This rarely screened Monica Vitti film will be introduced by film scholar Richard Dyer, who will talk on the life and career of the Italian actress.
Cine Lumiere introduction: After his wife Lisa leaves him for another man, Livio forms an elaborate plan to bring them back together by inviting his estranged wife, his French love rival Jean-Claude, and his secretary Patty on a weekend away. Monica Vitti’s performance as Lisa won her a fourth David di Donatello award for Best Actress, cementing her reputation as the “Queen of Italian cinema”, especially for her roles in comedies for which she is so fondly remembered in Italy.
This 35mm presentation, also being screened on June 22nd (details here), is part of the 80s on 35mm season at Screen on the Green (all the films can be found via this link).
Chicago Reader review: It's
personal all right, also solipsistic, intransigent, and occasionally
ridiculous. David Lynch's 1986 fever-dream fantasy, of a young college
student (Kyle MacLachlan) returned to his small-town roots and all
manner of strangeness, is replete with sexual fear and loathing,
parodistic inversions (of Capra, Lubitsch), and cannibalistic recyclings
from Lynch's own Eraserhead and Dune.
The bizarrely evolving story—MacLachlan becomes involved with two
women, one light and innocent (Laura Dern, vaguely lost), the other dark
and sadomasochistic (Isabella Rossellini), as well as with a murderous
psychopath (a brilliantly demented Dennis Hopper)—seems more obsessive
than expressive at times, and the commingling of sex, violence, and
death treads obliquely on familiar Ken Russell territory: it's Crimes of Passion with
the polarities reversed. Still, the film casts its spell in countless
odd ways, in the archetype-leaning imagery, eccentric tableau styling,
and moth-in-candle-flame attraction to the subconscious twilight. Pat Graham
BFI introduction: The influence of Isaac Julien’s groundbreaking, lyrical and poetic meditation on the life of revered Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes still ripples throughout the representation of queerness on screen today. Following the film, host of the award-winning Busy Being Black podcast Josh Rivers will be joined by BFI Race Equality Lead Rico Johnson-Sinclair and Black Queer Media Writer Dr Rico Norwood to discuss the work (alongside Marlon T Riggs’ Tongues Untied) and explore the past, present, and future of queer cinema, reaffirming modern queer cinema’s afro-centric roots.
This great film, which also screens on June 20th, is part of the Robert Bresson season. Full details of all the films included in the retrospective are here.
Chicago Reader review: Robert Bresson’s telling of the King Arthur legend begins where most versions end, describing a Camelot of fading glory, where the ideals of chivalry and spiritual purity are threatened by a modern, pragmatic mentality. The rhythms of this grave, spare film are slow and irresistible, the images closely cropped and full of inexpressible portent. Released in 1974, it belongs withPickpocketandAu hasard Balthazarat the highest level of Bresson’s achievement. Dave Kehr
The Kennington Bioscope is a regular cinema event featuring live accompaniment to silent films that takes place at the Cinema Museum. Tonight's film is from a BFI 35mm print.
BFI Screenonline introduction:One of the stranger films to emerge from Britain in the 1920s,Man Without Desirewas the feature film debut ofAdrian Brunel, better known today for a series of short burlesques, includingCrossing the Great Sagrada(1925), and as a founder of theFilm SocietywithIvor Montaguand others. As the title - which surprisingly made it past the censor - suggests,Man Without Desireconcerns loss of sexual desire and, implicitly, impotence. At its centre isIvor Novello(on his way up but not yet the stage and screen idol he was to become) as tragic lover Vittorio, who, in despair at the death of his love Leonora, volunteers to be put into suspended animation, awaking after two centuries and immediately finding himself attracted to Leonora's descendant - and virtual double - Genevra. But Vittorio's slumber has robbed him of his passion, and their marriage is unfulfilled. Novello's other-worldly beauty and sexual ambiguity - a homosexual when such things weren't spoken of - is perfectly suited to Vittorio's aloofness, just as it was to his more celebrated role asHitchcock'sThe Lodgerthree years later.Man Without Desirewas the first of three films withBrunel, includingNoël Coward'sThe Vortex(1927).
This screening will be introduced by Dr Elena Gorfinkel (King’s College London).The evening is programmed by Oliver Dickens to raise funds for Ukraine humanitarian aid and the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre in Kyiv. The Russian invasion has disrupted funding, making it not only impossible for the Dovzhenko Centre to cover basic costs such as utilities or to continue its regular activities, but also to pay its staff’s salaries. Proceeds from this screening will be split between the Dovzhenko Centre and Ukraine humanitarian aid.
Cine Lumiere introduction: Ostensibly the story of the strained relationship between a divorced translator and her teenaged son, The Long Farewell’s “almost unbearable tension… is explored in a series of fluid, inventive sequences, which … show Muratova [to be] streets ahead of her male contemporaries” (Ian Christie). Completed in 1971 and promptly shelved by censors for sixteen years, Muratova’s important early feature, scripted by prominent feminist Natalya Ryazantseva, was deemed too aesthetic, personal and elitist by Soviet authorities and got her disqualified from directing at Odessa Film Studio. Heralded as a lost masterpiece when finally released in 1987, this simple tale of maternal jealousy and filial rebellion is transformed by Muratova into a thrillingly odd drama full of visual sophistication, exquisite camerawork, and quietly stunning piano score by Oleg Karavaichuk.
Time Out review: The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty outdoes even Wim Wenders' subsequent Alice in the Cities in
its sense that everything shown is at once subjective and objective.
German goalie Bloch (Arthur Brauss) walks out of a game in Vienna, hangs
around, commits an arbitrary murder, and then takes a coach to the
Austrian border to look up an old flame. It's the journey of a man who's
getting too old for his job, living off his nerves, sustained by his
taste for Americana, movies and rock (everything from Hitchcock to
'Wimaway'). Brauss' engagingly hangdog face anchors it all in
recognisable human feelings, while avoiding the least hint of
'psychological' explanation. More than in his later movies, Wenders'
style here has a remarkably charged quality: every frame haunts you for
goddam weeks. Tony Rayns
Here (and above) is Wim Wenders' introduction to the film.
This 35mm presentation (also being screened on June 26th) is part of the Judy Garland season at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details of the season here.
Time Out review: A dazzling Caribbean cod-swashbuckler of a musical, with acting as its very theme and the imaginative projection of illusionism its self-referential life-blood. Strolling player (Gene Kelly) woos sheltered but romantic girl (Judy Garland) in the guise of the notorious pirate Macoco, while her dull fiancé (Walter Slezak) desperately hangs on to his own concealed identity.Cole Portersongs, a choreographed camera, vivacious performances, and Minnelli's customarily camp colour scheme and decor are wonderfully seductive vehicles for the themes that run obsessively through almost all the director's films, be they musicals, comedies or melodramas. Paul Taylor
All great art stays relevant,
but the times can add extra potency. Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd is the story
of a vagabond turned TV star turned politician, abusing his power for personal
gain. Caught on tape making damaging comments, marrying a woman half his age...
it's hard not to see this 1957 film as a parable for the Trump era. But it's
also a universal film about the seductive power of appealing to 'the common
man', and the cynicism behind populism. From the writer-director team
behind On the Waterfront, this film plays the same trick on the
audience as its star, Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith), does on its audience:
piling spadeloads of charisma to make us accept anything. Duncan Carson
Chicago Reader review: Andy
Griffith, as a hick radio star modeled on Arthur Godfrey, delivers an
astonishing, sinister performance in Elia Kazan's 1957 essay on media
demagoguery. Promoted by Patricia Neal, he swells from a local
personality to a national political force. The script, by Budd
Schulberg, is pat and badly proportioned, but the picture has a sharp,
dirty appeal. With Lee Remick (excellent in her film debut), Walter
Matthau, and Anthony Franciosa. Dave Kehr
This 35mm presentation is part of the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details via this link here.
Time Out review: A deserving Palme d'Or winner at Cannes '99, Rosetta is in the same, grim realist mould as the Dardennes' earlier La Promesse;
it, too, offers a glimmer of hope through the prospect of friendship.
Teenage Rosetta (Emilie Dequenne) has it tough: living in a trailer park
with her promiscuous, alcoholic mother, she tries to hang on to
whatever mundane jobs she can get, but for all her determination and
hard work, bad luck and her surly, volatile disposition repeatedly tell
against her. Is life really worth living? Using very little dialogue and
long, hand-held tracking shots (the relentlessly restless visuals
perfectly reflect Rosetta's unsettled life, the secret to which is
provided only halfway through the movie - and even then, subtly), the
Dardennes never sentimentalise their heroine but respect the mysteries
of her soul; the result is a film almost Bressonian in its rigour and
power to touch the heart. Geoff Andrew Here (and above) is the trailer.
Chicago Reader review: Robert Bresson made this short
electrifying study in 1959; it's one of
his greatest and purest films, full of hushed transgression and sudden
grace. A petty thief (Martin Lasalle) becomes addicted to the art and
thrill of picking pockets. He loses his friends and fiancee, and begins
to live like a monk, concentrating his entire being on his obsessional,
increasingly devotional acts of theft. If the film seems familiar,
that's because Paul Schrader recycled great chunks of it in his scripts
for Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, and Raging Bull. But the original
retains its awesome, austere power. With Pierre Leymarie and Marika
Green. In French with subtitles. Dave Kehr
This film is part of the Paul Schrader season at the Prince Charles. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Despite a steady rise in his craft as both a writer and a director, Paul Schrader is still light years away from his mentor and model, Robert Bresson. His persistent ludicrous efforts to remakeDiary of a Country PriestandPickpocketin Hollywood terms have already given usTaxi DriverandAmerican Gigolo, and they’re as doomed as ever in this portrait of a Manhattan drug dealer (Willem Dafoe) desperate to clean up his act. (Now Schrader appears to be trying to remakeTaxi Driver, complete with excremental metaphors, nocturnal views of New York, and droning offscreen narration by the hero.) But Susan Sarandon (who improves even more with age than Schrader does) is so good as Dafoe’s boss, and the dialogue is so literate for such a familiar story, that there’s a lot to admire—it’s Schrader’s best film—as long as one can get past the transcendental claptrap (e.g., aNew York Postheadline reading “Fall From Grace”) that Schrader sheds compulsively. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This screening of Kira Muratova’s The Asthenic Syndrome is programmed by Oliver Dickens to raise funds for Ukraine humanitarian aid and the National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Centre in Kyiv. The Russian invasion has disrupted funding, making it not only impossible for the Dovzhenko Centre to cover basic costs such as utilities or to continue its regular activities, but also to pay its staff salaries. Proceeds from this screening will be split between the Dovzhenko Centre and Ukraine humanitarian aid.
Kira Muratova (1934-2018) was one of the most suppressed (and most transgressive) filmmakers of the Soviet era. She graduated from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, before moving to Odessa, Ukraine where she would make most of her films. Her most celebrated film, the epic The Asthenic Syndrome was winner of the Silver Bear at the 1990 Berlinale and brought her international acclaim. The film will be introduced by Dr Elena Gorfinkel of King's College, London.
Chicago Reader review: A great movie (1989), but not a pleasant or an easy one. Directed by the transgressive Kira Muratova in her mid-50s, it has been rightly called the only “masterpiece of glasnost,” though it was banned by the Russian government for obscenity. Beginning as a powerful black-and-white narrative about a middle-aged woman doctor in an exploding, aggressive rage over the death of her husband (who resembles Stalin), the film eventually turns into an even more unorthodox tale in color about a schoolteacher (cowriter Sergei Popov) who periodically falls asleep regardless of what’s happening around him. (The title alludes to a form of disability that encompasses both the doctor’s aggressiveness and the schoolteacher’s passivity.) Though this tragicomic epic has plenty to say about postcommunist Russia, it also deals more generally with the demons loose in today’s world. It may drive you nuts–as it was undoubtedly meant to–but you certainly won’t forget it. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This 35mm presentation in the 'Projecting the Archive' strand at BFI Southbank will be introduced by film historian Jonathan Rigby.
BFI introduction: A convict settlement on a tropical island descends into revolution due to the inhuman treatment inflicted on the inmates. Leading man Conrad Veidt was one of Britain’s biggest gains from the 1930s exodus from Germany and as ‘Convict 83’ he gives the kind of intense performance that few British actors could muster. To counter the surrounding masculinity, Hollywood import Helen Vinson sports Schiaparelli gowns as Veidt’s love interest. The production is lent polish by Hitchcock collaborators Charles Bennett and Sidney Gilliat on the script side, while art director Oscar Werndorff brings to life a hellish prison camp on the studio floor.
This 35mm presentation, also screening on June 7th (details here), is part of the Judy Garland season at BFI Southbank. All the films in the season can be found here.
Chicago Reader review: Vincente Minnelli’s first nonmusical (1945) is a charming and stylish if somewhat sentimental love story about a soldier (Robert Walker) on a two-day leave in New York who meets and marries an office worker (Judy Garland). Filmed on a studio soundstage with enough expertise to make it seem like a location shoot, the film is appealing largely for its performances and the innocence it projects. (Similar qualities can be found, at a half-century remove, in Richard Linklater’sBefore Sunrise.) In addition to Walker and Garland, Keenan Wynn and Moyna Macgill are well used. Screenwriters Robert Nathan and Joseph Schrank adapted a story by Paul and Pauline Gallico. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This screening is part of the 80s Cinema Late Nights season in 35mm at Screen On The Green (full list of films here). It's also screened on June 8th. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Eddie Murphy as a Detroit detective who heads west to avenge the murder of a pal. It’s a satisfying star vehicle of the old school, in which the undisguised plot mechanics of the scenario serve only to allow Murphy to do his thing—razzing uptight, white-bread authority figures—and do it often. The film is overloaded with commercial elements, but director Martin Brest (Going in Style) does his best to find personal variations, teasing some pleasing silent-comedy rhythms out of the opening chase and inserting some affectionate Laurel-and-Hardy byplay between two supporting cops (Judge Reinhold and John Ashton) during the climactic shoot-out. It’s one of the few star comedies of the early 80s to allot some humor and personality to the minor characters. With Lisa Eilbacher, Ronny Cox, and Steven Berkoff. Dave Kehr
This 35mm presentation, also screening on June 12th, is part of the Robert Bresson season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: The first full-length feature of Robert Bresson, made in 1943 and preceded only by his 1934 comedy,Affaires Publiques. His spare, concentrated style had not yet fully developed, but the seeds are there in this study of a Dominican nun’s obsessive devotion to a female ex-convict who comes to live in her convent. The spiritual themes—confession, absolution, salvation—are explored through visual and dramatic paradoxes, as Bresson draws parallels between a life in prison and a life in God, and finds his final image of freedom in a pair of handcuffs. The script, by dramatist Jean Giraudoux, is talky and relatively conventional (it even makes some concessions toward some very un-Bressonian suspense), but the heaviness of the dialogue is balanced by Jany Holt’s superbly understated performance as the prisoner—a performance that looks forward to the invisible acting style of Bresson’s mature work. Dave Kehr
The Rebel Reel Cine Club presents this alternative jubilee presentation.
Quietus review: Released in Elizabeth II's silver jubilee year of 1978 as a provocation seemingly towards just about everyone, it's little wonder Derek Jarman's second feature film,Jubilee, caused such an uproar. The Queen herself is mugged and killed for her crown early on in a Deptford edgeland, the punk movement still then raging over London is unconsciously sent up by some of the very people who were part of it, and the raw mixture of violence, conservative nostalgia, swipes at Catholicism and copious nudity makes it as anarchic as anything the director made afterwards. Amongst this incredibly heady concoction of both successful and failed attempts at creating a feasible narrative world, however, sits something far more essential; a time-capsule of a period in London's history when subcultures grew overtly and naturally due to the city's many affordable, derelict areas. Adam Scovell
Chicago Reader review: Very entertaining 1996 action hokum that benefits hugely from the use of
its three stars—Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage, and Ed Harris. Harris,
evoking Dr. Strangelove‘s Jack D. Ripper, is a brigadier general
so angry about the U.S. government’s refusal to honor the soldiers who
died in covert operations that he kidnaps a bunch of tourists on
Alcatraz and threatens to hit the mainland with lethal poison gas if
reparations aren’t made immediately. Connery is a top-secret federal
prisoner who once escaped from Alcatraz and Cage is an FBI chemist and
biological weapons expert; together they form a funny and crotchety
action duo pitted against Harris and his renegade commandos. Michael Bay
directed from a script by David Weisberg, Douglas S. Cook, and Mark
Rosner that’s high-octane nonsense but gives both the actors and the
audience all that’s needed to make this diverting—car chases,
wisecracks, narrow escapes, explosions. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is a 35mm presentation, also screening on June 2nd (details here).
Chicago Reader review: Four friends just out of high school join the military: Denise Richards
wants to pilot enormous spaceships, Casper Van Dien wants to be near
her, Dina Meyer wants to be near him, and Neil Patrick Harris wants to
pit his brain power against that of giant enemy insects—if they have
brains. The plot of this 1997 feature may sound like silly, conventional
science fiction and soap opera romance, but director Paul Verhoeven
blends the conflicting elements of intentional camp and perverse
sincerity into a single tone—and he doesn't resort to simple irony.
Instead he revels in the contradictions and defies us to see fascist
ideology in a story that allows us to identify with warmongering
characters. Lisa Alspector
This month has been dedicated to films screened from prints on 16mm and 35mm and every day has featured a celluloid screening. Currently there are no movies in London scheduled to be screening from film on this day so there is no recommendation as yet. If we find one you'll certainly be the first to know. Keep watching this space.
This 35mm screening is from the Vito Project LGBTQ+ Film Club.
Fictionalized version of the Leopold-Loeb case, with Orson Welles arriving late as the Clarence Darrow figure, his summing up for the defense of thrill-killers Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman an electrifying tour-de-force. The collective Cannes Best Actor Award to Stockwell, Dillman, and Welles.
This 35mm presentation,also screening on June 1st, is part of the Nicolas Cage on 35mm season at the Screen on the Green. Detailshere.
Chicago Reader review: Very entertaining 1996 action hokum that benefits hugely from the use of its three stars—Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage, and Ed Harris. Harris, evokingDr. Strangelove‘s Jack D. Ripper, is a brigadier general so angry about the U.S. government’s refusal to honor the soldiers who died in covert operations that he kidnaps a bunch of tourists on Alcatraz and threatens to hit the mainland with lethal poison gas if reparations aren’t made immediately. Connery is a top-secret federal prisoner who once escaped from Alcatraz and Cage is an FBI chemist and biological weapons expert; together they form a funny and crotchety action duo pitted against Harris and his renegade commandos. Michael Bay directed from a script by David Weisberg, Douglas S. Cook, and Mark Rosner that’s high-octane nonsense but gives both the actors and the audience all that’s needed to make this diverting—car chases, wisecracks, narrow escapes, explosions. With Michael Biehn, William Forsythe, and Vanessa Marcil. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This 35mm presentation is part of the Queer East season (details here).
Time Out review: The most daring and achieved of all the 'illegal' independent films made in China in the '90s - and quite probably the last, since it prompted the Film Bureau to formally outlaw unauthorised production and confiscate Zhang Yuan's passport. A-Lan, a young gay man, is arrested in a Beijing cruising park and held for overnight interrogation by Shi, a macho but latently ambivalent cop. As he describes his life since childhood and his sexual history, it becomes clear that his stories are actually expressions of his desire for the cop. This realisation makes Shi more aggressive. The film is an intense chamber drama with large resonances: its ultimate implication is that the bond between the people and the authorities in China is essentially a sado-masochist one. This is the closest cinema has ever come to the spirit of Jean Genet, closer even than Genet's ownChant d'amour. Tony Rayns
A hypnotic, bittersweet ode to boyhood, cinemagoing, postwar working-class family life, Catholicism and glacial erosion,The Long Day Closesfollows Bud, a lonely young boy growing up in Liverpool in the 1950s. Told as a trance of memories and moments, the film’s particular brand of sadness, beauty, breathtaking rhythm and atmospheric cinematography is emblematic of why writer-director Terence Davies is one of the great artists of contemporary British cinema.
Chicago Reader review: The 1992 conclusion of Terence Davies's second autobiographical trilogy may not achieve the sublime heights of parts one and two (which comprised 1988'sDistant Voices, Still Lives), but it's still a powerful film, possibly even a great one—the sort of work that can renew one's faith in movies. Part three chronicles his life in working-class Liverpool between the ages of 7 and 11, a period he compresses into the years 1955 and 1956, but Davies focuses less on plot or memory as they're usually understood than on the memory of emotions and subjective consciousness. Music, lighting, elaborate camera movements, and the sound tracks of other films are among the tools he uses in relation to the basic settings of home, street, school, church, pub, and movie theater. Davies emphasizes the continuities and discontinuities between these places and the emotions they evoke, creating a consistent sense of religious illumination and transfiguration. What he does with the strains of "Tammy" in one climactic sequence and with the drift of moving clouds in another are alone worth the price of admission. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This 35mm presentation is also screened on May 29th and is part of the Cote d'Azur season - full details can be found here.
Chicago Reader review: A thwarted caper film in the vein of Melville’sBob le flambeurand Kubrick’sThe Killing, Henri Verneuil’s 1963 feature stars Jean Gabin, the avatar of world-weary criminality, in one of his finest roles. Fresh out of prison, he enlists a former cell mate (Alain Delon) in a daring plan to rob a casino on the Riviera. Though the film was an international hit, Verneuil’s conventional narrative style attracted the scorn of the French New Wave. Forty years later it stands as a well-crafted noir with a long, tautly executed heist and a protracted denouement that’s even more engrossing. Joshua Katzman
