Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 76: Tue Mar 17

Innocence (Hadzihalilovic, 2004): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This is a 'Machine That Kills Bad People'* screening

ICA introduction:

Leslie Thornton, Peggy and Fred in Hell (The Prologue), 1984, 21 min.
Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Innocence, 2004, 122 min.
 
Leslie Thornton's Peggy and Fred in Hell maps a surreal, apocalyptic realm littered with the detritus of a pop culture bursting at the seams. Castaways in this semiotic wilderness, the protagonists Peggy and Fred have been, in Thornton words, "raised by television," their experience shaped by a palimpsest of science and science-fiction, new technologies and obsolete ones, half-remembered movies and the leavings of history. 
 
In a different kind of hell, Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s debut feature Innocence unfolds in a girls' boarding school, ostensibly at the start of the twentieth century. Based on a 1903 novella by Frank Wedekind, Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls, Innocence begins with the arrival of the youngest girl – in a wooden coffin. Investigating the socially-conditioned origins of female sexual knowledge, Hadzihalilovic uses dreamlike images to explore the metamorphosis from girl to woman.

This screening is accompanied by a commissioned essay by Chris McCormack. 

Time Out review:
Is this a horror movie or a grim fairy tale? Dedicated to her colleague, confrontationalist director Gaspar Noé, and sourced from a work by dark expressionist Frank Wedekind, Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s stunning debut describes the purgatorial existence of schoolgirls in a sequestered rural college. In their crisp white gym shifts andpigtail ribbons colour-coded by age, these prepubescent model pupils are self-policing, save for a lone crippled mistress and a ballet teacher and the hovering threat of their ‘graduation’ ceremony in the mysterious house through the dark wood from whence none ever return. Meticulously shot by Benoît Debie with the chromatic richness of the pre-Raphaelite painters  – you can almost smell the moss and decay – and miraculously acted by its predominately young cast, Hadzihalilovic’s film may make for a finally problematic feminist fable, but its unique vision conjures memories of the terrible beauty of Franju’s surreal work and Laughton’s supreme symbolist invocation of childhood, ‘The Night of the Hunter’. 
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

*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.

The Machine That Kills Bad People is held bi-monthly in the ICA Cinema and is programmed by Erika Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, Maria Palacios Cruz, and Ben Rivers.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 75: Mon Mar 16

Wałęsa: Man of Hope (Wajda, 2013): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm

This film, part of the Andrzej Wajda season at BFI Southbank, is also screened on March 1st. Details can be found here.

Guardian review:
At the age of 87, that remarkable Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda has directed a movie with terrific gusto and a first-rate lead performance from Robert Więckiewicz. It’s a full-tilt biopic tribute to the trade-union leader Lech Wałęsa, founder of the Solidarity movement: bullish, cantankerous, with an exasperating charm and the gift of the gab. Wałęsa’s defiance of Poland’s Soviet masters removed the very first brick from the Berlin Wall. Famously, Wałęsa was the one subversive trade-union leader whom Margaret Thatcher felt able to love: Arthur Scargill did not enjoy the same admiration. Wałęsa: Man of Hope is a belated companion piece to his Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron (1981), respectively about a Stakhanovite bricklayer and his son in Poland; it discloses now an unexpected trilogy, and somehow suggests, in retrospect, that the heroic “Man” of those first two films really was Wałęsa all along. The almost Napoleonic career of Wałęsa looked at the time like a kind of miracle; Wajda sets out to examine how that miracle came about. Wałęsa starts as a shipyard electrician, devoted to his young wife Danuta, (Agnieszka Grochowska), and to their growing family, and radicalised by the Gdańsk shipyard riot of 1970. Amusingly, Wajda suggests that Wałęsa’s luxuriant moustache made him famous and recognisable: the anti-Stalin in the cause of freedom. His activism moreover coincided with the sensational arrival of the charismatic new Polish Pope John Paul II; the Catholic Wałęsa was a key political beneficiary. It’s an invigorating and very enjoyable film from a director who shows no sign of slowing down.
Peter Bradshaw

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 74: Sun Mar 15

Man of Iron (Wajda, 1981): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6pm

This film, part of the Andrzej Wajda season at BFI Southbank, is also screened on February 22nd and March 1st. Details here.

Time Out review:
Andrzej Wajda's remarkable sequel to Man of Marble welds newsreel footage of the Solidarity strike to fiction in a strong investigative drama. A disillusioned, vodka-sodden radio producer is bundled off to Gdansk in a black limousine. His mission: to smear one of the main activists - who also happens to be the son of the hapless 'Marble' worker-hero. But, tempered by bitter experience of the failed reforms of '68 and '70, these new men of iron are more durable than their fathers, not as easily smashed. Media cynicism, censorship and corruption are again dominant themes, this time anchored through the TV coverage of the strike, though the conclusion hints with guarded optimism at a possible rapprochement between workers and intelligentsia. An urgent, nervy narrative conveys all the exhilaration and bewilderment of finding oneself on the very crestline of crucial historical change; and for the viewer, all the retrospective melancholy of knowing that euphoria shattered by subsequent events.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 73: Sat Mar 14

Planet of the Apes (Schaffner, 1968): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.45pm

This film is part of the Big Screen Classics season at BFI Southbank. Details here.

Time Out review:
Four sequels and a TV series bred contempt, but this first visit to Pierre Boulle's planet, bringing a welcome touch of wit to his rather humourlessly topsy-turvy theory of evolution, remains a minor sci-fi classic. The settings (courtesy of the National Parks of Utah and Arizona) are wonderfully outlandish, and Franklin Schaffner makes superb use of them as a long shot chillingly establishes the isolation of the crashed astronauts, as exploration brings alarming intimations of life (pelts staked out on the skyline like crucified scarecrows), and as discovery of a tribe of frightened humans is followed by an eruption of jackbooted apes on horseback. The enigma of the planet's history, juggled through Charlton Heston's humiliating experience of being studied as an interesting laboratory specimen by his ape captors, right down to his final startling rediscovery of civilisation, is quite beautifully sustained.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 72: Fri Mar 13

Ma Vida Loca (Anders, 1993): ICA Cinema, 6.15pm

ICA introduction: Mi Vida Loca a.k.a. My Crazy Life, centres on a group of young Latina women who navigate friendship, rivalry, and responsibility amidst the street gangs of Los Angeles in the early 1990s. Shot in the real streets, porches, and apartments of Echo Park the film paints a picture of a close-knit community with its own conflicts, rules, and pressures. After the success of Gas Food Lodging writer/director Allison Anders delivered a new take on the female-led romance/drama by embracing the story of young Chicanas in an urban setting as colourful and vibrant as the songs on the film’s soundtrack. Organised into three connected chapters and using a mix of professional and non-professional actors, Anders unflinching eye and commitment to reality led Hal Hinson of The Washington Post to praise the “extraordinary powers of observation…each segment is richly detailed and vivid…the stuff of life.” Out of circulation in the UK for decades, Lost Reels presents an extremely rare 35mm screening of this unique drama by special arrangement with HBO and it will be followed by an in-person Q&A with writer/director Allison Anders.

Chicago Reader review: A funky independent feature by Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging), set in the Los Angeles barrios and concentrating on the friendships between working-class women there. The stylistic boldness may get a little top-heavy in spots, but in general this is funny, insightful, and imaginatively told. The cinematographer, interestingly, is Rodrigo Garcia, son of writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 71: Thu Mar 12

Gas Food Lodging (Anders, 1992): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

ICA introduction: One of the quintessential American indies of the nineties, writer/director Allison Anders elicits detailed performances from an engaging cast and astutely observes the quiet challenges of small-town life. Beautifully written, directed and photographed, the film was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 42nd Berlin International Film Festival and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1992. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, “subtly etched characters, effortlessly fine performances, and a moving story that is not easily forgotten.” Tonight’s screening from Lost Reels is a rare 35mm presentation of this evocative, lyrical film followed by an in-person Q&A with writer/director Allison Anders.

Time Out review: Nora (Adams) waits tables and scrapes by, single-handedly raising two teenage daughters in a clapped-out trailer. Romance seems as scarce as rain in her New Mexico backwater: Nora and elder daughter Trudi (Skye) know what it means to be left high and dry, and even young Shade (Balk) suffers rejection at the hands of dreamy Darius (Leitch). But hopes of love die hard, and there's escapism to be found at the local Spanish fleapit. Shade decides to go father-hunting, but an attempt at match-making and the hunt for her long-absent dad (Brolin) yield decidedly mixed results. Far from gloomy fare, this debut from an American independent offers humour, wry observation and sympathetic characterisation. Without patronising her characters, writer-director Anders captures the frustrations of both generations, and the concluding optimistic note isn't forced. Delightfully oddball and strangely sane.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 70: Wed Mar 11

The Promised Land (Wajda, 1975): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.45pm

This screening features a Q&A with actor Daniel Olbrychski. The film, part of the Andrzej Wajda season at BFI Southbank, is also being shown on February 22nd.

Guardian review (in full here):
Andrzej Wajda’s queasily compelling film from 1975, adapted by him from a novel by Wladysław Reymont, is an expressionist comic opera of toxic capitalism and bad faith, carried out by jittery entrepreneurs whose skills include insider trading, worker-exploitation and burning down failing businesses for the insurance. It is set in late 19th-century Łódź, a supposed promised land of free enterprise, whose night skies are shown by Wajda as more or less permanently red with factories set ablaze.
Peter Bradshaw

Here (and above) is the trailer.