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Past Screenings
Thursday
21st November at 8:00pm at Fabrica Gallery Bruno Dumont (L’il Quinquin) takes another unclassifiable, leftfield turn with this audacious, 15th century-set, speed metal / trip hop musical. It’s 1425, and 8-year-old Jeannette already has the weight of the French nation on her shoulders, as she grapples with matters of the soul, the brutality of war with the English, and an overarching sense of a greater calling. Set to an electronics-heavy score by French metal musician Igorrr, ‘Jeannette’ follows her early path from faith to fanaticism, aided along the way by head-banging nuns, visions of levitating saints and beautifully off-kilter dancing. Shot entirely on location in the Calais countryside, Dumont employs a cast of non-actors performing their songs live for the camera, and laces the film with oblique, deadpan mysticism drawn from the works of 19th Century poet Charles Péguy. "Pitched somewhere between Straub-Huillet and Headbangers Ball, Monty Python and Messiaen, Bruno Dumont's new feature Jeannette marks an unexpected and near-perfect synthesis of the French iconoclast's many disparate interests and obsessions… he's responsible for some of the most exhilaratingly alive cinema in the world right now." Jordan Kronk, Cinema Scope "This singular musical gloriously combines gorgeous beachside settings, idiosyncratic non-actors, beautifully low-key singing, and heavy metal for one of the most joyous experiences the [Cannes] festival has to offer." Elena Lazic, Seventh Row Brighton Premiere! Screening as part of BFI Musicals! The Greatest Show on Screen, a UK-wide film season supported by National Lottery, BFI Film Audience Network and ICO.
Friday
7th June at 8pm Open Colour offer a glimpse into current experimental and auteur cinema from Spain, screening a selection of films praised at major festivals and from directors who are making their mark nationally and beyond. Night
Without Distance http://agencia.curtas.pt/films/show/396 Our
Friend the Moon http://catalanfilms.cat/en/productions/our-friend-the-moon Aliens http://offecam.com/aliens/ The
Entrails https://marvinwayne.com/en/las-visceras
Thursday 9th
May 2019 at 8pm Completed in 1972, Reminiscences is a film journey in search of a place to call ‘home’ - a place to which everybody returns to at some point of his or her life. Mekas writes, “The film consists of three parts. The first part is made up of footage I shot with my first Bolex, during my first years in America, mostly from 1950–1953. It shows me and my brother Adolfas, how we looked in those days; miscellaneous footage of immigrants in Brooklyn, picnicking, dancing, singing; the streets of Williamsburg. The second part was shot in August 1971, in Lithuania. Almost all of the footage comes from Semenis1kiai, the village I was born in. You see the old house, my mother (born 1887), all the brothers, goofing, celebrating our homecoming. You don’t really see how Lithuania is today: you see it only through the memories of a Displaced Person back home for the first time in twenty-five years. The third part begins with a parenthesis in Elmshorn, a suburb of Hamburg, where we spent a year in a forced labor camp during the war. After the parenthesis closes, we are in Vienna where we see some of my best friends—Peter Kubelka, Hermann Nitsch, Annette Michelson, Ken Jacobs. The film ends with the burning of the Vienna fruit market, August, 1971.”
Sunday
28th April 2019 at 12 Midday. Adam Bohman's entire being is pervaded by collage - from his artworks to his sound works. He magpies and gleans away pedestrian gems, and from his hoard he conjures up a prolific and kaleidoscopic creative output. It’s a pure and wonderful compulsion. Filmed within his creative den - his sublimely cluttered flat in Catford - Adam guides us through tabletops overspilling with springs and metal, tottering piles of collages, and cut-up takeaway menus, offering an intimate glimpse into his processes and passions.
Thursday
28th March 2019 at 7.30pm To
mark the eve of the original date of the UK's split from Europe,
join us for a special screening of the restored version of Pabst's
gripping, internationalist classic. Pabst brings a vivid sense of claustrophobia to this ticking-clock scenario, using sets designed by Erno Metzner to create a maze of soot-choked shafts. No music is used. Instead the remarkable sound design is a whirl of clanking chains, metal against metal and the drone of elevator shafts. Multiple versions of the film exist; Dialogue spoken in French and German was left unsubtitled in their respective versions at Pabst insistence, highlighting the difficulties in communication between the miners. This new restoration (fully subtitled), reinstates a final bitter coda as the authorities regain control of the border – this was after all, a Germany on the brink of National Socialism. Inspired by a real-life mine collapse, Kameradschaft (Comradeship) is both an edge of the seat disaster film and a stirring plea for international co-operation. It cemented Pabst’s status as one of the most morally engaged and formally dexterous filmmakers of his time. +
Weekend
Saturday March
2nd 2019 at 7.30pm We’re excited to present the extraordinary new feature by acclaimed experimental animator Jodie Mack, alongside new work from Brighton based artists F-Ampism and Karen Constance, and a short from the couplet series of US master collagist Lewis Klahr. The
Grand Bizarre The Grand Bizarre
is the culmination of Mack’s many varied interests and experiments
to date. Shot in a dozen countries, the film finds Mack’s
trademark, colour-coordinated textiles dancing across a variety
of exotic locales (India, Mexico, Holland, Morocco, and Turkey represent
just a partial itinerary) through a meticulous process of frame-by-frame
photography and practical production magic. Playful and propulsive,
in Mack’s dazzling montage, everyday sources—maps, globes,
plane tickets, even back tattoos—reveal both cross-cultural
codes and universal truths, bringing this eclectic cinematic travelogue
into a seamless dialogue with each viewer’s unique worldview.
It’s all driven by a homemade soundtrack that locates a heretofore
unrealized intersection between hip-hop, chiptune, and synth-pop.
Top five US films of the year you must see - Sight and Sound! F-Ampism
is the audio-visual solo project of Paul Wilson of improvising
sextet Bolide. His work has featured abstracted melodics, hidden
everyday exotica, percussive clusters, stop motion animation and
destroyed & mutated radio waves. F-Ampism will perform live
to a new moving image work. Karen
Constance is a Scottish visual and sound artist based in
Brighton. Her paintings and collages have been exhibited world wide
and featured on numerous experimental album covers, gig posters,
fanzines, and private press releases - often with sound artists
and musicians she has collaborated with sonically. They can be vibrant,
textural, scary and hilarious in equal measures. This is a first
screening of new short works in stop motion animation. April
Snow A love story about cars, girls, boys and time, carried away by songs from the Shangri-La's and The Boss. Lewis Klahr has been working with collage filmmaking since 1977. In Klahr’s work, images from mid-20th-century advertisements, comic books, and other ephemeral talismans of American popular culture are animated to produce what Tom Gunning called 'submerged narratives', in which plots stir just beneath the threshold of perceptibility. April Snow is part of his series of Couplets, organized around the pairing of various pop songs and the theme of romantic love. “In the age of industrial sound and light, Lewis Klahr makes special-effects movies that are almost insanely artisanal— one man, labour-intensive animations that are at once crude and poetic, blunt and enigmatic, as funny as they are inventive... [He is] the reigning proponent of cut and paste.” J. Hoberman, Village Voice Kelly
Sears on April Snow
Sunday 24th
February 2019 at 4pm With a stunning mix of the surreal and the naturalistic, Mambéty incendiary debut follows two young lovers as they attempt to flee the dead end clutches of Dakar for an idealised dream of life in Paris. Travelling through the countryside and urban sprawl on a motorbike pinned with a cow’s skull, they plan to fund their escape through petty crime and wild schemes, encountering obstacles and visions en route, both real and mystical. Inspired in part by the French New Wave, Mambety, though only 28 and with no formal film training, captures with raw, visceral energy the clash between folk customs, superstitions and the enforced adoption of European colonial attitudes, in a country seemingly at a crossroads. Characterized by dazzling imagery and music, a pace that jumps between the manic and meditative, this vivid, fractured portrait of Senegal in the early 1970s, is widely considered one of the most important African films ever made. In an interview Mambety said 'one must have a mad belief that anything is possible....Cinema must be reinvented each time, and whoever ventures into cinema must also share in its reinvention.' To introduce the film we are pleased to welcome Dr Estrella Sendra Fernandez, a documentary filmmaker, journalist, lecturer and researcher at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, who specialises in Senegalese festivals and African Cinema. She is also part of the curatorial team at Cambridge African Film Festival, which she directed in 2014 and 2015. Attenborough
Centre for the Creative Arts Restored by The World Cinema Foundation at Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata in association with the family of Djibril Diop Mambéty. Restoration funding provided by Armani, Cartier, Qatar Airways and Qatar Museum Authority
Saturday
26 January 2019 at 7.00pm Willie
Stewart in Q+A with Tom Roberts Mich first came to prominence in Antwerp’s turbulent, underground 70’s art scene. He orchestrated mass, Fluxus style performances and released a series of experimental films including Saturnus (1971), a DIY sci-fi transmission from another world shot with a homemade fish eye lens, and Lysistrata (1975), an all nude adaptation of Aristophanes’ satire featuring a soundtrack of primal yelling, tape delay, instant sax blasts and de-tuned guitar. A painter, sculptor, holographer, musician, and performance artist, Mich has worked across all artforms for over five decades, and collaborated widely with artists including Thurston Moore, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Dennis Tyfuss, Jennifer Walshe, Blood Stereo, Wataru Kasahara, Kiyoharu Kuwayama, Burial Hex, The Joyous Cosmology, Syed Kamran Ali, Pascal Nichols, Roman Nose, Blue Yodel, Mama Bar, Kommissar Hjuler and more! Through a mix of archival footage, interviews with family and friends and fly on the wall filming, Ludo Is Fantastic immerses us in the 'Mich Dimension.' We're very pleased to welcome director Willie Stewart for a Q+A hosted by Tom Roberts. UK Premiere. Opening the evening two short performances from Unks
Of Pleasure Burbling
of the Mich Mind
Sunday 20th
January 2019 at The Regency Town House, Hove, BN3 1EH As a moral panic swept 20s Hollywood Normand found herself caught up in scandals that would see her sidelined by the industry. Now, as part of the British Film Institute's ‘Comedy Genius’ tour, this collection of short films brings Normand back into the spotlight. It includes Mabel's Blunder (1914), Mabel's Dramatic Career (1913) and His Trysting Place (1914) and Should Men Walk Home? (1927), each with a newly commissioned score by The Meg Morley Trio.
11th November
2018 at 7pm - Sallis Benney Theatre A poet, a defiantly
independent filmmaker, an artist of unique and extraordinary vision
– the great Margaret Tait would have been 100 on November
11th 2018. We’re celebrating her centenary with a special
programme featuring new restorations of Tait’s film poems,
alongside rare 16mm screenings from artists working in the tradition
of intimate, first person cinema. 'Scottish
film-poet Margaret Tait produced an exquisite body of work combining
poetry, portraiture, music, ethnography, and animation. She studied
filmmaking in Rome during the height of Italian neorealism before
returning to Scotland in the early 1950s, where she found inspiration
in the contrasting daily rhythms of Edinburgh and the Orkney Islands.
In an early jewel of a film, A PORTRAIT OF GA (1952), Tait cut together
birdsong and snippets of Orkney lore with shots of her mother and
the rugged island landscape to produce a startlingly poignant impression
of family andplace. She explored similar themes in later films like
WHERE I AM IS HERE (1964), COLOUR POEMS (1974), and AERIAL (1974)
– each screening tonight - reflecting on the passage of time
while attending to the details of everyday life.’ (Amy Beste)
Friday 19th
October 2018 at 7.30pm at the Sallis Benney Theatre, Brighton The first ever feature-length portrait of renowned percussionist, thinker and creative dynamo Milford Graves, a suitably free-flowing exploration of his kaleidoscopic creativity and relentless curiosity. Graves has performed internationally since 1964, both as a soloist and in ensembles with such legends as Albert Ayler, Giuseppi Logan and Sonny Sharrock. Graves tells stories of discovery, struggle and survival, ruminates on the essence of "swing", activates electronic stethoscopes in his basement lab to process the sound of his heart, and travels to Japan where he performs at a school for children with autism, igniting the student body into an ecstatic display of spontaneous collective energy. Oscillating from present to past and weaving intimate glimpses of the artist's complex cosmology with intense performances from around the globe, Milford Graves Full Mantis features a 77-year-old polymath who is anything but ordinary, and shows no signs of slowing down, in a documentary as radical as his music. 'Stunning...a
captivating sound poem.' - The New York Times
Thursday 28th
September 2018 in The Friends Meeting House, Brighton One of the most acclaimed and hotly debated experimental films in recent years, Medina’s debut is a fragmented, digital diary exploring ideas of time, love, philosophy, poverty and poetry. 88:88 follows Medina and friends through a densely layered montage of notes, sketches, reality and re-enactments, edited from a variety of sources and formats. 'Converting the flashing 88:88 clock - the reset display that appears when power is restored to dwellings - into an equation of love and infinity, Medina’s film seeks to explore alternate ways of being, resulting in one of the most unique representations of class and race in Canadian filmmaking and sounding the arrival of a fresh new voice.' TIFF 'A bold debut feature that audaciously rethinks the possibilities and language of cinematic form. A powerful and original new voice has been discovered.' - Sight & Sound
Friday
June 16th at Phoenix Brighton Ciao
Bella A heated, summer-in-the-city excursion into the streets, strip clubs and low rent apartments of late 70s, pre-Giuliani NYC. ‘Verite footage of Lower East Side bikers, Times Square topless dancers, and Coney Island crowds achieve a highly charged atmosphere of manic exhibitionism.’ J. Hoberman / Art Forum.‘In Ciao Bella, Bromberg shows us a world of crowded New York streets and hauntingly empty interior spaces, graced briefly by wisps of childish energy and the provocation of nearly naked women. She deftly contrasts such vibrant exuberance with a sense of devastating loss, and the effect is at once brazenly personal and incredibly powerful. Unfolding desire merges with the ever-present reality of the threat of losing what you love' Holly Willis, IFilm The
Day Before the End It's 2050 and passages from Shakespeare are recited by non-actors in a nocturnal city awaiting the onslaught of a raging tempest. Diaz is one of the most exciting artists in contemporary cinema. His sprawling sagas of Philippines tumultuous, recent history are epic in scope, while bracingly intimate in style, challenging notions of storytelling and how cinema gives images and sound to voices unheard. Winner of the Principle Prize at Oberhausen, the Jury said it's 'a work of political urgency. Made by an artist known for works that unfold over many hours, this short film is both elaborate and succinct.' Vivir
para Vivir / Live to Live Opening with a quote from Argentinean writer Adolfo Bioy Casares - 'If I want to remember what happened on this trip, what should I do?', Lertxundi's search for answers takes us from sparsely populated mountain regions via Lertxundi's ECG recordings to Tashi Wada’s sine waves - all the while it's the filmmaker's body itself that shapes image, sound and colour. Laida Lertxundi is a Spanish filmmaker and artist living and working in California. Her films, shot in and around Los Angeles, are self reflexive, enigmatic and intensely beautiful. They read like subtexts to stories waiting to be told. Wayward
Fronds Nature's outlaws have begun to take over, engulfing and taming civilization after centuries of attack, forcing humans to adapt and evolve. Wayward Fronds references a series of historical events that helped shape the Florida Everglades, while fictionalizing its geological future and its effects on both native and exotic inhabitants. 'New York based Fern Silva is a contemporary master of 16mm filmmaking. His works reach toward exciting new cinematographic languages while embodying committed engagement with the troubled, bewildering and at times exhilarating complexities of globalism. Driven by curiosity and memory - and drawn to myth, folklore and mysticism - his films explores narrative, ethnographic and documentary forms while elaborating a strong personal and poetic cinematic vision.' SF CinemathequeFern Silva Homepage Ai
- Ye A rare screening of Hugo’s first film, a free-form kaleidoscope of colour, sound and image, shot largely from the prow of a boat journeying along the Pacific Coast of South America - through sleeping villages and tropical lagoons to the mouth of a volcano in the clouds. The hypnotic soundtrack of chants and drums was improvised as the film unrolled by Ozzie Smith and recorded by electro pioneer Bebe Barron. Interpreted by Anais Nin as the universal story of mankind’s voyage, Hugo says ‘I used documentary footage as a starting point, and I showed their gradual transformation into dream - the language of multiple dimensions of our inner world.' Blue
Loop, July Summer
Tape While the late, great Brighton based experimental filmmaker is best known for his dense, hyper-kinetic pop culture animations, this short audio piece reveals another aspect to his work. Summer Tape is drawn from a collection of field recordings Keen made by leaving a cassette recorder running to capture a Nightingale singing in the overgrown gardens outside his studio. As you listen, through a haze of cassette static, the environment itself falls into focus.
Thursday
18th May at 7.30pm in the Friends Meeting House, Brighton We’re excited to welcome back to Brighton one of our favourite filmmakers - Ben Rivers will be here to introduce What Means Something, his warm, immersive portrait of the painter Rose Wylie. Filmed at her remote home/studio in Kent over the course of a summer, it’s a joy – a celebration of art, friendship and the working of two creative processes on either side of the camera. Just as Wylie's house is a living repository of her working methods, the film lays bare Rivers' own artistic approach. Through candid conversations and observing Wylie as she works on large-scale canvases, drawings and watercolours, we're offered a rare insight into the process of image-making for painter and filmmaker alike. Rivers said of the film, ‘I met Rose a few years ago and we got along well. I went to visit her studio and she watched some of my films. Happily she liked them. So I asked her if I could make a film about her and she agreed. The film, finally, is a meeting between two friends.’
Thursday
20th April 2017 at Phoenix Brighton - Main Gallery Hollywood’s
hidden reverse – the Dream Factory as re-imagined by American
underground cinema Outer
and Inner Space Both 16mm reels runs for 33 minutes and are played side by side; What you see is the incredible presence of Sedgwick x 4 - alternating video/film, video/film. The soundtrack itself is largely inaudible with only isolated phrases ('We had better times than anybody else,'' ''I don't believe it') emerging from the layers. 'Outer and Inner Space' is one of Warhol's great portraits -- a masterpiece of video art made before the term even existed'. J Hoberman / NY Times. You can read Hoberman's full article on Sedgwick and the background of the film here Puce
Moment Little
Stabs at Happiness Life
and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra + Live Soundtrack
from Lizzy Carey and Tim Wilton
Friday 7th April 2017 at Phoenix Brighton - Main Gallery Solid
Light Landscapes Join us for a programme of rare, experimental 16mm screenings, re-enactments and performance that upend and play with our expectations of how we percieve cinema. Includes Anthony McCall, the Western ideal, paper planes, the original (and best) flicker movie and Lorah Pierre. Line
Describing a Cone Robert
Davis and J. Robert Parks on viewing Line Describing a Cone Hell's
Angels Arnulf
Rainer Song
of Rio Jim Hardware
Electronics, Material and Sound - Lorah Pierre
The
LFMC was founded in October 1966 as a distributor and film laboratory
for avant-garde cinema. Within this unique facility, film-makers
were able to control every aspect of the creative process. Many
explored the material aspects of celluloid, whilst others experimented
with multiple projection and performance-based ‘expanded cinema’.
This artist-led organisation asserted the significance of British
work internationally, and anticipated today’s vibrant culture
of artists’ moving image. Tonight's programme features rare
single, double and triple projection 16mm films by Malcolm Le Grice,
Lis Rhodes, Jeff Keen, Guy Sherwin, Gill Eatherley, Annabel Nicolson
and others. Berlin Horse
– Malcolm Le Grice (2 screen) Shoot Shoot Shoot: The First Decade of the London Film-Makers Co-operative 1966-76’ (LUX, 2016), edited by Mark Webber, has been published by LUX to celebrate the LFMC’s 50th anniversary, it brings together texts, interviews, images and a large number of archival documents in exploring the history of the early years of the organisation.
Thursday
3rd November at 7.30pm Chromasonic
Feedback Join us for the first screening in over 50 years of the rediscovered FC Judd 8mm cine footage of his Chromasonics invention, plus the first UK screening of one of the earliest films to feature a Moog synthesizer score; both the film and music created by US composer Andrew Rudin in 1967. There'll be two new Ian Helliwell video feedback films with Hellitron generated soundtracks and MORE! Programmed and Introduced by Ian Helliwell
Wednesday
28th September at 7.30pm Filmed on set during the shooting of Jess Franco's 'El conde Drácula / The Count Dracula', Vampir - Cuadecuc is both a rapturous, dreamlike reflection on the conventions of horror cinema and covert political allegory. Portabella dismantles Franco's film in two ways: On the one hand, he eliminates colour in favour of lush, high contrast black-and-white images, on the other, he replaces the on-set audio track with a fabulously dissonant soundscape by Catalonian modernist Carles Santos. It all adds up to a poetic alchemy in which Portabella transforms one of Jess Franco’s lesser efforts (and we’re fans) into one of the most beautiful movies ever made about anything. "The first word in the title of Pere Portabella's ravishing 1970 underground masterpiece, made in Spain while General Francisco Franco was still in power and shown clandestinely, means both 'worm's tail' and the unexposed footage at the end of film reels. The film is a silent black-and-white documentary about the shooting of Jesús Franco's Count Dracula, with Christopher Lee, that becomes much more: the high-contrast cinematography evokes deteriorating prints of Nosferatu and Vampyr, and the extraordinary soundtrack by composer Carles Santos intersperses the sounds of jet planes, drills, syrupy Muzak, and sinister electronic music, all of which ingeniously locate Dracula and our perceptions of him in the contemporary world. Moving back and forth between Franco's film (with Dracula as an implicit stand-in for the generalissimo) and poetic production details, Portabella offers witty reflections on the powerful monopolies of both dictators and commercial cinema. The only wordsheard are in English, spoken by Lee and written by Bram Stoker." Jonathan Rosenbaum
Wednesday 10th
August at 8pm The
latest masterpiece from visionary Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul
is, like his beguiling Palme d'Or winner 'Uncle Boonmee Who Can
Recall His Past Lives', a transfixing, enigmatic work of restrained
“magical realism” that delivers the mythical and mundane
in equal, hushed tones. Top 10 film of 2015 for Sight & Sound, Cahiers du Cinema, and Cinema Scope. Brighton Premiere!
Dreamland and
Open Colour Present ‘A
film that incites radical fantasies and exults in the dream of a
repressive social order being destroyed. It’s a trip, a surreal
manifesto, a joy to behold’ Telegraph Artificial
Paradise (Chick Strand, 1986, USA,13 min) / 16mm screening Accent Grave
on Ananas (Tamara Henderson, USA/Canada 2013 3 mins) /
16mm screening
Thursday 16th
June at 7pm To celebrate
the publication of Ian Helliwell's Tape Leaders
- A Compendium of Early British Electronic Music Composers,
this event combines a programme of short films with electronic music
soundtracks, plus a talk and discussion with several of the composers
featured in the book. The programme includes: Mr. Benn - The
Spaceman (1970) Discussion with composers Laurie Scott Baker, Ron Geesin, George Newson and Ian Helliwell, chaired by Angus Carlyle. www.fabrica.org.uk
Thursday
25th February at 7.30pm (Doors 7.20pm) Valerie
and Her Week of Wonders Jires’ feverish, non-linear, gothic fantasy follows the plight of Valerie, no longer a child, and finding her idyllic village transformed into a nightmarish carnival of vampires, magic and ritual. Identities become fluid, family and friends are possessed, priests become predators, while magical jewellery could somehow save the day… Jires crystallises a sense of the mystical and captures it ravishingly on celluloid - just at the moment when Soviet state communism threatened to (and eventually did) suppress an entire generation of provocative new directors. 'A work
of both visceral immediacy and lingering allure, Valerie and Her
Week of Wonders is a uniquely influential film, one of intoxicating
sensation and unconscious immersion' Slant magazine + Rare Svankmajer on 16mm: The Ossuary (Jan Svankmajer, 1970, CZ, 10 min, 16mm). A 'horror documentary' starring Sedlec's Monastery Ossuary, which is constructed from over 50,000 human skeletons. Svankmajer’s live action, dense collage pays homage to Czech artist Frantisek Rint’s obsessive creations (including skull pyramids, crosses, a monstrance and a chandelier containing every bone of the human body). + The Last Trick (Jan Svankmajer, CZ, 1969, 12 min, 16mm) Svankmajer’s first film, influenced by his work at the Laterna Magika Theater, depicts an absurd, deadly battle between two magicians
Saturday
12th December at 4.30pm at the Sallis Benney Theatre Myth, hand painted abstract visions and more in a programme of acclaimed new artist cinema from festivals around the world. Plus archive classics unveiling a nocturnal realm of dream logic and poetry. And easing you into the yuletide spirit an opening sound work from Blood Stereo. Neither
God nor Santa Maria
Sunday November
15th at 7pm + Opening Soundpiece by Embla Quickbeam A rare 16mm screening of Alan Clarke’s remarkable BBC ‘Play for Today’ - one of the visionary masterworks of British television drama. Set against a backdrop of the Malvern Hills, it follows the teenage son of a pastor, whose arch-conservative worldview begins to unravel in a series of mystical encounters with angels, demons, Edward Elgar and the pagan King Penda - a journey of self discovery that confronts questions of nationhood, religion and sexuality. ‘PENDA!!!’ 'An unforgettable hybrid of horror story, rites-of passage spiritual quest and vision of an alternative England that has been hailed as one of the most original and hauntingly ambitious British films of the last half century.’ The Guardian A revised and expanded edition of ‘The Edge is Where the Centre Is’ - a beautiful small press publication exploring the film with articles by Evans, Rudkin, William Fowler and Sukhdev Sandhu - will be available on the night. Embla
Quickbeam (Rowan Forestier)
Thursday 15th
October at 7.30pm 'In motion, in thought, ears and eyes wide open!' (Film Comment). Somewhere in China, crammed into a train of unknown destination, men, women and children talk, kill time, eat and sleep. Snippets of overheard conversation reveal popular opinion, fleeting relationships, insights, while outside - hurtling at breakneck speed - vast panoramas and cityscapes flicker into momentary existence. As a one man crew, American filmmaker Sniadecki filmed The Iron Ministry over a period of three years while riding across China’s sprawling railway network, editing the footage into one fluid journey. An affiliate of Harvard’s ‘Sensory Ethnography Lab’, Sniadecki’s camera is rarely still and, aided by the remarkable sound design of Ernst Karel, immerses the viewer headlong into the heightened visual and sonic abstractions of the train’s material environment —the squeals of locomotion, a power cable slicing across the sky—all the while maintaining an intimate sense of its human scale. Raw, impressionistic, chaotic and unforgettable, Sniadecki's experimental documentary uses a China in motion to craft a unique metaphor for modern society. 'Absorbing...
The Iron Ministry turns the chaos of modern China into dense, frantic
poetry' Indiewire + From the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, two early films from the directors of Leviathan (2012) The
High Trail Thursday
17th September at 7.30pm The
Seashell and the Clergyman (La coquille et le clergyman) +
Early films from the French Avant-Garde Tuesday
1st September at 7.30pm |
