Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 229: Mon Aug 17

The War Game (Watkins, 1965): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.20pm

This film, which also screens on August 2nd, is part of the Peter Watkins season at BFI Southbank. Full details here. Tonight's presentation features an introduction by season co-curator William Fowler.

Time Out review:
An amateur film-maker headhunted by the BBC’s Huw Weldon in 1963, Peter Watkins presented his new boss with a list of ‘films which ought to be made’. Top of that list was a documentary on the effects of thermo-nuclear war – about which, Watkins believed, there was a conspiracy of silence. As it turned out, he was right. Weldon persuaded him to tackle Culloden first – the English rout of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Highland uprising, 1746. If there was some safety in history, no-one told Watkins. He treated it as a piece of live reportage, recreating the battle and interviewing the participants, from the generals down to the cannonfodder. Charles Stuart emerges as an arrogant fool, a disaster for his followers, but the English Duke of Cumberland is indicted of something we might now call ‘ethnic cleansing’, genocide. Shot for just £3,000, ‘Culloden’ (1964) was a triumph, a trailblazer which still exerts considerable influence – and it enabled Watkins to make ‘The War Game’ (1965), which applied a similar ‘you-are-there’ approach, this time to a projected nuclear war. A subtitle might have been: ‘Learn to Start Worrying and Loathe the Bomb’. Exposing the gross inadequacy of civil defense strategies and  near-universal ignorance about the power of the H-bomb, the film proved far too frightening for the BBC, who declined to broadcast it after consulting with the Home Office and Number 10. Watkins resigned in protest, and embarked on an itinerant independent career. ‘The War Game’ was screened in cinemas, and latterly in schools, but it wasn’t until 1985 that the BBC transmitted it on TV for the first time anywhere in the world. Released on DVD with critical commentaries, and an earlier Watkins short apiece, these remain dynamic, disturbing, committed films from a revolutionary film-maker.
Tom Charity

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 228: Sun Aug 16

Le Maison de Bois (Pialat, 1971): BFI Southbank, 12pm

This screening is presented by A Nos Amours, with am introduction by David Thompson. A Nos Amours is a collective founded by Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts dedicated to programming, promoting, understanding and enjoying over-looked, under-exposed or especially potent cinema.

BFI introduction: 
This restoration finally allows modern audiences to see Maurice Pialat’s landmark series, which he regarded as his finest work, in all its glory. Set during the tumult of the First World War, Pialat’s film focuses on the lives of three boys who were sent for safety to the countryside by their respective parents. Opening in 1917, the drama finds Hervé, Michel, and Albert having mostly forgotten their real parents, after spending years with Albert Picard, his wife and two children. As they grow up, they witness the impact of war and the subtle changes of life in the village. Working mostly with non-professional actors, Pialat’s film is striking for its naturalism, creating an immersive portrait of life in and around the country village. A key location in the drama is the school, with its stern yet understanding teacher played by the filmmaker. Unseen for years, La maison des bois should now sit alongside Ken Loach’s equally bold Days of Hope (1975) as one of the finest achievements of 1970s television.
Ian Haydn Smith, writer and curator 

Chicago Reader review:
Maurice Pialat’s 1971 TV miniseries, set in a rural French community toward the end of World War I, is bracingly devoid of sentimentality, building emotion through accretion of details and an unvarnished yet ultimately generous view of humanity. A gamekeeper (Pierre Doris), his wife (Jacqueline Dufranne), and their two grown children welcome three displaced Parisian boys into their secluded home in the forest. One of the youngsters (Herve Levy), troubled by his parents’ mysterious absence, begins acting out, but his warmth and spontaneity disarm many of the locals—including the gamekeeper’s boss, an aloof marquis with some dark secrets of his own.
Andrea Gronvall

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 227: Sat Aug 15

Graduate First (Pialat, 1978): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.45pm

This is part of a mini-season of Maurice Pialat films at BFI Southbank. Details here. The film also screens on August 18th and 21st.

Harvard Film Archive introduction: 
After two false starts and a large part of the budget spent, Pialat reworked the concept and the script for the third time, assembling a few professional teenage actors and filling in the rest of the cast with amateurs culled from Lens, the same province of Naked Childhood. While much of the wandering narrative was scripted as they shot—often from the teenagers’ actual conversations of the day before—at other times the actors would just be hanging out and not realize they were being filmed. Pass Your Exams First follows no single character or primary focus, as if, like its confused subjects teetering on the edge of maturity and responsibility, it is experimenting with various paths without knowing quite where any of them will lead. The most comic entry in Pialat’s oeuvre, the film follows the group’s antics in school, at home and on holiday, and at the only hot spot, the town’s actual café. With limited options at a time of shifting traditions and economies, they engage in fleeting couplings, contradictory opinions, vague dreams and their own false starts. Presciently inscribed by the hand of Pialat, their lives remain a series of question marks … awkwardly, ambivalently, precisely rendered question marks. 

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 226: Fri Aug 14

A Nos Amours (Pialat, 1983): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6pm 

This screening is presented by A Nos Amours, with an introduction by David Thompson. A Nos Amours is a collective founded by Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts dedicated to programming, promoting, understanding and enjoying over-looked, under-exposed or especially potent cinema.

This film is also being shown on August 17th and 20th. Details here. 

Once you've seen this film you might want to read critic Nick Pinkerton's take on this troubling movie here from the Reverse Shot website here.

Chicago Reader review:
A 15-year-old French girl (Sandrine Bonnaire, extraordinary) finds refuge from her troubled family in a series of casual sexual encounters. The subject invites a certain social-worker condescension (it's the stuff of TV movies), yet Maurice Pialat's mise-en-scene allows us no comforting distance from the characters. His ragged long takes plunge us straight into the action and hold us there, as if we, too, were combatants in this family war. His unorthodox dramatic construction rejects the symmetry of classical plotting, and the narrative has a quirky, self-propelling quality that allows for some astonishing things to happen. Pialat himself plays the father, whose disappearance sets the action in motion and whose reappearance makes it explode.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 225: Thu Aug 13

 Privilege (Watkins, 1967): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.45pm 

This film, which also screens on August 8th, is part of the Peter Watkins season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

BFI introduction:
Peter Watkins’ extraordinary satire imagines a near-future Britain in which a manufactured pop idol is used by the authorities to distract the public into ‘fruitful conformity’. Casting Manfred Mann’s Paul Jones as the emotionally hollow Steven Short, alongside 1960s icon Jean Shrimpton, Watkins anticipated the growing entanglement of celebrity culture, advertising and political manipulation. It’s one of the key British films of the era.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 224: Wed Aug 12

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Oshima, 1969): ICA Cinema,  

This film, which is also screened on August 9th, is part of the Nagisa Oshima season at the ICA Cinema. You can find the full details here. 

Time Out review:
One of Nagisa Oshima's most teasing and provocative collages, inspired by the student riots of '68 and contemporary 'youth culture' generally. The main thread running through it is the relationship between a passive and vaguely effeminate young man and an aggressive and vaguely masculine young woman. They meet when he steals books and she poses as a shop assistant who catches him in the act; they spend the rest of the movie trying to reach satisfactory orgasms with each other. Their route takes them through a dizzying mixture of fact and fiction, from an encounter with a real-life sexologist to involvement in a 'fringe' performance of a neo-primitive kabuki show. The logical connections are there, but they're deliberately submerged in a welter of contrasting moods, styles and lines of thought.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2026 — Day 223: Tue Aug 11

The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss (Zeisler, 1936): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.20pm

This 35mm presentation features an introduction by Charles Drazin, writer and film historian.

BFI introduction:
Ernest Bliss is rich but miserable. His doctor diagnoses an excess of self-indulgence and prescribes a dose of hard work to sharpen his zest for life. Through his pursuit of happiness, Ernest finds romance and a social conscience. The role of Bliss was tailor-made for Grant’s suave but bluff screen persona, while Hollywood import Mary Brian is a worthy co-star, with excellent support from an ensemble of solid British talent. This BFI National Archive print runs close to the original British release, while all other copies currently available are of the 62-minute American-release cut.

Here (and above) is an extract.