The event Life On Mars invites all those fascinated with space to get together for a screening of the extraordinary Russian silent film “Aelita”, which this year celebrates its 90th anniversary.
Throughout the night the audience will also engage in a dreamy travel through soundscapes and imagery created by contemporary artists. All right in the heart of the city.
As part of this special event, the venue will be transformed by selected international visual artists. Amongst them, artist, adventurer and future astronaut Michael Najjar, documentary filmmaker and former planetary scientist Christopher Riley, French visual artist Anaïs Tondeur, and, premiering works in UK, Lithuanian artists Laura Grybkauskaite and Vsevolod Kovalevskij.
The night will also feature a sound performance, based on NASA transmissions, by the sound artist Andrew Page whose work has been exhibited in art galleries in the UK, Europe, America and Canada.
Renowned film scholar and Sight & Sound contributor Ian Christie will introduce the
screening. Here (and above) is the opening.
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No 2 Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (Oshima, 1983): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.40pm
This is screening as part of the Jeremy Thomas season at BFI Southbank and is also bein gshown on April 2nd and 15th. Details here.
Chicago Reader review:
Lurid sadism blends with equally lurid lyricism in this first English-language film (1983) by leading Japanese director Nagisa Oshima (The Ceremony, In the Realm of the Senses). The setting is a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, where four main characters—a conciliatory British officer (Tom Conti), a brutal peasant guard (Takeshi), a beautiful, guilt-riddled English commando (David Bowie), and the equally beautiful Japanese commandant (Ryuichi Sakamoto)—work out different responses to the savage conditions around them. The elliptical narrative centers on the unspoken erotic attraction between Sakamoto and Bowie, and Oshima appears to be treating ideas of elegantly transmogrified, purified emotions, yet the context and frequent incontinence of the execution bring the film uncomfortably close to the pseudophilosophical bondage fantasies of Yukio Mishima.
Dave Kehr
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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