Chicago Reader review: Chris Marker’s 1982 masterpiece is one of the key nonfiction films of
our time—a personal philosophical essay that concentrates mainly on
contemporary Tokyo but also includes footage shot in Iceland,
Guinea-Bissau, and San Francisco (where the filmmaker tracks down all
the locations from Hitchcock’s Vertigo). Difficult to describe
and almost impossible to summarize, this poetic journal of a major
French filmmaker radiates in all directions, exploring and reflecting
upon many decades of experience. While Marker’s brilliance as a thinker
and filmmaker has largely (and unfairly) been eclipsed by Godard’s,
there is conceivably no film in the entire Godard canon that has as much
to say about the state of the world, and the wit and beauty of Marker’s
highly original form of discourse leave a profound aftertaste. A film
about subjectivity, death, photography, social custom, and consciousness
itself, Sans Soleil registers like a poem one might find in a time capsule. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out review: An accomplished film of Ronald Harwood's theatrical two-hander, animated
by two gigantic performances. Albert Finney, grossly Shakespearean as Sir, the
imperious, declamatory actor-manager with a Moses-like command of his
company and inanimate objects ('St-o-o-p th-a-a-a-t tr-ai-ai-n!' he
bawls, bringing British Rail to its knees), is fully matched by Tom Courtenay's pantomime poof Norman, Sir's devoted dresser: mincing,
nagging, but the only one able to reach to the furthest depths of Sir's
hair-tearing madness and coax him into the costumes and roles that have
by wicked irony destroyed him. Especially pleasing, then, that in the
final act it is the quiet craft of an actress - Eileen Atkins as the
long-suffering, love-lorn stage manageress - that rises above
constrictions of plot and thankless part to upstage them.
This 35mm screening in the 'Projecting the Archive' strand features a Q&A with actors Hayley Mills, Diane Poole and Alan Barnes.
BFI introduction: When a stranger appears in their barn, three siblings care for him in
the belief that he’s Jesus returned to Earth. Forbes shot his
directorial debut on location in rural Lancashire with a cast of local
children, who give performances of astonishing wit and candour. A film
about childhood that avoids sentimentality, it has enchanted audiences
across the generations.
'I've tried to vary my films considerably, but I would
have to admit that Bleak Moments remains, in some ways, the mother of
all Mike Leigh films. And I'm very proud of it.' Mike Leigh
The film screened by Contemporary 75, a London festival screening films that inspired generations of British audiences and filmmakers, will be followed by a Q&A with director Mike Leigh.
Chicago Reader review: Mike Leigh's auspicious first feature focuses on the painful gaps in
communication between a lonely accountant's clerk (Anne Raitt) and an
uptight schoolteacher she halfheartedly tries to seduce. Kitchen-sink
realism with a vengeance, punctuated by painful and awkward silences,
this was made before Leigh formed a fully coherent social and political
view of his material, but his feeling for the characters never falters.
One can find a glancing relationship with John Cassavetes's first feature, Shadows,
but the style and milieu is English to the core. This might seem
overlong, and the drabness and emotional constipation may drive you
slightly batty, but the film leaves a powerful aftertaste. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Sight & Sound review: This is the
first feature in Africa to be directed by a woman. Set in 1961, at the
start of the Angolan War of Independence, and shot in Congo, the film
tracks the resistance efforts of the Popular Movement for the Liberation
of Angola (MPLA), a militant group whose
leader Mário Pinto de Andrade was also Maldoror’s husband. In part, it’s
about the arrest and brutal torture of a tractor driver, Domingos
Xavier, who lives in a working-class district of the capital city Luanda
and harbours seditious beliefs such as, “There are no whites, no
mulattos, no blacks. There’s only the poor and the rich.” She
gives equal importance to his wife Maria who, carrying along her infant
child, sets out to find him, going from one prison to another,
confronting indifference, lechery, dead ends. In her suffering, she
becomes a kind of Mother Angola. Her doggedness and her heartache are
portrayed with wounding acuity and illuminate Maldoror’s much-quoted
belief that “African women must be everywhere. They must be in the
images, behind the camera, in the editing room and involved in every
stage of the making of a film. They must be the ones to talk about
their problems.” Yet
Maria’s plight is not solely African or colonial; a dogged seeker of
justice, she resembles the desperate women in Zhao Liang’s documentary
Petition (2009). For the director, she evokes “the alone-ness of a woman
and the time it takes to trudge… It could be any woman, in any country,
who takes off to find her husband.” Sukhdev Sandhu
This is part of the Andrzej Zulawski season at the Garden Cinema. This film is also being shown on September 16th and October 13th. The screening on the September 1st will be introduced by Garden Cinema team member, writer, and filmmaker Sarah Grice. Chicago Reader review: Polish-born director Andrzej Żuławski was a master at depicting worlds divorced from traditional moral order, whether the Nazi-occupied Poland ofThe Third Part of the Night(1971), the supernatural Berlin ofPossession(1981), the strange planet ofOn the Silver Globe(1988), or the sweetly absurd universe of his final film,Cosmos(2015). Few filmmakers have rendered so palpably the experience of losing one’s grip on reality, and with the 1975 French dramaL’Important C’Est D’Aimer, Żuławski marries this lifelong subject to a romantic sensibility unlike anything else in his body of work. The title can be translated as “the important thing is to love,” and Żuławski presents love as an all-consuming force, similar to madness or addiction. The film is deliberately overstylized—with outsize performances, lush music (by Georges Delerue), and delirious camera movements—yet the grandeur reflects the intensity of the characters’ experience. Żuławski considers a relationship between two lost souls. Servais (Fabio Testi) is a former war photographer now shooting pornography and working for tabloid magazines; Nadine (Romy Schneider) is a onetime starlet now slumming in sexploitation films. Servais falls for Nadine after taking her picture on a movie set and, to prove his devotion, borrows money from the gangster who finances his porno shoots to produce an avant-garde staging ofRichard IIIthat will star Nadine and, she hopes, jump-start her career. During the production, Servais gets closer to the actress but keeps his beneficence a secret; he also gets to know her husband, a mentally unbalanced cinephile (pop singer Jacques Dutronc in one of his first serious roles) whom Nadine pities more than she loves. The growing attraction between Servais and Nadine comes to destroy all three characters, who regret how they’ve failed to live up to their ideals. They try to reclaim their dignity, but only too late, after the stage production flops and Servais is hunted down by the gangster. Żuławski boldly mixes sensationalist elements with high art, defamiliarizing all of them. Scenes of Shakespeare follow S-M porno shoots; protestations of romantic yearning come between depictions of graphic violence. The director connects these disparate pieces with a uniform emotional potency; no matter what takes place onscreen, the characters respond with deep, sometimes terrifying feeling. Also shining throughL’Important C’Est D’Aimeris a genuine sense that love enables us to transcend the most degrading experiences. Thanks in part to towering performances from Testi and Schneider, the film makes one believe that the characters’ love is a matter of life and death. JR Jones Here (and above) is the trailer.
BFI introduction: Hailed by Ingmar Bergman as ‘a work of genius’, Watkins’ film
fragments the difficult formative years of the Norwegian painter’s life
into a vivid, intensely subjective exploration of memory, illness,
sexuality and artistic creation. Blending interviews, direct address,
documentary techniques and impressionistic montage, the film evokes both
the emotional turbulence of Munch’s work and the social and emotional
conditions that shaped it. James Bell
Time Out review: Peter Watkins' biography of the formative
years of the pioneer Expressionist easily vindicates its running time.
As Munch moves through his youth, quiet and alienated, we realise that
he too was eluded by any lasting intimacy: a long, abortive affair with
an older woman joins the ubiquitous ghosts of a childhood scarred by
sickness and death. In the end it's the paintings which do Munch's
talking for him, both directly and through the prefigurations and
echoes in the film's set pieces, a fuzzed, mutely anguished procession
of half-profiles and silently helpless groups with numb, naked eyes.
It's a remarkable film. Giovanni Dadomo Here (and above) is a clip from the film.
