This film is only £1 for Prince Charles Cinema members.
Time Out review: Unexpectedly, at three days' notice, Alan Rudolph was asked by producer Sydney Pollack
to take the helm on this carefree comedy set in the world of Country
& Western music. The result was Rudolph's fastest paced and most
uninhibited film to date: a quirky, rambling tale of two star performers
on the road. Incorporating songs specially written by Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, the film indulges their male-bonding, hard-drinking,
womanising life style, as well as giving Lesley Ann Warren her own shot at performing (not bad). A likeable shaggy dog of a movie, assuming the music's to your taste. David Thomson
For more than two decades, Rita Azevedo Gomes (b. 1952) has quietly
forged and reshaped an unmistakable cinema, rooted in literature,
theatre, music and art history, and unfolding with a rare attentiveness
to language, performance, and the spaces that open between them, and
moving always with deliberate strangeness and clarity. This screening is part of the ICA season devoted to the filmmaker. You can find the full details here.
ICA introduction to tonight's screening: Widowed actor René lives in purposeful isolation, drifting
between phone conversations and memories that refuse to settle, as
fragments of a distant past resurface. The screening will be preceded by an introduction from Benjamin Crais, a scholar, critic, and film programmer. He is on the editorial board of the film magazine Narrow Margin, a quarterly magazine of film criticism.
Critic Adrian Martin has written about Gomes' cinema (full article via this link) and here is an extract from his writing about her on the film screening this evening: Altar (2003) is Rita Azevedo Gomes' most radical and inventive exploration
of this layered approach. At its core stands the small, physical gesture of a
woman, Madeleine (Patrícia Saramago), a gesture that obsesses a widower
playwright (René Gouzene) living on an island. The entire film is constructed
as a slow-paced unfolding of the events and implications surrounding this single
gesture. The oral retelling of memories, filled with rich literary description,
is both accompanied and counterpointed by a careful soundtrack mixing natural sounds,
various musical pieces, and passages of poetry by E.E. Cummings and Sophia de
Mello (read by the director herself). The image-track mixes domestic scenes
where the protagonist tells the story to a young visitor, with a selection of
details from paintings. Altar is a stunningly beautiful piece, very much in line
with an idea that Oliveira and Bénard da Costa discuss in The Fifteenth Stone: that the power of an image comes not from what
it shows but what it signifies, a meaning which is not strictly visible, and
can be found only by going right “inside” the work.Altar also plays with two tropes beloved of Azevedo Gomes:
the paradoxical parallelisms between sensory or aesthetic experiences (“images
so silent that, when seeing them, it seems like I’ve closed my eyes”, as one of
de Mello’s poems says); and the intermingling of spatio-temporal dimensions.
These tropes were already evident in Azevedo Gomes’ stunning debut, The Sound of the Trembling Earth (1990),
where Alberto (José Mário Branco) quotes Leonardo da Vinci’s famous saying:
“Painting is mute poetry and poetry is blind painting”. A powerful device in
this film is the hallucinatory collapse of movements occurring simultaneously in
different directions – a little like the famous “zolly” shots (zooming in and
tracking out) made famous by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).
Chicago Reader review: One of the loveliest of Nick Ray’s movies: this 1952 feature begins as a
harsh film noir and gradually shifts to an ethereal romanticism
reminiscent of Frank Borzage. Robert Ryan is the unstable hero, a
thuggish cop sent upstate in search of a murderer; he ends up falling in
love with the killer’s blind sister (Ida Lupino, who took over some of
the direction when Ray fell ill). Ray excels both in the portrayal of
the corrupt urban environment, a swirl of noirish shadows and violent
movements, and in his exalted vision of the snow-covered countryside,
filmed as a blindingly white, painfully silent field for moral
regeneration. With Ward Bond and an excellent score by Bernard Herrmann. Dave Kehr
This is a 35mm screening and is part of the Rio Forever season. More details here. Director and Rio Patron
Asif Kapadia (Senna, Amy, Diego Maradona, 2073) will introduce the
film, discussing its importance to him both as a director and film
lover. Here is an excellent article by John Patterson in the Guardian on the movie.
Time Out review:
It’s
worrying that 1974’s ‘The Godfather Part II’ is now best known for
being the film-lover’s kneejerk answer to the question ‘which sequel is
superior to the original’? It’s a pointless discussion, because both
films are damn close to perfect: two opposing but complementary sides of
the same coin. If ‘The Godfather’ was a knife in the dark, its sequel
is the long, slow death rattle; if the first film lusted after its
bloodthirsty antiheroes, the second drowns itself in guilt and
recrimination. Two stories run in parallel in ‘Part II’. In the first, a
young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) rises to power in New York,
fuelled by vengeance and brute, old-world morality. In the second, set
50 years later, his son Michael (Al Pacino) struggles to reconcile his
father’s ideals with an uncertain world, and finds himself beset on all
sides by treachery and greed. This is quite simply one of the saddest
movies ever made, a tale of loss, grief and absolute loneliness, an
unflinching stare into the darkest moral abyss. Tom Huddleston Here (and above) is the trailer.
This 35mm screening is on sale at £1 for Prince Charles Cinema.
Time Out review: Jerry Schatzberg might be a very urban cowboy (Panic in Needle Park, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, Sweet Revenge,
etc), but there's no evidence here of slick, Altman-style condescension
to country 'n' western culture. Instead there's an unforced equation of
the upfront emotional currency of C&W lyrics with a simple
triangular plotline pared down from Intermezzo (singer Willie Nelson and
wife Dyan Cannon almost come apart over the lure of the road and one more
infidelity). Nothing new under the sun - but the easy-going fringe
benefits are well worth the ticket: Nelson's a natural, and the duets
with Cannon are pure gold. Paul Taylor
This 16mm screening is introduced by Gregory La Cava researcher Annabel Jessica Goldsmith.
Chicago Reader review: With this 1935 film, Gregory La Cava turned his talent for ensemble improvisation (My Man Godfrey,Stage Door) to melodrama rather than comedy, and the result is a tearjerker of unusual sobriety and heft. The setting is a mental hospital, where the new director (Charles Boyer) is resented by the staff for his scientific detachment, while doctor Claudette Colbert tries to extricate herself from an overly warm working relationship with a married colleague (Joel McCrea). While the drama seeks to define precise emotional distances, La Cava’s camera adheres to his actors with a respectful mobility that still seems strikingly modern. Dave Kehr
This is a Funeral Parade screening. Full details of the strand can be found here.
Time Out review: Hemmed in by an arid marriage, paunchy
middle-aged banker John Randolph
grasps another chance at life when a secret organisation transforms him
into hunky Rock Hudson and gives him a new start as an artist in
Californian
beach-front bohemia. Freedom, however, turns out to be a rather daunting
prospect, and the struggle to fill the blank canvas comes to typify
Hudson's unease with his new existence. Saul Bass' unsettling title
sequence sets the scene for the concise articulation of fifty-something
bourgeois despair, as visualised by James Wong Howe's distorting
camerawork and the edgy discord of Jerry Goldsmith's excoriating score.
After that, the film's uptight view of the hang-loose West Coast feels
like a slightly forced argument, until Frankenheimer regroups and the
jaws of the narrative shut tight on one of the most chilling endings in
all American cinema. Little wonder it flopped at the time, only to be
cherished by a later generation, notably film-makers Siegel and McGehee
who drew extensively on its themes and visuals in their debut Suture.
(This downbeat sci-fi thriller completed Frankenheimer's loose
'paranoid' trilogy - earlier instalments being The Manchurian Candidate
and Seven Days in May). Trever Johnston
