Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 267: Wed Sep 28

8 Women (Ozon, 2002): Cine Lumiere, 6.15pm

This 35mm presentation, also being screened on September 25th and 30th plus October 11th, is part of the Isabelle Huppert season. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
A factory owner is found dead, and the finger of guilt passes from one occupant of his glamorous home to another: his coolly fashionable wife (Catherine Deneuve), his willful daughters (Virginie Ledoyen and Ludivine Sagnier), his morally loose sister (Fanny Ardant), his miserly mother-in-law (Danielle Darrieux), his neurotic sister-in-law (Isabelle Huppert), and the home’s two domestics (Firmine Richard and Emmanuelle Beart). Francois Ozon directed this slaphappy musical melodrama (2002), drawing on Douglas Sirk for his dramatic mise-en-scene and Vincente Minnelli for his saturated color schemes and iconic handling of the stars. The scandalous secrets come tumbling out in such profusion that the women’s issues are buried, and by the end the mystery has begun to crumple of its own weight. But the French screen royalty assembled by Ozon and the film’s sheer exuberance in its own artifice make this a delight from beginning to end.
JR Jones

Here (and above) os the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 266: Tue Sep 27

The Marriage of Maria Braun (Fassbinder, 1978): Prince Charles Cinema, 6.15pm

This film, also being screened on September 29th, is part of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
In 1979, Rainer Werner Fassbinder retreated from the failures of Chinese Roulette and Despair with what, for him, was an extremely naturalistic and accessible work. The sublime Hanna Schygulla stars as a plucky frau perennially separated from her husband, first by war, then by prison, and finally by pervasive capitalist malaise. She channels her frustrated romantic energy into the construction of an industrial empire—a plot that mixes love and money in the manner of Mildred Pierce. Though Fassbinder takes a more open attitude toward his characters, letting them exist as fully developed psychological specimens, his deadly irony continues to operate on the level of mise-en-scene, drawing his actors into an unstable world of seductive surfaces and shifting meanings. Fassbinder argues that happiness delayed is happiness denied, tempering the film's emotion with precise analysis.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 265: Mon Sep 26

Arabian Nights (Pasolini, 1974): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.15pm

This film, also being screened on October 3rd, is part of the Pier Paolo Pasolini season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Full details here.

Time Out review:
If The Decameron represented an intense vision behind its humourous facade, and The Canterbury Tales - the trilogy's weak point - a loss of ground amid a welter of sexual exhibitionism, the Arabian Nights emerges as a wonderfully relaxed and open puzzle of interlinked tales dedicated to the multiplicity of truth. It yields an engrossing array of mysterious, profound and liberating moments. The tales revolve around slaves and kings, demons, love, betrayal, loss and atonement. Zumurrud (Ines Pellegrini), a slave turned monarch, after her 'drag' wedding, amid delightfully conspiratorial laughter, reveals her true sexual identity to her diminutive (and equally delighted) bride. Shot on location in North Africa, the film has rarely been seen in Britain after its release in 1975 by United Artists - in an insanely dubbed version, ludicrously cut by the censor.
Verina Glaesser

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 264: Sun Sep 25

Mother (Naruse, 1952): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.20pm

This 35mm presentation, which will also screen on September 19th, is part of the Kinuyo Tanaka season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Slant magazine review:
Simultaneously sentimental and meta, director Mikio Naruse’s Mother depicts a period in the life of Masako Fukuhara (Kinuyo Tanaka) as narrated by her teenage daughter Toshiko (Kyôko Kagawa). Forced to take over the family dry-cleaning business after the death of her husband, Masako attempts to cope with her daughter’s rebellious behavior while also supporting her sickly son Susumu (Akihiko Katayama), now confined to a sanitarium. Toshiko, meanwhile, harbors suspicions that her mother is falling for her Uncle Kimura (Daisuke Katô)—fondly nicknamed “Uncle Prisoner” after his time as a POW in Manchuria—even as she herself starts to feel the first stirrings of love and passion. The mood throughout is, rather surprisingly for Naruse, almost sickly sweet, but there’s clearly a self-awareness to Mother, nowhere more evident than in the director’s brilliant use, during a movie-within-the-movie sequence, of a “The End” intertitle that rather harshly defuses the sentiment on display. Indeed, the characters seem acutely aware of the influence that populist art has on their lives; one of them even states, when speaking of a local movie-house offering, to “Bring your handkerchiefs.” Self-reflexivity can only take a film and its makers so far, so it’s no surprise that Naruse finds a perfect object of attention in Tanaka, her every gesture permeated with a truthfulness that counteracts even the most melodramatic of situations. Though Mother isn’t one of Naruse’s best, it does contain one of his finest closing images in which an exhausted Masako brushes back an errant strand of hair while Toshiko immortalizes her in poetic voiceover.
Keith Uhlich

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 263: Sat Sep 24

Pre-History of the Partisans (Tsuchimoto, 1969): Close-Up Cinema, 6pm

Organised by Open City Documentary Festival, a nine-screening programme of documentary maker Tsuchimoto Noriaki's films will take place throughout September at the ICA and Close-Up, with a series of central screenings coinciding with the festival dates. Tonight, a part of the Close-Up programme, is a UK premiere.

Close-Up Cinema introduction:
Pre-history of the Partisans is one of the most extraordinary films about the student struggles taking place globally at the end of the 1960s. In 1969, Tsuchimoto (together with members of Ogawa Productions) had access to a self-organised group of students barricaded inside the Kyodai University in Kyoto. Tsuchimoto was critical of the sectarian conflict that divided the various leftist student groups, but at the same time was interested in their ability to organise, and willingness to act autonomously. The film, a direct-cinema masterpiece that would be a turning point in Tsuchimoto’s own method of working, documents in detail the discussions between the members of the group as they organise and discuss their ideas, define their tactics, prepare their fight, build barricades, and seek ways to broaden their struggle to overthrow not only academic authority but society as a whole.

“This film is perhaps the best documentary made, anywhere, about the student protests of the 1960s. Tsuchimoto was the only filmmaker or journalist allowed to witness the secret workings of an ultra-radical splinter group at the prestigious Kyoto University (alma mater of Oshima Nagisa). As Ogawa has done in Forest of Pressure, Tsuchimoto virtually lived with his subjects during the course of the shoot. Tsuchimoto, however, emerges as more even-handed than Ogawa toward his subjects, more dispassionate as a filmmaker. This is probably a function of the Partisan group’s overt desire for direct, violent confrontation with the authorities. While Tsuchimoto himself does not necessarily share his subjects’ views on the efficacy of violence, he does convey the honesty and intensity of the group members themselves.” – David Desser

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 262: Fri Sep 23

Brothel No 8 (Kumai, 1974): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm

This 35mm presentation, which will also screen on October 1st, is part of the Kinuyo Tanaka season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

BFI introduction:
A young female journalist researching ‘karayuki-san’ – impoverished Japanese girls and women sent abroad to work as prostitutes – interviews survivor Osaki (Tanaka), now an old woman. Recalling her story in flashback, Osaki reveals the painful reality of forgotten women in Japan’s history. Tanaka’s stunning performance won her the Best Actress award at the Berlin Film Festival and the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 261: Thu Sep 22

Who's Afraid of the Bogey Man? (Misselwitz, 1989): Goethe Institute, 7pm

 
This double-bill is part of Portraits from an Other Germany, a season of screenings and discussions dedicated to the work of East German documentary filmmaker, Helke Misselwitz. The season is curated by Emily Mason in partnership with the National Film and Television School, the Goethe-Institut London and the ICA. 

As one of the most significant documentary filmmakers of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Helke Misselwitz first gained national recognition within East Germany for her 1988 feature film After Winter Comes Spring. In this, as in much of her work, her sensitive and perceptive interview style creates an intimate frame through which to view the private lives of her contributors. Misselwitz tirelessly seeks out personal stories from ordinary people, an approach which occasionally brought her into conflict with film censors when these stories did not conform to official narratives. 

Goethe Institute introduction:
To begin the season, we will look at some of Misselwitz’s most timely work, filmed in the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Bulky Trash (1990) the signs of the times are ever present, with protests against the GDR’s leadership forming the tumultuous background against which the four young musicians at the centre of the film live their lives. Through their punk band, Bulky Trash, ideas around youth culture are explored, as well as questions of how young people relate to older generations, and how they view the possibility of German reunification. 

Who’s Afraid of the Bogeyman? (1989) focuses on coal delivery workers, with the female owner of a family coal business at the forefront. Rather than an overly sentimental view of the work they do, we instead gain an understanding of the problems faced by these workers. Misselwitz’s emphasis on their private lives would have previously been considered taboo in East German cinema, not least due to the discussions of alcoholism, suicide and the possibility of escaping to the West. 35mm screening

Here (and above) is an extract from some of the director's work.