Capital Celluloid 2016 - Day 111: Wed Apr 20

Beat Girl (Greville, 1960): Regent Street Cinema, 6.30pm

This presentation will feature a Q&A with star Gillian Hills after the screening, in conversation with BFI curator of fiction cinema, Vic Pratt.

Here is the background to the DVD release of the film in April:
BFI Flipside is back! Edmond T Gréville’s legendary British 1950s juvenile delinquency flick Beat Girl is one of three British cult classics that will be released on the BFI’s Flipside label on 25 April 2016.

Remastered from original negatives, Beat Girl is presented in Dual Format Edition (DVD and Blu-ray discs) and packed with extras including three versions of the film, a new interview with the film’s star, Gillian Hills, three short films and an illustrated booklet.
Restless teen Jennifer (Gillian Hills, Blow-up, A Clockwork Orange) escapes her square papa (David Farrar, Black Narcissus) at Soho’s Off Beat coffee bar, rocking it with beatnik Dave (a super-cool Adam Faith), sensual singer Dodo (Shirley Anne Field) and icy-eyed Plaid Shirt (Oliver Reed). But a secret from Jennifer’s French stepmother’s past leads to the Les Girls strip joint, run by the sleazy Kenny King (Christopher Lee).

Beat Girl, which features John Barry’s fantastic first soundtrack, is released alongside two more new Flipside titles – Expresso Bongo (Val Guest, 1959) and Symptoms (José Ramón Larraz, 1974).
Here (and above) are the opening credits.

Capital Celluloid 2016 - Day 110: Tue Apr 19

Possession (Zulawski, 1981): ICA Cinema, 8.40pm

This screening, introduced by musician Stephen Thrower, is part of the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival at the cinema. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Andrzej Zulawski's 1981 masterpiece opens with the messy separation of a middle-class couple (Sam Neill, Isabelle Adjani), then goes on to imagine various catastrophic breakdowns—of interpersonal relationships, social order, and ultimately narrative logic itself. The film can be hilarious one moment and terrifying the next, and Zulawski's roving camera only heightens the sense of unpredictability. Few movies convey so viscerally what it's like to go mad: when this takes an unexpected turn into supernatural horror, the development feels inevitable, as though the characters had been bracing themselves for it all along. Adjani won the best actress prize at Cannes for her dual performance (as an unfaithful wife and her angelic doppelganger), but the whole cast is astonishing, exorcising painful feelings with an intensity that rivals that of the filmmaking. Performed in English and shot in Berlin by an international crew, this also conveys a sense of displacement that's always been crucial to Zulawski's work.
Ben Sachs 

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2016 - Day 109: Mon Apr 18

King Lear (Brook, 1970): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6pm

This screening is part of the Shakespeare on Film season at BFI Southbank.

Time Out review:
Made on location in what looks like a perilously cold Denmark, Brook's only Shakespeare on celluloid found a similarly frosty reception, especially as it came out just after Kozintsev's grandly conceived Russian version. Peter Brook's filming is graceless - looming close-ups, perverse camera moves - but there are some remarkable performances (developed from his much praised stage production a few years before with Paul Scofield). The conception is consistent with the influential views of Jan Kott, who saw Lear as a precursor to Beckett's plays about human blindness and nothingness (a line reinforced by the casting of Jack MacGowran as the Fool, and Patrick Magee as the Duke of Cornwall). A bleak interpretation, in every sense.
David Thompson

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2016 - Day 108: Sun Apr 17

Boy Meets Girl (Carax, 1984): Cine Lumiere, 2pm

This is screening as part of the Sunday French Classics: Revisiting Cannes Film Festival’s Hits season at Cine Lumiere.

Chicago Reader review:
The revelation of the 1984 Cannes festival was this first feature by 23-year-old Leos Carax. In its fervor, film sense, cutting humor, and strong autobiographical slant, it suggests the first films of the French New Wave (there's something in the arrogant iconoclasm that specifically recalls Godard), yet this isn't a derivative film. Carax demonstrates a very personal, subtly disorienting sense of space in his captivating black-and-white images, and the sound track has been constructed with an equally dense expressivity. The hero is a surly young outsider who has just been abandoned by his girlfriend; as he moves through a nocturnal Paris, his adolescent disillusionment is amplified into a cosmic cry of pain. The subject invites charges of narcissism and immaturity, but Carax's formal control and distance keep the confessional element in a state of constant critical tension.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2016 - Day 107: Sat Apr 16

Knife in the Water (Polanski, 1962): Close-Up Cinema, 8pm

This screening, part of the Masters of Polish Cinema season at Close-Up Cinema, is being shown from a 35mm print.
 
Chicago Reader review:
'Written with Jerzy Skolimowski (Moonlighting), this 1962 production was Roman Polanski's first feature film, and there are those who would still call it his best. A middle-aged married couple, intrigued by a young blond hitchhiker, invite him to spend a weekend on their yacht. The sexual tensions build slowly and subtly, and when they explode into violence, it seems to be the desired result.'  
JR Jones

Here is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2016 - Day 106: Fri Apr 15

Repulsion (Polanski, 1965): Close-Up Cinema, 8pm

This screening, part of the Masters of Polish Cinema season at Close-Up Cinema, is being shown from a 35mm print.

Chicago Reader review:
'Roman Polanski's first film in English (1965) is still his scariest and most disturbing—not only for its evocations of sexual panic, but also because his masterful employment of sound puts the audience's imagination to work in numerous ways. Catherine Deneuve gives an impressive performance as a quiet and quietly mad beautician living with her older sister in London and terrified of men. When the sister and her boyfriend take off on a holiday, her fears and her isolation in the apartment are allowed to fester along with the uncooked food, with increasingly violent and macabre results. As narrative this works only part of the time, and as case study it may occasionally seem too pat, but as subjective nightmare it's a stunning piece of filmmaking.'
Jonathan Rosenabum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2016 - Day 105: Thu Apr 14

The Shout (Skolimowski, 1978): Barbican Cinema, 6.30pm

Awarded the Special Jury Prize in Cannes, The Shout is the second feature produced in Great Britain by Jerzy Skolimowski, after Deep End. The Barbican are screening this movie as part of ther Kinoteka Film Festival at the cinema. Full details here. Tonight's presentation will feature an introduction and Q&A with producer Jeremy Thomas.

Chicago Reader review:
An airy allegory (from a Robert Graves story) held to earth by some scathing sexual passion. Alan Bates is the traveling madman who holds a composer (John Hurt) and his wife (Susannah York) in thrall. Sexuality triumphs over civilization through a series of small betrayals, each registered with appalling, pinpoint accuracy by Jerzy Skolimowski's camera. Though Skolimowski had backed off from his formal ambitions somewhat (he once seemed a real rival to Godard), this 1978 feature is shrewd, imaginative moviemaking, a trance thriller that beats Peter Weir on his own turf.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.