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
Time Out review: Deliriously playful yakuza pic, in which Seijun Suzuki lets logic hang.
Basically just another tale of gang warfare, it's kitted out with plot
ellipses, bizarre sets and colour effects, inappropriate songs, absurd
irrelevancies (nice hair-drier gags!), action scenes that verge on the
abstract, and some visual jokes tottering precariously between slapstick
and surrealism. Somehow, it still just about works as a thriller, with
(very, very faint) echoes of Jean-Pierre Melville and Sergio Leone. Inspired lunacy. Geoff Andrew
Reverse Shot review: Raging Sun, Raging Sky is split into three distinct verses,
consisting of a prologue and two separate epic visual love songs, the
first contemporary the second mythic and ancient, featuring the same
principal characters, but for the first time in color. All stanzas are
largely dialogue-free, with images moving in musical ebbs and flows—it’s
unlikely that anyone has made or ever will again make a men’s room
seduction scene as lengthy and sinuous and erotic as the one that opens
the film’s second act. After a brief shot of a projectionist, firmly
situating us both in a movie dream world and literally in a movie
theater frequented by horny young gay men, Hernández orchestrates an
intense roundelay of flirtations, intercourse, masturbation, and
voyeurism between multiple mute characters, from urinal to stall and
back again—graceful camera dexterity transforms this potentially putrid
lavatory space into an erotic labyrinth and unites these hungry young
men in a luscious continuum of desire. The cruising continues in the
shadowy entrance to the theater itself, an overhead chiaroscuro of Kieri
avoiding Tari’s attempted seduction on the steps—as stunningly
patterned with light as anything from early Sternberg. The lingering air of sensuality in this film, as in Broken Sky,
is so strong that it’s almost as though all the characters have
ESP—that they can sense each other’s presence, their skin and bodies,
yes, but also their melancholy and loneliness, their intense passions.
Hernández here almost seems to view this young community of gay men
(more than twenty years his junior) as spiritually connected. In their
isolation one could read a rather old-fashioned take on the homosexual
doomed to loneliness, but there is no discernible sociopolitical angle
to his point of view—this is the stuff of classic romantic legend, of
poetry, of lovesickness and pursuit. When Hernández shows us an overhead
shot of man in bed curled up, the sheet creases fanning out around his
body like rays of light, it’s not a visual aside, it’s an entire stanza
from the love song itself. Yet Hernández is seeking something more sensuous; these men are not
shirking their skins but inhabiting them even more fully, and their
desire is depicted as a primal, ancient force, one that, in this case,
even has power to affect the present. Indeed, the richness of
Hernández’s filmmaking isn’t quite comparable to that of any other of
the formalist darlings of the contemporary art-house scene, from Tsai
Ming-liang to Lisandro Alonso or even to Portuguese director João Pedro
Rodrigues, who may also trade in vivid homoeroticism but whose approach
is less extravagant and more given to tragic grotesquerie. The
romanticism and desperation in Hernández’s films are an aesthetic unto
themselves—Mexican cinema has somehow given birth to the bastard child
of Cocteau and Ophuls. Now the world needs to take notice. Michael Koresky
Chicago Reader review: I can’t vouch for its fidelity to Homer, but this version of the Iliad,
scripted by David Benioff (25th Hour) and directed by Wolfgang Petersen,
is clearly more than a prequel to O Brother, Where Art Thou? It has
plenty of visual sweep, fine action sequences, and, thanks especially to
Brad Pitt (as Achilles) and Peter O’Toole (as King Priam), a deeper
sense of character than one might expect from a sword-and-sandal epic
(even if Pitt’s character has some of the beefcake accoutrements of
Leonardo DiCaprio’s in Titanic). Far from lost among the zillions of
extras are Eric Bana (Hector), Brian Cox (Agamemnon), Diane Kruger
(Helen), Orlando Bloom (Paris), Sean Bean (Odysseus), Rose Byrne, and
Julie Christie. Jonathan Rosenbaum
