This 16mm screening, introduced by Nanette Newman, one of its stars and the wife of the late Bryan Forbes, is part of the Projecting the Archive: Bryan Forbes at 100 season at BFI Southbank. You can find the full details here.
BFI introduction: A catalogue of mishaps and bizarre coincidences foils the attempts of
two bumbling brothers to secure a fortune from their elderly uncle. This
surreal comedy won a BAFTA for Julie Harris’ exquisite period costumes,
and is brimming with famous faces, including cameos by Tony Hancock and
Peter Sellers. The print being screened is Peter Sellers’ own personal
16mm copy.
The film will feature a video introduction by writer Adam Żuławski.
Andrzej Żuławski’s sprawling lunar futurist epic, a dark and delirious allegory on civilisation and original sin is a haven
of futurist worldbuilding, hemmed in by Magdalena Tesławska’s ornate,
baroque costume design. Famous for its long, troubled and repeatedly
thwarted production, On the Silver Globe was finally
immortalised in its incomplete state in 1988, with supplemented scenes
of contemporary Poland that further a jarring juxtaposition to the
story’s otherworldly alien landscapes.
Film Comment review extract (full analysis here): Even with this extra self-reflexive layer, it’s hard to make claims for On the Silver Globe
as a great film or even, by conventional criteria, a good one. It’s
excessive in so many ways—so grandiose, so hysterical, so utterly
earnest. Yet it’s a film you should see, on the big screen if possible,
because it’s such a spectacular anomaly—because its sheer will to
strangeness is so furiously unrestrained. In its poetic and
philosophical aspirations, in its outrageous maximalism, in its utter
disregard for the normal prerogatives of pleasing an audience, this is
the sort of film that by rights should not even exist. On the Silver Globe is not just a film maudit,
but a genuine example of that small but exalted category of films you
might call “Impossible Cinema,” in which I’d include other massive
visionary projects either completed or aborted: Andrei Rublev; the landscape epics of Miklos Jancsó; Jodorowsky’s unmade Dune, as well as his earlier completed films; Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God (similar to Silver Globe in its mix of primitivism and futurism); and the supposedly forthcoming Dau, a long-gestating Russian epic of already-legendary don’t-hold-your-breath status. Jonathan Romney
This special screening will be introduced by film critic and historian Pamela Hutchinson who will be signing copies of her book The Curse of Queen Kelly in the BFI Southbank Foyer following the film. There will be a live piano accompaniment by Neil Brand. The long-awaited restoration and reconstruction of the surviving nitrate
reels of Queen Kelly, based on Von Stroheim’s original scripts, with
added stills and titles, was undertaken by longtime friends of the BFI, Dennis Doros and Amy Heller of Milestone Films.
Chicago Reader review: Erich von Stroheim’s 1928 film was the last that he would be allowed to
sign, yet it, too, survives only in a fragmentary version. The story of a
convent girl who is romanced by a prince but ends up as the mistress of
an African bordello, it was intended to run for five hours, but
producer Joseph P. Kennedy (who financed the film as a showcase for his
close friend Gloria Swanson) turned off the money at the midway point,
and the film was released in a truncated 70-minute version. (Two reels
of the African footage, shot but never incorporated into the original
prints, were discovered some years ago and spliced into the present
101-minute version.) Though it’s far from coherent, Queen Kelly is one of Stroheim’s most provocative works, not just in terms of its
extravagant subject matter but in the aesthetic shift it suggests
between the fierce realism of Stroheim’s earlier work and a distant,
abstract perspective that points to the cinema of Josef von Sternberg. Dave Kehr
This is part of the Claude Chabrol season at BFI Southbank. The other screenings of the film on September 5th is detailed here.
Chicago Reader review: Claude Chabrol’s first color feature (1959) adapts a Stanley Ellin thriller in which a bourgeois family’s oedipal
conflicts lead to murder. The beautiful color cinematography of
Aix-en-Provence is by Henri Decae, and the film is plotted with a mise
en scene that suggests Alfred Hitchcock. The lively if uneven cast
includes Jean-Paul Belmondo, the creepy Andre Jocelyn, Madeleine
Robinson, Bernadette Lafont, and nouvelle vagueaxiom Laszlo
Szabo. It’s not a total success, but it was one of the first pictures to
translate the French New Wave’s genre interests into mainstream terms,
and it’s full of sexy and irreverent details. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This film, presented in a new 4K restoration, also screens on September 9th, 19th and 26th. You can find all the details here.
Time Out review: Although
the ending is a bit of a cop out from a feminist point of view, Martin
Scorsese's warm and witty blending of the road movie with the
conventions of the women's weepie is a delight. Ellen Burstyn is
excellent as the eponymous heroine who, following the death of a husband
she barely loved, sets off for the Monterey of her childhood with hopes
of reviving her abandoned singing career. Her encounters, and those of
her precociously witty 12-year old son, are observed with great
generosity and a raw realism, while Scorsese typically makes wonderful
use of music to underline character and situation. Bitter-sweet and very
charming. Geoff Andrew
This is part of the Claude Chabrol season at BFI Southbank with the film being introduced by critic Geoff Andrew. Other screenings of the film
(September 5th and October 4th) during the season are
detailed here.
Chicago Reader review: Claude Chabrol’s 1969 adaptation of Nicholas Blake’s thriller The Beast Must Die.
Michel Duchaussoy and Jean Yanne star in a tale of a father obsessed
with discovering and murdering the hit-and-run killer of his son. One of
Chabrol’s most affecting, and chilling, studies of middle-class guilt
and the parameters of retribution. Not to be missed. Don Druker
This 35mm screening of a superb and rarely seen western is part of the Harry Dean Stanton season and is also being shown on September 16th (details here).
Time Out review: A wonderfully quirky Western, brilliantly scripted by Thomas McGuane, which strips all the cute whimsy away from the Butch Cassidy
theme (outlaws on the run from a relentless lawman), replacing it with a
kind of pixillated terror. Playing the 'regulator' as a camp Buffalo
Bill with an Irish accent, Marlon Brando makes his entrance playing peekaboo
from behind his horse, and at one point even stalks his prey in a dress
and poke bonnet. But he is also a legalised killer, expert with a rifle
but preferring (as the flail of God) to use a harpoon shaped like a
crucifix. And as his gloating sadism shades into hints of bizarre
perversion when he dedicates a love song and a kiss to his horse, the
tone gradually darkens to a kind of horror. It's one of the few truly
major Westerns of the '70s, with a very clear vision of the historical
role played by fear and violence in the taming of the wilderness. Tom Milne
