Capital Celluloid 2021 — Day 128: Tue Sep 21

Hush! (Hashiguchi, 2001): Genesis Cinema, 6.10pm

Ryosuke Hashiguchi’s film (screened here in 35mm) was first shown in the official selection of the 2001 Cannes Film Festival Directors’ Fortnight, and twenty years after its release, this groundbreaking work can be appreciated for its anticipation of current debates around same-sex families and parenthood.

Chicago Reader review:
Two gay men and a straight woman who wants one of them to father her child gradually come together to form an elective family in this 2001 Japanese drama. The woman, who works in a dental office, is a bit unbalanced: she’s had several failed affairs and attempted suicide in the past. The relationship between the men is tentative at first—one of them is closeted and sometimes dates women. Though often entertaining, the film suffers from a loose narrative structure and inconsistencies in tone. Director Ryosuke Hashiguchi’s long takes and static compositions, which effectively articulate the emotional detachment of the characters, are disrupted by a rapidly cut comedy sequence that seems jarringly out of place.
Fred Camper

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2021 — Day 127: Mon Sep 20

The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941): BFI Southbank, 12pm, 3pm & 6.20pm

This John Huston classic is on extended run at BFI Southbank. Full details here. 

Chicago Reader review:
The key film in the Bogart myth (1941). I don't want to knock it, but what John Huston does with Bogart's personality and the hard-boiled genre in general has always struck me as pale compared to the Howard Hawks films that followed (To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep). The Maltese Falcon is really a triumph of casting and wonderfully suggestive character detail; the visual style, with its exaggerated vertical compositions, is striking but not particularly expressive, and its thematics are limited to intimations of absurdism (which, when they exploded in Beat the Devil, turned out to be fairly punk). But who can argue with Bogart's glower or Mary Astor in her ratty fur?
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2021 — Day 126: Sun Sep 19

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Mamoulian, 1931): Genesis Cinema, 3pm

Celebrating chilling audiences for 90 years, join Pre-Code Queen Sarah Cook, and Movies on Weekends, for a special screening of Rouben Mamoulian's 1931 horror classic Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde.

Chicago Reader review:
Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, this 1932 screen adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic is a remarkable achievement that deserves to be much better known. Fredric March won a well-deserved Oscar for his performance as the lead, and Miriam Hopkins and Rose Hobart play the two women who match the opposite sides of the hero’s nature. The transformations of Jekyll are a notable achievement for March and Mamoulian alike, and the disturbing undercurrents of the story are given their full due (as they weren’t in the much inferior 1941 Victor Fleming version with Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, and Lana Turner). Mamoulian was at his peak in the early 30s, as this film shows.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2021 — Day 125: Sat Sep 18

Boxer (Terayama, 1977): Barbican Cinema, 5.50pm

This presentation is part of the Japanese and Avant-Garde Film Festival season at the Barbican Cinema. You can find full details here.

Time Out review:
Terayama has here brilliantly fused the elements of his previous film and theatre work - surrealism, a sense of the essential anarchy of relationships, and a flair for startling and beautiful images - with a compulsively exciting Hollywood-style narrative about a young man's relentless ambition to be a champion boxer. The film synthesises these seemingly disparate approaches while allowing them separate existences, and through this evokes not only a poetic vision of modern industrial Tokyo and the fading dreams of the city's losers, but also a tense and realistic portrayal of the sheer brutaulity of the world of boxing, in its inexorable attraction and its heroic despair.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2021 — Day 124: Fri Sep 17

Lovers Are Wet (Kumashiro, 1973): Barbican Cinema, 8.30pm

This presentation is part of the Japanese and Avent-Garde Film Festival season at the Barbican Cinema. You can find full details here.

Barbican Cinema introduction:
Smut or art? Join us to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno series of pink films with Tatsumi Kumashiro’s existential shag-a-thon, Lovers are Wet. It’s Friday evening, and after a long week at work, it’s time to surreptitiously purchase your ticket, slipping unobserved into our erotic movie palace.

We’ve opted to mark this 50th anniversary of Nikkatsu Roman Porno with a somewhat subversive selection. Not out of place with the "angry young man" films by Nagisa Oshima and Shuji Terayama, Lovers are Wet depicts the return of a particularly nihilistic native to his seaside village. Working in a local softcore cinema, Katsu refuses to acknowledge his connection to the town, and begins a mission of cruel seduction. Kumashiro’s bleak and windswept vision is punctured by humour and depravity and serves as an angry broadside against censorship in Japan.

This screening includes an introduction by Jasper Sharp.

Capital Celluloid 2021 — Day 123: Thu Sep 16

Nanami: The Inferno of First Love (Hani, 1968): Barbican Cinema, 6pm

This rare 16mm presentation is part of the Japanese and Avent-Garde Film Festival season at the Barbican Cinema. You can find full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
A teenage boy and girl (played by 19-year-old nonprofessionals) have a nude encounter in which the boy is unable to function sexually, and traumatic flashbacks follow as they recount their lives to each other. The boy was molested as a child, and the girl performs nude shows, some including S-M, in the chaotic Shinjuku district of Tokyo. Stylistically disjointed, Susumu Hani’s 1968 film lurches from silhouettes of S-M performers to grainy flashbacks to noirish scenes of the present, providing an effective if sometimes disorienting portrait of two young people struggling to find themselves in an almost valueless world.
Fred Camper

Here is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2021 — Day 122: Wed Sep 15

Absolute Beginners (Temple, 1986): BFI Southbank, NFT1 8.25pm

This presentation will aslo include a Q&A with director Julien Temple and cinematographer Oliver Stapleton and is part of the the National Film & Tekevision School season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
A fascinating attempt by rock video director Julien Temple to do several things at once—adapt a Colin MacInnes novel, show the London youth scene in 1958 (while dealing at length with the racial tensions of the period), build on some of the stylistic innovations of Frank Tashlin, Vincente Minnelli, and Orson Welles, and put to best use a fascinating score by Gil Evans that adapts everything from Charles Mingus to Miles Davis. A mixed success, but an exhilarating try (1986). With David Bowie, Keith Richards, and James Fox.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.