BFI
mark.kidel
Weimar Germany produced some extraordinary cinema, with Pabst, Murnau, Fritz Lang and others creating a language that transformed the medium and is still a core reference today. People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag), a silent film made in 1929, entirely on location – itself unusual at the time – features a team that would make tracks once established in Hollywood. The credits include a story by Curt Siodmak, Billy Wilder as screenwriter, Edgar G Ulmer and Robert Siodmak as directors, and Fred Zinnemann and Eugen Schüfftan as cinematographers.The film tells the story of a group of Read more ...
graham.rickson
The British Transport Commission was created in 1948 by the Atlee government, an ambitious attempt to organise rail, road and water transport under a single unwieldy umbrella (for a time it was the world’s largest employer, with a staff of over 900,000). British Transport Films was set up a year later, the biggest industrial film unit in the UK. It was run by renowned documentary maker Edgar Anstey and survived until the late 1980s, its intention to promote the virtues of a newly nationalised transport network. The BTF’s output included travelogues and training materials, the more popular Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Publishable, but worth it?” EM Forster’s hesitations about the value of Maurice, his novel of Edwardian homosexuality – written in 1913-14, it was published only posthumously, in 1971 – were certainly redeemed by James Ivory’s 1987 film of the book. Even if, typically, the only place where it wasn’t really well received was in its home territory, the UK: reactions elsewhere, from the Venice Film Festival where stars James Wilby and Hugh Grant shared the Best Actor award, through to distribution in France, where it apparently played for a year, were far more enthusiastic. But if any doubts Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Who would have known that the word “Kubrickian” only entered the Oxford English Dictionary last year? You’d have thought that one of the great film directors of the 20th century would have earned his own epithet long ago. It’s taken a long time, too, for Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition to reach his adopted homeland, and its current berth at London’s Design Museum – so long, in fact, that you might almost begin to wonder about prophets unhonoured and all that: the show opened originally in Frankfurt in 2004 and has been travelling the world, in one iteration or another, more or less ever since Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
“I think we need to get rid of labels, certainly World Music,” insists Soumik Datta, who is both composer and musician, and has lived in the UK since the age of 11. “It is possible to be a musician in the Indian tradition, as well as an electronic musician, as well as a contemporary musician... When it’s convenient, the music industry warps things to make them fit, but otherwise all the pigeonholing and the taxonomies are really unhelpful to a lot of artists out there.”Datta plays the sarod. This 19-string instrument has a tremendous range and provides enough complex rhythms and glissando Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 early masterpiece Rashomon was a revelation for post-war western screen audiences, winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival that year and becoming a standard-bearer for the new generation of Japanese film. Its lead actor, Toshiro Mifune, would become known as “Japanese cinema’s biggest export after Godzilla”, a pioneering star – the first recognisable such figure from outside Europe and the US – whose charisma crossed national boundaries. His work with Kurosawa has been described as the greatest actor-director collaboration of all time in cinema, best known Read more ...
graham.rickson
Marvel at Stranger in the House’s title sequence, the pulsating multi-coloured shapes accompanied by the cheesiest of title themes. It’s not Saul Bass, but it’s effective. Pierre Rouve’s 1967 film contains elements which may confound, irritate and annoy, though it fully deserves this handsome reissue in the BFI’s Flipside strand, with its mission “to rescue weird and wonderful British films from obscurity”. They don’t come much more weird and wonderful than this, with Hungarian émigré Rouve fresh from duty as executive producer on Antonioni’s Blow-Up. You can tell.Georges Simenon’s source Read more ...
mark.kidel
Derek Jarman has always been described as irreverent, but, paradoxically, he is treated today with unreserved and probably excessive reverence. In the church of the avant-garde, and it’s perhaps not completely out of order to suggest that such an institution exists, he has been well and truly sanctified.Volume Two of the BFI’s monumental and impressive edition of Jarman’s video and film work will add to his status as genius and martyr. This lovingly assembled collection completes a remarkable account of the director’s work with the moving image, an extraordinary oeuvre as he was also writing Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Postcards from London is a surprise. You will certainly come away from Steve McLean’s highly stylised film with a new concept of what being an “art lover” can involve, while his subject matter is considerably more specialised, not least in the sexual sense, than its seemingly innocent title might suggest. Mischievously self-conscious in tone, its niche approach to certain established themes – principally gay culture and art history – leavens any pretension with generous humour.Harris Dickinson plays Jim, an 18-year-old naif (pictured below) who leaves behind the restrictions of his Essex home Read more ...
graham.rickson
The Children’s Film Foundation was founded in the early 1950s. Funded by a levy on cinema tickets, its mission was to provide wholesome Saturday morning entertainment, specifically "clean, healthy, intelligent adventure". On a miniscule budget, the CFF produced scores of hour-long features until its demise in the late 1980s. Nine are included here, from 1956’s Peril for the Guy to 1984’s Pop Pirates, the latter featuring cameos from Roger Daltrey and soul singer PP Arnold. These films often depict an enchanting, prelapsarian England, one populated by bicycling policemen, pipe-smoking dads and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Jamil Dehlavi is a filmmaker whose work straddles two worlds. His native Pakistan is certainly the key element in the two early films on this BFI dual-format release – it follows on from the director’s August South Bank retrospective, the first there for a director from that country – but it is as if, for a variety of reasons, he always had a foot in a cinematic context that went beyond it.His film education and training came in New York, and the spirit of experimental cinema of the time infuses his 1975 Towers of Silence, though its visual elements are anchored in Karachi’s shoreline and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“There’s a lot of weirdness I didn’t want explained,” Paul Schrader reveals at one point in a new director’s commentary to his 1990 film. He certainly succeeded on that score: with its script by Harold Pinter (adapting Ian McEwan’s elliptical 1981 novel), you sense that explanation – in any standard sense, at least – was indeed never going to be much of an issue in The Comfort of Strangers.If the novelist had offered little dialogue in his investigation of the irreconcilability of the sexes, and the playwright riffed on his favourite theme, that “language is a tool we use not to communicate Read more ...