Time Out review: A companion piece to Flesh, with Joe Dallesandro as a down-and-out
junkie living on New York's Lower East Side whose heroin addiction has
rendered him impotent; just as Joe's desirable virility formed the
(nominal) subject of Flesh, so his undesirable impotence is at the centre of Trash.
The surprise value of Paul Morrissey's films (the 'liberating nudity', the
frankness about sexuality, the playful reversals of sex-roles)
camouflaged a number of crucial failings. Flesh and Trash
are both eulogies to Dallesandro's body, but are also both moralistic
to the point of being puritan about sex in general, and the female sex
in particular. Tony Rayns
This is a Funeral Parade screening. Here are the details of the screenings in the regular season at the Prince Charles Cinema.
Time Out review: In Theorem, Pasolini achieved his most
perfect fusion of Marxism and religion with a film that is both
political allegory and mystical fable. Terence Stamp
plays the mysterious Christ or Devil figure who stays briefly with a
wealthy Italian family, seducing them one by one. He then goes as
quickly as he had come, leaving their whole life-pattern in ruins. What
would be pretentious and strained in the hands of most directors, with
Pasolini takes on an intense air of magical revelation. In fact, the
superficially improbable plot retains all the logic and certainty of a
detective story. With bizarre appropriateness, it was one of the last
films made by Stamp before he virtually disappeared from the
international film scene for some years. David Pirie
Peter
Mandelson’s grandfather Herbert Morrison, deputy Prime Minister in
Clement Attlee’s landmark post-War Labour government, famously carried
his Desert Island Discs choices in his wallet, expecting the call to
appear on the programme.It wasan invitation that sadly was never extended to himandI thought of that tale when I wasactuallyasked to contributeto the most famousof all moviepolls, run by Sight & Sound magazine. All those years of trawling the previous decades choiceswith rapt fascination, readingthe articles on the canonand the time keeping thatrunning list of my ten all-time favourites that wereinevitablemixed up withthegreatest in my headwas not wasted. Now,though,I was going to be forced to think about it and make a definitive list. Othersweredoing the same,prompting responses varying widely from“it’s a bit of fun” to “it’s agony”.
The
more I thought about it the more I wanted my contribution to be just
that, a genuine heartfelt one, made up of the films I desperately wanted
people to seebut had not been consideredin the previous voting,and modestlyhoping fora re-evalutionof the choices.I made two rules.All ofthe films in my list(reproduced below) would deserve to bepart oftheSight&SoundGreatest poll conversation andallthe choiceswould not havereceived a single vote in the 2012 poll.
Some in this list are simply neglected favourites but in other cases thereareverygoodreasonssome ofthese
films have been overlooked. Jean Grémillon, for instance, faded from
view after an ill-fated directorial career, and has only resurfaced in
the last decade with devoted retrospectives and DVD releases. The
heartbreaking Remorques is one of his masterpieces. The Alfred Hitchcock melodrama Under Capricorn, which quickly disappeared afterbombing at the box officeand thesubsequentdissolving of the director’sproduction company,deserves high rank in the Master’s work but languishesin limbo, only seen at major retrospectives.The Exiles and Spring Night, Summer Night are bothoncelost American independent classics only just receiving their due after recent rediscovery.White Dog,after a desultory release overshadowed bymisguidedaccusations of racism, was not in circulation for many years.Warhol's Vinly, based on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, wasshownin 2013from(fortuitously I later discovered)16mm in an ICA gallery and feltthrillinglyauthentic,thesoundof thewhirring projectorand the artist’s singular framingcombining to create a mesmeric experience. Here is the full list:
Remorques/Stormy Waters (Jean Grémillon, 1941)
Under Capricorn (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949)
The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)
La Baie des anges/Bay of Angels (Jacques Demy, 1963)
Vinyl (Andy Warhol, 1965)
Spring Night, Summer Night (Jospeh L. Anderson, 1967)
Heroic Purgatory (Yosgishige Yoshida, 1970)
Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)
White Dog (Sam Fuller, 1982)
Three Times (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2005)
Six from the list have been shown in a London cinema since the poll appeared and now we have a rare screening of the brilliant director Sam Fuller's late masterpiece at the Nickel Cinema.
Chicago Reader review: Samuel
Fuller's 1982 masterpiece about American racism—his last work shot in
this country—focuses on the efforts of a black animal trainer (Paul
Winfield) to deprogram a dog that has been trained to attack blacks.
Very loosely adapted by Fuller and Curtis Hanson from a memoir by Romain
Gary, and set in southern California on the fringes of the film
industry, this heartbreakingly pessimistic yet tender story largely
concentrates on tragic human fallibility from the vantage point of an
animal; in this respect it's like Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar,
and Fuller's brilliantly eclectic direction gives it a nearly comparable
intensity. Through a series of grotesque misunderstandings, this
unambiguously antiracist movie was yanked from U.S. distribution partly
because of charges of racism made by individuals and organizations who
had never seen it. But it's one of the key American films of the 80s.
With Kristy McNichol, Burl Ives, Jameson Parker, and, in cameo roles,
Dick Miller, Paul Bartel, Christa Lang, and Fuller himself. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This screening includes an extended intro by BFI National Archive preservation and curatorial staff, and writer Ken Hollings. The film is screening as part of the Trash season at BFI Southbank and is also being shown on April 21st. Details here.
Chicago Reader review: Bela Lugosi died during the making of this low-budget
science fiction programmer, but that didn't faze director Edward Wood:
the Lugosi footage, which consists of the actor skulking around a
suburban garage, is replayed over and over, to highly surreal effect.
Wood is notorious for his 1952 transvestite saga Glen or Glenda? (aka I
Changed My Sex), but for my money this 1959 effort is twice as strange
and appealing in its undisguised incompetence. J. Hoberman of the
Village Voice
has made a case for Wood as an unconscious avant-gardist; there's no
denying that his blunders are unusually creative and oddly expressive. Dave Kehr
John Huston is much better known for The Dead, African Queen and The
Maltese Falcon but Fat City is surely, along with Wise Blood (1979), his finest work. Don't miss the
chance to see a rare screening of this wonderful slice of Hollywood
melancholia in which Stacy Keach gives the performance of a lifetime as a
struggling boxer giving it one last try and Jeff Bridges shines as a
naive up-and-coming fighter. Watch out, in particular, for the final scene
of this movie and an audacious, haunting shot a minute from the end.
Time Out review: Marvellous, grimly downbeat study of desperate lives and the escape routes people construct for themselves, stunningly shot by Conrad Hall.
The setting is Stockton, California, a dreary wasteland of smoky bars
and sunbleached streets where the lives of two boxers briefly meet, one
on the way up, one on the way down. Neither, you sense instantly, for
all their talk of past successes and future glories, will ever know any
other world than the back-street gymnasiums and cheap boxing-rings
where battered trainers and managers exchange confidences about their
ailments, disappointments and dreams, and where in a sad and sobering
climax two sick men beat each other half to death for a few dollars and a
pint of glory. John Huston directs with the same puritanical rigour he
brought to Wise Blood. Beautifully summed up by Paul Taylor as a
"masterpiece of skid row poetry". Tom Milne
ICA introduction: In Deux Isabelle Huppert plays a dual role of two young twins,
Marie and Magdelana (their mother played by Bulle Ogier), to explore
the complex and surreal resonances of the double, mirrored selves and
memory, and the violences done to women by patriarchy and
family. His second collaboration with the actress,
Schroeter wrote the film for Huppert, who he described as his “alter
ego” and claimed it contains elements of direct autobiographical
interludes and dreams.
“Deux is a very
personal film about the tragedy of love.” — Elfi Mikesch