Lost Reels introduction: A rare screening of Henry & June, Philip Kaufman’s audacious and provocative adaptation of Anaïs Nin’s diaries, recounting her tempestuous relationships with American novelist Henry Miller and his wife June in a bohemian 1931 Paris. Driven more by mood than story and imbued with an evocative sense of time and place, it’s one of the most sensuous and beautifully photographed films ever made. Maria de Medeiros is riveting as the sexually liberated Anaïs and Fred Ward gives a career best performance as the gruff rakish Miller. Uma Thurman is mysterious and seductive as June and Richard E. Grant is perA rare screening of Henry & June, Philip Kaufman’s audacious and provocative adaptation of Anaïs Nin’s diaries, recounting her tempestuous relationships with American novelist Henry Miller and his wife June in a bohemian 1931 Paris. Driven more by mood than story and imbued with an evocative sense of time and place, it’s one of the most sensuous and beautifully photographed films ever made. Maria de Medeiros is riveting as the sexually liberated Anaïs and Fred Ward gives a career best performance as the gruff rakish Miller. Uma Thurman is mysterious and seductive as June and Richard E. Grant is perfect as the earnest Hugo. Upon initial release the film’s sexual content earned it notoriety in the US, causing it to be the film ever to be given the NC-17 adults-only rating - the kiss of death at the domestic box office. Still largely unavailable on either side of the Atlantic, Lost Reels is proud to present a special performance of this exquisite and intoxicating film from an original 35mm print on the date of Anaïs Nin’s birthday.
This 35mm presentation (also screening on February 28th) is part of the Akira Kurosawa season. You can find the full details of the Kurosawa programmehere.
Chicago Reader review: The Japanese title literally means “not yet,” a child’s response to the
query “Are you ready?” in a game of hide-and-seek, and Akira Kurosawa’s
1993 film is his own way of saying the same thing. Written and directed
by Kurosawa at age 83, this very personal film, set between 1943 and
about 20 years later, concerns a retired professor (Tatsuo Matsumura),
his circle of adoring former students (all male), his cat, and his wife.
It?s full of moving moments, but unlike the exquisite Rhapsody in August
(1991) it can’t be regarded as major Kurosawa. Basically a series of
sketches drawn from the writings of Hyakken Uchida, the film
periodically calls to mind John Ford’s The Long Gray Line as an extended valediction (one long birthday gathering seems to go on forever). Madadayo
has the expressionistic simplicity of Kurosawa?s other late films,
their distillation and intensity of emotion; one of the lengthiest
episodes, about the loss of the hero’s cat, is especially powerful.
There’s something undeniably hermetic and at times sluggish about the
film’s style, but the sheer freedom of the discourse—the way Kurosawa
inserts brief flashbacks into the narrative whenever he feels like it or
ends the movie with a dream—is comparable in some ways to late Buñuel,
and the film shares his poignant sense of wonder. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This presentation is part of the Jean-Luc Godard season at Cine Lumiere. You can find all the details of the season here.
Chicago Reader review: Challenging but unfailingly gorgeous, this 2010 feature achieves one of
Jean-Luc Godard's greatest ambitions: to reclaim political agitprop as
the stuff of symbolist poetry. Like T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land,
it's designed as a Tower of Babel, with dialogue in several languages
(the comically stripped-down English subtitles, which Godard calls
"Navajo English," won’t make things easier for monoglots) and allusions
to politics, history, art, and philosophy. Beneath the imposing
structure, though, is a simple, eloquent plea for humanism amid the
fractured culture of the 21st century. With characteristic perversity,
Godard shot this "film" in a variety of digital video formats, and he
seems invigorated by the postcinematic landscape (especially its utopian
social aspect), finding classical beauty nearly everywhere he looks. At
79, Godard has again made a young man's movie. Ben Sachs
Harvard Film Archive review: The extended engagement with the intellectual and cultural roots of modern Japanese politics explored by Yoshida in Eros + Massacre [culminated in] Coup d'état, his remarkable portrait of Ikki Kita, a controversial militarist who led the notorious February 26, 1836 coup later fetishized by Yukio Mishima. Yoshida's first non-widescreen feature, Coup d'état
brilliantly exploits the smaller format with stunning, sharply
modernist cinematography and mise-en-scène that favors unusual,
off-kilter compositions and works to heighten the claustrophobia of
Kia's increasing paranoia and delusion. Coup d'état also features an incredible score by noted avant-garde composer and frequent Yoshida collaborator Ichiyanagi Sei
The film is being screened in conjuction with It Came From Outer Space (1953). Yiu can find the full details here.
Time Out review: One of the great sci-fi classics, a Howard Hawks film in all but director
credit (he produced, planned the film, supervised the shooting). The
gradual build-up of tension, as a lonely group of scientists in the
Antarctic discover a flying saucer and its deadly occupant, is quite
superb; while The Thing itself (played by James Arness) is shown sufficiently
little to create real menace. As in most of Hawks' work, the emphasis is
on professionalism in a tiny, isolated community, on a love
relationship evolving semi-flippant fashion into something important,
and on group solidarity. Also characteristic is the contrast with a film
like Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still (made the
same year), which took a liberal stand in exposing the stupidity of men
when confronted with an alien. Hawks rejects out of hand the idea that
the alien might be worth trying to understand or communicate with; in
fact, the scientist who tries to do this is made to seem feeble and even
inhuman, so that the overall message of The Thing emerges as distinctly hawkish. Reactionary or not, though, it's still a masterpiece. David Pirie
This 70mm presentation (also screening on February 27th) is part of the Akira Kurosawa season. You can find the full details of the Kurosawa programmehere. Tonight's screening will be introduced by season co-curator Ian Haydn Smith.
Observer review: In the early 1970s Akira
Kurosawa's fortunes and spirit were at a low ebb. He'd been dropped by
Hollywood from the Pearl Harbor epic Tora! Tora! Tora! in which he had invested much time and energy. His first colour film Dodes'ka-den was
a critical and box-office failure. A crisis in the Japanese film
industry had made financing his movies impossible. As a result he
attempted suicide. But eventually his career was restored by a Soviet
invitation to direct a film version of a non-fiction work he'd loved in
his youth, and back in the 1940s he had planned a Japanese version that
was aborted, partly due to unsuitable locations but mainly because its
themes were in conflict with Japanese militarism. Published in 1923, the book
is a memoir by the Russian army engineer Captain Vladimir Arsenyev
about his friendship with a nomadic hunter, Dersu Uzala, of the remote
Nanai tribe, known at the time as the Goldi people. Uzala twice saved
Arsenyev's life while acting as a guide to his surveying expedition in
remote eastern Siberia during the first years of the 20th century, the
first time in a blizzard, the second after an accident on a raft in a
fast-flowing river. Shot on location
over a period of nine months, it's an elegiac film of great visual and
spiritual beauty about the relationship between an intelligent European
raised in an advanced urban world (the tall, handsome Yuri Solomin), and
a wise, nomadic Asian in close touch with the wilderness (the stocky,
elderly Maxim Munzuk). Both actors are excellent. This
humanist masterwork is close in spirit to John Ford and has many of the
ingredients of a classic western. The central relationship recalls that
between the pioneers and the native Americans in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper,
though the violent incidents happen offstage. The film won an Oscar for
best foreign language film, and Kurosawa went on to make Kagemusha, Ran and Dreams with backing from Lucas, Spielberg and Coppola. Philip French
This film is in the Pink Palace season at the Rio Cinema. Full details here.
BFI review: Nighthawks took
shape around a teacher character who struggles to come out to his
friends and colleagues as he becomes newly acquainted with the
underground gay scene. It was the first British feature film explicitly
about contemporary gay life, made by out gay people and presenting a
powerful portrait of pre-AIDS London. Through it Peck met Paul Hallam, the Nighthawks co-writer who became an important collaborator and confidant.
The film was
superficially social-realist in shape, and yet the searching
point-of-view camera shots travelling down London’s tungsten-lit roads,
plus the strange, plastic, electronic music in the club scenes, lend the
work an eerie, almost sci-fi perspective. It powerfully evokes the
Ballardian London of the 1970s, a city emptying itself of people while
bracing for the onslaught of Thatcherism. Will Fowler
Chicago Reader review: Jean-Luc Godard calls this 1980 production, Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie),
his “second first film”—which means both a return to narrative after
his brilliant documentary-theoretical work in the 70s and a complete
clearing of the decks. You feel him questioning his entire life here,
his most basic impulses and ideals, and his honesty is devastating; he
emerges as a hollow man, trapped between the limitations of his politics
and his sexuality, with barely enough ego left to imagine his own
death. Of course, the film’s substantial artistry belies Godard’s
self-negation: with his formal, four-part ordering of the narration, the
tension he establishes and exploits between sound track and image, and
his use of slow motion to analyze and abstract the action, Godard pulls
an aesthetic victory from the jaws of utter nihilism. Dave Kehr
This 35mm presentation (also screening on February 1st) is part of the Akira Kurosawa season. You can find the full details of the Kurosawa programmehere.
Time Out review: An early encounter between Kurosawa and two of his favourite actors,
Mifune and Shimura, both playing detectives in Japan's uneasy postwar
period under US imperialism. When Mifune's pistol is stolen, he is
overwhelmed by a feeling of dishonour rather than failure, and sets out
on a descent into the lower depths of Tokyo's underworld, which
gradually reveals Dostoievskian parallels between himself and his
quarry. A sweltering summer is at its height, and Kurosawa's strenuous
location shooting transforms the city into a sensuous collage of
fluttering fans and delicate, sweating limbs. A fine blend of US
thriller material with Japanese conventions, it's a small classic. Chris Peachment
Chicago Reader review: Said to be the most important work of the Japanese new wave, this
beautiful and provocative 1969 feature by Yoshishige Yoshida intertwines
two narratives for a dialectical examination of love and politics, the
individual and society. One, set in the early 20th century, is based on
the life of anarchist Sakae Osugi, who advocated free love as part of
his philosophy of personal liberation; the other, set in the 60s,
concerns a journalist who emulates Osugi with two lovers, one a voyeur.
Yoshida uses a variety of devices to distance us from the action,
including scenes staged as theater, incidents presented in several
different ways, and characters from the past popping up in the present.
Yet the film is held together by his sensitive use of black-and-white
‘Scope: filling space with water, cherry blossoms, or urban surfaces, he
casts his characters adrift on the screen just as the editing floats
them across time. The film implicitly rejects what the actual Osugi
called the “conscious destruction of past cultural residue” in favor of a
more nuanced understanding of human contradiction, and in their quest
for freedom the protagonists are foiled by the social order and their
inherent limitations, becoming alienated from each other and themselves. Fred Camper
This special presentation is part of the BFI's Akira Kurosawa season. You can find the full details of the Kurosawa programmehere.
Chicago Reader review: Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 film is slightly marred by some too obvious
straining toward masterpiece status, yet it’s a stunning
achievement in epic cinema. Working on a large scale seems to bring
out the best in Kurosawa’s essentially formal talents; Kagemusha
seems only a rough draft for the effects he achieves here through a
massive deployment of movement and color. Both landscape and weather
seem to bend to his will as he constructs an imaginary 16th-century
Japan out of various locations throughout the islands, which seems to
re-form itself to reflect the characters’ surging passions as the
violent tale progresses. It’s loosely adapted from King Lear:
an aging warlord (Tatsuya Nakadai, in a performance that approaches a
Kabuki stylization) decides to step down as the head of his clan,
which unleashes a power struggle among his three sons. As in
Kagemusha, Kurosawa envisions the only alternative to rigid
oppression as apocalyptic chaos, yet the bleak proposal is put with
infinitely more immediacy and personal involvement. Dave Kehr
This 35mm presentation is part of the Mel Brooks season - further details here.
Chicago Reader review: With this 1974 western spoof, Mel Brooks abandoned the sweetly sentimental tone of his first two movies, The Producers and The Twelve Chairs,
for the manic vulgarity that would become his cinematic calling card.
Cleavon Little stars as the black sheriff of a frontier town (Brooks
couldn’t sell the studio on Richard Pryor, still relatively unknown at
the time), and Gene Wilder is his ally, the Waco Kid. JR Jones
In this rarely screened documentary, filmmaker Ron Peck, who sadly passed away recently, narrates this exploration of the world and work of Edward Hopper with Gail Levin, curator of the Edward Hopper Collection at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. The film will be introduced by BFI National Archive curator Steven Foxon.
+ Night Work Director Miranda Pennell UK 1998. 14min Digital
While Hopper’s Nighthawks teaches us ways of seeing, Miranda Pennell’s Night Work allows us to eavesdrop on the sounds and whispers in corporate corridors after work.
Here (and above) is film of Edward Hopper painting in his studio in 1965.
Those wonderful programmers at Everyman Screen on the Green are putting on a 35mm Steven Spielberg season (full details here) with the arrival of The Fabelmans due later in January. This film is also being screened on February 4th. Details here.
Guardian review: Here is the movie Steven Spielberg should have
made instead of AI. It's a fantastically confident and exhilarating
thrill-ride into the future which far more satisfactorily combines
Kubrick's chilly sense of the alienating and the bizarre with
Spielberg's own mastery of sugar-rush suspense tactics. Based on a
Philip K Dick short story - and what self-respecting new sci-fi venture
is not? - this is a futuristic noir thriller in the Blade Runner mode
about a driven cop played by lean, mean Tom Cruise. Peter Bradshaw
Chicago Reader review: Orgasm and nuclear holocaust are the controlling factors in this horny, delirious fantasy by the talented Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin).
The hero (Thomas Dekker) is a hip college freshman longing for gay sex
but also open to the physical ministrations of a British party girl
(Juno Temple); meanwhile, his best pal (Haley Bennett) has gotten into a
hot-and-heavy lesbian romance with a fellow student (Roxane Mesquida)
who turns out to be a witch. Araki captures the fever of bisexual
exploration with his hot color palette and nubile actors, but at the
same time he spins a bizarre sci-fi intrigue—complete with cryptic
messages and fearsome nightmare sequences—that recalls Richard Kelly’s
teen cult masterpiece Donnie Darko (2001). Funny, scary, and exuberant, Kaboom delivers the goods as both a generational marker and a tale of things to, uh, come. J.R. Jones
This screening pays tribute to director Nicolas Roeg and will be followed by a Q&A with actors Jenny Agutter & Luc Roeg moderated by writer Tony Rayns.
Time Out review: Nicolas Roeg's second film (made after the massively delayed Performance)
is at first sight uncharacteristic: the story of two posh English kids
abandoned in the Australian outback and left to fend for themselves when
their father commits suicide. In fact, the shimmering light and colour,
the conflict of cultures, and the emergence of semi-mystic sexual
forces in the desert landscape make this as Roeg-ian a film as The Man Who Fell to Earth or Bad Timing. Chris Auty Here (and above) is the trailer.
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. 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 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)
The ten I chose (above) shouldallideally be seen screened so continue to keep an eye on this blogand the listings at Close-Up Cinema in Shoreditch. This presentation of Heroic Purgatory (which also screens on February 11th) is part of the Essential Cinema strand at the venue (full details here).
Village Voice review: Heroic Purgatoryis a world-beater of a film, a more condensed and intense dose of director Kishu Yoshida-ness, in which a student gaggle of would-be terrorists angst about their communal non-action, a strange runaway teen infiltrates the lives of a middle-class couple, and characters keep taking off wigs, revealing that they’re someone else. Every vertiginous shot is an idea, and Yoshida musters the dislocation living in an arthouse science fiction film, when in fact it’s just life at the end of the Sixties. Michael Atkinson
