BFI introduction: Thief Peter Curran double-crosses his partner John and girlfriend Gianna
following a robbery, making away with their ill-gotten gains. The two
trail him from London to Spain, along the way falling for each other.
Dorothy Dandridge gives Gianna a sense of depth and mystery, but also a longing
for the moment when she was happiest. When John says he plans to escape
to Mexico and enjoy the money they intend to retrieve from Peter, Gianna
replies wistfully, "London was my Mexico".
This 16mm presentation by those great people at Cine-Real film club is
also being screened on Thursday July 24th. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Les Blank’s 1982 documentary on the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. The film suggests Herzog’s own documentaries about visionaries—The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner, La Soufriere—as
Blank steps back to coolly observe Herzog’s grand, demented attempts to
haul a steamship up an impossibly steep river bank. But Blank’s
approach is less mystical than Herzog’s, and in the film’s more ironic,
matter-of-fact moments, the German director can be seen busily
manufacturing his own myth. The film is at once funny and, in its
depiction of the scant differences between art and megalomania, somewhat
frightening. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s first film is neo-neorealism, set in the slums and
back alleys familiar from De Sica and Fellini but directed with a cold
dispassion that belongs to Pasolini alone. Accattone is a thief and pimp
who tries to go straight, fails, and eventually kills himself in a
meaningless accident. The brutality and frigid despair of this 1962 film
have had a lasting impact on political filmmaking. Dave Kehr
This is part of the Friday Night Frights season at the Prince Charles. Details here.
Time Out review: An intriguing premise: what if a certain species of LSD, a decade later,
should begin to have an unexpected effect on its users' chromosomes?
All over an American city, isolated individuals inexplicably slaughter
their loved ones before going on the rampage. The film has a phenomenal
opening, and makes the most of its plot possibilities, but the police's
continual arrival at the scene of murder just in time to implicate the
investigative hero will put a strain on any audience's credulity.
Exploitation of a superior kind, nonetheless. David Pirie
This film is being screened at the new Nickel Cinema. Full listings here.
Time Out review: Harvey Keitel is the depraved and corrupt New York cop of the title. Hooked on
crack, heroin and alcohol, he's up to his eyeballs in debt and staking
his life on the Dodgers - and they're starting to lose. Perversely, the
appalling rape of a nun proffers salvation: a $50,000 reward to find the
perpetrator. The film isn't so much a thriller as a slice of (low-)
life. The script is cut to the bone, the set-ups have a vérité feel,
while the editing mimics real time in long, nearly unwatchable
sequences in which Keitel shoots up, or masturbates before two teenage
girls. Abel Ferrara allows his star to dictate the pace, and is rewarded with
a performance of extraordinary, terrifying honesty. This is an actor
laying himself bare before the camera/confessor. Astonishingly, Ferrara
ups the ante. Out of degradation, he pulls redemption. It is a jarring
stroke, and will divide audiences who have stayed with the film this
far. It seems to me that Ferrara is an artist of the profane; his
Catholicism looks suspiciously like a Scorsese hand-me-down. In this
exploitation/art movie, it may just be that the truth is in the sleaze. Tom Charity
Cinema Year Zero is a London-based journal of film criticism, covering cinema history and archive, with an ethos of ‘slow criticism from the end of the world’. Volume 20 of their periodical takes a new look at Ken Russell’s body of work as an alternate history of mankind. The issue will be exclusively available at the event.
Siren Screenis a London-based community film club dedicated to celebrating myths in motion. From cult cinema to the esoteric and under-seen, they showcase cinema that explores the fantastical and the mystical through ancient stories and modern visions alike. Delving into archetypes and symbolic narratives, they investigate how the cinematic mythic shapes identities and cultures across the globe.
They have combined for tonight's screening. The main feature will be preceded by Nunsploitation short filmVisions of Ecstasy(Nigel Wingrove, 1989), chosen by film club Siren Screen.
Time Out review: First and foremost, an extremely uninhibited satire on American sexual
dreams and nightmares. Kathleen Turner, a career woman who doubles by night as
the ultra-hooker China Blue, acts out every male fantasy in the book
until she picks up a cop, sees him turn into a piece of meat beneath
her, and gets carried away with her stiletto heels and his nightstick.
She meets her Baudelairean match in Anthony Perkins, a deranged fundamentalist
consumed by lust and slowly mustering the energy to act out his own dark
fantasies. In between, the film lays into an 'average' suburban couple,
living a sexual fantasy of their own - of marital fulfilment. It relies
on sheer pace and stylistic bravura, and talks dirty more wittily than
anything since Bogart and Bacall. There are lapses, but this is in the
main a comedy so black that it recaptures some of the cinema's long-lost
power to shock. Tony Rayns
This is the latest screenings from those wonderful 'The
Machine That Kills Bad People' people. Their manifesto states: The
Machine That Kills Bad People is,
of course, the cinema – a medium that is so often and so visibly in
service of a crushing status quo but which, in the right hands, is a
fatal instrument of beauty, contestation, wonder, politics, poetry,
new visions, testimonies, histories, dreams. It is also a film club
devoted to showing work – ‘mainstream’ and experimental, known
and unknown, historical and contemporary – that takes up this task.
The group borrowed their name from the Roberto Rossellini film of the
same title, and find inspiration in the eclectic juxtapositions of
Amos Vogel’s groundbreaking New York film society Cinema 16.
Programme: Ritual
in Transfigured Time, dir. Maya Deren, USA 1945-46, 16mm, 14
min., silent The Asthenic Syndrome, dir. Kira Muratova,
USSR (Ukraine) 1989, DCP, 153 min, Russian, Ukrainian, English and
Romany spoken with English subtitles
ICA introduction: This
double-bill brings together works by two Ukrainian-born filmmakers
with a keen interest in dreams and temporality.Written
in 1989 just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, The
Asthenic Syndromeis
Kira Muratova’s most celebrated film and won the Silver Bear when
it premiered at the 1990 Berlinale. Often referred to as a portrait
of an era, the film is made up of two stylistically and thematically
distinct parts that tell the story of two archetypal Soviet
intellectuals: Nikolai, the teacher who falls asleep in inappropriate
places at the most inappropriate times, and Natalia, a doctor and
distraught widow who has just buried her husband. “Muratova created
vivid images of desperate characters determined to endure, capturing
and divining the state of the USSR on the eve of its collapse. A
searing portrait of individual malaise and collective apathy, with
polyphonic elements and absurdist tableaus, the film stuns the viewer
with shock therapy, destroying every illusion.” (Elena
Gorfinkel)
Made
two years after her pathbreaking work Meshes
of the Afternoon(1943),
Maya Deren’s Ritual
in Transfigured Time(1945–46)
brings together the interests in psychodrama, dream logic, and dance
for which the filmmaker is renowned. Deren wrote, “I believe that
Ritual contains everything that Meshes had, but has more, and, of
course, differently,” and deemed it to be more representative of
her practice than her most famous film.
Chicago Reader review: A
great movie (1989), but not a pleasant or an easy one. Directed by the
transgressive Kira Muratova in her mid-50s, it has been rightly called
the only “masterpiece of glasnost,” though it was banned by the Russian
government for obscenity. Beginning as a powerful black-and-white
narrative about a middle-aged woman doctor in an exploding, aggressive
rage over the death of her husband (who resembles Stalin), the film
eventually turns into an even more unorthodox tale in color about a
schoolteacher (cowriter Sergei Popov) who periodically falls asleep
regardless of what’s happening around him. (The title alludes to a form
of disability that encompasses both the doctor’s aggressiveness and the
schoolteacher’s passivity.) Though this tragicomic epic has plenty to
say about postcommunist Russia, it also deals more generally with the
demons loose in today’s world. It may drive you nuts–as it was
undoubtedly meant to–but you certainly won’t forget it. Jonathan Rosenbaum
