Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 74: Thu Mar 15

Performance (Roeg/Cammell, 1970): Genesis Cinema, 6.40pm

The daddy of midnight movies which was a weekly feature of the late-night cinema circuit in London in the 1970s and 80s, showing in a pristine 35mm print. Not to be missed (even at teatime;).

I'm busy 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. 

Here is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 73: Wed Mar 14

Strain Andromeda The (McGuire, 1992): Close-Up Cinema, 7.30pm

Brighton Cinematheque review:
With Strain Andromeda The, video artist Anne McGuire has created an awesome and spellbinding film that throws everything from story structure to character motivation into question. Put simply, McGuire has taken Robert Wise's entire 1971 virus from outer space classic The Andromeda Strain and re-edited it shot-by-shot precisely in reverse, so that the last shot appears first and the first last, though nothing is actually running backwards. As the film unfolds (or reverts?), more and more information about how the characters and their surroundings came about is revealed to us. While initially confusing, the film quickly takes on an ominous and mesmerising quality that defies description. The original film plot is one filled with tension in a 'race against time' which only adds to this effect.
Michael Sippings 

You can find an extract if you click here.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 72: Tue Mar 13

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (Scorsese, 1974): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

This 35mm presentation is part of a Jodie Foster selectrospective at the Prince Charles Cinema. You can find the full details here.

Time Out review:
Although the ending is a bit of a cop out from a feminist point of view, Martin Scorsese's warm and witty blending of the road movie with the conventions of the women's weepie is a delight. Ellen Burstyn is excellent as the eponymous heroine who, following the death of a husband she barely loved, sets off for the Monterey of her childhood with hopes of reviving her abandoned singing career. Her encounters, and those of her precociously witty 12-year old son, are observed with great generosity and a raw realism, while Scorsese typically makes wonderful use of music to underline character and situation. Bitter-sweet and very charming.
Geoff Andrew

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 71: Mon Mar 12

Celine and Julie Go Boating (Rivette, 1974): Prince Charles Cinema, 7.45pm

This great film is a '35mm Presentation' at the prince Charles. For a full list click here. 

Chicago Reader review:
Jacques Rivette's comic feminist extravaganza is as scary and unsettling in its narrative high jinks as it is exhilarating in its uninhibited slapstick (1974). Its slow, sensual beginning stages a meeting between a librarian (Dominique Labourier) and a nightclub magician (Juliet Berto). Eventually, a plot within a plot magically takes shape—a somewhat sexist Victorian melodrama with Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Barbet Schroeder (the film's producer), and a little girl—as each character, on successive days, visits an old dark house and the same events take place. The elaborate Hitchcockian doublings are so beautifully worked out that this movie steadily grows in resonance and power. The four main actresses scripted their own dialogue with Eduardo de Gregorio and Rivette, and the film derives many of its euphoric effects from a wholesale ransacking of the cinema of pleasure (cartoons, musicals, thrillers, and serials).
Jonathan Rosenabum

Here (and above) is Jonathan Romney's tribute to a one-off movie. 

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 70: Sun Mar 11

A Special Day (Scola, 1977): Cine Lumiere, 2pm

This presentation is part of the 'Cinema Made in Italy' season at Cine Lumiere. You can find all the details here.

Cine Lumiere introduction:
8 May 1938. The city of Rome is buzzing with excitement with the State visit from the Fürher to Il Duce, Mussolini. Antonietta (Sophia Lauren) is a conservative housewife bound to her chores while her fascist husband Emanuele (John Vernon) takes to the streets to follow the parade. Daydreaming about a life of freedom, Antonietta makes the encounter of a neighbour, Gabriele (Marcello Mastroïani), a journalist persecuted for his liberal views and homosexuality. An unexpected friendship blossoms in the course of the day. Ettore Scola paints here an exquisite portrait in muted tones, a story of two individuals helpless in the face of Fascism’s rise.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 69: Sat Mar 10

L'Atalante (Vigo, 1934): Close-Up Cinema, 7.30pm

This is scheduled to be a 35mm screening - please check with cinema nearer time.

Chicago Reader review:
'Jean Vigo's only full-length feature (1934), one of the supreme masterpieces of French cinema, was edited and then brutally reedited while Vigo was dying, so a “definitive” restoration is impossible. (The reassembled version released in France in 1990 is almost certainly the best and most complete we'll ever be able to see—it's wondrous to behold.) The simple love-story plot involves the marriage of a provincial woman (Dita Parlo) to the skipper of a barge (Jean Daste), and the only other characters of consequence are the barge's skeletal crew (Michel Simon and Louis Lefebvre) and a peddler (Gilles Margaritis) who flirts with the wife at a cabaret and describes the wonders of Paris to her. The sensuality of the characters and the settings, indelibly caught in Boris Kaufman's glistening cinematography, are only part of the film's remarkable poetry, the conviction of which goes beyond such categories as realism or surrealism, just as the powerful sexuality in the film ultimately transcends such categories as heterosexuality, homosexuality, and even bisexuality. Shot by shot and moment by moment, the film is so fully alive to the world's possibilities that magic and reality seem to function as opposite sides of the same coin, with neither fully adequate to Vigo's vision. The characters are at once extremely simple and extremely complex (richest of all is Simon's Pere Jules, as beautiful a piece of character acting as one can find anywhere), and while the continuity is choppy in spots—a factor skillfully cloaked by Maurice Jaubert's superb score—the film's aliveness and potency are so constant that this hardly seems to matter. A major inspiration to subsequent generations of filmmakers, yet no one has ever succeeded in matching it.'
Jonathan Rosenbaum 

Here is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 68: Fri Mar 9

The Story of Sin (Borowczyk, 1971): Close-Up Cinema, 7.30pm

Time Out review:
Like Walerian Borowczyk's earlier Blanche, this traces the misfortunes that befall an erotic innocent when she tries for love in a world dedicated to repressing or exploiting it. The source here is a turn-of-the-century Polish novel, and Borowczyk films it (with absolute period fidelity) as a full-blooded melodrama, carrying his audience off on swings of emotion, alternately rapturous and harrowing. At the same time, though, he invests it with countless reminders of his own background as the most idiosyncratic of contemporary surrealists: by bringing décor and design to the same prominence throughout as the physical action (incidentally 'eroticising' many of the objects that appear), and by framing the story of Eva's amour fou with precise descriptions of the religious, moral and economic factors that conspire to thwart it. His control of everything from his attractive cast to his speed-of-thought editing is unassailable. The result is passionately intense, and extremely entertaining.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.