This 35mm screening is part of the Michelangelo Antonioni season and is also being shown on February 20th. Details here. Tonight’s event will be introduced by the filmmaker’s widow Enrica Fico Antonioni. Chicago Reader review: Michelangelo Antonioni's 1982 feature (he didn't make another until the 1995 Beyond the Clouds) focuses on an Italian filmmaker (Tomas Milian) and his chance encounters with two women. The most openly erotic of Antonioni's features, and visually one of the most beautiful (what he does with fog in one famous sequence is particularly memorable), it's also one of his most elusive in terms of plot and character. With Christine Boisson, Daniela Silverio, and Sandra Monteleoni. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is the trailer.
This 35mm screening is part of the season (details here) celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Curzon Soho. Time Out review: Who else but Merchant Ivory to give the big-screen treatment to Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning novel about class, fascism and the stiff upper lip? Anthony Hopkins plays Mr Stevens the butler, a man so fanatically devoted to selfless service that he carries on pouring the port while his father lies dying, and refuses to question the Nazi sympathies of his titled master (Edward Fox). Yet love steals unawares into even the hardest of hearts, and his stern warnings to female staff cannot protect him from falling slowly for the new housekeeper, Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson). That the film works is down to Hopkins, who plays his face like a lyre - a tic here, an inflected eyebrow there. It's an astonishing performance, but the viewer is still hard-pressed to commit to him emotionally. It's Thompson we really feel for, trying to get some reaction from the man she too comes secretly to love. In these scenes of repartee, where politeness is a weapon and every honorific twists in the gut like a knife, the film finally comes alive. Here (and above) is the trailer.
Supakino and Zodiac Film Club are teaming up to bring you a dirty disco double bill featuring the infamous Joan Collins films The Stud (1978) and The Bitch (1979). A rousing alternative to Valentine’s Day, we invite you to put on your platforms, bring a date and prepare to dance. We’ll be providing party bags, an intermission disco and prizes for the sleaziest looks, along with one or two surprises in the works with our media partner Radiant Circus. Shot on a tiny budget in three weeks and rejected by most major studios, The Stud ended up being the most successful film of 1978. Based on the steamy novel by Jackie Collins, the film revived her sister Joan’s career and went on to spawn an equally excessive sequel just a year later. Set in London’s disco scene, The Stud and The Bitch follow the hedonistic, erotic exploits of Fontaine Khaled, a woman of expensive taste and unbridled libido. With their hazy aesthetic, lavish set design and disco soundtrack, the sleek and sleazy classics are the perfect 70s treat.
This film is on an extended run at the cinema. You can find the full details here. It is also part of the Barbara Stanwyck season, the full information for which your can find here. Chicago Reader review: Preston Sturges extended his range beyond the crazy farces that had made his reputation with this romantic 1941 comedy, and his hand proved just as sure. Henry Fonda is the heir to a massive beer fortune who has spent his life in the scientific study of snakes; Barbara Stanwyck is the con girl who exclaims “What a life!” and sets out to turn Fonda around. Among the faces who crowd the frames are Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette, William Demarest, Eric Blore, Melville Cooper, and Jimmy Conlin. Dave Kehr
The annual Valentine’s Day screening by Cigarette Burns is traditionally the best in London and this year is no different.
Barbican introduction:
Simone is the devoted fan of the film's title, eagerly devouring every scrap of publicity the Gary Numan-esque pop star R tosses to his teen followers. In school, she spends her classes dreamily writing R unanswered love letters; at home, she stalks the postman in desperate hopes of a reply. She is entranced by R's every television appearance; he seems to look directly through the TV screen at her, singing only to her. This must be love. When they finally meet, their lives are forever changed. This West German film brilliantly maps the loneliness and confusion of adolescence, then goes further, exploring the terrifying depths of fanaticism and the looming shadow of Germany’s own dark past. Rivalling the grim intensity of that other German cult classicChristiane F, Der Fan is not a film you will easily leave behind in the cinema.
Tate Modern introduction to this special 16mm screening:
Canadian artist Michael Snow is celebrated for his groundbreaking work in a range of media including film, video and sound. Over the last six decades, his practice has explored the characteristics of these media in great depth, addressing questions of time, movement and perception. We are honoured to welcome the artist to Tate to screen his renowned filmWavelength1967, followed by the world premiere of Waivelength 2019, a new audio performance specially conceived for Tate Modern's Starr Cinema. A feat of structural filmmaking,Wavelengthunfolds as a gradual zoom from one side of the artist’s loft to the other, accompanied by the sound of a rising sine wave. The film is punctuated by changes in light, colour filters and four moments in which human characters appear, gesturing towards a narrative. After a short break, Snow and collaborator Mani Mazinani will premiere an audio performance entitledWaivelength. The immersive performance reworks the film's sine wave soundtrack into a new composition distributed across multiple channels of sound in real time.
Here is a thoughtful piece by Donato Totaro on Wavelength, often dubbed the ‘Citizen Kane’ of experimental cinema. ‘Thirty-five years after its inception, Wavelength (Ontario, 1967, 45 min.) remains one of the most vital and (still) groundbreaking films in the history of experimental cinema. It is, quite simply, the “Citizen Kane” of experimental cinema. Screenings of Wavelength in and out of academic situations have probably generated more mixed emotions – frustration, boredom, exhilaration and awe (sometimes in the same spectator) – than any other film. I can vouch from personal experience of teaching this film, that Wavelength retains its power to evoke these emotions.’ Here (and above) is a 1983 documentary on Wavelength’s director Michael Snow.
This 35mm presentation is part of the Prince Charles Cinema's ‘Love is in the Air’ Season. You can find the full details here. There are certain films that can survive critical brickbats. This is assuredly one of them. Some would have you believe this is a sterile, emotionless movie; others that the premise is ridiculous, that Laura (Celia Johnson) should have left Fred (Cyril Raymond) for Alec (Trevor Howard) and had done with it. The movie, which was not that successful in its day, survives and indeed thrives because so many have surrendered to it and find the despair at the heart of the tale overwhelming. Richard Dyer, in his BFI Film Classics monograph on Brief Encounter, sums the feelings of those who love this film thus: "If you don't feel the melodramatic pull of the film, then everything fits just a little too neatly and rigidly, the life has been squeezed out of the film by the meticulousness with which it has been put together. But I do feel it."
