Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 292: Sun Oct 28

The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.05pm

This 35mm screening of the director's cut will be followed by a Skype Q&A with William Friedkin.

Time Out review:

A re-release with an impeccable digital soundtrack and ten minutes of extra footage, including the notorious 'spider walk' (which lasts about 3 seconds) and a longer coda with corny banter between the cop and Father Dyer. As any aficionado will tell you, this is not a 'director's cut' in any real sense (William Friedkin's version was released in 1973), but it's probably closer to how writer/producer Blatty might have edited the film. As well as new subliminal demon imagery, it also includes a scene between Chris and Regan's first doctor, and an expanded role for Max von Sydow's Father Merrin, most notably a key speech about why the demon has picked on this little girl: to make us despair for humanity. In other words it's now more than ever a faithful Catholic treatise on Evil, even if the film's shock effects remain at least half the story. Either way it's rigged, but it certainly puts you through an emotional grinder.
Tom Charity

 

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 291: Sat Oct 27

La Nuit Fantastique (L'Herbier, 1942): BFI Southbank, 1.30pm

This 35mm screening is part of the Fantastique: The Dream Worlds of French Cinema season at BFI Southbank. Fulll details here. The film is also being shown on October 29th. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Made during the French Occupation, this 1942 feature by Marcel L'Herbier is a whimsical yet brittle nocturnal fantasy that consists mainly of a nerdy Parisian student's expressionistic, romantic dream about pursuing an imaginary beauty. It's the first film scripted by Louis Chavance, editor of L'Atalante and writer of the corrosive Le corbeau, and it oddly evokes both The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Eyes Wide Shut in its troubled moods and dreamlike studio settings (e.g., a formal ball at the Louvre, complete with magic show and trapdoors). Its illogical drift seems to convey the creepy collective unconscious of the occupation, so indelibly that even the happy ending turns out to be deeply disturbing.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 290: Fri Oct 26

Malpertius (Kumel, 1971): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.05pm

This 35mm screening is part of the Fantastique: The Dream Worlds of French Cinema season at BFI Southbank. Full details here. The film is also being shown on November 21st. Details here.

Time Out review:
A fresh-faced blond sailor (Mathieu Carrière) is shanghaied from a '20s port full of sleazy bars and art-nouveau mansions, and held captive in the endless corridors of a crumbling Gothic pile called Malpertuis: we don't discover why until the end, in a denouement as outrageous and devastating as any ever filmed. Harry Kümel elaborates the mystery like a master, drawing much of his design and composition from Surrealist painting (Magritte, de Chirico), and weaving serpentine patterns from the intrigues between the many characters. Welles is at his most mountainous as the house's patriarch; Hampshire is a revelation, playing three contrasted women.
Tony Rayns

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 289: Thu Oct 25

The Fall of the House of Usher (Epstein, 1928): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.35pm

This 35mm screening is part of the Fantastique: The Dream Worlds of French Cinema season at BFI Southbank. Fulll details here. The film is also being shown on November 8th.

Cine-List review:
A director and film theorist affiliated with the French Impressionist movement of the 1920s, Jean Epstein is credited with laying the groundwork for many cornerstone concepts in cinema studies, such as the notion of medium specificity, or what he referred to as photogénie. As film scholar Malcolm Turvey details in his history of the "revelationist" tradition, at the heart of the French Impressionist approach is the belief that film holds the ability to transcend the fallibility of human vision and reveal the true nature of reality via cinematic techniques like editing and close-ups. While viewers may take these ideas for granted today, Epstein and his contemporaries are responsible for no less than realizing cinema's potential as a bona fide art form. It's fitting that Epstein chose to adapt Edgar Allen Poe, a major influence for the French symbolist poets, who in turn offered a reference point for the Impressionist filmmakers. Co-written by Luis Buñuel, THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER remains just as eerie today as it was over eighty years ago. Epstein's use of chiaroscuro lighting and deep space lend the film a haunting, atmospheric quality and the actors involved (including Abel Gance's wife) give suitably hypnotic performances. The story, about a man obsessed with immortalizing his dying wife in a painting, is all too apropos for a filmmaker who wrote extensively about the boundaries between reality and representation. 

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 288: Wed Oct 24

Wolfen (Wadleigh, 1981): Prince Charles Cinema, 9pm

This screening, which is part of the Horroctober season at the Prince Charles, is being shown from a 35mm print and is also only £1 as part of the cinema's weekly Members Screenings.

Time Out review:
School-leavers whose ambitions lean towards criminal pathology will pick up useful tips on wielding the scalpel and the white sheet in this foray into the bleakly explicit world of the contemporary shocker: a werewolf movie for an ecology-conscious age. The last-reel process whereby the lurking terror breaks cover and is transformed into a 'sympathetic' but unconquerable force is smoothly convincing: we are a long way here from simply feeling a bit sorry for King Kong. The setting is two New Yorks: that of the multinational, politically-amoral corporations, and that of the slum wastelands, both with the same landlords. The camera's vision is a fresh one, and though the wolf's eye view sequences threaten at first to become a nuisance, they are soon justified as a dramatic device, and ultimately as essential to the plot.
John Collis

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 287: Tue Oct 23

Throne of Blood (Kurosawa, 1957): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.40pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Southbank. You can find all the details here. 

Chicago Reader review:
Akira Kurosawa's remarkable 1957 restaging of Macbethin samurai and expressionist terms is unquestionably one of his finest works—charged with energy, imagination, and, in keeping with the subject, sheer horror. Incidentally, this was reputed to have been T.S. Eliot's favorite film. With Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 286: Mon Oct 22

Death Line (Sherman, 1972): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.05pm

A rare chance to see this British horror classic projected from a 35mm print. This is part of the  cinema's Horroctober season - full details can be found here.

Time Out review:

One of the great British horror films, Death Line is a classic example of what Hellraiser director Clive Barker calls 'embracing the monstrous'. The film's basic premise is a gruesome one: following a cave-in during the construction of an underground tunnel in 1892, successive generations of plague-ridden cannibals have survived and developed their own subterranean culture. Forced out of hiding by the death of his wife, the sole surviving cannibal begins abducting passengers from Russell Square tube station. The disgust provoked by the corpse-filled underground world inhabited by the cannibal is offset by the tenderness with which he treats his dying wife, and by the unutterable sadness of his lonely plight. The film's great achievement is in eliciting sympathy for a creature whose residual capacity for human feeling amid such terrible degradation is ultimately more moving than horrifying.

Nigel Floyd

Here is the celebrated long take from this great movie.