Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 200: Sun Jul 21

The Long Absence (Colpi, 1961): ICA Cinema, 2.30pm

This is part of the excellent Marguerite Duras season at the ICA. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Directed by Henri Colpi—editor of Alain Resnais’ first two features, Hiroshima, mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad—and coscripted by Marguerite Duras, this melancholy tone poem focuses on a woman who runs a workers’ cafe in a dingy Paris suburb and an amnesiac derelict she comes to believe is her long-lost husband, who apparently was deported to Germany during the war and may have died there. Decidedly pre-New Wave in its conventional narrative style, though attractively filmed in black-and-white ‘Scope, this picture, which won the grand prize at Cannes in 1961, is interesting today mainly as a haunting period piece.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 199: Sat Jul 20

Secretary (Shainberg, 2002): The Ritzy, Brixton, 8.15pm

The Lost Reels team is proud to present a rare screening of this funny, sexy, romantic, one-of-a-kind comedy/drama from a beautiful 35mm print.

Chicago Reader review:
This wicked little black comedy (2002), adapted from a short story by Mary Gaitskill, chronicles the perverse attraction between a young typist (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and her uptight boss (James Spader), a sadomasochistic tango that strikes unexpected chords in each character. The young woman is a self-mutilator, and when the attorney spanks her for a minor mistake, she knows she’s found the right job. The film’s romantic conceit turns on the decidedly un-PC notion of female submissiveness, but director Steven Shainberg (Hit Me) twists the story into a sly and stylized study of two lonely souls who come to realize they’re made for each other. Spader is both haughty and tender as the sadistic control freak, and Gyllenhaal is even better as the love-starved kitten, crawling around on all fours and meowing for more. Angelo Badalamenti wrote the creepy score; with Lesley Ann Warren as the typist’s overly solicitous mother and Stephen McHattie as her self-loathing father.
Ted Shen

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 198: Fri Jul 19

Destroy, She Said (Duras, 1969): ICA Cinema, 6.45pm

This film, part of the Marguerite Duras season at the ICA, is also being screened on August 6th. Full details here.

ICA introduction:
Marguerite Duras’s debut as a solo director – based on her 1969 novel of the same name – is a film about love and destruction. Shot in gloomy black and white, which serves to enhance the film’s underlying but palpable violence, Destroy, She Said captures a series of encounters between a couple and another man and woman at a secluded hotel in rural France, where they seem to be the only people present. Elisabeth, recuperating after a miscarriage, catches the eye of Professor Max Thor. Meanwhile, Max’s young wife, Alissa, is drawn to an enigmatic German Jew, Stein, who sleeps in the hotel grounds and furtively observes her and Max each night. Amid wanderings and conversations in the forest adjoining the hotel, characters gaze at each other in different configurations and with ambiguous intent. Suddenly, Elisabeth’s husband arrives to take her home, and another angle is revealed.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 197: Thu Jul 18

La Musica (Duras, 1967): ICA Cinema, 6.45pm

This is the opening night of the excellent Marguerite Duras season at the ICA. Full details here.

ICA introduction:
In 1966, Marguerite Duras – already established as a prolific writer, but looking for an escape from the world of publishing – made her debut as a filmmaker with La Musica, based on a short play she had written a year earlier. Co-directed with Paul Seban – with whom she had made television – La Musica is a psychological three-hander that delicately dissects love after separation. The paths of two women and a man cross in a provincial town in the North of France. A young American woman (Julie Dassin, who, for Duras, possessed “a kind of wildness combined with a certain purity”) accosts the man (Robert Hossein) in a café. She is ostensibly on holiday, though the true reasons behind her stay are less clear. They spend the afternoon together. He is there to formalise his divorce from a woman (the ever-marvellous Delphine Seyrig), in the town in which they had once lived. In an empty hotel, the couple has a final conversation: with corridors, rooms and lobbies providing containers for their reminiscences, confessions, and renewed feelings. With exquisite staging and camerawork by Sacha Vierny, who had worked on Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, this screening of La Musica is a New Wave-adjacent primer to Duras’s filmic universe.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 196: Wed Jul 17

Sorry, Wrong Number (Litvak, 1946): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

Time Out review:
Barbara Stanwyck in one of her most famous roles, as an invalid who overhears a telephone conversation between conspiring murderers, and slowly realises that she is their intended victim. Based on Lucille Fletcher's celebrated 22-minute radio play, the film is none the less well sustained. Anatole Litvak's camera paces the confines of Stanwyck's lacy bedroom like an accused man in his cell; and although she is for the most part restricted to acting from the head up, Stanwyck's metamorphosis from indolence to hysteria is brilliantly executed.
Tom Charity

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 195: Tue Jul 16

Model Shop (Demy, 1969): Cine Lumiere, 6.30pm

This film, screening in tribute to the late, great Anouk Aimée, is also being screened on July 14th and 19th. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Jacques Demy's only - and underrated - American film may lack the fairytale charm of his finest French work, but the bitter-sweet delicacy of tone and acute feeling for place are at once familiar. Anouk Aimée's Lola, abandoned by her lover Michel, has now turned up in LA where, older and sadder, she works in a seedy photographer's shop, and brings brief respite to a disenchanted young drifter (Gary Lockwood) with whom she has a one night stand. Unlike Antonioni with Zabriskie Point, Demy never even tries to deal with the malaise afflicting American youth in the '60s, but gives us yet another (relatively plotless) tale of transient happiness and love lost. It's also one of the great movies about LA, shown for once as a ramshackle, rootless sprawl, where movement on the freeways (accompanied by the sounds of West Coast band Spirit) is seemingly endless.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 194: Mon Jul 15

Possession (Zulawski, 1981): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6pm

This film is screening as part of the Discomfort Movies season.

Chicago Reader review:
Andrzej Zulawski's 1981 masterpiece opens with the messy separation of a middle-class couple (Sam Neill, Isabelle Adjani), then goes on to imagine various catastrophic breakdowns—of interpersonal relationships, social order, and ultimately narrative logic itself. The film can be hilarious one moment and terrifying the next, and Zulawski's roving camera only heightens the sense of unpredictability. Few movies convey so viscerally what it's like to go mad: when this takes an unexpected turn into supernatural horror, the development feels inevitable, as though the characters had been bracing themselves for it all along. Adjani won the best actress prize at Cannes for her dual performance (as an unfaithful wife and her angelic doppelganger), but the whole cast is astonishing, exorcising painful feelings with an intensity that rivals that of the filmmaking. Performed in English and shot in Berlin by an international crew, this also conveys a sense of displacement that's always been crucial to Zulawski's work.
Ben Sachs

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 193: Sun Jul 14

Wild Target (Salvadori, 1993): Cinema Museum, 2pm

This film in the season of French Sundaes at the Cinema Museum is a 35mm presentation.

Cinema Museum introduction:
A brilliant dark comedy to conclude our French Sundaes season. Great performances and a sparkling script gives you an insight into paid assassins you would never expect.

“Anchoring the film is another of (Jean) Rochefort’s superb portrayals of the haut bourgeois whose very inscrutability and repression engender sympathy and amusement in equal portion. As his dignity is eroded in a knockabout farce around the streets of Paris, his emotions begin to unbutton” (Time Out).

Each film is accompanied by an introductory illustrated talk by Jon Davies, Tutor in French Cinema at Morley College.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 192: Sat Jul 13

With Gilbert & George (Cole, 2008): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

ICA introduction:
Filmmaker, Julian Cole first met Gilbert & George when he modelled for them in 1986. His intimate and moving portrait filmed over 18 years, reveals for the first time the individuals behind the living sculptures. The film traces their lives from humble beginnings to the world’s artistic stage where they have performed their enigmatic and controversial double act for four decades. Followed by an in-person conversation with Gilbert & George and filmmaker Julian Cole, hosted by Gregor Muir.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 191: Fri Jul 12

Coming Forth by Day (Lofty, 2012): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.20pm

This film is part of the Pan-African film season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

BFI introduction:
Shot amid the turmoil of revolution, this impressive debut takes place in the suburbs of Cairo and traces one day in the life of a daughter as she and her mother struggle to look after her father, who is housebound following a stroke. Echoing the work of Chantal Akerman, Lofty’s film is noted for its disorientating use of space and time to convey the solitude and claustrophobia of life.

Here (and above) is an introduction to the film.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 190: Thu Jul 11

Threads (Jackson, 1984): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.15pm

This film is part of the Discomfort Movies season and also screens on July 21st.

Time Out review:
Originally aired on British TV during the mid ‘80s, Mick Jackson’s docudrama is a sobering, scary and highly realistic hypothetical account of what might happen following a breakdown of society perpetrated, in this instance, by a nuclear strike on Sheffield. The sense of impending doom is palpable as the city’s citizens watch TV news reports about the collapse in relations between Russia and the West. Panic buying becomes looting as humanity begins to adopt a dog-eat-dog mentality. Then the obliteration begins – and it’s pretty ghastly. Small wonder Threads is in our 'Best Horror Films' list; while not strictly part of the horror genre, it provokes a raft of similar emotions – only here you’re aware that this can really happen. Powerful, thought-provoking stuff.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 189: Wed Jul 10

The Conversation (Coppola, 1974): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.20pm

This Francis Ford Coppola classic is on an extended run at BFI Southbank (details here). Tonight;s screening features a Q&A with the movie's film editor and sound designer Walter Murch.

Chicago Reader review: 
Gene Hackman excels in Francis Ford Coppola's tasteful, incisive 1974 study of the awakening of conscience in an “electronic surveillance technician.” Coppola manages to turn an expert thriller into a portrayal of the conflict between ritual and responsibility without ever letting the levels of tension subside or the complicated plot get muddled. Fine support from Allen Garfield as an alternately amiable and desperately envious colleague, plus a superb soundtrack (vital to the action) by Walter Murch—all this and a fine, melancholy piano score by David Shire. 
Don Druker

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 188: Tue Jul 9

Carnal Knowledge (Nichols, 1971): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.30pm

This rarely screened film is being presented from a new 4K restoration for the first time in the UK, via Animus Magazine.

Chicago Reader review:
Director Mike Nichols tries for a European visual patina (the cinematographer is Giuseppe Rotunno, Fellini’s man) but the structure is pure American short-hit—the style of the blackout sketch and comic book. Jack Nicholson, here in the first flush of his stardom, plays the shallow stud hero in an impenetrable combination of masochism and snottiness, though Art Garfunkel and Ann-Margret are quietly charming in support (or should I say relief). The picture has its moments of chilling insight, though essentially it is one more quaint early-70s stab at an American art cinema that never materialized.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 187: Mon Jul 8

Bug (Friedkin, 2006): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.15pm

This film is part of the Discomfort Movies season and also screens on July 25th.

Chicago Reader review:
Steppenwolf ensemble member Tracy Letts adapted his play into this fearsome horror movie, directed with single-minded claustrophobia by William Friedkin (The Exorcist). Michael Shannon, reprising his role from the original 1996 production, is all crawling skin as a man convinced that unknown government powers have infested him with aphids; Ashley Judd is persuasively unstrung as the woman who buys into his delusions to escape her own problems. Friedkin embraces the story’s staginess and sense of implosion as the pair retreat into paranoid madness, a journey that includes several electrifying scares and ultimately plays out in blue light against tinfoil-covered walls. The shocker ending has a rather rhetorical quality, but you have to admire Letts for obeying his own sick logic.
J R Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 186: Sun Jul 7

A Woman Under the Influence (Cassavetes, 1974): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 7.30pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the Discomfort Movies season and also screens on July 28th.

Chicago Reader review:
John Cassavetes's 1974 masterpiece, and one of the best films of its decade. Cassavetes stretches the limits of his narrative—it's the story of a married couple, with the wife hedging into madness—to the point where it obliterates the narrator: it's one of those extremely rare movies that seem found rather than made, in which the internal dynamics of the drama are completely allowed to dictate the shape and structure of the film. The lurching, probing camera finds the same fascination in moments of high drama and utter triviality alike—and all of those moments are suspended painfully, endlessly. Still, Cassavetes makes the viewer's frustration work as part of the film's expressiveness; it has an emotional rhythm unlike anything else I've ever seen. With Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 185: Sat Jul 6

The Lost Weekend (Wilder, 1945): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 3.50pm

This film is part of the Discomfort Movies season and also screens on July 21st and 29th.

Time Out review:
A scarifyingly grim and grimy account of an alcoholic writer's lost weekend, stolen from time intended to be spent on taking a cure and gradually turning into a descent into hell. What makes the film so gripping is the brilliance with which Wilder uses John F Seitz's camerawork to range from an unvarnished portrait of New York brutally stripped of all glamour (Ray Milland's frantic trudge along Third Avenue on Yom Kippur in search of an open pawnshop is a neo-realist morceau d'anthologie) to an almost Wellesian evocation of the alcoholic's inner world (not merely the justly famous DTs hallucination of a mouse attacked by bats, but the systematic use of images dominated by huge foreground objects). Characteristically dispassionate in his observation, Wilder elicits sympathy for his hero only by stressing the cruelly unthinking indifference to his sickness: the male nurse in the alcoholic ward gleefully chanting, 'Good morning, Mary Sunshine!', or the pianist in the bar leading onlookers in a derisive chant of 'somebody stole my purse' (to the tune of 'Somebody Stole My Gal') after he is humiliatingly caught trying to acquire some money. A pity that the production code demanded a glibly unconvincing ending in which love finds a way.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 184: Fri Jul 5

The Man Without Desire (Brunel, 1923): Birkbeck Institute of Moving Image, 6.30pm

This is a 35mm screening with piano accompaniment.

Birkbeck Institute introduction:
A mourning lover reawakens after 200 years to search for his beloved. Filmed in Berlin and on location in Venice, this romantic time-travel fantasy has an exotic atmosphere rare in the British silent era, thanks to the group of bohemian artists and skilled technicians Brunel assembled for his debut feature, with cameraman Henry Harris fresh from working on Abel Gance's J'accuse. It helped launch the screen career of Ivor Novello, although by a cruel irony Brunel was denied the opportunity to direct Novello's biggest hit, The Rat. A rare chance to see this on 35mm with live accompaniment by Costas Fotopoulos.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 183: Thu Jul 4

The Lighthouse (Saakyan, 2006): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.20pm

This film is part of the Restored strand at BFI Southbank.

Time Out review:
Impressive allegory of war – notably in how it affects communities of the elderly, infirm, children and women left bereft by the absence of their menfolk, either through battle, exile or death – set in an undefined region of the Caucasus, but making clear references to the genocidal Armenian experience. Lena (the expressive Anna Kapaleva) journeys by train to her  mountain village, in the aftermath of an unspecified war hinted at by government radio broadcasts, to encourage her grandparents’ departure but finds herself stranded. Beautifully shot in muted colour tones (replete with some extraordinary mordant, misty time-lapse shots of  the helicopter-gun-ship strewn landscape), this atemporal requiem, assuredly directed by Mariya Saakyan,  is played out with a Kusturica-style heightened naturalism, stripped bare of his carnival-esque levity, and deepened by affecting poetic musings on familial and cultural loss. 
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 182: Wed Jul 3

 The Driver (Hill, 1978): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

This is a 16mm screening and part of The Nickel's season of road movies at the cinema.

Chicago Reader review:
An audacious, skillful film noir (1978) by Walter Hill, so highly stylized that it's guaranteed to alienate 90 percent of its audience. There's no realism, no psychology, and very little plot in Hill's story of a deadly game between a professional getaway driver (Ryan O'Neal) and a detective obsessed with catching him (Bruce Dern). There is, however, a great deal of technically sophisticated and very imaginative filmmaking. The cross-references here are Howard Hawks, Robert Bresson, and Jean-Pierre Melville: a strange, heady, and quite effective range of influences. With Isabelle Adjani, Ronee Blakley, and Matt Clark.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the season trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 181: Tue Jul 2

Alps (Lanthimos, 2011): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

There is another screening of this film on July 18th and is part of the Yorgos Lanthimos season at the Prince Charleds Cinema. Full details here.

Time Out review:
In a gymnasium, a handful of odd people calling themselves ‘Alps’ hangs out, connected by a fixation with the mundane details of the lives of people at death’s door – including a promising teenage tennis player in intensive care. Weird hobby? Exploitative enterprise? Search for identity? Greek filmmaker Giorgos Lanthimos might be best suited to a form that doesn’t really exist: the cinematic novella. Both 2009’s ‘Dogtooth’, about a perversely insulated nuclear family, and this follow-up have much to recommend them. They cultivate queasy suspense from banalities and unfurl with a dry-as-dust deadpan absurdism that covers a multitude of sins. They have a powerful feeling for the ways in which social and linguistic structures underwrite arbitrary but binding – even reassuring – power games. And they have a juggling, discombobulating way with intimate deceptions, sudden violence and nuggets of Hollywood fandom.
Ben Walters

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 180: Mon Jul 1

Eraserhead (Lynch, 1976): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.40pm

This genuine cult movie, which also screens on July 14th and 27th, is part of the excellent Discomfort Movies season at BFI Southbank. Tonight will feature an extended introduction from season curator Kimberley Sheehan.

This film takes me back to an era before video, DVD and social media when print and word-of-mouth were the main forms of communication where a film was concerned. Lynch's debut was a must-see back in the late 1970s and it was fitting that the movie had its premiere at a midnight screening at the Cinema Village in New York as the midnight-movie circuit was responsible for popularising this indefinable work. Eraserhead is a seminal work in the history of independent film and is as much a must-see now for anyone interested in what film can achieve.

Chicago Reader review:
David Lynch describes his first feature (1977) as “a dream of dark and troubling things,” and that's about as close as anyone could get to the essence of this obdurate blend of nightmare imagery, Grand Guignol, and camp humor. Some of it is disturbing, some of it is embarrassingly flat, but all of it shows a degree of technical accomplishment far beyond anything else on the midnight-show circuit. With Jack Nance and Charlotte Stewart.'
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the original trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 179: Sun Jun 30

The Tree of Life (Malick, 2011): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.15pm

This is a 35mm screening.

Chicago Reader review:
A masterpiece, this fifth feature by Terrence Malick manages to reconcile the emotional force of his 70s classics, Badlands and Days of Heaven, with the epic naturalism of his more recent comeback films, The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005). Brad Pitt gives an impressively sober, tight-lipped performance as the rigid 1950s patriarch of a little family in Waco, Texas, a decent but angry man whose strict treatment of his three young sons is countered by the love and Christian grace of his ethereal wife (Jessica Chastain). Interspersed with this humble family conflict are scenes of the world's creation that Malick concocted with the legendary special effects artist Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey). These audacious sequences can't help but evoke the metaphysical questing of 2001, and in fact The Tree of Life often feels like a religious response to Stanley Kubrick's cold, cerebral view of our place in the universe. Not to be missed.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 178: Sat Jun 29

El Sur (Erice, 1983): Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm

This film is also screened on June 22nd at Close-Up Cinema. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
On the surface, despite the presence of a different fictional source (a story by Adelaida Garcia Morales) and scriptwriter (Jose Luis Lopez Linares), Victor Erice's second feature seems to bring back some of the haunting obsessions of his first, the wonderful Spirit of the Beehive (1973): the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the magical spell exerted by movies over childhood, and a little girl's preoccupation with her father and the past. But as English critic Tim Pulleine has observed, a reference to Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt in El sur (South, 1983) points to an elaborate system of doubling and duplication that underlies the film's structure as a whole, operating on the level of shots and sequences as well as themes (north and south, father and daughter, real and imaginary). Although this subtle spellbinder ends somewhat abruptly, reportedly because the film's budget ran out, it seems to form a nearly perfect whole as it is: a brooding tale about an intense father-daughter relationship and the unknowable past, mysterious and resonant, with the poetic ambience of a story by Faulkner.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 177: Fri Jun 28

Snake Eyes (De Palma, 1998): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This film is part of the Nicolas Cage season at the Prince Charles. Full details here.

Time Out review:
Brian De Palma's coldly executed techno-thriller opens with a signature sequence: a continuous Steadicam shot starts outside an Atlantic City sports arena, then snakes its way along corridors, up stairs and down an escalator, to reveal the packed crowd awaiting the start of a heavyweight boxing match. We're following flamboyant Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage), a corrupt cop who revels in the fact that he sees every angle. Inside, his old pal, Navy commander Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise), is keeping an eye on Secretary of Defence Kirkland, who has a ringside seat courtesy of arena owner and munitions tycoon Gilbert Powell (John Heard). Minutes later, the odds-on favourite hits the canvas, a shot rings out, and Kirkland is fatally wounded. Santoro immediately seals the crowd inside the arena and, using TV and surveillance camera playback, scans the screens for clues as to the killer's identity. As Santoro interviews key witnesses, the film turns into Rashomon with action replays, as we see flashbacks from multiple points of view. The film echoes the technical wizardry and complex plotting of De Palma's best film, Blow Out. Edgy suspense and powerful kinetic energy are generated by the intriguing revelations and razor-sharp editing, while the truth behind its convoluted conspiracy has a surprisingly serious political and emotional undertow.
Nigel Floyd

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 175: Thu Jun 27

Pastoral: To Die in the Country (Terayama, 1974): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

ICA introduction:
This event will celebrate the semicentennial of Shūji Terayama’s film Pastoral: To Die in the Country (Den-en ni shisu, 1974). Pastoral is a playfully painful, shrewdly surreal investigation into the mutability of memory & identity. At the foot of Mt. Fear, in a fever dream idyll of the countryside, a boy longs to escape a present that never was. Shūji Terayama (1935-1983) is considered an icon of the post-war avant-garde movement in Japan. Before establishing himself as a filmmaker and the leader of angura theatre troupe Tenjō Sajiki, Terayama broke into public consciousness as a poet. Pastoral shares its title and key themes with Terayama’s final tanka collection, Den-en ni shisu (1965). Rather than an ‘adaptation’, the film is an experiment in melding poetry with film to create a new way of expression. A screening of the film will be preceded by a polyphonic recital of Terayama’s poetry, co-directed by Kaisa Saarinen and Alan Fielden & in collaboration with performance artist Noe Iwai. The dialogue of poetry and cinema in Pastoral will be expanded into a trilogue of forms through this hybrid performance.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 174: Wed Jun 26

Permanent Vacation (Jarmusch, 1980): Prince Charles Cinema, 3.45pm

This presentation is also screened on June 10th. Details here.

Time Out review:
Jim Jarmusch's 16mm feature debut, made not long after the writer/director graduated from film school, is an oblique study of a young man (Chris Parker) adrift on the streets of New York. As he roams, he has chance encounters with a car thief, a saxophone player and a grizzled war veteran, among others. Learning their stories, he begins to seem more and more isolated. Even his relationship with his girlfriend (Leila Gastil) is coming under strain. Perhaps the film doesn't have quite the charm of its successor, Stranger Than Paradise, but Jarmusch's freewheeling episodic approach to storytelling is already evident.
Geoffrey Macnab

Here (and above) is the trailer.