Film
Graham Fuller
Céline Danhier’s Blank City is a useful but slightly frustrating primer on the grass-roots No Wave cinema movement that blossomed in New York’s East Village and Lower East Side in the post-punk era of the late Seventies and early Eighties. Hyper-energized and calculatedly ramshackle – thus echoing its subject matter – the documentary traces the emergence of the sync-sound super-8 filmmaking craze from the alternative art and music scene oriented around the CBGB rock club on the Bowery. Did you know that Jim Jarmusch was once in a band, the Del-Byzanteens, which supported Echo and the Bunnymen Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The chance to see all 14 of the great Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer's full-length films and a selection of his shorts during the BFI’s season is unique. Conviction and mysticism are central to his films. Whether it’s the suffering principle of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927) or the 17th-century hunts of Day of Wrath (made in Nazi-occupied Denmark in 1943), his characters are driven by passion and certainty. Most often they are women.Dreyer's naturalistic approach was characteristically spartan - in each of his films he made sure to use very few scenes. The precision brings its own Read more ...