This film also has its London premiere at the Prince Charles on August 4th. Details here.
Time Out review: New Yorker Adolpho Rollo (Steve Buscemi) is your classic head-movie auteur. In
his mind he's creating deathless classics of the screen. Back in the
real world, he can't pay the rent on the downtown grothole he calls
home. He knows he must be getting really desperate when he puts a script
'Unconditional Surrender' - 500 pages of angst-drenched gobbledygook -
up for sale and attracts the attentions of one 'Joe' (Seymour Cassel), a
warm-hearted minor gangland figure. Director Rockwell's affectionate
screenplay pits innocence against experience, artist against philistine,
but unexpectedly weighs sympathies towards Cassel's force-of-nature mob
mentor, who's soon giving his po-faced protégé a life-lesson
masterclass in generosity of spirit, wooing the girl-next-door (Beals),
and seat-of-the-pants petty crime. Rockwell's wonderfully unassuming
movie throws a big hug around youthful ambition, b/w filmstock, and the
glowing screen charisma of Cassel. An unheralded gem. Trevor Johnston
BFI introduction: A young Sicilian woman flees her repressive family for London, finding
liberation amid a more permissive environment. Vitti effortlessly blends
humour and dramatics as Assunta, who attempts to track down and murder
the boyfriend who abandoned and dishonoured her. The film follows her as
she travels around the country, gradually discovering the joys of
women’s liberation and self-fulfilment.
Peter
Mandelson’s grandfather Herbert Morrison, deputy Prime Minister in
Clement Attlee’s landmark post-War Labour government, famously carried
his Desert Island Discs choices in his wallet, expecting the call to
appear on the programme.It wasan invitation that sadly was never extended to himandI thought of that tale when I wasactuallyasked to contributeto the most famousof all moviepolls, run by Sight & Sound magazine, the latest of which was in 2022. All those years of trawling the previous decades choiceswith rapt fascination, readingthe articles on the canonand the time keeping thatrunning list of my ten all-time favourites that wereinevitablemixed up withthegreatest in my headwas not wasted. Now,though,I was going to be forced to think about it and make a definitive list. Othersweredoing the same,prompting responses varying widely from“it’s a bit of fun” to “it’s agony”.
The
more I thought about it the more I wanted my contribution to be just
that, a genuine heartfelt one, made up of the films I desperately wanted
people to seebut had not been consideredin the previous voting,and modestlyhoping fora re-evalutionof the choices.I made two rules.All ofthe films in my list(reproduced below) would deserve to bepart oftheSight&SoundGreatest poll conversation andallthe choiceswould not havereceived a single vote in the previous 2012 poll.
Some in this list are simply neglected favourites but in other cases thereareverygoodreasonssome ofthese
films have been overlooked. Jean Grémillon, for instance, faded from
view after an ill-fated directorial career, and has only resurfaced in
the last decade with devoted retrospectives and DVD releases. The
heartbreaking Remorques is one of his masterpieces. The Alfred Hitchcock melodrama Under Capricorn, which quickly disappeared afterbombing at the box officeand thesubsequentdissolving of the director’sproduction company,deserves high rank in the Master’s work but languishesin limbo, only seen at major retrospectives.The Exiles and Spring Night, Summer Night are bothoncelost American independent classics only just receiving their due after recent rediscovery.White Dog,after a desultory release overshadowed bymisguidedaccusations of racism, was not in circulation for many years.Warhol's Vinly, based on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, wasshownin 2013from(fortuitously I later discovered)16mm in an ICA gallery and feltthrillinglyauthentic,thesoundof thewhirring projectorand the artist’s singular framingcombining to create a mesmeric experience. Here is the full list:
Remorques/Stormy Waters (Jean Grémillon, 1941)
Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949)
The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)
La Baie des anges/Bay of Angels (Jacques Demy, 1963)
Vinyl (Andy Warhol, 1965)
Spring Night, Summer Night (Jospeh L. Anderson, 1967)
Heroic Purgatory (Yosgishige Yoshida, 1970)
Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)
White Dog (Sam Fuller, 1982)
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2005)
Seven from the list have been shown in a London cinema since the poll
appeared and now the Jacques Demy film gets anothert screenings at the Prince Charles Cinema.
Time Out review: Jacques Demy's second feature has a ravishing Jeanne Moreau, ash-blonde for the
occasion and dressed all in white, as a compulsive gambler who doesn't
care what happens to her so long as she has a chip to start her on the
roulette tables. Ostensibly the subject is gambling, but the real theme
is seduction - with Moreau casting a spell on Claude Mann that turns him every
which way - and this is above all a visually seductive film. Shot mainly
inside the casinos and on the sunstruck promenades of Nice and Monte
Carlo, it is conceived as a dazzling symphony in black and white.
Moreau's performance is magnificent, but it's really Jean Rabier's
camera which turns the whole film into an expression of sheer joy - not
only in life and love, but things. Iron bedsteads make arabesques
against white walls; a little jeweller's shop becomes a paradise of
strange ornamental clocks; a series of angled mirrors echo the heroine
as she runs down a corridor into her lover's arms; roulette wheels spin
to a triumphant musical accompaniment; and over it all hangs an aura of
brilliant sunshine. Tom Milne
Here (and above) are the evocative opening credits.
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
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
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.
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
