Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 43: Tue Feb 12

Brief Encounter (Lean, 1945): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

This 35mm presentation is part of the Prince Charles Cinema's ‘Love is in the Air’ Season. You can find the full details here.

There are certain films that can survive critical brickbats. This is assuredly one of them. Some would have you believe this is a sterile, emotionless movie; others that the premise is ridiculous, that Laura (Celia Johnson) should have left Fred (Cyril Raymond) for Alec (Trevor Howard) and had done with it. The movie, which was not that successful in its day, survives and indeed thrives because so many have surrendered to it and find the despair at the heart of the tale overwhelming. Richard Dyer, in his BFI Film Classics monograph on Brief Encounter, sums the feelings of those who love this film thus: "If you don't feel the melodramatic pull of the film, then everything fits just a little too neatly and rigidly, the life has been squeezed out of the film by the meticulousness with which it has been put together. But I do feel it."

Brief Encounter is number 12 in Time Out's poll of Best British Films.

Time Out review:
In this enlightened age of quickie divorces and Ashley Madison, it would be all too easy to sniff at ‘Brief Encounter’, director David Lean and author Noël Coward’s prim, oh-so-English tale of romance, respectability and repression. But those willing to give themselves over to the film’s mounting mood of swooning, tight-lipped desperation will be rewarded with one of the most vivid, impassioned and painfully believable love stories ever committed to celluloid. 
She is Laura (Celia Johnson): the good little housewife to a drab, inattentive middle-class worker bee, trudging through a repetitive, stultifying existence somewhere in suburbia. He is Alec (Trevor Howard): a doctor whose equally loveless union has driven him to find solace in work. Their chance meeting in a station café develops first into a casual friendship, then gradually, guiltily into something neither of them can fully understand or admit. Drenched in Lancashire drizzle and overshadowed both by the receding clamour of war and the spectre of impending social change – it was released in 1945 – ‘Brief Encounter’ is so much more than just a tale of two lovers. It’s also an affectionate but firm nudge-in-the ribs for the British bourgeoisie: are we really going to let our lives run on rails, never grabbing happiness where we find it? Have we learned nothing in these cruel years? As it turned out, Lean and Coward were on to something: just a few decades later, the selfless, stifled attitudes of ‘Brief Encounter’ would, for better or worse, be a distant memory.
Tom Huddleston

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 42: Mon Feb 11

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Milestone, 1946): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.40pm

This 35mm presentation, which is also being shown on February 24th, is part of the Barbara Stanwyck season. Full details here.

Time Out review:

Superb performance by Stanwyck (as coldly calculating as she was in Double Indemnity) as the apex of a traumatic triangle comprising the two men who (maybe) saw her club her wealthy aunt to death when they were children. Now a tycoon in her own right, bonded to one of the witnesses (Kirk Douglas) in a guilt-ridden marriage, she finds the other (Van Heflin) resurfacing in her life as both promise of escape and threat to security - and the stagnant waters begin to stir again with murderous crosscurrents of fear and desire. A gripping film noir, all the more effective for being staged by Lewis Milestone as a steamy romantic melodrama.

Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 41: Sun Feb 10

Blow up (Antonioni, 1966): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.05pm

This 35mm presentation, also being screened on February 3rd and 7th, is part of the Michelangelo Antonioni season. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:

Michelangelo Antonioni's sexy art-house hit of 1966, which played a substantial role in putting "swinging London" on the map, follows a day in the life of a young fashion photographer (David Hemmings) who discovers, after blowing up his photos of a couple glimpsed in a park, that he may have inadvertently uncovered a murder. Part erotic thriller (with significant glamorous roles played by Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, Verushka, and Jane Birkin), part exotic travelogue (featuring a Yardbirds concert, antiwar demonstrations, street mimes, one exuberant orgy, and a certain amount of pot), this is so ravishing to look at (the colors all seem newly minted) and pleasurable to follow (the enigmas are usually more teasing than worrying) that you're likely to excuse the metaphysical pretensions—which become prevalent only at the very end—and go with the 60s flow, just as the original audiences did.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 40: Sat Feb 9

Sweet Dream (Yang, 1936) + Fisherman’s Fire (Ahn, 1938): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 3.50pm

This double-bill, which includes Fisherman’s Fire on 35mm, is part of the ‘Early Korean Cinema’ season at BFI Southbank and also screens on February 15th. Details here. The screening on Friday 15th February will be introduced by Chung Chong-hwa, Korean Film Archive.

BFI introduction:
Sweet Dream follows a bored housewife as she abandons her family to search for love and excitement in 1930s Seoul ... Fisherman’s Fire is the tale of a young woman who is seduced away from her poor fishing village only to become a bar girl (gisaeng) in the city. 

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 39: Fri Feb 8

Belle de Jour (Buñuel, 1967): Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm

This classic surrealist film is part of the Luis Buñuel season at Close-Up Cinema and is also being screened on February 3rd. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Though it may not reach the level of sublimity of his three last features, Luis Buñuel recounts the story of a frigid upper-class housewife (Deneuve), devoted to her husband (Jean Sorel), who secretly works at a high-class brothel every weekday afternoon in order to satisfy her masochistic impulses. Placing the heroine’s fantasies, dreams, and recollections on the same plane as her everyday adventures, Buñuelcomes closer to the French New Wave than he did before or after, and much of his secondary cast reinforces this association (including Michel Piccoli, Macha Meril, and, most memorably, Pierre Clementi as a dandyish gangster), but there are also many explicit visual and aural echoes of his surrealist beginnings (Un chien andalou and L’age d’or). Haunting, amusing, provocative, teasing, and elegant in its puzzlelike ambiguities, this is essential viewing. With Genevieve Page, Francisco Rabal, Georges Marchal, and Francoise Fabian (a couple of years before Eric Rohmer “discovered” her in Ma nuit chez Maud).
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 38: Thu Feb 7

A Touch of Sin (Zhangke, 2013): Genesis Cinema, 9pm

Genesis Cinema introduction:
We welcome the Chinese New Year in collaboration with Christine Ni and a screening of Zhang-Ke Jia's exceptional A Touch of Sin. Xueting Christine Ni was born in Guangzhou, during China's "re-opening to the West". As an adolescent, she emigrated with her family to England. After graduating in English Literature and realising that her experiences gave her a unique a cultural perspective, bridging the Eastern and Western, she began translating original works of Chinese fiction. Since 2010, Christine has written extensively on Chinese culture and China's place in Western pop media, presenting publicly in collaboration with companies, theatres, institutions and festivals. Having worked on manhua, documentaries and science fiction, she continues her cultural translation of China, with a mission to help improve understanding of Chinese heritage, culture and innovation, and introduce its wonders to new audiences.

Chicago Reader review:
Jia Zhang-ke's films are valued most here in the West for their glimpses of a changing China and their acute observations of predatory global capitalism; one comes to them expecting a large story writ small. This drama (2013), collecting four tales of deadly violence across mainland China, lives up to that expectation to some extent, though limiting each protagonist to a more compact time frame heightens one's sense of them as individuals, and their impulsive actions remind us of the power of human agency. A former soldier seething over political graft in his little village, a transient who develops a serious gun fetish, a woman whose affair with a married man turns sour, a young man sinking into despair as he bounces from one dead-end job to the next—Jia's primary concern here is the solitary suffering of his characters, punished to the point where they can’t take anymore.
JR Jones


Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 37: Wed Feb 6

Red Desert (Antonioni, 1964): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 8.40pm

This film, part of the Michelangelo Antonioni season at BFI Southbank, is also being shown on February 9th and 23rd. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Michelangelo Antonioni's first color feature (1964) uses colors expressionistically, and to get the precise hues he wanted, he had entire fields painted. The film came at the end of his most fertile period, just after L'Avventura, La Notte, and Eclipse, and it isn't as good as the first and last of these, but the ecological concerns look a lot more prescient today. Monica Vitti plays a neurotic married woman briefly attracted to industrialist Richard Harris, and Antonioni does eerie, memorable work with the industrial shapes and colors that surround her; she walks through a science fiction landscape dotted with structures that are both disorienting and full of possibilities. Like any self-respecting Antonioni heroine, she's looking for love and meaning and mainly finding sex. But the film's most spellbinding sequence depicts a pantheistic, utopian fantasy of innocence, which she recounts to her ailing son.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.