This 16mm presentation by those great people at Cine-Real film club is also being screened on Wednesday February 19th. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: When Fritz Lang filmed it in 1938 (asYou Only Live Once), the story had a metaphysical thrust. When Nicholas Ray filmed it in 1948 (They Live by Night),
it was romantic and doom laden. But by the time Arthur Penn got to it
in 1967, it was pure myth, the distillation of dozens of drive-in movies
about rebellious kids and their defeat at the hands of the
establishment. It's by far the least controlled of Penn's films (the
tone wobbles between hick satire and noble social portraiture, and the
issue of violence is displayed more than it's examined), but the pieces
work wonderfully well, propelled by what was then a very original acting
style. Dave Kehr
This film - part of the Visions in Ruins: British Cinema 1970 - 1980 season at Garden Cinema - is also screened on February 20th will be introduced on that night by novelist and publisher Nicholas Royle, and will be followed by a post-film discussion in the cinema bar.
As with a number of movies by director Nicolas Roeg the producers did not know or,
possibly, like what they had on their hands here and this was poorly
distributed at the time.
It isn't surprising the film suffered indifferent attention from the
studio and puzzlement from the critics on release as this is a
disturbing and complicated work. Labyrinthine plotting; cross-cutting;
masculinity crisis and dazzling camerawork - all the touches associated
with Roeg are here. If you like the Roeg oeuvre you are in for a treat.
The ending stayed with me for quite some time.Here's an essay by the excellent Richard Combs on the movie.
Time Out review: One of Nicolas Roeg's most complex and elusive movies, building a thousand-piece
jigsaw from its apparently simple story of a consuming passion between
two Americans in Vienna. Seen in flashback through the prism of the
girl's attempted suicide, their affair expands into a labyrinthine
enquiry on memory and guilt as Theresa Russell's cold psychoanalyst
lover (Art Garfunkel) himself falls victim to the cooler and crueller
investigations of the detective assigned to her case (Harvey Keitel in
visionary form as the policeman turned father-confessor). But where Don't Look Now
sustained its Gothic intensity with human intimacy, this film seems a
case-example of how more could have been achieved with less editing,
less ingenuity, less even of the bravura intelligence with which Roeg at
one point matches Freud with Stalin as guilt-ridden spymasters. Don Macpherson
This screening is part of the Chantal Akerman season at BFI. The digital restoration also screens on February 15th and 21st. Full details here. Tonight’s screening will include an extended intro by Melanie Iredale, Director of Reclaim The Frame.
Chicago Reader review of Je Tu il Elle: Chantal Akerman directed and plays the lead in this early (1974) black-and-white feature that charts three successive stages of its heroine's love life. In the first part she lives like a hermit, eating only sugar, compulsively rearranging the furniture in her one-room flat, and apparently writing and rewriting a love letter; in part two she hitches a ride with a truck driver and eventually gives him a hand job; in part three she arrives at the home of her female lover, and they proceed to make frantic love. This is every bit as obsessive and as eerie as Akerman's later Jeanne Dielman and Toute une nuit, though not as striking on a visual level; as in all her best work, however, the minimalist structure is both potent and haunting. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This film is part of the Masterpieces of the excellent Iranian New Wave season at the Barbican. You can find full details here.
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 is a 35mm screening in the Celluloid on Sunday strand at the ICA Cinema.
Time Out review: After the impressive but inevitably compromised Under Fire, it's
good to see a movie that deals with conflict in Central America with a
real sense of commitment. Haskell Wexler's brazenly partisan film may lack the
artistic sophistication of its mainstream counterparts, but it gains in
power by focusing not on the familiar 'neutral' journalist/photographer
figure, but on an invading American soldier, a Green Beret lieutenant
(Robert Beltran) drafted to Honduras to train a platoon of 'Contras' for secret
raids on Nicaragua. There he becomes embroiled not only in the
infliction of death, torture and US propaganda upon the Sandinistas, but
in the contradictions of his position. First, he's a Latin American
himself; second, he falls for a woman working in Honduras who hails from
the village that is his prime target. Wexler's methods involve passion
rather than 'balance': black-and-white moralising may occasionally be
the result, but there's no denying the emotional punch dealt by the
assured combination of taut narrative and intelligently researched
context. Geoff Andrew
This night dedicated to the late director also includes mystery shorts plus coffee, doughnuts and cherry pie as well as a David Lynch raffle.
Time Out review: It begins with an axe crashing into a TV set: sparks fly, a scream is
heard, and the symbolism is brutally obvious - forget everything you
thought you knew about the quirky, wacky, cosy world of ‘Twin Peaks',
cos Daddy's home and he's pissed off. Like many of the show's hardcore
fans, David Lynch was disillusioned with what ‘Twin Peaks' had become:
from a groundbreaking, excoriating peek into America's small-town
underbelly to a cute parade of oddball soap-operatics in under two
years. The big screen version gave him licence to bring it all back to
basics, and he grabbed it with both hands: even in Lynch-land, with all
its ear-severing, head-exploding, exploitation and rough sex, there's
nothing so dark and demented as ‘Fire Walk With Me', the simplest,
strangest, saddest and arguably greatest of all his films. The critics
sneered, the fans balked and the public stayed away in droves. It's
their loss: this was a beautiful new kind of madness, terrifying,
exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure. Tom Huddleston
Chicago Reader review: The succes de scandale of Jeanne Dielman brought Chantal Akerman
the opportunity to make a film for the French major Gaumont; the result
was this moody, terse, haunting feature about a woman filmmaker (Aurore
Clement) on a promotional tour of Europe. In each city she takes the
chance to look up relatives, friends, and ex-lovers, but none of the
meetings is wholly satisfying; some block to communication always
remains. Akerman’s use of long takes and open spaces delineates the gulf
that separates her characters from their environment and from each
other. While the atmosphere of anomie may be familiar from countless
European art films, it is Akerman’s intense emotionality, held
desperately in check by her precise camera style, that makes this effort
something special. Dave Kehr
This 35mm presentation is the opening night of the Jacques Rivette season at ICA Cinema. Full details of the programme devoted to the director can be found here.
Chicago Reader review: Though more amateurish than the other celebrated first features of the
French New Wave, Jacques Rivette’s troubled and troubling 1960 account
of Parisians in the late 50s remains the most intellectually and
philosophically mature, and one of the most beautiful. The specter of
world-wide conspiracy and impending apocalypse haunts the characters—a
student, an expatriate American, members of a low-budget theater company
rehearsing Pericles—as the student tries to recover a tape of
guitar music by a deceased Spanish emigre who may have committed
suicide. Few films have more effectively captured a period and milieu;
Rivette evokes bohemian paranoia and sleepless nights in tiny one-room
flats, along with the fragrant, youthful idealism conveyed by the film’s
title (which is countered by the opening epigraph from Charles Peguy:
“Paris belongs to no one”). Jonathan Rosenbaum
This 35mm screening is part of a mini Ken Russell season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Full details can be found here.
Chicago Reader review: Ken Russell first claimed attention with this 1970 adaptation of the
D.H. Lawrence novel. In retrospect, it seems surprisingly sane and
classy for him, though his themes of excess and abandon bubble beneath
the surface. Though the plotting is largely shucked in favor of image
and atmosphere, it remains Russell’s best-told film apart from Savage Messiah.
The delirious romanticism is not nullified, in Russell’s usual way, by a
sour awareness of its absurdity, which may account for the film’s
persistent popularity. Dave Kehr
Review: Tomorrow We Move (2004) is Chantal Akerman’s most underrated film. There is frequently an element of self-portraiture in
Akerman’s work, but probably never so frankly as in Tomorrow We Move. Sylvie Testud plays Charlotte, a writer finding
it difficult to crank out her commissioned, erotic prose. Chain-smoking,
clumsy, eternally scatty and distracted, Charlotte is a human sponge: whatever
she sees and (especially) hears goes straight into whatever she’s typing. Those
around her burst into laughter at one glimpse of her “comic” attempts at
describing sex. “Comic?”, she keeps asking herself at unexpected intervals. Comedy, sensuality, hard work, mess, cooking, chaos, and
above all the constant presence of music: everything flows, buzzes and
intersects in this portrait of everyday life. It’s a film that the philosopher Spinoza could have
dreamed up, because everything here is a matter of swiftly fluctuating moods,
sensations, inputs that instantly alter people and the way they see and
experience their surroundings. Akerman – much to the chagrin of her co-writer, Eric
de Kuyper – insisted on incorporating even those familial memories of the
Holocaust that haunt much of her œuvre, deepening the prevailing “lightness”
and airiness of the piece. Akerman had, indeed, a lot to “get out of her
system”! The English title gives the film a pun it lacks in the
original French, but fully deserves. “We move”: the reference is to moving
house, relocating oneself; Akerman had already used it once before in the 40
minute monologue-piece, Le Déménagement (Moving In, 1992), which (recalling Michael
Snow’s Wavelength [1967]) slowly
creeps into an extreme close-up of Sami Frey amidst the unpacked boxes of his
life. But there is another type of movement that is
incessant here: the physical movement of walking, rushing, gesturing, dancing.
Like in a musical, everyone is inevitably enchanted (even when they wish not to be), everybody sways to the rhythm – but the
relations between music, dance and action remain loose, mutually autonomous. Adrian Martin
This is a 35mm presentation from the excellent Lost Reels, an organisation dedicated to showing
lost, unavailable and out-of-circulation films.
Lost Reels introduction: This rarely screened coming-of-age drama follows the tempestuous
relationship between Mariel Hemingway’s college hurdler Chris and
Patrice Donnelly’s Olympian pentathlete Tory, as they first become
lovers and then competitors during the 1980 US Olympic trials. This
tender, poetic film explores the dynamics of sporting alliances, the
rigours of training, sexual fluidity, and what it means to compete. A
clear influence on last year’s Challengers.
Chicago Reader review: Robert Towne, the acclaimed screenwriter of Shampoo and Chinatown,
turned to directing with this 1982 drama (from his own script) about
the love affair between two female athletes (Mariel Hemingway and
Patrice Donnelly). Though the gay theme is given much greater erotic
force than in Arthur Hiller’s movie of the same year, Making Love,
it is also used as a metaphor for what Towne sees as the innate
narcissism of the athlete, the love of one’s own body as reflected in
another. The characters have a fullness and vitality rare in American
films of that period. With Scott Glenn as a flinty coach, making the most of
a part that is an actor’s dream. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Edward Yang's most accessible movie is also his best sinceA Brighter Summer Day,
displaying a comparable mastery that won him the prize for best
direction in Cannes. In keeping with the musical connotation of the
English title, the thematic counterpoint between generations is as
adroit as the focus on a single generation was in his earlier
masterpiece. Beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral in the
same contemporary Taipei family, the film takes almost three hours to
unfold, and not a moment seems gratuitous or squandered. Working again
with nonprofessional actors, Yang coaxes a standpout lead performance
from Wu Nienjen (a major screenwriter and director in his own right) as a
middle-aged partner in a failing computer company who has a secret
Tokyo rendez-vous with a former girlfriend he jilted 30 years ago, now
living in Chicago, while trying to team up professionally with a
Japanese games designer. (The chats between the latter two are all in
English, and Yang's own background in American computers serves him
well.) Other major characters include the hero's spiritually traumatized
wife, her comatose mother, his pregnant sister and her debt-ridden
husband, his teenage daughter, and his eight-year-old son. The latter—a
comic and unsentimental marvel named Yang-Yang—may come closest to
serving as Yang's own mouthpiece; the kid becomes obsessed with
photographing what people can't see, such as the backs of their own
heads, which comprises for him the half of reality that's missed. Yang,
one comes to feel, misses nothing, thanks to the interweave of shifting
viewpoints and poignant emotional refrains. Cutting between the
absent-mindedness of three family members in the opening sequence and
orchestrating comparable thematic rhymes later, he makes his family one
of the richest in modern movies—with the deepest impacts made by the
oldest and youngest members, like the top and bottom notes in a musical
scale. Jonathan Rosenbaum Here (and above) is the trailer.
Chicago Reader review: One of the constants of Chantal Akerman’s remarkable work is a powerful
if “heavy” painterly style that practically precludes narrative flow
even when she’s telling stories. Even at her best, as in Jeanne Dielman and The Man With a Suitcase,
the only kind of character development she seems able to articulate
with conviction is a gradual descent into madness. But the relatively
unneurotic Night and Day (1991) strikes me as her most successful
work in years. Julie (Guilaine Londez), the heroine, makes love to Jack
(Thomas Langmann) in their small flat by day and wanders through Paris
at night while he drives a cab—until she meets Joseph (Francois Negret)
and guiltlessly launches a secret nighttime affair with him. Akerman
brings a lyricism to the material that makes it “sing” like a musical.
Whether the camera is gracefully traversing Jack and Julie’s flat or
slowly retreating from Julie and Joseph across bustling traffic while he
recounts the things he loves about Paris, Akerman seems to have
discovered both a musical rhythm for her mise en scene and a deftness in
integrating her score that eluded her in her literal musical Window Shopping. This movie isn’t for everyone—no Akerman feature is—but if you care about her work you shouldn’t miss it. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review: Gus Van Sant's 1990 feature, his best prior to Elephant,
is a simultaneously heartbreaking and exhilarating road movie about two
male hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves) in the Pacific
Northwest. Phoenix, a narcoleptic from a broken home, is essentially
looking for a family, while Reeves, whose father is mayor of Portland,
is mainly fleeing his. The style is so eclectic that it may take some
getting used to, but Van Sant, working from his own story for the first
time, brings such lyrical focus to his characters and his poetry that
almost everything works. Even the parts that show some strain—like the
film's extended hommageto Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight—are
exciting for their sheer audacity. Phoenix was never better, and Reeves
does his best with a part that's largely Shakespeare's Hal as filtered
through Welles. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out review: A rather crude attempt to expand the Italian Western, cashing in on the
blaxploitation and kung-fu markets. Two black dudes (Jim Brown, Fred Williamson),
in uneasy alliance and carrying a heap of money, pick up a couple of
waifs and strays, including a kung-fu fighting Indian, while a vast army
of bounty hunters headed by Lee Van Cleef chase after the loot. All an
excuse for some undemanding thrills, listlessly put together. The film
only rouses itself to kill people off: they don't just die, they fall
from heights, slam into railings, and throw themselves into puddles just
in front of the camera. Ironic that it's only in their dying seconds
that most of the cast come alive. Chris Peachment
Chicago Reader review: Otto
Preminger's directorial debut (1944), not counting the five previous B
films he refused to acknowledge and an earlier feature made in Austria.
It reveals a coldly objective temperament and a masterful narrative
sense, which combine to turn this standard 40s melodrama into something
as haunting as its famous theme. Less a crime film than a study in
levels of obsession, Laura is
one of those classic works that leave their subject matter behind and
live on the strength of their seductive style. With Dana Andrews as the
detective, Gene Tierney as the lady in the portrait, and Clifton Webb as
the epicene litterateur. Dave Kehr Here (and above) is the trailer.
Time Out review: 'Returning to feature filmmaking after a lengthy sojourn as a video artist, Belgium’s Chantal Akerman
delivers a work as substantive, challenging and unique as her
brilliant Proust adaptation from 2000, ‘The Captive’. Billed as a
‘liberal’ take on Joseph Conrad’s little-known first novel, this
languid essay in despair sees Stanislas Merhar
playing the stuttering, frenzied but ultimately tragic and possibly
deranged figure of Almayer, a European ex-pat in Cambodia who idly tends
to his failing trading post while ensuring his daughter, Nina (born to
a local mother), is instilled with the same enlightened European
values as himself. Scenes usually run in single, medium close-up takes
(all immaculately framed and executed) and the elliptical narrative can
usually be navigated by gauging the griminess of the cast. Tough as
the film may be, it still speaks volumes about colonial exploitation
and catastrophic clashes of culture, gender and age. The (eight-minute)
climactic shot is also sensational.' David Jenkins
This 35mm presentation (which will feature an introduction by Mario Van Peebles) is part of the African American Western season and also screens on February 25th. You can find the full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Not to be confused with the better-than-average western directed by Kirk
Douglas in 1975, this 1993 movie about blacks in the west directed by
and starring Mario Van Peebles (New Jack City) breaks with
standard genre myth to come closer to historical truth. Pretty good in
terms of action and character, but since historical verisimilitude is at
issue I certainly could have done without the blatantly anachronistic
music (I seriously doubt that chanteuses resorted to flatted fifths in
turn-of-the-century saloons). The plot follows the exploits of veterans
of the Spanish-American War (including Van Peebles, Charles Lane, Tone
Loc, Tiny Lister Jr., and Big Daddy Kane), all but one of them (Stephen
Baldwin) black, who have banded together to form a posse. As in New Jack City,
Van Peebles displays a distinctive visual style of tilted angles and
frequent camera movement, and the script by Sy Richardson and Dario
Scardapane also keeps things moving, but perhaps the best sequence of
all is the opening one, which features the great Woody Strode. Jonathan Rosenbaum
THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT BUT THERE IS A REPEAT 16mm SCREENING on Saturday February 15th. Details here.
This
film, being shown on 16mm by Nickel Cinema after David Lynch's recent death, 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
Time Out review: Chantal Akerman, the mistress of minimalism, has made her own midsummer night's
sex comedy, with a superabundance of stories and a cast of (almost)
thousands. The film shows an endless series of brief encounters that
take place in Brussels in the course of one delirious, torrid June
night, with the twist that each relationship is condensed into a single
moment of high melodrama - the coup de foudre, the climax of
passion, the end of an affair - with the spectator left to fill in the
fictional spaces between scenes. Each couple compulsively plays through
the same gestures, each mating rite is a variation on the same theme:
repetitions which Akerman uses both as a rich source of comedy and as a
device to show erotic desire as a pattern of codes and conventions.
Marrying the pleasure of narrative to the purism of the avant-garde,
this is her most accessible film to date.
BFI introduction: Set in 1880, this adaptation of Marvin Albert’s best-selling 1957 novel
Apache Rising arrived at a moment when the Western genre was undergoing
significant revision. The film employs the Anglo-Native American
conflict as a metaphor for Black-white relations in contemporary US
society. In his first Western, Sidney Poitier delivers a commanding
performance alongside James Garner, fresh from the hit TV series
Maverick. Together, they confront prejudice on the frontier, in a
groundbreaking precursor to the interracial buddy films that became a
hallmark of US cinema.
BFI introduction: In the pre-Civil War West, Gossett and Garner’s buddies and professional
conmen Jason O’Rourke and Quincy Drew beat racist slave owners at their
own game. Traveling through small towns, they swindle auction buyers
out of their ill-gotten gains and abscond with their money. But what
will these gamblers do when their luck runs out? Paul Bogart and Gordon Douglas’
comedy balances action and quick-fire dialogue, and features its two
stars at their very best.
This groundbreaking film is part of the African American Western season and also screens on February 21st. Details here. BFI introduction: Renowned photographer Gordon Parks wrote, directed, produced and scored
this adaptation of his 1963 novel. A deeply personal and
semi-autobiographical drama, it follows Newt Winger, a Black teenager
navigating adolescence and manhood in 1920s Cherokee Flats, Kansas. This
poignant coming-of-age story vividly captures the challenges of racial
injustice, community and self-discovery during a turbulent era. Among
the first films to be inducted into the American National Film Registry
in 1989, it remains a touchstone of American cinema.
This is a Funeral Parade Queer Film Society screening. There are others here.
Chicago Reader review: A lesbian love triangle becomes a schema of sexual power plays in Rainer
Werner Fassbinder's most harshly stylized and perhaps most significant
film (1972). The action is confined to a single set—the apartment of
fashion designer Margit Carstensen, decorated with desiccated mannequins
and a mammoth painting of fleshy, galloping nudes—where the three
characters (one is a mute) scheme, complain, and attempt to seduce. With
Irm Hermann and Hanna Schygulla. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman
(Jeanne Dielman) made this independent work from a work-in-progress
known as The Eighties (the English title of the finished film is Window
Shopping).
Forty minutes of videotaped auditions and rehearsals for Akerman's
shopping center musical are followed by three production numbers—in
radiant 35-millimeter—from the film. The subject is first and foremost
Akerman's love of actors and the filmmaking process, and second the
process itself—the intermediary steps between conception and perfection,
from physical materials to cinematic illusions. If you don't know
Akerman's work, this is an excellent place to start: it's a very funny,
very idiosyncratic piece from one of the most sympathetic of modernist
filmmakers. Dave Kehr Here (and above) is the opening to the film.
This 16mm presentationis part of a two days of screenings at ICA Cinema devoted to a titan of
experimental cinema, Michael Snow (1929-2023), who produced a body of
work that established entirely new ways of seeing.
Chicago Reader review: Michael Snow’s 1971 film La region centrale is surely one of the most
unusual in the history of the medium. For three hours we see a single
northern Quebec landscape from a single position, with no signs of human
presence save a rare glimpse of the camera shadow. The camera is
mounted on a complex custom-designed machine that takes it through a
series of increasingly elaborate, carefully choreographed movements,
many of which combine several different kinds of rotation. The sound
track consists entirely of a series of beeps that come from the tape
used to control the machine. Clearly, this is not a film for everyone,
but what emerges for the patient viewer is a sense that this rocky,
mostly treeless landscape possesses a vast, timeless, almost visionary
continuity that ultimately transcends the human-designed camera
movements. I have hiked similar Canadian terrain and can testify that
this land has a feeling of being very old, as if barely evolved through
the aeons, a sense well captured by Snow’s film. Few works of art have
so eloquently articulated the difference between the world we were given
and the consciousness we have evolved. Fred Camper
This film (showing along with 'So This Is' (1982), is part of a two days of screenings at ICA Cinema devoted to a titan of experimental cinema, Michael Snow (1929-2023), who produced a body of work that established entirely new ways of seeing. ICA introduction: A painter, sculptor, photographer and musician as well as a filmmaker,
Snow used techniques from across the disciplines to challenge
conventional cinematic notions of perception and representation. As part
of the structural film movement in which form was prioritised over
content, he saw framing, sound and duration as tools for reinventing the
language of the medium, saying that “to shape time seems to me to be
the quintessence of cinema”. Objecting to commercial cinema’s explicit
attempts to prompt emotional responses, Snow didn’t try to predict the
effect his work would have on audiences. Instead he stressed the bodily
effect of viewership, emphasising that his films, while carefully
structured, were “real experiences”. Noting that his 1971 work La Région Centrale
had caused some viewers to faint, he said “I must be doing something
right”. His work's ability to prompt both instinctive and analytical
reactions has helped it endure across the decades. With thanks to Dream of Light, a London-based film project that champions experimental and underseen cinema.
Chicago Reader review: Michael Snow’s notorious experimental classic (1967), consisting of a single, extended zoom (if anything moving at such a snaillike pace can properly be called a zoom) from one side of a loft space to the other. The aesthetic unfolding is engaging, also quite demanding, though I’m not convinced that letting your technical apparatus make the major decisions of your art is such a good formal idea. If nothing else, the film provides an inadvertent comment on the old classroom riddle of whether it’s possible to have a one-word poem; no, the classical answer goes, because it wouldn’t rhyme . . . and I’m not so sure that’s as stupid as it sounds. Pat Graham
Birkbeck Cinema introduction: The coincidence of the UK crisis in public funding with the Assisted Dying Bill prompts this screening of Plan 75. Produced by the famed melodrama auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda and directed by a woman, Chie Hayakawa, Plan 75 is set in a very contemporary Japan, beset by an aging population with minimal state support. (Real-life Japan has some of the rich world’s highest rates of senior poverty, particularly among single women.) The consequence is a new state venture, in which all citizens of 75 and over are offered financially-incentivized euthanasia. The film will be introduced by Birkbeck Honorary Research Fellow Mandy Merck, and you are invited to discuss it afterwards with her and Birkbeck Professor Emerita Lynne Segal, author of Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Aging.
Guardian review: This strange, melancholy film fromJapaneffectively makes the (unfashionable) case against euthanasia: that old people won’t want to be a bother or appear selfish and so will feel pressured into accepting state medicide. We see older characters retired from jobs which they really need, people without access to welfare and housing, old people who are desperately lonely and who even crave the Plan 75 helpline as someone to talk to. But the movie creates dissident moments: a young employee of Plan 75 realises that one applicant is his elderly uncle, while a Plan 75 call centre operative meets an old lady in person and takes her for an evening’s bowling, and realises that her colleagues are being trained in steering callers away from the last-minute change of heart which is the customer’s theoretical right. This is a poignant and weird film. Peter Bradshaw
This is a 16mm screening from the wonderful Cine-Real team.
Chicago Reader review: Completing a loose trilogy that began with Red Sorghum and Ju Dou,
Zhang Yimou’s grim 1991 adaptation of a novel by Su Tong once again
stars Gong Li as a young woman who marries a much older man, and once
again tells a story that explicitly critiques Chinese feudalism and
indirectly contemporary China. This time, however, the style is quite
different (despite another key use of the color red) and the vision is
much bleaker. The heroine, a less sympathetic figure than her
predecessors, is a university student in the 1920s who becomes the
fourth and youngest wife of a powerful man in northern China after her
stepmother can no longer afford to pay for her education. She quickly
becomes involved in the various intrigues and rivalries between wives
that rule her husband’s world and family tradition: each wife has her
own house and courtyard within the palace, and whoever the husband
chooses to sleep with on a given night receives a foot massage, several
lighted red lanterns, and the right to select the menu for the following
day. The film confines us throughout to this claustrophobic universe of
boxes within boxes, where wives and female servants devote their lives
to scheming against one another; the action is filmed mainly in frontal
long shots. Zhang confirms his mastery and artistry here in many ways,
some relatively new (such as his striking sound track), though the cold,
remote, and stifling world he presents here doesn’t offer much
emotional release. Joanthan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review: In Claude Chabrol’s 1986 French detective film, the title character
travels to a village to investigate the murder of a local luminary, only
to discover that the man’s widow is his former lover. The characters
are interesting enough, pursuing self-centered activities that,
typically for Chabrol, seem parodies of bourgeois behavior (the widow’s
brother spends his time making painted sculptures of eyeballs). There
are also some wonderfully characteristic images—the widow first appears
behind glass, her face rendered at once more vivid and more distant, and
an overhead shot of the murder scene lays out the geography while
distancing us from the characters. Fred Camper
BFI introduction: In this tender and bittersweet comedy of outsiders, a former housewife
and a Jamaican widower, the latter freshly released from a mental
institution, strike up an irresistible romance. Directed by one of
America’s most revered independent filmmakers, this delicate tale
approaches aging, mental illness and race in a poignant and honest way.
Unreleased for decades, this 4K restoration finally does justice to the
film and the late, great James Earl Jones’ performance.
Chicago Reader review: This rarely screened 1958 gem about the mind of a contract killer is one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite thrillers, and it’s easy to see why. The film follows an existential hipster (Vince Edwards) who coolly regards his work as a business until he gets thrown by a big-time assignment to rub out a woman about to testify in court. Neither the screenwriter (Ben Simcoe) nor the director (Irving Lerner) ever made it big, but here they achieved something nearly perfect–with a memorable guitar score, a witty feeling for character, dialogue, and narrative ellipsis, and a lean, purposeful style. Lucien Ballard did the black-and-white cinematography. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is a 4K restoration screening and part of the Alfonso Cuáron on Alain Tanner season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: A
sailor (Bruno Ganz) abandons his job as a hand on an automated oil
tanker to spend a few days exploring the city of Lisbon. Suddenly
liberated from purpose, responsibility, and structured time, he finds
that the world looks different to him, and slowly he loses himself in
its newly opened fissures. What gives this 1983 film its authenticity
and powerful moodiness is perhaps the fact that the director, Alain
Tanner, has followed the course of his own protagonist, cutting himself
off from a planned scenario and allowing the shape of the city to
dictate the incidents of his drama. Temperamentally it's like no other
Tanner film (at times, it suggests the work of Wim Wenders), but it has
all his rigor and visual acuteness. With Teresa Madruga (of Manuel de
Oliveira'sFrancisca). Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Long dismissed as a footnote to Luchino Visconti’s career, this 1957
film, from the Dostoyevsky story, now seems to be a crucial turning
point, the link between Visconti’s early neorealist manner and the
obsessive stylization of his late films. Shot on forthrightly false sets
entirely within a studio, the film brings a lonely stranger (Marcello
Mastroianni, in one of his first important parts) together with a
surrealistically detached woman (Maria Schell) for a brief, enigmatic
affair. Robert Bresson treated the same material in his Four Nights of a Dreamer; curiously, it became one of Bresson’s most socially oriented films, while this is one of Visconti’s least. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: After driving nonstop from San Francisco to Denver, a
silent macho type (Barry Newman) accepts a bet that he can make it back
again in 15 hours; a blind DJ named Super Soul (Cleavon Little) cheers
him on while the cops doggedly chase him. While Richard Sarafian's
direction of this action thriller and drive-in favorite isn't especially
distinguished, the script by Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(writing here under the pseudonym he adopted as a film critic, G. Cain)
takes full advantage of the subject's existential and mythical
undertones without being pretentious, and you certainly get a run for
your money, along with a lot of rock music. With Dean Jagger and
Victoria Medlin. Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader review: A
masterpiece of the German silent cinema and easily the most effective
version ofDracula on record. F.W. Murnau's 1922 film follows the Bram
Stoker novel fairly closely, although he neglected to purchase the
screen rights—hence, the title change. But the key elements are all
Murnau's own: the eerie intrusions of expressionist style on natural
settings, the strong sexual subtext, and the daring use of fast-motion
and negative photography. Dave Kehr
This 35mm presentation (introduced by critic Phuong Le), andalso screening on January 13th, is part of the Luchino Visconti season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Time Out review: A parable about the approach of death, this centres around a slightly
Prospero-like professor (Burt Lancaster incarnating a role similar to the one
he played in The Leopard) who finds his carefully nurtured,
opulent solitude upset by the eruption into his life of a wealthy woman
(Silvana Mangano) and her chaotic jet-set entourage. Helmut Berger, for whom the film
on one level seems a valedictory love-song, plays an angel of death
figure, to whom a certain mystery attaches. If the dolce vita-style
intrusion is given distinctly Jacqueline Susann-like overtones by the
rather dissociated dialogue in the English language version, Conversation Piece nevertheless comes across as a visually rich and resonant mystery, far more fluid and sympathetic than Death in Venice. Verna Glaessner
