Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 310: Fri Nov 16

The Iron Rose (Rollin, 1973): BFI Southbank, 8.40pm

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 10th. Full details here.

BFI Southbank introduction:
Encompassing horror, eroticism and the fantastique, Jean Rollin’s films are possessed of a haunting atmosphere all their own. In this beguiling tale, a couple (Pascal and Quester) head into a rambling, deserted graveyard for a romantic tryst, but as darkness falls they realise they’re unable to find their way back out again... and edge toward madness.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 309: Thu Nov 15

All I Desire (Sirk, 1953): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

This film is part of the 'Magnificent Obsessions; The Films of Ross Hunter' season at the Cinema Museum.

Chicago Reader review:
A failed actress and mother of three (Barbara Stanwyck) returns to the husband (Richard Carlson) and family she deserted years before in this superior 1953 drama by Douglas Sirk, a very personal reworking of a standard soap-opera plot. True to form, Sirk transforms the material through a careful and ironic subversion of the conventions; what emerges is a biting assessment of the value of survival in the face of small-town meanness and prejudice, a neat use of a very bourgeois format to satirize its audience.
Don Druker

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 308: Wed Nov 14

Bigger Than Life (Ray, 1956): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.10pm

Here's a chance to see Bigger Than Life, generally regarded to be one of Nicholas Ray's finest films, at the NFT from a 35mm print. I saw the film on TV recently again and was mightily impressed.

Ray was one of the most interesting directors of Hollywood's Golden Age. Famously lauded for Rebel Without A Cause, he was also responsible for some of the most remarkable movies to emerge from America in the 1950s.

Ray directed the weird western Johnny Guitar and a fascinating anti-war drama in Bitter Victory, a Richard Burton vehicle now almost entirely forgotten but which deserves its growing reputation. However, Bigger Than Life is Ray's masterpiece. A searing indictment of American middle-class values, the film was trashed on release but came to the attention of film buffs in the 1960s after being championed by Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.

In the movie James Mason plays a quiet sububan teacher who is transformed into a murderous megalomaniac following his addiction to cortisone. If the radical story wasn't recommendation enough, Ray's use of colour and his unequalled use of Cinemascope are masterful.

The film is also on at the NFT on November 5th (details here) but tonight's screening is introduced by Geoff Andrew. This film is part of the Big Screen Classics strand.

Chicago Reader review:
Nicholas Ray's potent 1956 CinemaScope melodrama dealt with the ill effects of cortisone on a frustrated middle-class grammar-school teacher (James Mason) at about the same time that the first wave of “wonder” drugs hit the market. But the true subject of this deeply disturbing picture is middle-class values—about money, education, culture, religion, patriarchy, and “getting ahead.” These values are thrown into bold relief by the hero's drug dependency and resulting megalomania, which leads to shocking and tragic results for his family (Barbara Rush and Robert Simon) as well as himself. Ray's use of 'Scope framing and color to delineate the hero's dreams and dissatisfactions has rarely been as purposeful. (It's hard to think of another Hollywood picture with more to say about the sheer awfulness of “normal” American family life during the 50s.) With Walter Matthau in an early noncomic role as the hero's best friend; scripted by Cyril Hume, Richard Maibum, and an uncredited Clifford Odets.
Jonathan Rosenbaum 

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 307: Tue Nov 13

Melancholia (Von Trier, 2011): Barbican Cinema, 6.30pm

This screening is part of the Science on Screen season at the Barbican and is introduced by Valerio Lucarini, Professor of Statistical Mechanics at the University of Reading.

Barbican introduction:
A major focus of contemporary science deals with the understanding of critical transitions – situations, like the close encounter of Earth and Melancholia, where forecasting the final outcome is extremely challenging. The presentation will focus on the challenges of prediction in the vicinity of critical transitions, and how this is reflected in the film's climactic structure, which was a direct inspiration for a scientific paper written by Valerio Lucarini.

Chicago Reader review:
A mysterious planet heads straight for earth, threatening to destroy all human life. The same premise has animated numerous sci-fi adventures, but this elegant drama by Danish writer-director Lars von Trier (Dogville, Antichrist) applies it to more philosophical ends. Von Trier came up with the idea after his shrink pointed out to him that depressed people often react more calmly to a crisis than happy ones, because they already understand that life is nasty, brutish, and short. To that end, the filmmaker divides his story into two parts, named for a pair of siblings: Justine (Kirsten Dunst), who descends into catatonic misery as her malignant friends and relatives celebrate her wedding at a rented mansion, and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), whose cheery facade begins to crumble as the rogue planet grows ever larger in the sky. Apocalyptic visions are nothing new in cinema, but they're almost always epic in scale; Von Trier's innovation is to peer down the large end of the telescope, observing the end of the world in painfully intimate terms.
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 306: Mon Nov 12

They Shoot Horses Don't They (Pollack, 1969): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm

This 35mm screening is part of the Jane Fonda season at BFI Southbank (full details here) and is also being shown on November 15th (follow this link for more information).

BFI introduction:
A film that Fonda herself has described as being seminal to her career, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is set during the American Depression of the 1930s. Troubled Gloria (Fonda) heads to Hollywood to make it as an actress and joins a group of desperate people to compete in a gruelling dance marathon for a cash prize. She partners with naïve Robert (Sarrazin) as they try to survive the exploitative tactics of the MC.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 305: Sun Nov 11

Their Last Love Affair (Myung-se, 1996): Close-Up Cinema, 8pm

The London Korean Film Festival (LKFF) presents three early features at Close-Up Cinema by Korean New Wave director Lee Myung-se. Presented here on 35mm each film will be followed by a discussion between Lee and LKFF programmer Mark Morris. Full details here.

"People might find my films confusing, and perhaps that’s because I insist that film communicates without explanation. I think of my films as transmitting meaning directly, from heart to heart." – Lee Myung-se

“Lee Myung-se’s films are exceptional and distinctive, and not only by Korean standards. Of the "new wave" directors he is perhaps the one least obviously marked [...] by the political struggles of the 1980s, but his films bespeak an even stronger impatience with the mainstream movie-making tradition [...] Lee’s work is committedly cosmopolitan in its refusal to limit itself to Korean terms of reference. It is also committedly innovative” – Tony Rayns

Writer Grady Hendrix has written an excellent introduction to the films of Lee Myung-se in Film Comment which you can find here.

Close-Up introduction:
Poet-professor Yeong-min meets Yeong-hee, an attractive writer who has reviewed a collection of his poems. They click: literary criticism is far from their minds as they dash off to a hotel room for some fairly acrobatic lovemaking. He becomes obsessed with Yeong-hee; she makes an effort to resist, but not for long. Yeong-min, pretending to need time away from family for the sake of research, sets the two of them up in a beachside shack where domestic routine vies with passion. How long can this world apart contain them? The film playfully wrong-foots us at the outset. We begin in what looks like a noir crime caper, only to drop into the first encounter of the two main characters. Much later, even amid the passion and increasing tension in scenes at the beach house, the story maintains its balance of humour and visual beauty.
Mark Morris

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 304: Sat Nov 10

First Love (Myung-se, 1993): Close-Up Cinema, 8pm

The London Korean Film Festival (LKFF) presents three early features at Close-Up Cinema by Korean New Wave director Lee Myung-se. Presented here on 35mm each film will be followed by a discussion between Lee and LKFF programmer Mark Morris. Full details here.

"People might find my films confusing, and perhaps that’s because I insist that film communicates without explanation. I think of my films as transmitting meaning directly, from heart to heart." – Lee Myung-se

“Lee Myung-se’s films are exceptional and distinctive, and not only by Korean standards. Of the "new wave" directors he is perhaps the one least obviously marked [...] by the political struggles of the 1980s, but his films bespeak an even stronger impatience with the mainstream movie-making tradition [...] Lee’s work is committedly cosmopolitan in its refusal to limit itself to Korean terms of reference. It is also committedly innovative” – Tony Rayns

Writer Grady Hendrix has written an excellent introduction to the films of Lee Myung-se in Film Comment which you can find here.

Close-Up introduction:
Yeong-shin is an innocent young woman from a nice family living in a pleasant if fairly poor neighbourhood in a town somewhere far from the big city. When her am-dram club decides to invite a writer from Seoul to come direct their production of Our Town, Yeong-shin, despite an unpromising first encounter with a grubby, hard-drinking Chang-wook, manages to fall head over heels. The film plays with our melodramatic reflexes, involving us in a sentimental education made all the more bittersweet through nuanced acting of Kim Hye-su. Rather than offering melo-realism, however, the film revels in the sheer beauty of its sets, subtle lighting, fantasy scenes – Yeong-shin’s ghostly visit to Chang-wook is both funny and heart-warming. Our Town has been termed a form of meta-theatre. Maybe we could consider Lee Myung-se’s aesthetic a kind of meta-cinema.
Mark Morris