Time Out review: On the face of it, a TV-style comedy inspired by Ealing Studios, most notably The Lavender Hill Mob.
But somehow Cliff Owen, the cast, and a large team of writers turn it into a
very superior piece of work, with both an eye and an ear for dialogue
and the absurd situation. Peter Sellers, a smooth Bond Street couturier, is
also the rough-diamond leader of a bunch of inept criminals. He keeps
them happy with luncheon vouchers, home movies, and paid holidays in
Spain. But their welfare state criminality is undermined by the arrival
of a gang of Australians, forcing Scotland Yard to get its act together.
Not only is it genuinely funny, it's also a sly portrait of Britain
slowly emerging from the 'Never Had It So Good' days into the Wilson
era. Adrian Turner
Time Out review: Striking one-off by a former record producer. A weirdly funny black
comedy about an undersized cop, barely five feet tall but nursing a
dream of becoming a Clint Eastwood hero. He makes the grade (after a
fashion, since the dream turns sour) by way of an alarmingly funny echo
of Dr Strangelove (his mentor in detection has no use for
evidence, preferring instead to stand in the moonlight listening to his
inner voices) and some spiky mockery of police methods. The message may
be a little naïve when he finally opts for humanity rather than
authoritarianism, but the film has an extraordinary texture, peeling
away layer after layer to reveal dark depths of loneliness and despair
as this cop Candide learns that he isn't living in the best of all
possible worlds. And Conrad Hall's photography, especially of the Monument Valley landscapes, is a joy. Tom Milne
This is part of the 35mm presentations of Michael Haneke films at the Genesis.
Chicago Reader review: Love is measured in devotion, and devotion in the minutes and hours of
suffering, in this harrowing and moving romance from Austrian master
Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon, Cache). Jean-Louis
Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva play a long-married couple trying to
adjust as the wife, a piano teacher, suffers a series of strokes that
leave her paralyzed and finally bedridden. Anger, humiliation, and
despair all take their toll, but Riva, extraordinary in the role, also
communicates the class, intelligence, and beauty that the husband still
sees. His tireless attention to her as her body breaks down and her
spirit wilts is a thing of wonder to Haneke, who has put his finger on a
very particular kind of heartbreak: seeing a lover give up not on you
but on the life you’ve shared. JR Jones
Time Out review: Donald Cammell transforms a stalk'n'slash thriller into a complex, cubist
kaleidoscope of themes and images. Paul and Joan White (David Keith and
Cathy Moriarty) lead a happy enough life in a quiet Arizona mining town, until
Paul suddenly finds himself chief suspect in a police investigation of a
series of violently misogynistic murders. Matters are complicated by
the reappearance of Joan's gun-crazy ex-husband (Alan Rosenberg). A
determinedly offbeat murder mystery, delving into dotty Indian mysticism
and throwing up symbols, red herrings, and Steadicam flourishes for the
asking, this nevertheless remains oddly effective. Imbued with a
brooding, oppressive atmosphere and coloured by vivid performances,
though often murkily motivated, it is genuinely nightmarish in its
portrait of relationships where love is blinding and the past casts an
intolerably heavy spell.
Geoff Andrew
Time Out review: Marvellous amalgam of sadistic thriller and fairytale romance, drawing on a wild diversity of genres from film noir to Feuillade serial. The deliriously offhand plot, cheekily parodying
Watergates and French Connections, has switched tapes setting a pair of
psychopathic hoods on the trail of a young postal messenger, turning his
obsessive dream - of romance with a beautiful black opera singer whose
performance on stage he has secretly recorded - into a nightmare from
which he is rescued by a timely deus-ex-machina (clearly a
descendant of the great Judex). The most exciting debut in years, it is
unified by the extraordinary decor - colour supplement chic meets pop
art surrealism - which creates a world of totally fantastic reality
situated four-square in contemporary Paris. Tom Milne
This 35mm presentation (also screening on August 5th) is part of the Sophia Loren season at BFI Southbank. Full details here. Tonight's screening is introduced by season curator Adrian Wootton.
Time Out review: George Cukor's one stab at the Western genre was a typically personal response
to the conventions, playing much of the adventure for comedy, and
centering the plot around a touring theatrical troupe. As in so many of
his films, the relationship between life and theatre is explored as the
company, performing to ramshackle communities in an untamed frontier,
act out heroic tales of love, passion and honourable death, surrounded
by an altogether less romantic reality in which people struggle simply
to survive. As in A Star Is Born and Les Girls, George Hoyningen-Huene's colour designs are magnificent, and under the expert
eye of Cukor, even Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn give superb performances. Geoff Andrew
This presentation is part of an excellent Classics on 35mm season at the Genesis.
Chicago Reader review: Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 film is slightly marred by some too obvious
straining toward masterpiece status, yet it’s a stunning
achievement in epic cinema. Working on a large scale seems to bring
out the best in Kurosawa’s essentially formal talents; Kagemusha
seems only a rough draft for the effects he achieves here through a
massive deployment of movement and color. Both landscape and weather
seem to bend to his will as he constructs an imaginary 16th-century
Japan out of various locations throughout the islands, which seems to
re-form itself to reflect the characters’ surging passions as the
violent tale progresses. It’s loosely adapted from King Lear:
an aging warlord (Tatsuya Nakadai, in a performance that approaches a
Kabuki stylization) decides to step down as the head of his clan,
which unleashes a power struggle among his three sons. As in
Kagemusha, Kurosawa envisions the only alternative to rigid
oppression as apocalyptic chaos, yet the bleak proposal is put with
infinitely more immediacy and personal involvement. Dave Kehr
BFI introduction: Set just prior to the First World War, Adriana is a sick widow in a rich
Sicilian family who reaches for her last chance at happiness with her
brother-in-law Cesare. Director De Sica’s final collaboration with Loren
is a handsome, heartbreaking romantic saga and also a fitting coda to
their storied cinematic partnership.
Chicago Reader reviews:A gut-wrenching movie, and probably the director’s most personal. It’s a corrosive ode to the filmmaking process that manages to find beauty and wonder in some truly ugly scenarios. The film’s movie-within-a-movie conceit offers jarring lapses into documentary style and video formatting, informing the volatile atmosphere created by Ferrara’s stand-in Harvey Keitel, perhaps the director’s most important onscreen collaborator. As the critic Camille Nevers wrote, this is “the film in which [Ferrara] is ultimately not just foreman as well as architect but also active spectator and implicit and central actor.” Drew Hunt
Concept movies are rarely as galvanizing as this deliberately disorienting 1993 movie-within-a-movie. Some scenes seem improvised or even documentary, some are impossible to relegate to a single level of fictional reality. Yet there’s a clear story line in which Harvey Keitel plays movie director Eddie Israel and Madonna plays Sarah Jennings, a celebrity recommended for a lead role in his latest production by her on- and offscreen allure, star status in another medium, and capital. Much of the movie Israel’s making (and Dangerous Game) exposes Madonna/Jennings to emotional and physical intrusions that are engineered by Keitel/Israel, though ultimately director Abel Ferrara calls the shots. This grueling, multifaceted drama about (and by) a filmmaker whose MO includes severely testing the sanity and loyalty of his actors complicates the significance of the casting of Madonna–who also produced–even if you believe a woman’s complicity in her own exploitation is a feminist gesture. Lisa Alspector
This film is part of the Stephanie Rothman season at the Barbican. Details here.
Barbican Cinema introduction: Stephanie Rothman’s filmmaking
career in Hollywood was bookended by two brilliant films about gender,
labour, sex, money and class. The first, was her breakout film The Student Nurses, yet it is her last film, The Working Girls that
captures Rothman’s heart and politics. Three young single women in Los
Angeles look for their place in the world. Each character reflects the
challenges and misogyny Rothman faced as a female filmmaker in 1970s
Hollywood. Although set
during a chronic recession, seen today, the film oozes a distinctly
dreamy Californian carefreeness and lightness, punctuated throughout
with Rothman’s razor-sharp humour. A socially and politically trenchant
film, full of melancholia, regret and hope. Rothman’s final film leaves
us imagining what could have been had she continued her film career.
This very rarely seen comedy film is part of the Peter Sellers season at BFI Southbank and was the actor's first lead role in which he played numerous parts, as he was to in other much more famous films). This is a 35mm presentation which also screens on August 3rd. Details here.
Time Out review: Simply spiffing comedy about scandal-mongering, with smarmy Dennis Price
playing a gutter press baron who plans to blackmail a number of public
figures or smear them across page one unless they hand over their House
of Lords luncheon vouchers. Much miffed, Terry-Thomas contacts other victims - Peggy Mount's romantic novelist, Peter Sellers'
TV celeb - and lays plans to undo the beastly rotter. A period piece,
maybe, but much funnier and arguably more authentic than Scandal. Adrian Turner
This film is part of the Stephanie Rothman season at the Barbican. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Given the genre (horror) and the budget (extremely low), it may seem
perverse to say that Stephanie Rothman’s 1971 film is among the best
women’s films ever made, but so it is—a highly intelligent, deftly
poetic reimagining of the vampire myth, with the theme of fatal
sexuality transferred to a female character. The vampire is neither an
aggressor nor a seductress, but an abstract figure of polymorphous
sensuality: her “victims” choose her, and they range from a would-be
rapist to a liberated (and wittily parodied) southern California couple. Dave Kehr
BFI introduction: This anthology of stories set on the day of a big football match in Rome
is a fine example of ‘pink neorealism’ – a sub-genre of films that
melded working class characters with 1930s-style populist comedy. An
entertaining satirical drama, it features terrific location shooting and
Loren in an early serious role, playing a melancholy widow trying to
chase down her lover, an unfaithful lawyer.
Time Out review: One of the very finest epics produced by Samuel Bronston, equally impressive in terms of script (by Philip Yordan,
who mercifully steers clear of florid archaisms) and spectacle. Charlton Heston
is aptly heroic as the 11th-century patriot destined to die in the fight
for a Moor-less Spain, Mann's direction is stately and thrilling, and
Miklos Rosza's superb score perfectly complements the crisp and simple
widescreen images. Sobriety and restraint, in fact, are perhaps the
keynotes of the film's success, with the result that a potentially
risible finale (in which Cid's corpse is borne into the realm of legend,
strapped to his horse as it leads his men to battle) becomes genuinely
stirring. Geoff Andrew
The daddy of midnight movies this was a weekly feature of the
late-night cinema circuit in London in the 70s and 80s and is showing from a 35mm print. Not to be missed.
I'm busy re-reading Colin McCabe's BFI Film Classics book, a wonderful introduction to what the author calls "the greatest British film ever made."
Time Out review: Nicholas Roeg's debut as a director is a virtuoso juggling act which manipulates
its visual and verbal imagery so cunningly that the borderline between
reality and fantasy is gradually eliminated. The first half-hour is
straight thriller enough to suggest a Kray Bros documentary as James Fox,
enforcer for a London protection racket, goes about his work with such
relish that he involves the gang in a murder and has to hide from
retribution in a Notting Hill basement. There, waiting to escape abroad,
he becomes involved with a fading pop star (Mick Jagger) brooding in exile
over the loss of his powers of incantation. In what might be described
(to borrow from Kenneth Anger) as an invocation to his demon brother,
the pop star recognises his lost power lurking in the blind impulse to
violence of his visitor, and so teases and torments him with
drug-induced psychedelics that the latter responds in the only way he
knows how: by rewarding one mind-blowing with another, at gunpoint.
Ideas in profusion here about power and persuasion and performance ('The
only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is one that
achieves madness'); and the latter half becomes one of Roeg's most
complex visual kaleidoscopes as pop star and enforcer coalesce in a
marriage of heaven and hell (or underworld and underground) where the
common denominator is Big Business. Tom Milne
Chicago Reader review: Stanley Donen’s follow-up to Charade is not quite the tour de
force the earlier film was, but even with Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren
standing in for Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, it’s a slick and
satisfying entertainment. Watch for the unforgettable Eisensteinian
moment when Donen cuts from Loren’s mouth to a steam shovel. Dave Kehr
This film is part of the Stephanie Rothman season at the Barbican. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: High comedy and progressive sexual politics in an exploitation film—you
can only imagine the puzzled expressions on the faces of the drive-in
moviegoers of America when they encountered this little gem by Stephanie
Rothman back in 1972. Three men and three women attempt to set up a
communal relationship in a Los Angeles suburb as the neighbors look on
with shock and envy. Whenever the situation threatens to drift into
Aquarian platitudes, Rothman rescues it with a deft application of
gentle wit and affectionate eroticism. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: So-FEE-uh and Mar-CHELL-oh! That was surely the major draw for
audiences who flocked to Vittorio De Sica's frivolous, Oscar-nominated
dramedy---which examines the tempestuous relationship between prostitute
Filumena Marturano (Sophia Loren, radiant even sans makeup) and playboy
Domenico Soriano (Marclello Mastroianni, delightful as a slick-haired rake)---and
it's the only reason to see it now. Not that there's anything wrong with
that: Star power can make up for a lot, and these two burn extra
bright. The opening's a grabber, as Filumena, seemingly at death's door,
is carried to her bed by a crowd of neighbors while the self-involved
Domenico, busy trying on hats, is called to her side. Cue a pair of
lengthy flashbacks---one from each character's perspective---that trace
the duo's decades-spanning love-hate affair. History rolls along
("Eisenhower elected U.S. President!," screams a newspaper
headline---must be 1952) while Filumena and Domenico deal with ebbing
and flowing attractions, illegitimate children and a fraudulent wedding.
Then the wet-eyed stuff comes: sacrifices, reconciliations and a
marriage (in da style of de Italianos) for real this time. De Sica is no
stranger to jerking one's tear ducts, but the central duo here doesn't
have anything approaching the emotional resonance of, say, a pair of
bicycle thieves or an old man and his dog living on the street. Yet we
still get Loren and Mastroianni. So why complain too churlishly? Keith Uhlich
This film is part of the Stephanie Rothman season at the Barbican. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Humanism in an exploitation film, believe it or not. Actually, the only
condescension director Stephanie Rothman makes to the genre is to have
her actors take off their clothes once in a while; the rest is a
surprisingly sensitive study of youthful aspirations and conflicting
interests among three female friends. It may be stiff and awkward at
times, but it shows a heart of genuine talent. With Elaine Giftos, Karen
Carlson, Barbara Leigh, and Reni Santoni; this 1970 film was the first
produced by Roger Corman for his New World Pictures. Dave Kehr
Time Out review: There are things wrong with All I Desire, but Douglas Sirk isn't
responsible for them. It didn't need the forced 'happy ending' for a
start, and it should clearly have been made in colour. But Hollywood
producers were even more stupid in 1953 than they are now, and directors
didn't often get their way. Sirk was less compromised than most,
because his strategy was a kind of 'hidden' subversion of genres like
musicals and weepies: appearing to deliver the producer's goods, and
simultaneously undercutting them. Here, the excellent Barbara Stanwyck plays an
actress who hasn't made the grade, returning to the small-town family
she walked out on after a scandalous affair with a local stud. She moves
from one 'imitation of life' to another: from life-on-the-run in
showbiz to life-under-wraps in Hicksville, Wisconsin. Sirk's delineation
of the manners and 'morality' of bourgeois middle America is
devastating; and the precision with which he dissects the repressions,
jealousies and joys that permeate a family has never been rivalled. Tony Rayns
Chicago Reader review: No one would mistake this stiff, shoddy 1981 biopic of Joan Crawford for
a “good” movie, but in terms of issues—movies, melodramas, mothers and
daughters—it’s rich, stimulating thought in spite of itself. Frank Perry
was a poor choice to direct (Robert Aldrich and Paul Morrissey would
have been more appropriate), yet his gross inadequacies somehow help the
film—the bad laughs he gets push it into black comedy, which is what
the audience wants. The dominant tone is that of a horror movie as it
might have been produced by soap opera king Ross Hunter in the 50s: lots
of elegant clothes and settings, weirdly linked to a shock rhythm of
tension and release. It’s a movie dream turned into a movie nightmare, a
wonderful idea the film doesn’t know it has. Dave Kehr
Film Forum review: L’oro di Napoli (1954, Vittorio De Sica) Six stories set in De Sica’s father's hometown: street performer Totò (The Passionate Thief) lays flowers on the capo’s wife’s grave, then returns home to his own wife and three boys — and il guappo
who’s taken over his household for the past ten years; when voluptuous
20-year-old pizza purveyor Sophia Loren loses the emerald ring given to
her by her nervously tubby husband — in the dough? — they comb the quartiere
for the day’s customers, including suicidal Paolo Stoppa, in hysterical
mourning for his just-deceased wife; Teresa De Vita carries off the
“Funeralino” of her small child along the Bay of Naples;
tightly-reined-in compulsive gambler Count De Sica (an out-of-control
gambler in private life) finds a formidable opponent in his doorman’s
shrewd but bored 7-year-old son; working girl Silvana Mangano finds, out
of nowhere, her dreams coming true: marriage with a handsome,
prosperous middle class man — or is something else coming true?; a local
wisdom dispenser, legendary Neapolitan playwright and actor Eduardo De
Filippo (see Marriage Italian Style and Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow), advises on such things as the get-off-easy way to razor-slash a cheek and the proper delivery of a full-blooded, communal pernacchio
to a despised duke. The granddaddy and gold standard of European
omnibus films, adapted from stories by Giuseppe Marotta (and scripted
with Marotta by De Sica and longtime collaborator Cesare Zavattini),
runs the gamut from pure farce to outright tragedy, with Loren’s
gyrating walk in the rain her star-making moment.
This 4K screening (also being shown on August 13th) includes an introduction by season curator Adrian Wootton. It is part of the Sophia Loren season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Director Vittorio De Sica (The Bicycle Thief, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis)
hits his stride in this powerful 1961 story of a mother (Sophia Loren)
and her daughter who meet with tragedy and violence in the waning days
of World War II. Loren won a deserved Oscar for her performance as the
life force encased in a magnificent body. Don Druker
Chicago Reader review: This brilliant if unpleasant puzzle without a solution, about
surveillance and various kinds of denial, finds writer-director Michael
Haneke near the top of his game, though it's not a game everyone will
want to play (2005). The brittle host of a TV book-chat show (Daniel
Auteuil) and his unhappy wife (Juliette Binoche) start getting strange
videos that track their comings and goings outside their Paris home.
Once the husband traces the videos to an Algerian he abused when both
were kids, things get only more tense, troubled, and unresolved. Haneke
is so punitive toward the couple and his audience that I periodically
rebelled against—or went into denial about—the director's rage, and I
guess that's part of the plan. Jonathan Rosenbaum
New Yorker review: Paul Schrader’s second feature, “Hardcore,” from 1979, is his version of
John Ford’s “The Searchers.” Both movies are dramas of an isolated,
stoic, rigidly principled man who takes it upon himself to rescue a
young female family member from a way of life—captivity, or something
like it—that he deems unfit for her. But Ford’s film, from 1956, is a
Western, a philosophical drama set just after the Civil War, in a place
and a time far removed from the director’s birth in Maine, in 1894,
whereas Schrader’s
is contemporary—set in his home town of Grand Rapids, Michigan (where
he was born in 1946), and in the religious community of rigorous
Calvinists in which he was raised. Built on the very bedrock of
Schrader’s being, “Hardcore” is one of the key works of his career, a
cinematic declaration of identity and principle that echoes throughout
his body of work. Richard Brody
This film is part of the Stephanie Rothman season at the Barbican. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: A lurid exploitation subject turned into a crafty feminist allegory
(1973) by Stephanie Rothman. The setting is a tiny island where the
state of California has decided to send all prisoners convicted of
first-degree murder to fend for themselves; the more brutal elements
quickly erect a fascist dictatorship, while the women they’ve enslaved
plot an escape to join the utopian rebels hiding in the hills. It’s
difficult now to believe there was a time when such progressive politics
could be expressed in a drive-in movie, but yes, Virginia, there was an
early 70s. With Phyllis Elizabeth Davis, Don Marshall, Barbara Leigh,
Sean Kenney, and (way down in the cast) the future stars of TV’s neocon
series Magnum P.I.—Tom Selleck and Roger Mosley. Dave Kehr
BFI introduction: Thief Peter Curran double-crosses his partner John and girlfriend Gianna
following a robbery, making away with their ill-gotten gains. The two
trail him from London to Spain, along the way falling for each other.
Dorothy Dandridge gives Gianna a sense of depth and mystery, but also a longing
for the moment when she was happiest. When John says he plans to escape
to Mexico and enjoy the money they intend to retrieve from Peter, Gianna
replies wistfully, "London was my Mexico".
This 16mm presentation by those great people at Cine-Real film club is
also being screened on Thursday July 24th. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Les Blank’s 1982 documentary on the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. The film suggests Herzog’s own documentaries about visionaries—The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner, La Soufriere—as
Blank steps back to coolly observe Herzog’s grand, demented attempts to
haul a steamship up an impossibly steep river bank. But Blank’s
approach is less mystical than Herzog’s, and in the film’s more ironic,
matter-of-fact moments, the German director can be seen busily
manufacturing his own myth. The film is at once funny and, in its
depiction of the scant differences between art and megalomania, somewhat
frightening. Dave Kehr
Chicago Reader review: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s first film is neo-neorealism, set in the slums and
back alleys familiar from De Sica and Fellini but directed with a cold
dispassion that belongs to Pasolini alone. Accattone is a thief and pimp
who tries to go straight, fails, and eventually kills himself in a
meaningless accident. The brutality and frigid despair of this 1962 film
have had a lasting impact on political filmmaking. Dave Kehr
This is part of the Friday Night Frights season at the Prince Charles. Details here.
Time Out review: An intriguing premise: what if a certain species of LSD, a decade later,
should begin to have an unexpected effect on its users' chromosomes?
All over an American city, isolated individuals inexplicably slaughter
their loved ones before going on the rampage. The film has a phenomenal
opening, and makes the most of its plot possibilities, but the police's
continual arrival at the scene of murder just in time to implicate the
investigative hero will put a strain on any audience's credulity.
Exploitation of a superior kind, nonetheless. David Pirie
This film is being screened at the new Nickel Cinema. Full listings here.
Time Out review: Harvey Keitel is the depraved and corrupt New York cop of the title. Hooked on
crack, heroin and alcohol, he's up to his eyeballs in debt and staking
his life on the Dodgers - and they're starting to lose. Perversely, the
appalling rape of a nun proffers salvation: a $50,000 reward to find the
perpetrator. The film isn't so much a thriller as a slice of (low-)
life. The script is cut to the bone, the set-ups have a vérité feel,
while the editing mimics real time in long, nearly unwatchable
sequences in which Keitel shoots up, or masturbates before two teenage
girls. Abel Ferrara allows his star to dictate the pace, and is rewarded with
a performance of extraordinary, terrifying honesty. This is an actor
laying himself bare before the camera/confessor. Astonishingly, Ferrara
ups the ante. Out of degradation, he pulls redemption. It is a jarring
stroke, and will divide audiences who have stayed with the film this
far. It seems to me that Ferrara is an artist of the profane; his
Catholicism looks suspiciously like a Scorsese hand-me-down. In this
exploitation/art movie, it may just be that the truth is in the sleaze. Tom Charity
Cinema Year Zero is a London-based journal of film criticism, covering cinema history and archive, with an ethos of ‘slow criticism from the end of the world’. Volume 20 of their periodical takes a new look at Ken Russell’s body of work as an alternate history of mankind. The issue will be exclusively available at the event.
Siren Screenis a London-based community film club dedicated to celebrating myths in motion. From cult cinema to the esoteric and under-seen, they showcase cinema that explores the fantastical and the mystical through ancient stories and modern visions alike. Delving into archetypes and symbolic narratives, they investigate how the cinematic mythic shapes identities and cultures across the globe.
They have combined for tonight's screening. The main feature will be preceded by Nunsploitation short filmVisions of Ecstasy(Nigel Wingrove, 1989), chosen by film club Siren Screen.
Time Out review: First and foremost, an extremely uninhibited satire on American sexual
dreams and nightmares. Kathleen Turner, a career woman who doubles by night as
the ultra-hooker China Blue, acts out every male fantasy in the book
until she picks up a cop, sees him turn into a piece of meat beneath
her, and gets carried away with her stiletto heels and his nightstick.
She meets her Baudelairean match in Anthony Perkins, a deranged fundamentalist
consumed by lust and slowly mustering the energy to act out his own dark
fantasies. In between, the film lays into an 'average' suburban couple,
living a sexual fantasy of their own - of marital fulfilment. It relies
on sheer pace and stylistic bravura, and talks dirty more wittily than
anything since Bogart and Bacall. There are lapses, but this is in the
main a comedy so black that it recaptures some of the cinema's long-lost
power to shock. Tony Rayns
This is the latest screenings from those wonderful 'The
Machine That Kills Bad People' people. Their manifesto states: The
Machine That Kills Bad People is,
of course, the cinema – a medium that is so often and so visibly in
service of a crushing status quo but which, in the right hands, is a
fatal instrument of beauty, contestation, wonder, politics, poetry,
new visions, testimonies, histories, dreams. It is also a film club
devoted to showing work – ‘mainstream’ and experimental, known
and unknown, historical and contemporary – that takes up this task.
The group borrowed their name from the Roberto Rossellini film of the
same title, and find inspiration in the eclectic juxtapositions of
Amos Vogel’s groundbreaking New York film society Cinema 16.
Programme: Ritual
in Transfigured Time, dir. Maya Deren, USA 1945-46, 16mm, 14
min., silent The Asthenic Syndrome, dir. Kira Muratova,
USSR (Ukraine) 1989, DCP, 153 min, Russian, Ukrainian, English and
Romany spoken with English subtitles
ICA introduction: This
double-bill brings together works by two Ukrainian-born filmmakers
with a keen interest in dreams and temporality.Written
in 1989 just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, The
Asthenic Syndromeis
Kira Muratova’s most celebrated film and won the Silver Bear when
it premiered at the 1990 Berlinale. Often referred to as a portrait
of an era, the film is made up of two stylistically and thematically
distinct parts that tell the story of two archetypal Soviet
intellectuals: Nikolai, the teacher who falls asleep in inappropriate
places at the most inappropriate times, and Natalia, a doctor and
distraught widow who has just buried her husband. “Muratova created
vivid images of desperate characters determined to endure, capturing
and divining the state of the USSR on the eve of its collapse. A
searing portrait of individual malaise and collective apathy, with
polyphonic elements and absurdist tableaus, the film stuns the viewer
with shock therapy, destroying every illusion.” (Elena
Gorfinkel)
Made
two years after her pathbreaking work Meshes
of the Afternoon(1943),
Maya Deren’s Ritual
in Transfigured Time(1945–46)
brings together the interests in psychodrama, dream logic, and dance
for which the filmmaker is renowned. Deren wrote, “I believe that
Ritual contains everything that Meshes had, but has more, and, of
course, differently,” and deemed it to be more representative of
her practice than her most famous film.
Chicago Reader review: A
great movie (1989), but not a pleasant or an easy one. Directed by the
transgressive Kira Muratova in her mid-50s, it has been rightly called
the only “masterpiece of glasnost,” though it was banned by the Russian
government for obscenity. Beginning as a powerful black-and-white
narrative about a middle-aged woman doctor in an exploding, aggressive
rage over the death of her husband (who resembles Stalin), the film
eventually turns into an even more unorthodox tale in color about a
schoolteacher (cowriter Sergei Popov) who periodically falls asleep
regardless of what’s happening around him. (The title alludes to a form
of disability that encompasses both the doctor’s aggressiveness and the
schoolteacher’s passivity.) Though this tragicomic epic has plenty to
say about postcommunist Russia, it also deals more generally with the
demons loose in today’s world. It may drive you nuts–as it was
undoubtedly meant to–but you certainly won’t forget it. Jonathan Rosenbaum
