Capital Celluloid 2012 - Day 73: Tuesday Mar 13

Altered States (Russell, 1980): Roxy Bar & Screen, London Bridge, 7pm

The Scala Forever team, who organised a season of movies in the capital last year recalling the days of the wonderful Scala cinema at King's Cross, are back with Russell Forever as a tribute to the late, great British film-maker. Here are the details for the full Ken Russell season screenings. This is a FilmBar70 presentation. Details here.

This is the FilmBar70 introduction to the night: Detonate the brain, shred the synapse and de-evolve to the time when the human consciousness was but a glint in the primordial soup’s eye. Filmbar70 proudly pays tribute to the iconoclastic Ken Russell with a screening of the monumentally psychedelic ALTERED STATES (USA 1980). We’ve thrown our hat (and the whole bloody kitchen sink) into the ring of Ken Russell Forever, a season dedicated to the wayward genius of British cinema, with a Filmbar favourite that truly reflects Ken’s attitude and scorched earth policy. Featuring a visionary railing against the mundane banalities of life and a doomed, romantic quest to transgress the barriers of taste and decorum in order to reveal an essential ‘truth’, ALTERED STATES is 100% Russell – overblown yet meticulous, vulgar yet intelligent, preposterous yet absorbing. His first Stateside commitment may have been late to the psychedelic party, but represents the last hurrah of American leftfield/mainstream cinema, and fully unleashes his propensity for verbal and visual pyrotechnics. And, most incredibly, William Hurt is not boring in it.

We’re also delighted to present BARTOK, one of the Monitor series of great composers, broadcast in 1964. This subsequently rarely screened doc concerns the Hungarian Béla Bartók, an early 20th Century composer whose work may seem strikingly modern, yet in actuality is deeply rooted in tradition. A major influence on Bernard Herrmann (just compare the score of PSYCHO to Bartók’s 2nd string quartet), Bartók’s fusion of the avant-garde and folk still reverberates in the concert halls of today."

Here is the FilmBar70 trailer for the evening.