Capital Celluloid

Capital Celluloid 2017 - Day 239: Tue Aug 29

Leon Morin, Priest (Melville, 1961): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.15pm

This 4K restoration of the Jean-Pierre Melville film, part of the director's season at BFI Southbank, is also being shown on August 19th, 21st and 25th. You can find all the details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Aiming successfully for a wider audience in 1961, the neglected French independent Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Samourai) adapted Beatrix Beck's autobiographical novel, set in a French village during World War II, about a young woman falling in love with a handsome, radical young priest who's fully aware of his power over her. For the starring roles Melville, godfather of the New Wave, ironically selected two talented actors catapulted to fame by that movement—Emmanuele Riva (Hiroshima, Mon Amour) and Jean-Paul Belmondo (Breathless). The poetic results are literary and personal; the heroine's offscreen narration suggests the pre-Bressonian form of Melville's first feature, Le Silence de la Mer, and sudden subjective shots convey the woman's physical proximity to the priest as she undergoes an ambiguous religious conversion. Not an unqualified success, the film remains strong for its performances, its inventive editing and framing, and its evocative rendering of the French occupation. The eclectic and resourceful nonjazz score is by jazz pianist Martial Solal.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2017 - Day 238: Mon Aug 28

The Wicker Man (Hardy, 1973): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.30pm

This film is screening is part of the Cinematic Jukebox season at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find full details of the season here.

Time Out review:

All those sacrifices to the cinema gods must have worked, because after a yearlong worldwide search, the final cut of ‘The Wicker Man’ has been found. The thrill of seeing the 1973 cult classic on the big screen is reason enough to drop everything and go – but doubly so with this longer version, which deeply enhances the film’s eerie pagan weirdness. That creepiness is what made distributors delete some of the film’s most evocative scenes: a sermon at the start, the ‘Gently Johnny’ song segment with snail-on-snail action and more of Christopher Lee’s splendid Lord Summerisle. The print quality is variable and much of the ‘new’ material has appeared on DVDs previously. Whole websites have been dedicated to spotting the differences, so fans will keep debating about which version is ‘definitive’. What an incredible treat, though, to see it all in one place, in the cinema, as director Robin Hardy intended. ‘The Wicker Man’, as a British classic, has it all: ‘Carry On’-style gags, a haunting folk soundtrack, spectacular Scottish landscapes, Edward Woodward’s stiff-upper-lip sense of duty, a critique of organised religion and that still-harrowing ending.
Kathryn Bromwich

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Over five days in August (Wednesday 23rd – Sunday 27th) the Cinema Museum will be celebrating the life and work of the director Ken Russell with a host of famous guests, including Glenda Jackson and Mark Kermode. You can find the selection of his movies, TV films and rare shorts in the line-up here. Tonight Melvyn Bragg will talk about Ken Russell’s films for BBC’s Monitor programme, followed by a screening of The Debussy Film (1965), the penultimate of these films, co-scripted by Russell and Bragg.

BFI Screenonline review:
Ken Russell's penultimate film for Monitor (subtitled 'Impressions of the French Composer') was originally planned as a feature film about Claude Debussy (1862-1918), though after the failure of his theatrical debut French Dressing (1963) he ended up making it for television. Little else was sacrificed, as the 82-minute result (co-written by the young Melvyn Bragg) was easily his most ambitious film up to then, and still represents a career high point. This opinion was not shared by Debussy's estate, which initially prevented repeat screenings, though the composer's copyright has since expired. The film operates on, and constantly switches between, three levels. First, there's the dramatised life story of Debussy and his stormy relationships with lovers, friends, colleagues and patrons. Then, there are visualisations of his music, along similar lines to those in Elgar (BBC, tx. 11/11/1962) and Béla Bartók (BBC, tx. 24/5/1964), beginning with a startling sequence in which a young woman, representing Saint Sebastian, is shot at point-blank range with arrows. And finally, there's the film within The Debussy Film, as an ambitious director attempts to capture the complexities of his subject while negotiating his actors' own turbulent relationships. Although this treatment might seem gimmicky, it represents the logical culmination of Russell's Monitor output. In constantly pushing at the boundaries of what was considered acceptable for a BBC documentary, he had to spend much time thinking about what he was attempting, not least in order to justify it to his boss Huw Wheldon, a stickler for factual accuracy. His director frequently voices these dilemmas, musing about how to convey particular ideas on film, incorporate additional material without unbalancing the narrative, or simply to vouch for the accuracy of individual scenes. Russell confirmed that the line "They did play with balloons - I checked" was a cheeky dig at Wheldon. Cast primarily because of his physical resemblance to Debussy, Oliver Reed has surprisingly little to do except intersperse smouldering broodiness and violent rage. The dominant performance is by the saturnine Vladek Sheybal as both the film's director and Debussy's own Svengali, the pornographer-poet Pierre Louÿs. Decades before the introduction of the DVD, Sheybal supplies a near-constant 'director's commentary' on the soundtrack, though he also knows when to let 'his' film speak for itself, notably the climax of the extraordinary sequence that fuses Debussy's own decline with the subject of his unfinished opera, The Fall of the House of Usher.
Michael Brooke
Here (and above) is an extract