Crimes of Passion (Russell, 1984): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm
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 Screen is 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 film Visions 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
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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