidge turned a short-lived fad into a genuine sleeper, an exploitation film that thoroughly transcends its origins to become a highly appealing romantic comedy (1983). Pert, toothy Val gal Deborah Foreman falls in love with Hollywood punk Nicolas Cage, who suggests a lobotomized Robert Mitchum; the star-crossed lovers are threatened by peer pressure and cultural incompatibility, but true feeling triumphs in the end. Coolidge hasn't made a campy, condescending comedy, but a satiric romance, in which the background gags and caricatures contribute to a sense of significant conflicts and solid emotions. It's irresistible. With Elizabeth Daily, Michael Bowen, Lee Purcell, Colleen Camp, and Frederic Forrest.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 13: Tue Jan 13

I Am Here (Holmes, 2014): ICA Cinema, 6.45pm

This film is being shown as part of the London Short Film Festival and full details of all the screenings can be found here.

Here is the ICA introduction:

This afternoon we’re excited to present the UK premiere of David Holmes’ directorial debut, I Am Here, starring Edward Hogg & Liam Cunningham, and shot by Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love). A surreal dream-like short about a man who wakes to find himself stranded in a strange new world, I Am Here is the latest development in Holmes’s eclectic career.

Belfast born David Holmes began DJ-ing from the age of 15, releasing his own music and mixes from 1995 and forming The Free Association in 2002, mixing northern soul and psychedelic funk, and producing work for U2, Doves, Manic Street Preachers and Primal Scream.

In 1998 he was commissioned to create the soundtrack for Steven Soderburgh’s Out of Sight, and has since worked with Soderburgh on the Oceans film series and Haywire (2012), as well as Steve McQueen’s Hunger, and 2014’s massively critically acclaimed ’71.

David Holmes and film critic Mark Kermode will take the stage following the screening, to discuss inspirations from the world of film and music.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 12: Mon Jan 12

To Have and Have Not (Hawks, 1944): Greenwich Picturehouse, 1pm

This film, which is being shown on 35mm, also screens at Hackney Picturehouse on 8 January and Ritzy Cinema on 20 January. Click on the links for more details. 

There's some fascinating work on the movie by academics Catherine Grant and Ian Garwood. Here is Grant's tribute to Lauren Bacall and you can find Garwood's video and accompanying text featuring the film here.

Chicago Reader review:
Howard Hawks's 1944 answer to Casablanca (which he was originally set to direct but lost to Michael Curtiz) is a far superior film and every bit as entertaining. Humphrey Bogart, the captain of a charter boat in a Nazi-held French colonial port, gradually grows into the Hawksian ethos of action and responsibility as he reluctantly enters World War II in order to protect a rummy (Walter Brennan) and win a woman (Lauren Bacall). In many ways the ultimate Hawks film: clear, direct, and thoroughly brilliant.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is an extract.