Chicago Reader review: The notoriously ruthless 1955 thriller by France's most neurotic director, Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear).
Clouzot cast his own wife, Vera, as an invalid who plots the murder of
her husband, assisted by his mistress (Simone Signoret). Set in the
rotting confines of a private school for boys, the film is cruel, sour,
and—unfortunately—very effective. Dave Kehr
This 35mm presentation is part of the Roger Corman season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details here.
Time Out review: The humour of Richard Matheson's well-calculated send-up of Poe's gruesome The Black Cat – as the middle story in Roger Corman 's Tales of Terror – went down so well that Matheson here used Poe's poem The Raven as the basis for a full-length parody. With Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre superbly funny as rival magicians - and Jack Nicholson turning up to give the most atrocious performance of his career as the juvenile lead - The Raven
is one of the few fantasy comedies that hangs together as happily as a
fairytale, and it climaxes with a suitably splendid duel of marvels
between Karloff and Price. David Pirie
This is part of the Made in Taiwan season at the Garden Cinema. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: A reflective autobiographical film (1985) about filmmaker Hou
Hsiao-hsien’s youth in the late 40s and early 50s. Largely filmed in the
same places in Taiwan where the events originally happened, this
unhurried family chronicle carries an emotional force and a historical
significance that may not be immediately apparent. Working in long takes
and wide-screen, deep focus compositions that frame the characters from
a discreet distance, Hou allows the locations to seep into our own
memories and experience, so that, as in Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs
and Tian’s The Blue Kite, we come to know them almost as intimately as
touchstones in our own lives. Yet paradoxically, the unseen Chinese
mainland carries as much weight in the film as the landscape of Taiwan:
Hou’s Christian family left in 1948, and the revolution that followed
made it impossible for them to return. Subtly interweaving everyday
details with processes and understandings that evolve over years, the
film conveys a density of familial detail that we usually encounter only
in certain novels, and a sense of the tragic within hailing distance of
Ozu. This was the first film by Hou I ever saw, and it provides an
excellent introduction to his work as a whole Jonathan Rosenbaum
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with
Sophie Marceau, moderated by Daniel Bird (Curator and scholar of Eastern
European cinema).
Cine Lumiere introduction: As she does every summer, George Sand spends a day in 1846 at her
Nohant estate, a place steeped in childhood memories and filled with her
close circle of writers and artists. Among them are her rebellious
daughter Solange, whom she resents and urges to marry Fernand, a local
country squire; Frédéric Chopin, her lover of eight years; Pauline
Viardot, who performs his music; and painter Eugène Delacroix, who has a
studio on the estate. Having dismissed the servants for the day, the
household is busy in the kitchen preparing to welcome new guests... Recently restored to its original splendour, La Note bleue is one of four films Sophie Marceau made with Andrzej Żuławski over fifteen years. Their collaboration also produced L’Amour braque (1985), Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours (1989) and La Fidélité (2000).
This presentation is part of the 'Lost, Banned, Reclaimed' season at ICA Cinema (details here).
ICA introduction: Screened publicly only once on its original release, at the 1976
Tehran International Film Festival, Chess of the Wind is one
of the most distinctive films of Iran's pre-revolutionary New Wave.
After the Islamic Republic came to power in 1979, the film was
banned, and its original negative was presumed lost. Only degraded
VHS copies survived. Lost for nearly four decades until its
improbable rediscovery in a Tehran antique shop in 2014, Aslani's
masterwork has since been restored, regaining its place as an
achievement of Iranian cinema. Set inside an ornate,
candlelit mansion, the film follows Aghdas, a wheelchair-using
heiress who becomes vulnerable to her late mother's husband, a
corrupt stepfather determined to seize her inheritance, while his two
greedy nephews circle her wealth. Her only ally is her maidservant,
with whom she develops a complicated alliance. Drawing on classical
Persian art, gothic horror and European modernism, Aslani creates a
claustrophobic, still-life atmosphere of avarice and isolation. The
film’s eerie, atonal score was composed by Sheyda Gharachedaghi,
one of the most prolific female film composers of the 1960s and
1970s, blending Persian instrumentation with her Viennese
conservatoire training. This screening will be introduced
by Ali Lalfam, the season curator, followed by a short post-screening
Q&A with Iranian filmmaker and actor Ali Mosaffa.
Chess Of The Wind review: A
rich matriarch has died and the battle lines of inheritance are drawn
between her disabled daughter and second husband (rumoured to dabble in
witchcraft). As the paranoid, hothouse atmosphere builds – and the murky
basement with its jars of acid is revealed – murder seems inevitable.
Aslani’s chilling, decadent family thriller is told with unsettling
control and restraint. The beautifully composed interiors inspired by
classic Persian miniatures become the home to horror in a world where
disembodied hands express as much as faces. Sabotaged, suppressed and
banned, with its negatives lost for decades, Chess of the Wind almost
disappeared from the face of world cinema. With this new restoration,
our perception of Iranian film will never be the same again. Robin Baker
Barbican introduction: A masterpiece from the late Kathleen Collins, this film is a beautifully crafted drams, focusing on the tension between university lecturer Sara Rogers and her artist husband played by Bill Gunn. A rare example of an Black independent film depicting the ennui of a Black middle class, focusing on a community of professional well-educated artists, this is a rare object, made all the more rare by the premature passing of both Collins and Gunn, two artists, whose short career’s were important examples of refusing to be subsumed by the limitations provided by the film industry at the tie and would be integral in developing networks and avenues for independent Black creative spaces. The film was restored in 2022, premiering in October, having received a preservation grant from the Film Foundation and the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation which enabled the creation of a new digital master from the original 16mm film elements, a new 35mm film negative, and a restored 35mm optical soundtrack, which we will be showing for our screening. The screening will be introduced by Dr Terri Francis.
New Yorker review: It’s
great news that one of the first American features directed by a black
woman, “Losing Ground,” Kathleen Collins’s 1982 film, which wasn’t
released until 2015, is about to come out on DVD and Blu-ray,
thanks to Milestone Films. Though it’s good to see this film on the big
screen, it’s most important simply to see it and see it again,
freeze-frame on its deeply textured images and rewatch its sharply
constructed scenes, flip through it rapidly for the pleasures of memory
and watch it backward to see how it hangs together. I think it’s the
movie that I’ve watched most often in the past year-plus, in the time
since its rediscovery at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in February,
2015, and it continues to yield mysteries along with revelations.
Rewatching it again this week, I was struck by a quality that had eluded
me earlier: anger, an emotion that’s potentially destructive to express
but self-destructive to repress. The
film’s protagonist, Sara Rogers (Seret Scott), is a professor of
philosophy (she teaches, as Collins did, at City College of New York),
whose research involves the quest for ecstatic experience outside the
realm of religion. Her husband, Victor (Bill Gunn), is an older artist
finally enjoying the first flush of success and looking to advance his
work by spending a summer upstate spent sketching landscapes and people.
To join him there, Sara would have to put her own research on the back
burner, and Victor doesn’t hesitate to urge her to do so. The title of
the film suggests the conflicts at its core—the paradox faced by many
individual black women despite general progress regarding opportunities
for women and African-Americans—and the action of the film, as I discuss
in this clip, suggests some of the reasons why. Reason
itself is among them—the effort to advance constructively while gripped
by the irrational force of tradition, of unexpressed assumptions and
unexamined mythologies, repressed desires and frustrated aspirations,
undiscussed history and unacknowledged grief. The movie’s subject is the
notion of liberation, one that’s as much aesthetic, philosophical, and
emotional as it is practical and political. It’s one of the great
tragedies of the modern cinema that Collins didn’t make any subsequent
movies in which to pursue her powerful art and her powerful ideas—or
that this very movie wasn’t seen widely in its time, and thus didn’t
inspire (as it doubtless would have) a wide range of other filmmakers to
pursue those ideas, to seek their own cinematic liberation. Richard Brody
This 16mm presentation is part of the Shōhei Imamura season at the ICA. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Kikuyo Zendo, the subject of Shohei Imamura’s funny, shocking, and
seemingly effortless 1975 documentary, was one of thousands of
impoverished Japanese women forced into prostitution and shuttled across
southeast Asia in the early 20th century. The director clearly regards
her story as a vehicle for numerous perennial themes: the resilience of
women, sex as a function of capitalism, and the radical idea that the
oppressed economic underclass are the most reliable commentators on
Japanese history. Sort of a nonfiction follow-up to Imamura’s narrative
films The Insect Woman (1963) and Intentions of Murder (1964), this also looks forward to his 1987 period piece Zegen
in its cynical portrait of Japanese imperialism, and Imamura’s warm
onscreen rapport with Zendo (whom he dotes on as if she were his own
mother) anticipates the humanism of his late masterpieces The Eel (1997) and Dr. Akagi (1998). Jonathan Rosenbaum
