Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 164: Thu Jun 13

TAKE YOUR PICK 

1 White of the Eye (Cammell, 1987): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.30pm

THE HORROR SHOW VOD service launches Friday 14^th June and to celebrate there will be an exclusive launch event at the Prince Charles cinema tonight.

Kim Newman (keeper of Empire Magazine’s video dungeon and author of Nightmare Movies) will introduce his own selection of a very rare 35mm screening of Donald Cammell’s classic serial killer horror WHITE OF THE EYE

There will also be a short film accompaniment; HIM INDOORS starring League of Gentleman’s Reece Shearsmith, introduced by director Paul Davis, and horror-themed stand-up comedy from Perfect Movie host Richard Sandling (winner of So You Think You’re Funny in 2007).

The Guardian’s Damon Wise will be conducting on-stage interviews with Kim Newman as well as with Him Indoors director Paul Davis.

Time Out review:
Donald Cammell transforms a stalk'n'slash thriller into a complex, cubist kaleidoscope of themes and images. Paul and Joan White (Keith and Moriarty) lead a happy enough life in a quiet Arizona mining town, until Paul suddenly finds himself chief suspect in a police investigation of a series of violently misogynistic murders. Matters are complicated by the reappearance of Joan's gun-crazy ex-husband (Rosenberg). A determinedly offbeat murder mystery, delving into dotty Indian mysticism and throwing up symbols, red herrings, and Steadicam flourishes for the asking, this nevertheless remains oddly effective. Imbued with a brooding, oppressive atmosphere and coloured by vivid performances, though often murkily motivated, it is genuinely nightmarish in its portrait of relationships where love is blinding and the past casts an intolerably heavy spell.
Geoff Andrew

Here is the trailer.

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2 Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972): Renoir Cinema, 7.30pm

This is the latest screening from the A Nos Amours film club, a collective founded by film-makers Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts dedicated to programming over-looked, under-exposed or especially potent cinema. 

Here is their introduction: This time À Nos Amours presents a 35mm screening of Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972), which will be introduced by novelist, essayist, journalist Will Self. 

Takovsky’s adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel takes the premise of a powerful force on a distant planet that can materialise dreams and memories and creates from it a remarkable work of cinema. There are no monsters from any ‘beyond’ here: the truths Tarkovsky and the crew discover are folded from life, regret and consciousness itself.

Chicago Reader review:
Although Andrei Tarkovsky regarded this 1972 SF spectacle in 'Scope as the weakest of his films, it holds up remarkably well as a soulful Soviet “response” to 2001: A Space Odyssey, concentrating on the limits of man's imagination in relation to memory and conscience. Sent to a remote space station poised over the mysterious planet Solaris in order to investigate the puzzling data sent back by an earlier mission, a psychologist (Donatas Banionis) discovers that the planet materializes human forms based on the troubled memories of the space explorers—including the psychologist's own wife (Natalya Bondarchuk), who'd killed herself many years before but is repeatedly resurrected before his eyes. More an exploration of inner than of outer space, Tarkovsky's eerie mystic parable is given substance by the filmmaker's boldly original grasp of film language and the remarkable performances by all the principals. In Russian with subtitles. 165 min.
Jonathan Rosenabum

Here is an extract. 

Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 163: Wed Jun 12

The Accused (Kaplan, 1988): Hackney Picturehouse, 6.30pm

This is the latest screening for the I Am Dora collective. Here is their introduction:

I am Dora, in partnership with City Screen, are pleased to announce their fifth edition.A subjective and personal study, I am Dora explores how and why women identify with one another and what this means when the identification is with a flawed or misunderstood character.

Part 5 is guest curated by British filmmaker Tinge Krishnan. Tinge is a BAFTA winning short filmmaker who made her feature debut in 2011 with Junkhearts, a London set psychological thriller. 

Tinge has chosen Jonathan Kaplan’s "The Accused", starring Jodie Foster who won her first best actress Academy award for her performance as Sarah Tobias, the target of a brutal gang rape. Praised at the time of release for it’s frank depiction of rape, it’s confronting portrayal of attitudes to female victims of sexual violence is still fiercely relevant.The film will be screened at the Hackney Picturehouse and will be followed by an onstage discussion between Tinge and I am Dora founder Jemma Desai. The event will be accompanied with limited run film notes, written by Tinge and Jemma, and designed by Claire Huss.

More information on the I Am Dora Facebook page here.

Chicago Reader review:
Something of a first, this is a serious movie about rape, and as such might be said to represent penance of a sort for the crude milking of antifeminist sentiments in the previous film of producers Sherry Lansing and Stanley R. Jaffe, Fatal Attraction. Sarah Tobias (Jodie Foster) is gang-raped in a bar, and deputy district attorney Katheryn Murphy (Kelly McGillis) agrees to take her case. A courtroom drama with certain faint echoes of Anatomy of a Murder and the more recent Nuts (the latter of which had the same screenwriter, Tom Topor), this attention holder explores such issues as the public's received ideas about rape and the question of ultimate responsibility without ever stacking the deck or being unduly preachy; and director Jonathan Kaplan, who previously gave an edge to Over the Edge, guides things along capably. Not a brilliant film, but an intelligent and thoughtful one that builds to an effective climax, with an exceptional performance by Foster. 
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 162: Tue Jun 11

Vagabond (Varda, 1985): Room B33, Birkbeck College, Malet St, 6pm

This is part of the summer film season at Birkbeck College. Here is the introduction:

In this series we will watch three films in which the main protagonist is an itinerant or a wanderer. Whilst there is a great deal of journeying in cinema, this series distinguishes itself from the main stream genre of the road movie -whose forward propulsion mimics or can be seen as a metaphor for both the film itself rushing through the projector,and for narrative itself as linear journey rushing toward resolution and/or death. In the classical Hollywood journey/odyssey genre film the protagonist is often the active (often male) agent who mobilises the (often) linear trajectory of the films’ structure.

In this series we are interested in films that wander, meander, loop and weave -films that explore aimlessness, waiting, 'dead time', margins and associative oblique trajectories, films whose movement follows a different pattern, structure and logic creating a disorganised mobility that allows us to ask the question: can the cinematic produce nomadic subjectivities and what can that mean politically, psychically, formally, affectively, aesthetically?

After the screening there will be a panel discussion chaired by Amber Jacobs with Professor James Williams (Royal Holloway) Dr Libby Saxton (Queen Mary College).

Chicago Reader review:
The road movie takes a somber turn in this austerely beautiful 1985 French drama by Agnes Varda. Sandrine Bonnaire stars as a woman hitchhiking aimlessly through the unearthly winter landscape of southern France and surviving on handouts and ephemeral liaisons with strangers. Varda maintains a detached mood of melancholy and dread with lingering shots of etiolated plains and stunted vineyards, but at times her tracking shots of diseased trees, abandoned chateaus, and rusted fences become a bit relentless in their message that contemporary life is blighted and confining. At times Varda also slips into the bogus Brechtian posings of her earlier, execrable One Sings, the Other Doesn't—Mona's brief acquaintances stare into the camera and utter profundities such as "I often think of that hitchhiker: she was free and I am not. Where did she come from? Where did she go?" But in the protagonist, Varda has created an everyperson worthy of Samuel Beckett's. 
Peter Keough

Here is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 161: Mon Jun 10

Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.20pm & NFT1, 8.45pm

This film, on an extended run at BFI Southbank and the highlight of the Werner Herzog season, is being screened from 7th June into July. More details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Werner Herzog's 1972 film plays like a structural inversion of his Every Man for Himself and God Against All, with a party of Spanish conquistadores gradually succumbing to Herzog's animistic vision of nature as they plow through the Brazilian jungles in search of El Dorado. As is too often the case in Herzog's films, the man-versus-nature theme is put a little too schematically, but Aguirre is rife with the disquieting, surrealistic images that are the purest expression of his considerable talent.
Dave Kehr

Here is the new BFI trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 160: Sun Jun 9

Pretty Maids All in a Row (Vadim, 1971): Cinema Museum, 4pm

The Cinema Museum are running a season celebrating all things Star Trek and today in a double-bill with the film Star Trek IV they are showing this Gene Roddenberry collaboration with Roger Vadim.

Here is the Cinema Museum introduction: This fourth instalment not only sees the first use of extensive location shooting but the passage of time has delivered us with a delicious 1980s time capsule. Appropriately for a story of time travel, the supporting feature takes us to the equally exotic 1970s. In a parallel universe Gene Roddenberry’s 1971 collaboration with Roger Vadim, Pretty Maids All in a Row – starring Rock Hudson, Angie Dickinson and James Doohan amongst others – revolutionised another genre in much the same way Star Trek did science fiction. In the event we are left with a fascinating what-if and a colourful but rarely seen cinematic experience.

Pretty Maids All in a Row is always cited by Quentin Tarantino as one of his favourite movies (you can see his top dozen here) and this is a rare chance to see the film on the big screen. It's a weird one.

Here is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 159: Sat Jun 8

Dr Strangelove (Kubrick, 1963): ICA Cinema, 6pm

Here is the ICA introduction: In his new book A Short History of Nuclear Folly, Rudolph Herzog, the acclaimed author of Dead Funny, presents a devastating account of history's most irresponsible uses of nuclear technology. From the nightmare of Broken Arrows to Nazi bombs, suicide dust to plummeting nuclear satellites - and the death of John Wayne - Herzog focuses in on long-forgotten nuclear projects that nearly led to disaster.

A Short History of Nuclear Folly is a blackly sardonic people’s history of atomic blunders and near-misses in the spirit of films such as Dr. Strangelove and The Atomic Café. So it's only fitting that this celebrated young historian will introduce the book before a screening of Kubrick's Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Rudolph Herzog is the author of the hugely popular Dead Funny: Telling Jokes in Hitler’s Germany (Melville House, 2011) and, as a director, is best known for the reality crime series The Heist (Channel 4). He is the son of the celebrated filmmaker Werner Herzog.


Time Out review:
'Perhaps Stanley Kubrick's most perfectly realised film, simply because his cynical vision of the progress of technology and human stupidity is wedded with comedy, in this case Terry Southern's sparkling script in which the world comes to an end thanks to a mad US general's paranoia about women and commies. Peter Sellers' three roles are something of an indulgent showcase, though as the tight-lipped RAF officer and the US president he gives excellent performances. Better, however, are Scott as the gung-ho military man frustrated by political soft-pedalling, and - especially - Sterling Hayden as the beleaguered lunatic who presses the button. Kubrick wanted to have the antics end up with a custard-pie finale, but thank heavens he didn't; the result is scary, hilarious, and nightmarishly beautiful, far more effective in its portrait of insanity and call for disarmament than any number of worthy anti-nuke documentaries.'
Geoff Andrew

Watch this trailer. Now try and tell me you don't want to see this film again.

Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 158: Fri Jun 7

The Fog (Carpenter, 1981): The Nave, St Paul's Rd, N1 2QN, 7pm
This is a Cigarette Burns production and promises to be one of their best yet. The Nave is close to where I live and I can't think of a more atmospheric setting for this movie.

Here are some more details: To celebrate Death Waltz Recording Company's release of the Fog soundtrack with exclusive artwork by Dinos Chapman, Cigarette Burns Cinema and Death Waltz are proud to take over the Nave, an old deconsecrated church in Islington and transform it into a hall of cinematic worship for one night only , screening John Carpenter's atmospheric classic from celluloid.
To up the analogue ante after the screening Death Waltz will be unveiling their exclusive vinyl artwork from the mind of Dinos Chapman, attendees will the first people to see this specially commissioned work and will have the chance to purchase the limited edition double LP set before it goes on general sale the following week.

Time Out review:
The Fog will disappoint those expecting a re-run of the creepy scares from Halloween. Instead, expanding enormously on the fantasy elements of his earlier films, Carpenter has turned in a full-scale thriller of the supernatural, as a sinister fog bank comes rolling in off the sea to take revenge on the smug little town of Antonio Bay, N. Calif. No shotguns pumping; no prowling of dark corners; no tricksy dry-ice chills. Instead you'll find a masterful simplicity of style, a lonely and determined group of characters under siege, and a childlike sense of brooding fear that almost disappeared in the '70s. Carpenter's confidence is outrageous; the range of his models even more so (from Poe to RKO); and the achievement is all his own, despite ragged moments and occasional hesitations.
Chris Auty

Here is the trailer.