This film is screening as part of a 'Head Trips: Films for the Inner Eye' season at the Barbican. You can find all the details here.
Chicago Reader review: Cold, documentarylike images of the Sahara are used in a grotesque
retelling of the story of creation in Werner Herzog's 1971 experimental
feature. Every shot has a double edge of harsh reality and surrealist
fantasy, as when the landing of a jet plane, repeated nine or ten times,
becomes an odd spiritual symbol, at once banal and mysterious. You'll
either be bored to death or fascinated—for me, it's Herzog's most
interesting film. Dave Kehr
This film is screening as part of a 'Head Trips: Films for the Inner Eye' season at the Barbican. You can find all the details here.
Chicago Reader: The late Sergei Paradjanov's greatest film, a mystical and historical
mosaic about the life, work, and inner world of the 18th-century
Armenian poet Sayat Nova, was previously available only in the
ethnically “dry-cleaned” Russian version—recut and somewhat reorganized
by Sergei Yutkevich, with chapter headings added to clarify the content
for Russian viewers. This superior 1969 version of the film, found in an
Armenian studio in the early 90s, shouldn't be regarded as definitive
(some of the material from the Yutkevich cut is missing), but it's
certainly the finest we have and may ever have: some shots and sequences
are new, some are positioned differently, and, of particular advantage
to Western viewers, much more of the poetry is subtitled. (Oddly enough,
it's hard to tell why the “new” shots were censored.) In both versions
the striking use of tableaulike frames recalls the shallow space of
movies made roughly a century ago, while the gorgeous uses of color and
the wild poetic conceits seem to derive from some utopian cinema of the
future, at once “difficult” and immediate, cryptic and ravishing. This
is essential viewing. Jonathan Rosenabum
This 35mm screening is part of a season at Close-Up Cinema dedicated to celebrated director Andrei Tarkovsky. You can find the full details here.
Time Out review: Another of Tarkovsky's strange, hauntingly beautiful meditations on
man's search for self. The film may forsake the run-down space station
of Solaris or the miraculous Zone of Stalker for the
hilltop villages of Tuscany, but its framework is familiar (flashbacks
in spectral black-and-white, the use of rich sepia alongside pastel
colour to blur distinctions between dream and reality), and so are its
themes (memory, melancholia, disenchantment with the material world,
dogged stumbling after salvation). An appropriately haggard academic,
Gorchakov (Oleg Jankovsky), has come to Italy to research the life of an
obscure Russian composer. Brooding over familial traumas and his
compatriot's eventual suicide, he's incapable of communicating with his
statuesque young interpreter (Dominziana Giordano), let alone having an affair with
her. In the meantime he meets Domenico (Erland Josephson), a recluse whom the
locals dismiss as mad. Each man recognises something of himself in the
other, and they embark upon the most absolute of alliances...Tarkovsky
remains as much a metaphysician as anything else, and Nostalgia isn't an entertainment but an article of faith. Angus MacKinnon
Brian De Palma's films have been controversial to say the least.
Feminist film collective The Final Girls present a special 40th
anniversary screening of his most iconic horror film, Carrie.
Tormented by a hyper religious mother and the meanness of teenage girls,
Carrie develops telekinetic powers. We will debate and explore the
film's complex and divisive female protagonist and the role of women in
Brian de Palma's films in a post-screening discussion. The discussion
will be followed by a bloody prom party to give Carrie White the
send-off she deserves.
Time Out review: Viewed in a modern context, ‘Carrie’ is a more troubling film than it
might have seemed to audiences in 1976, from the opening sequence of
naked teenage girls gliding around a shower room in soapy, soft-porn
slo-mo, through a bizarrely extended sequence of those same girls being
put through their paces on the sports field, to the climactic scene of
brutal matricide. As a film about women written and directed entirely by
men, it does sometimes feel distanced and exploitative, as though
author Stephen King and director Brian De Palma are peeking, ‘Animal
House’-style, through that locker room window, and concocting furtive
adolescent fantasies about the strange creatures they see there.
But
De Palma’s grasp on King’s material is never in doubt: this is a truly
throat-grabbing horror movie, sporting a handful of pitch-perfect
set-pieces, not to mention one of the few examples of effective
split-screen. Sissy Spacek’s performance in the title role is close to
flawless: she was 27 when the film was shot, but looks barely half that,
and this otherworldly combination of maturity and innocence adds to the
film’s unsettling tone. Tom Huddleston
The camera is turned on one of Hollywood’s most consistently daring provocateurs as he discusses his impressive career in this highly anticipated documentary. This film is on an extended run at BFI Southbank and you can find full details of all the screenings here.
Chicago Reader review: Filmmakers Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow interview Brian De Palma, director of such durable thrillers as Scarface (1983), The Untouchables (1987), andMission: Impossible
(1996). As a documentary, this is pretty lazy; Paltrow and Baumbach
simply walk De Palma through his filmography and collect his best
stories (most of which involve him clashing creatively with someone and
ultimately being proven right). But this systematic approach has a nice
leveling effect in that his more obscure, offbeat projects (Greetings, Phantom of the Paradise, Home Movies) get as much attention as his signature films (Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out).
De Palma came up in the business alongside Scorsese, Coppola,
Spielberg, and Lucas, and the rap against him has always been that,
despite his mastery of suspense mechanics, he lacks their strong
personal vision. Nothing here really contradicts that, though the sheer
variety of De Palma's work reveals an artist more eclectic and ambitious
than people usually acknowledge. J R Jones
This 35mm screening is part of the Warren Beatty season at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find all the details here. Time Out review: Made with all the awareness of hindsight, Shampoo offers a sharp sexual satire and a mature statement on both America and Hollywood in 1968, The Graduate
as it should have been, perhaps. Everyone is shown to act out of the
same fatal expediency, as the country elects Nixon for President while
Warren Beatty's chic Hollywood hairdresser tries to sort out an increasingly
dishevelled sex life, a campaign against the Establishment via its wives
and mistresses that's subversive only by default. Ostensibly a farce
about fucking for fun and its repercussions, but the laughs are tempered
by bleakness and the film ends up saddened by its characters'
waywardness. Chris Petit
This film (35mm screening) is also being shown on September 23rd. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: A juicy and deliciously over-the-top piece of Spanish raunchiness with
melodramatic as well as erotic overtones, this won the Silver Lion at
the 1992 Venice film festival. Bigas Luna's comedy—whose title might be
roughly translated (with pun added) as Double Hammy—is funnier to
my taste than anything by Pedro Almodovar in his postpunk phase. (The
fleshy and uninhibited satirical mode recalls Al Capp's comic strip Li'l Abner
in more ways than one.) Determined to prevent her son from marrying a
prostitute's daughter who works in a men's underwear factory, the wife
of the factory's owner hires a stud to seduce her, then falls for the
same hunk herself; in the ensuing fracas involving food, class, animals,
passion, and porking, overripeness is all, right down to the climactic
ham-bone duel. 94 min. Jonathan Rosenabaum
