Capital Celluloid 2014 - Day 143: Sat May 24

No1: Walerian Borowczyk Short Films Programme: ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This ICA programme includes two (Les Astronautes and Les Jeux Des Anges) of what critic Michael Brooke describes in his BFI article here as the five must-see movies from Borowczyk.

Here is the ICA introduction: Coinciding with Walerian Borowczyk: The Listening Eye in the Fox Reading Room at the ICA, this programme offers a unique opportunity to see rarely screened short films by the Polish painter, sculptor and filmmaker.

This programme of short films was originally selected by Walerian Borowczyk for an exhibition at Le Ranelagh in Paris 1965:

Renaissance (1963) 9’
Był raz Sobie… / Once Upon A Time… (1957) 9’
Encyclopedie de Grand-Maman (1962) 6’
Dom / Home (1958) 11’
Szkoła / School (1958) 7’
Le Concert (1962) 7’
Sztandar młodych / Banner of Youth (1957) 2’
Strip-Tease (1957) 2’
Les Astronautes (1959) 12’
Nagrodzone uczucie / Requited Feelings (1957) 8’
Les Jeux Des Anges (1964) 14’

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No2 Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013): Barbican Cinema, 6pm

Award-winning Polish born director Pawel Pawlikowski returns to his homeland for this moving and intimate drama about a young novitiate nun in 1960s Poland who, on the verge of taking her vows, discovers a dark family secret dating back to the Nazi occupation.

The film will be followed by a ScreenTalk with director Pawel Pawlikowski.

Time Out review:
Tragedy hangs like smoke over this spectral, startling return to form for Polish-born, British-based writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski. First and foremost, there’s the historical tragedy of The Holocaust which drives the story. But there’s also, it seems, a pervasive, underlying layer of personal tragedy: it doesn’t feel like a stretch to place ‘Ida’ alongside, say, Roman Polanski’s ‘Macbeth’ and Elem Klimov’s ‘Come and See’, films haunted by the loss of a spouse and a subsequent darkening in the filmmaker’s view of the world. ‘Ida’ is a film built of snapshots: few scenes run longer than a minute or two and the dialogue is sparse and functional, in stark contrast to Pawlikowski’s poetic earlier works like ‘My Summer of Love’. In addition, the painterly, painstakingly composed camera angles are all self-consciously ‘off’, Pawlikowski’s film may be bleak and unforgiving, but it’s also richly sympathetic and deeply moving.
Tom Huddleston

Here (and above) is the trailer.