'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.
This film is part of the Peter Watkins season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
BFI introduction: Watkins’ monumental account of the 1871 Paris Commune stages
revolutionary history as if covered by live television, with rival
broadcasts interviewing workers, soldiers and citizens. Shot in a
disused warehouse and developed collaboratively with its
non-professional cast, the film reveals uncomfortable connections
between the suppression of the Commune and contemporary inequalities.
Hailed as the culmination of Watkins’ life’s work, it is an unmissable
work that deserves to be seen on the big screen. James Bell
Time Out review: What looks likely to be the final film from the director of ‘The War
Game’ returns in style to Peter Watkins’ first feature, the provocative and
committed ‘Culloden’. He adopts a similar framing device – the
television presentation of a historical event – to explore the rise and
fall of the 1871 Paris Commune. Around 200 citizens from the relevant
districts reconstruct the events in a film that rigorously interrogates
media authority, political power and personal responsibility. Fluidly
shot in crisp monochrome, it builds a remarkable sense of popular
participation (reflected in its communal making) in a seminal historical
moment and deals head on with both how one makes a revolution actually
work and similarly how it is betrayed by hierarchical interests.
Chicago Reader review: This
is an experimental film in the original rather than fashionable sense
of that term—a 1980 adaptation by Michelangelo Antonioni of Jean
Cocteau's play The Eagle Has Two Heads that
reunites the filmmaker with Monica Vitti in the starring role as a
widowed queen who falls in love with an anarchist poet sent to
assassinate her. What makes this experimental is neither the play nor
the performances, but the fact that Antonioni shot it in color video
(later transferred to 35-millimeter), regarding the medium not as
“television” but as a new kind of cinematography, and associating each
character with a different color as part of his visual exploration. The
choice of the Cocteau play seems more arbitrary than inevitable, which
raises the form-versus-content issue even more than in most Antonioni
features. The results are singular, to say the least. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here(and above) is an extract.
BFI Southbank introduction: Prophetic in its depiction of surveillance culture and the erosion of
civil liberties, Watkins’ drama constructs a portrait of Denmark’s
‘model society’ in crisis during a NATO summit that is overshadowed by
strikes in a Copenhagen shipyard, terrorism and mounting social unrest.
Blending staged drama with the texture and immediacy of television
reportage, the film follows the state’s increasingly authoritarian
response to dissent. James Bell
