Chicago Reader review: Josef von Sternberg's 1934 film turns the legend of Catherine the
Great into a study of sexuality sadistically repressed and reborn as
politics, thus anticipating Bernardo Bertolucci by three decades. Marlene
Dietrich's transformation from spoiled princess to castrating matriarch
is played for both terror and sympathy, surface coolness and buried
passion, with weird injections of black humor from Sam Jaffe's
degenerate grand duke. Sternberg's mise-en-scene is, for once,
oppressively materialistic, emphasizing closeness, heaviness,
temperature, and smell. Dave Kehr
This 35mm screening os part of the ICA's Celluloid on Sunday strand.
Chicago Reader review: Another of Henry Jaglom’s let-it-all-hang-out gabfests, this one set in a
beautiful, about-to-be-destroyed Los Angeles theater, where Jaglom
invites his friends on Valentine’s Day. It certainly has its
moments—most of them provided by Orson Welles (in one of his last
extended film performances), his vivacious long-time companion Oja
Kodar, and the venerable Sally Kellerman—but most of this largely
improvised movie, as critic Elliott Stein has pointed out, is pretty
much the equivalent of the Donahue show, with all the strengths
and limitations that this implies, and Jaglom’s own earnest inquiries
about what makes so many people lonely can get a bit cloying after a
while. However, Welles, as the equivalent of a talk-show guest, is very
much in his prime, and his ruminations about feminism, loneliness,
drama, and related subjects certainly give the proceedings an edge and a
direction that most of the remainder of this floundering movie sadly
lacks. Among the other participants in this encounter session are
Jaglom’s brother Michael Emil, Andrea Marcovicci, Ronee Blakley, and
Monte Hellman. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is a 35mm screening. There will be an introductory illustrated talk by Jon Davies, tutor in French Cinema at Morley College.
Time Out review: Director Roger Vadim kicks off his adaptation of Jean-Claude Forest's 'adult' comic
strip by stripping Jane Fonda starkers. From there on it's typically vacuous
titillation as Barbarella takes off for the mysterious planet Sorgo in
40,000 AD, there to survive attack by perambulating dolls with vampire
fangs, receive her sexual initiation from a hairy primitive, fall in
love with a blind angel, be whisked off to an alarming Lesbian encounter
with the tyrannical Black Queen, etc. But Terry Southern's dialogue
occasionally sparkles, and the imaginative designs, as shot by Claude
Renoir, look really splendid. Tom Milne
This is a 35mm presentation at the Prince Charles Cinema. Chicago Reader review: 'What can you say about the movie that taught you what movies were? The first time I saw Kane
I discovered the existence of the director; the next dozen or so times
taught me what he did—with lights and camera angles, cutting and
composition, texture and rhythm. Kane (1941) is no longer my favorite Orson Welles film (I'd take Ambersons, Falstaff, or Touch
of Evil), but it is still the best place I know of to start thinking
about Welles—or for that matter about movies in general.' Dave Kehr
This film, presented in a 4K restoration, is on an extended run at BFI Southbank, and is part of the Italian Neorealism season at the cinema. Full details here.
I haven't seen this since my post-graduate days at Derby Lonsdale
College in the mid-1980s but found it a real eye-opener at the time and
wouldn't disagree with this ecstatic review in Chicago Reader. Director Roberto Rossellini was a pioneer and this film, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, brought the attention of the world to the development of the hugely influential neorealism era in Italian cinema.
Chicago Reader review: Roberto Rossellini's 1946 story of a group of workers and a priest in
1943-'44 Rome, declared an “open city” by the Nazis, was begun only two
months after the liberation. Its realistic treatment of everyday Italian
life heralded the postwar renaissance of the Italian cinema and the
development of neorealism; the film astonished audiences around the
world and remains a masterpiece. With Anna Magnani, Aldo Fabrizi, and
Maria Michi. Don Druker
This is a Cine Real screening and enjoyment is guaranteed thanks to the pair that put together their presentations. Cine Real
is one of the only film clubs in the UK to exclusively play films in
their original 16mm format. Cine Real is a non-profit organisation which
aims to unite film makers and enthusiasts in their appreciation of
classic film.
Time Out review: Bernardo Bertolucci’s beautiful, idea-laden and
thrilling film noir, released in post-événements 1970, opens with a
Paris hotel sign flashing on a man with a fedora, a gun and a naked
woman. But Bertolucci’s late-’30s-set adaptation of Albert Moravia’s
novel examining Italy’s fascist past was no exercise in black-and-white
nostalgia. The noir elements – the complex flash-back structure and the
out-of-kilter ‘Third Man’-syle camera angles framing its anti-hero,
volunteer assassin Jean-Louis Trintignant – are a mere frame, pencil drawings on which cinematographer Vittorio Storaro paints his Freudian washes of blue and red.
Even at the time of the ‘The Conformist’, with its poison-penned
quotations of Godard, Bertolucci was already showing himself the
greatest pleasure seeker of the ‘children of Marx and Coca-Cola’
agit-prop school. Trintignant’s classically-educated Marcello Clerici –
he quotes Emperor Hadrian and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave – is the
epitome of the repressed bourgeois, so ashamed of his ‘mad’ father and
opium-addicted mother to be delighted, in shades of Sartre’s Daniel, to
be married to a ‘mediocre’ wife ‘full of paltry ideas’ and prepared to
commit murder to follow the flow of fascist political fashion. Until
that is, he claps eyes on the beautiful, decadent wife (Dominique Sanda) of his old tutor and present target, Professor Quadri (Enzo Tarascio). It’s a dazzling film, dated only in its sense of passionate
intellectual engagement, which seductively balances its seditious
syllabus of politics, philosophy and sex with a serio-comic tone,
exemplified by Gastone Moschin’s near pantomimic Blackshirt and Georges Delerue’s delightful score. Wally Hammond
This is a 35mm screening (also being shown on May 1st and from digital on May 23rd) and is part of the Lindsay Anderson season at BFI Southbank.
Chicago Reader review: Lindsay Anderson's debut film (1963) is probably the best crafted of
the British "kitchen sink" movies and features a memorable if somewhat
theatrical performance by Richard Harris as a rugby star who can't
handle success. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Nicholas
Ray's great sur-western (1954), in which, as Francois Truffaut put
it, the cowboys circle and die like ballerinas. For all its violence,
this is a surpassingly tender, sensitive film, Ray's gentlest
statement of his outsider theme. Joan Crawford, with a mature,
reflective quality she never recaptured, is the owner of a small-town
saloon; Sterling Hayden is the enigmatic gunfighter who comes to her
aid when the townspeople turn on her. Filmed in the short-lived (but
well-preserved) Trucolor process, its hues are pastel and boldly
deployed, and the use of space is equally daring and expressive. With
Mercedes McCambridge, unforgettable as Crawford's butch nemesis, as
well as Ernest Borgnine, Scott Brady, John Carradine, Royal Dano,
Ward Bond, and Ben Cooper. Dave
Kehr Here
(and above) is the trailer.
New Yorker review: One of Girlfriends' many gentle astonishments was brought to mind by a viewing of Alex Ross Perry’s recently released feature “The Color Wheel”—namely,
that, for all the discussion of the directorial art of comic timing,
the art of knowing just how near or far to place the camera to an actor,
the art of comic distance, is equally important in calibrating the
humor of performance. Weill is psychically close to her protagonist, the
young photographer Susan Weinblatt (played by Melanie Mayron with an
audacious vulnerability), but doesn’t stay so visually close as to
short-circuit her humor—both the self-deprecating kind and the kind,
achieved with a hint of critical detachment, that Weill sees in her.
Even scenes of anguished, ambivalent commitment evoke Susan’s whimsical,
dialectical jousting, her blend of studied reticence and irrepressible
spontaneity. The movie catches a moment of new expectations for women,
when professional assertiveness and romantic fulfillment were more
openly in conflict, but it also catches the last days of an old New
York, a time when office buildings were not guarded fortresses but open
hives, and when—peculiarly similarly—the boundaries between professional
activity and personal involvement were less scrupulously guarded,
perhaps even undefined. One of the wonders of Weill’s movie is in its
intimate crystallization of the inchoate; it propels Susan Weinblatt and
a city of young women into the future, and it’s terribly sad that
Weill’s—and, for that matter, Mayron’s—own careers didn’t leap ahead in
the same way. Richard Brody Here is Brody's video discussion of the film.
This 35mm screening is part of the Classic Film Season at the Prince Charles. Details here.
Time Out review: Half
the world can repeat half the dialogue of Michael Curtiz’s great
wartime (anti-)romance and half of Hollywood’s scriptwriters worked on
it. If Peter Bogdanovich is right to say the Humphrey Bogart persona was
generally defined by his work for Howard Hawks, his Rick, master of the
incredibly ritzy Moroccan gin-joint into which old Paris flame Ingrid
Bergman walks, just as importantly marked his transition from
near-psychopathetic bad guy to idiosyncratic romantic hero. Sixty-odd
years on, the film still works beautifully: its complex propagandist
subtexts and vision of a reluctantly martial America’s ‘stumbling’
morality still intrigue, just as Bogart’s cult reputation among younger
viewers still obtains. Claude Rains is superb as the pragmatic French
chief of police, himself a complex doppelgänger of Bogart; Paul Henreid
is credible and self-effacing as the film’s nominal hero; Sydney
Greenstreet and Peter Lorre give great colour; and Bergman literally
shines. Arguably, cinema’s greatest ‘accidental masterpiece’, it still
amounts to some hill of beans. Wally Hammond
This evening (in the Experimenta strand at BFI Southbank) is a collection of films celebrating underground filmmaker and Hollywood Babylon author Kenneth Anger titled 'Cinema Is Evil: Welcome to the World of Legendary, Queer Occult Filmmaker Kenneth Anger'.
BFI introduction: Kenneth Anger was a pioneering, agitational, visionary voice in
independent, underground film, whose stunningly shot, magick-inspired
movies disrupted experimental film and influenced the darker elements of
counterculture and punk. A year to the day since Anger’s death, we pay
homage to this cinematic magus and his contention that, ‘the day cinema
was invented was a dark day for mankind’. Programme includes early
cinema title When the Devil Drives (1907), Arena special Hollywood
Babylon (1991), about Anger’s infamous book, and his psychodramas
Fireworks (1947) and Rabbit’s Moon (1972).
This classic Howard Hawks movie, which also screens on May 19th and 23rd, is part of the Big Screen Classics season at BFI Southbank. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Most of what Robert Altman has done with overlapping dialogue was done
first by Howard Hawks in this 1940 comedy, without the benefit of Dolby
stereo. (The film, in fact, often circulates in extremely poor
public-domain prints that smother the glories of Hawks's sound track.)
It isn't a matter of speed but of placement—the dialogue almost seems to
have levels in space. Hawks's great insight—taking the Hecht-MacArthur Front Page
and making the Hildy Johnson character a woman—has been justly
celebrated; it deepens the comedy in remarkable ways. Cary Grant's
performance is truly virtuoso—stunning technique applied to the most
challenging material. With Rosalind Russell and Ralph Bellamy, a genius
in his way too. Dave Kehr
BFI introduction: Lindsay Anderson’s capacity for drawing out extraordinary performances hits full
flight in this tight, tense domestic drama starring Brian Cox, James
Bolam and Alan Bates. The powerhouse trio play three successful brothers
returning home to celebrate their working-class parents’ 40th wedding
anniversary. As the actors hit their stride, it’s not long before old
secrets, suppressed bitterness and quiet sadness resurface.
Here (and above) is Alan Bates talking about the making of the film.
Cinema Museum introduction: The Nickel Cinema continues its season of offbeat road film with the lean, mean and rarely seen Canuxploitation thrillerSudden Fury(1975).Psychosis and matricide on the Ontario backwoods! This forgotten grindhouse gem triumphs over its low budget with a tight script and a memorably deranged performance by regional actor Dominic Hogan, building to a breathless crescendo of an ending. You wont see this on Disney Plus!
Here (and above) is the trailer for this road movie season.
This film also screens on May 5th and 9th. Full details here. I wrote a feature about the film and its star, Jean Seberg, for the Guardian when the movie was screened at the London Film Festival in 2012. Chicago Reader review: Jean-Luc Godard conceived Jean Seberg's character in Breathless
as an extension of her role in this 1958 Otto Preminger film: the
restless teenage daughter of a bored, decaying playboy (David Niven),
she tries to undermine what might be her father's last chance for
happiness, a romance with an Englishwoman (Deborah Kerr). Arguably, this
is Preminger's masterpiece: working with a soapy script by Arthur
Laurents (by way of Francoise Sagan's novel), Preminger turns the
melodrama into a meditation on motives and their ultimate unknowability.
Long takes and balanced 'Scope compositions are used to bind the
characters together; Preminger uses the wide screen not to expand the
spectacle, but to narrow and intensify the drama. With Mylene Demongeot,
Geoffrey Horne, and Juliette Greco; photographed in Technicolor (apart
from a black-and-white prologue and epilogue), mainly on the Riviera, by
Georges Perinal. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Roberto Rossellini’s six-part film about the liberation of Italy was released in 1946; it confirmed the neorealist style of his Open City,
released a year earlier, but also extended that style into melodrama,
where many critics did not want to follow. The episodes all seem to have
an anecdotal triteness—black soldier befriends orphan boy, prostitute
finds redemption, etc—but each acquires a wholly unexpected naturalness
and depth of feeling from Rossellini’s refusal to hype the anecdotes
with conventional dramatic rhetoric. The concluding episodes—a final
skirmish between Germans and partisans in the Po valley—is one of
Rossellini’s most sublime accomplishments, a largely wordless sequence
that uses shifting focal lengths, drifting camera movements, and natural
sounds to create a suspense of almost unbearable intensity and
immediacy. JR Jones
Here (and above) is Martin Scorsese's introduction to the film.
Cinema Museum introduction: Lost Reels continues its series of provocative celluloid double bills
with two of the most terrifying, horror-infused love stories ever made. Love stories and horror are synonymous with the movies, and Lost
Reels’ provocative new double bill presents two of the most unusual –
and terrifying – films of passion in cinematic history. First is the
virtually forgotten and completely out of circulation, Tattoo (1981) starring Bruce Dern and Maud Adams. Described by Variety
as, “your standard boy-meets-girl, boy-kidnaps-girl,
boy-tattoos-girl-against-her-will love story” the film caused
controversy when first released, gained an ‘X’ certificate in the UK,
and is a genuinely bizarre, outrageous cult curio. Second is The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito)
(2011), Pedro Almodóvar’s brilliantly subversive foray into provocation
and horror starring Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, and Jan Cornet.
Unique within Almodóvar’s filmography, it’s a film first-time audiences
should know as little about as possible while at the same time being
prepared for one of the most perverse and unsettling experiences a trip
to the cinema can provide.
Time Out review: Luchino Visconti's stunning feature debut transposes The Postman Always Rings Twice
to the endless, empty lowlands of the Po Delta. There, an itinerant
labourer (Massimo Girotti) stumbles into a tatty roadside trattoria and an
emotional quagmire. Seduced by Calamai, he disposes of her fat, doltish
husband (Juan de Landa), and the familiar Cain litany - lust, greed, murder,
recrimination - begins. Ossessione is often described as the
harbinger of neo-realism, but the pictorial beauty (and astute use of
music, often ironically) are pure Visconti, while the bleak view of
sexual passion poaches on authentic noir territory, steeped, as co-scriptwriter Giuseppe De Santis put it, 'in the air of death and sperm'. Sheila Johnston
Chicago Reader review: High school BMOC Freddie Prinze Jr. is challenged by a mean-spirited buddy to upgrade the social standing of an unpopular girl by courting her, and the question of whether Prinze is supposed to be likable hangs in the air as this romantic comedy stumbles along. As an undiscovered beauty who frequents open-stage night at the local performance-art club, her rack hidden under paint-spattered overalls, her chiseled face obscured by glasses, Rachael Leigh Cook is charming and sincere, and ultimately so is Prinze, whose character’s realization that he’s not as shallow as he’d thought is convincing. Their charisma and the movie’s enthusiastically inconsistent tone make this makeover vehicle watchable; it’s often impossible to distinguish what’s meant to be cartoonish from what’s meant to be dramatic, but the confusion seems appropriately adolescent. Lisa Alspector
Time Out review: 'Perhaps
Stanley Kubrick's most perfectly realised film, simply because his
cynical vision of the progress of technology and human stupidity is
wedded with comedy, in this case Terry Southern's
sparkling script in which the world comes to an end thanks to a mad US
general's paranoia about women and commies. Peter Sellers' three roles
are something of an indulgent showcase, though as the tight-lipped RAF
officer and the US president he gives excellent performances. Better,
however, are Scott as the gung-ho military man frustrated by political
soft-pedalling, and - especially - Sterling Hayden as the beleaguered
lunatic who presses the button. Kubrick wanted to have the antics end up
with a custard-pie finale, but thank heavens he didn't; the result is
scary, hilarious, and nightmarishly beautiful, far more effective in its
portrait of insanity and call for disarmament than any number of worthy
anti-nuke documentaries.' Geoff Andrew
Watch this trailer. Now try and tell me you don't want to see this film again.
This film is part of the Nicolas Cage season at the Prince Charles. Details here.
Time Out review: Alcoholic scriptwriter Ben (Nicolas Cage) is blowing his options. Our first
glimpse sees his beyond-niceties collaring of an agent friend in a smart
restaurant to demand drink money, a symptomatic preamble to what's
staring him in the face: a 'sadly, we have to let you go' dismissal from
his studio job. Figgis sets the crap game running here: the pay-off
finances a one-way ticket to oblivion or, to give hell its name, Las
Vegas, city of permanent after-hours. Cash the cheque, burn the past,
take the freeway - we're in the booze movie, that most fascinatingly
flawed form of the modern urban tragedy. This modestly budget
masterpiece pools the Vegas streets with reflected neon and watches Ben
drown. Shue is good as the young hooker he falls for, but Cage is
extraordinary, producing an Oscar-winning performance of edgy, utterly
convincing suicidal auto-destruct. In fact, Figgis makes of him
something of an existential saint, a man for whom terminal
self-knowledge leads to a kind of grace. If the film lacks the depth and
structural sophistication of, say, The Lost Weekend (it was shot fast, with Declan Quinn's
saturated Super-16 photography blown up, which may explain its kinetic
buzz), it certainly has the courage of its convictions. Wally Hammond
This is the closing night film in the Open City Documentary Festival of 2024. Details here.
ICA introduction: It took Heiny Srour six years to make Leila and the Wolves,
a film that reveals a hidden past of women’s struggle in Palestine and
Lebanon in an attempt to rewrite the history of the region from a
feminist point of view. As John Akomfrah has written, Leila and the
Wolves “weaves a rich tableau of history, folklore, myth and archival
material.” The film is structured in a series of sketches, each of which
features the same actors. The female protagonist (Nabila Zeitoni) is a
modern Lebanese woman living in London, where she is staging a
photography exhibition in which women are the unsung heroines and
martyrs of political conflict. She time travels through the 1900s to the
1980s, wandering through real and imaginary landscapes of Lebanon and
Palestine. In an interview from 2020, the filmmaker says: “Nowadays,
Leila and the Wolves is travelling the world again, more relevant than
ever; my unconscious and the collective unconscious of the women of the
Middle East spoke together throughout the extreme conditions of making
this film.”
On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of its release, we are honoured
to close the 2024 edition of Open City Documentary Festival with a new
digital restoration of Leila and the Wolves, co-presented with Cinenova.
Cinenova is a volunteer-run organisation preserving and distributing
the work of feminist film and video makers. Leila and the Wolves was originally distributed in the UK by Cinema of Women, one of Cinenova’s predecessor organisations.
With an introduction by Nadia Yahlom (Sarha Collective)
Time Out review: A
weatherbeaten Dana Andrews gives one of his finest performances as Detective
Mark Dixon, a belligerent cop whose father was a crook and whose
roughhouse tactics appal his bosses. He's a good man at heart, but the
fates are against him and his behaviour becomes closer and closer to
that of the father he abhorred. Mobster Merrill is always on hand to
taunt him about his background. His plight becomes yet more desperate
when he accidentally kills a murder suspect and then falls in love with
the widow (Gene Tierney). Otto Preminger's superior noir boasts hardboiled and sardonic dialogue, courtesy of Ben Hecht,
but also a surprising strain of pathos as Dixon fights against his own
nature. Brutal, fatalistic, but desperate for redemption, he's just the
kind of cop James Ellroy would write about so well a generation later. Geoffrey Macnab
Chicago Reader review: Try to imagine a Russ Meyer porn movie about LA teenagers crossed with
an early scatological John Waters opus and punctuated with outtakes from
Natural Born Killers; you’ll have a rough idea what Gregg Araki is up to in this hyper, scattershot movie, whose own publicity compares it to a Beverly Hills 90210
episode on acid. Even if the compulsively kaleidoscopic visual style
(ten times too many close-ups for my taste) and scuzzy dialogue are such
that only one moment out of seven makes much of an impression, there’s
still plenty to be amused or nauseated by: phrases like “Whatev” (a
reductio ad absurdum of west-coast verbal sloth), “Dogs eating people is
cool,” and “You smell like a wet dog”; a face getting beaten to a pulp
by an unopened can of tomato soup (making one wonder if Campbell’s paid
for the product placement); blood-spattered walls color coordinated with
a tacky floral bedspread; flashes of kinky straight sex and tender
homoeroticism; periodic appearances by the Creature From the Black
Lagoon; and so on—adding up to loads of flash and minimal substance. The
cast includes James Duval, Rachel True, Christina Applegate, Debi
Mazar, and Chiara Mastroianni, and there are loads of guest appearances. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Cinema Museum introduction to this special day: Misty Moon presents a rare chance to see Ken Loach’s seminal classic film Kes (1969) and meet Billy Casper himself. Based on the book A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines and set in South Yorkshire, Kes
was originally released in 1969 and tells the tale of young Billy
Casper and his beloved kestrel. With memorable performances from David
Bradley, Colin Welland and Brian Glover, it is often cited as one of the
greatest British films ever made. The film will be shown in its entirety from an original 35mm release
print, followed by a Q&A with its leading man, David Bradley. There
will also be an opportunity to meet David after the show and to purchase
autographs. Doors open at 14.00, for a 15.00 start. Q&A starts at 17.30.
Chicago Reader review: In 1969 Ken Loach took time out from an acclaimed television career to
direct this quietly powerful narrative feature, a classic of British
social realism. Based on a novel by Barry Hines but shot like a
documentary, with a hardscrabble industrial setting and a cast that
blends professionals and amateurs, the film tracks an introverted
Yorkshire lad (David Bradley) who's abandoned by his father and bullied
by his coal-miner brother (Freddie Fletcher). A failure in the classroom
and on the soccer pitch alike, the boy finds his wings when he adopts
and trains a fledgling kestrel. Working in the style of cinema verite,
cinematographer Chris Menges captures the petty tyrannies of the
provincial working class and the inchoate joys of a youngster stumbling
toward the greater world. Andrea Gronvall
Time Out review: Apprentice work, comparatively speaking, not scripted by Joseph L Mankiewicz
himself (although he contributed), but still astonishingly
characteristic in its airy philosophical speculations about the
imagination and its role as a refuge when the salty ghost of a sea
captain (Harrison) befriends a beautiful widow (Gene Tierney) and intervenes
to save her from the cad she is thinking of marrying. Leaning too
heavily towards light comedy, Mankiewicz doesn't get the balance quite
right, so that the tale of a romance tenuously bridging two worlds isn't
quite as moving as it should be when reality ultimately reasserts its
claims. A hugely charming film, nevertheless, beautifully shot (by
Charles Lang), superbly acted, and with a haunting score by Bernard Herrmann. Tom Milne
The Nickel presents the 40th Anniversary restoration of Sogo Ishii’s (Electric Dragon 80.000 V (2001), Crazy Thunder Road (1980)) cult classic, with introduction by film critic James Balmont.
Chicago Reader review: An ideally symmetrical Japanese family–dad, mom, junior, and sis–moves
into a new suburban home, where rising middle-class expectations (and
gramps barging in for an open-ended stay) cause everything to
deconstruct explosively. Sogo Ishii’s lunatic black comedy seems less
concerned with actual family dynamics than with turning its sitcom
household into an open arena of competing pop-culture images and
energies. Ishii has a keen eye for cultural detritus–the samurai films
and superhero cartoon shows and pornographic comic strips that have
bored their way into modern Japanese consciousness (in much the same
manner as crazy dad’s termites)–and his film at times displays the
antinarrative logic of a TV wrestling marathon: it redundantly
accumulates rather than develops, with outrage piling upon outrage in
baroque profusion (kitchenware samurai mom faces off against Tojo
warrior gramps while martial nymphet sis plots against spacehead junior,
etc). There’s a Woman of the Dunes metaphor lurking about (dad digs a
hole in the kitchen floor and everybody falls in, but the house is
already an entropic pit) and plenty cartoon silliness to push the sitcom
strategies over the subversive edge. Not, shall we say, the shapeliest
of films, but one that packs a raw, energetic punch. Pat Graham
Chicago Reader review: Aiming successfully for a wider audience in 1961, the neglected French independent Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Samourai)
adapted Beatrix Beck's autobiographical novel, set in a French village
during World War II, about a young woman falling in love with a
handsome, radical young priest who's fully aware of his power over her.
For the starring roles Melville, godfather of the New Wave, ironically
selected two talented actors catapulted to fame by that
movement—Emmanuele Riva (Hiroshima, Mon Amour) and Jean-Paul Belmondo (Breathless).
The poetic results are literary and personal; the heroine's offscreen
narration suggests the pre-Bressonian form of Melville's first feature, Le Silence de la Mer,
and sudden subjective shots convey the woman's physical proximity to
the priest as she undergoes an ambiguous religious conversion. Not an
unqualified success, the film remains strong for its performances, its
inventive editing and framing, and its evocative rendering of the French
occupation. The eclectic and resourceful nonjazz score is by jazz
pianist Martial Solal. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Released and shown only twice in 1976, this Iranian gothic thriller was
banned by the Iranian theologians in power from 1979 and thought lost
forever - until that is, the mid 2010s, when the director’s children
found a copy in a charity shop. Restored by The Film
Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Image
Retrouvée laboratory (Paris) in collaboration with Mohammad Reza Aslani
and Gita Aslani Shahrestani. Restoration funding provided by the
Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
Film Forum introduction: In an ornate, candlelit mansion in 1920s Tehran, the heirs to a family
fortune vie for control of their matriarch’s estate — erupting in a
ferocious final act. Screened publicly just once before it was banned,
then lost for decades. “The opulent, claustrophobic interiors are
reminiscent of Persian miniatures… The influence of European cinematic
masters like Pasolini, Visconti and Bresson is also apparent. The sound
design also stands out: wolves howl and dogs bay as they circle the
house, ratcheting up the sense of menace; crows caw, jangling the
nerves; heavy breathing makes the characters’ isolation in this haunted
house increasingly oppressive. The soundtrack — an early work by
trailblazing female composer Sheyda Gharachedaghi — takes inspiration
from traditional Iranian music, and sounds like demented jazz.” – The Guardian.
This rarely seen Ingmar Bergman film is being screened from 35mm and is also being shown at the Prince Charles Cinema on April 10th and May 8th. Full details here.
Time Out review: Widely underrated, probably because of its strong comic elements and a tour-de-force
scene derived from horror movie conventions, Ingmar Bergman's chilling
exploration of charlatanism is in fact one of his most genuinely
enjoyable films. Max Von Sydow is the 19th century magician/mesmerist
Volger, on the run with his troupe from debts and charges of blasphemy,
whose diabolical talents are put to the test by the cynical rationalist
Dr Vergerus (Gunnar Björnstrand); their clash results in humiliation, doubt,
and death. Much of the film is devoted to wittily ironic sideswipes at
bourgeois hypocrisy; more forceful, however, is the way Bergman
transforms Volger's ultimately futile act of revenge into a sequence of
nightmarish suspense. Geoff Andrew
