Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 68: Mon Mar 9

The Conductor (Wajda, 1980): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 5.50pm

This presentation is part of the Andrzej Wajda season at BFI Southbank and features an introduction by film critic and scholar Michał Oleszczyk.

Time Out review: Culture shocks: Andrzej Wajda's credit appears over New York; John Gielgud's lips move and a disembodied Pole speaks his lines. Such incongruities are never quite integrated within this parable about a prodigal elder's attempted return to the fold. Gielgud is the eponymous international maestro whose encounter with a young violinist stirs memories of a provincial Polish debut - and an old debt - prompting him to celebrate his jubilee with his long-abandoned ain folk. His reception incorporates simmering jealousies and personality clashes (and Wajda's sly digs at the star system of socialist culture), but the film only really lives in fits and starts. Paul Taylor

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 67: Sun Mar 8

One P.M. (Pennebaker, 1971): ICA Cinema, 2pm

This screening is part of the Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned season at the ICA Cinema (full details here) and will be introduced by the season curator 

Time Out review: In 1968, Godard began work on a film in America (One AM or One American Movie) dealing with aspects of resistance and revolution. Dissatisfied with what he had shot, he abandoned the project. Pennebaker here assembles the Godard footage, together with his own coverage of Godard at work (One PM standing for either One Parallel Movie or One Pennebaker Movie). Although it may be dubious to show stuff that Godard had rejected, the film does manage to convey how he got his results. You can draw your own conclusions about his approach and why he abandoned the film.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 66: Sat Mar 7

Les Flocons d'or/Goldflocken (Schroeter, 1976): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This screening is part of the season at the ICA Cinema devoted to Werner Schroeter. You can finds all the details here.

ICA introduction:
Using the modest sum in prize money that Willow Springs had garnered, Schroeter began work on what would be one of his most uncompromising films to date and an unofficial final part to a trilogy of films alongside Willow Springs and The Death of Maria Malibran. With international co-production extending his cast of regular collaborators like Ingrid Caven and Magdalena Montezuma to include arthouse stalwarts like Bulle Ogier and Udo Kier, the film encompasses four parts weaving together high and low culture in a richly textured tapestry of underground filmmaking. The screening is preceded by an introduction from Anneke Kampman.

Venice film festival review:
A multilingual film, the summary of Schroeter’s early films: four episodes about great feelings and emotions, about the search for luck, about destiny and mortality, taking place in Cuba, France and Bavaria. Beautiful dreamlike variations on classic genres, from kitschy Mexican melodrama to poetic realism of French art films to Bavarian Heimatfilm in dialect. As Schroeter said: “It starts with an introduction conceived like a romantic poem about the general theme of the film: Death”. Les Flocons d’or was Schroeter’s last “super underground film” for which he could combine a unique international cast. Andréa Ferréol gambols erotically with three dogs and recites Poe’s The Raven; Magdalena Montezuma incarnates an angel of death; Bulle Ogier personifies “The Murderous Soul”; and Udo Kier carries a flower into the forest, like Schroeter’s hero Novalis, before repeatedly bashing his head into a rock. 

Here (and above) is an excerpt.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 65: Fri Mar 6

The Hurt Locker (Bigelow, 2008): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.20pm

This is a 35mm presentation which also screens on February 21st. The film is part of the Kathryn Bigelow season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.  

Chicago Reader review:
Kathryn Bigelow’s heart-stopping Iraq war drama (2009) follows a U.S. army bomb squad around Baghdad as it defuses IEDs, a job that places the men in potentially deadly situations a dozen times a day. After the squad’s explosives expert is killed in action, he’s replaced by a shameless cowboy (Jeremy Renner) whose needless risk-taking infuriates his two partners (Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty). He’s a true warrior, but Bigelow defines that in terms of addiction; as one of the other soldiers points out, he doesn’t mind endangering them to get his daily “adrenaline fix.” The war has already produced some excellent fiction films (The Lucky Ones, In the Valley of Elah), but this is the first to dispense with the controversy surrounding the invasion and focus on the timeless subject of men in combat. It’s the best war movie since Full Metal Jacket.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 64: Thu Mar 5

Katyn (Wajda, 2007): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm

This presentation is part of the Andrzej Wajda season at BFI Southbank and also screens on March 10th (with an introduction by journalist Carmen Gray). You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Andrzej Wajda has spent much of his long career dramatizing major events in Polish history, and this poignant feature depicts the circumstances surrounding the Soviet Union’s massacre of thousands of Polish officers in the spring of 1940. The film opens with a striking scene that underlines the plight of Wajda’s people in World War II: as hundreds of Poles cross a bridge to flee invading German troops, others run toward them to escape the advancing Russian army. The rest of this feature follows a handful of families over five years as they suffer through the Nazi occupation and the Soviet occupation that succeeded it.
Joshua Katzman

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 63: Wed Mar 4

Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt, 2008): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm

This film is part of the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Southbank. This screening will be introduced by writer and editor Laura Staab and the film is also being shown on March 8th. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Kelly Reichardt's masterful low-budget drama tells a story a child could understand even as it indicts, with stinging anger, the economic cruelty of George Bush's America. Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain) is impressively restrained as Wendy, a young homeless woman who's living in her car with her beloved mutt, Lucy. After the car breaks down in an Oregon hick town, she makes the mistake of tying Lucy up outside a grocery store before going in to shoplift, and when she gets busted and taken to the local police station, the dog disappears. Reichardt (Old Joy) and co-writer Jonathan Raymond began working on the story after hearing conservative commentators bash the poor in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and their movie is a stark reminder of how easily someone like Wendy can fall through our frayed safety net. The climax is a heartbreaker, and in its haunting finale the movie recalls no less than Mervyn LeRoy's Depression-era classic I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 62: Tue Mar 3

The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice, 1973): Prince Charles Cinema, 5.45pm

Time Out review:
Victor Erice's remarkable one-off (he has made only one film since, the generally less well regarded El Sur) sees rural Spain soon after Franco's victory as a wasteland of inactivity, thrown into relief by the doomed industriousness of bees in their hives. The single, fragile spark of 'liberation' exists in the mind of little Ana, who dreams of meeting the gentle monster from James Whale's Frankenstein, and befriends a fugitive soldier just before he is caught and shot. A haunting mood-piece that dispenses with plot and works its spells through intricate patterns of sound and image.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.