Aloah, Bobby and Rose (Mutrux, 1975): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm
This blog, as befits the name, has always favoured screenings from
celluloid for our daily picks of the best in repertory screenings in
London so the four-day festival at BFI Southbank dedicated solely to
film presentations is the most exciting season of the year in London as
far as we are concerned. You can read about the full programme here.
BFI introduction to the season:
BFI Film on Film Festival is a brand new film festival to take place at BFI Southbank, 8 to 11 June 2023 and the first film festival in the UK wholly
dedicated to screen works solely on film, spanning film formats
including 16mm, 35mm and 70mm as well as rare nitrate. While the
majority of films are now shown digitally in cinemas, the experience of
film projection from film is a very different one. For contemporary
filmmakers like Christopher Nolan (Tenet), Mark Jenkin (Enys Men) or
Greta Gerwig (Little Women), the decision to shoot on film is primarily
an artistic one on how their film will look to the viewer when
projected. BFI Film on Film Festival celebrates this materiality of film, recognising the uniqueness of film as a physical medium. BFI Film on Film Festival will comprise screenings of new and vintage film prints, programmed by the BFI National Archive’s curators from the national collection, giving audiences access to work held in the BFI National
Archive which can only be seen on film and which would otherwise never
been seen. The full festival programme will be announced in 2023. Like
the experience of listening to a great album on vinyl rather than a
digital platform, part of the pleasure and meaning of watching a film on
a film print comes from the different look and emotional impact when
projected. A whole generation of young filmgoers have grown up not
seeing film projected on film, the BFI Film
on Film Festival is designed to deliver a unique, cinema-based
experience enabling audiences to enjoy the physical materiality of film
in all its glory, exploring its aesthetics and challenges – and
celebrating the skills required to work with it, with expert voices from
the BFI’s world-leading conservation and projection teams.
New Yorker review of Aloah, Bobby and Rose (screening from 35mm):
Few directors have begun their careers as auspiciously as Floyd Mutrux did. His first feature, “Dusty and Sweets McGee,”
from 1971, is a blend of fiction and documentary, about heroin addicts
in Los Angeles, that is the West Coast counterpart to that year’s “The Panic in Needle Park”
but with an even sharper edge. His second feature, from 1975, “Aloha,
Bobby and Rose” (which I discuss in this clip) is that rarest of films—a
tough, uncompromising, and inventive independent film that cleaned up
at the box office. These numbers
are no misprint: it cost about sixty thousand to make, and took in
thirty-five million dollars. That meteoric success should have launched
Mutrux into an orbit that would keep him in action to this day. Instead,
his directorial career soon came to a halt: he made the exhilarating
fifties-rock musical “American Hot Wax,”
but it was a commercial flop; he made “The Hollywood Knights,” with
Michelle Pfeiffer in her first leading role (I haven’t seen it), but it,
too, was no hit—and he has made only one feature since then. I’ve
complained here often about the misplaced nostalgia for the New
Hollywood of the nineteen-seventies, which squandered as much talent as
it fostered, and Mutrux is one of the prime examples.
Richard Brody
Here (and above) is the trailer.
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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