BFI
james.woodall
It is resonantly famous, picking up plaudits from the off, with one Sight & Sound commentator claiming in 1962 that it was the "greatest film ever made", for which he'd been waiting "during the last 30 years". That now seems slightly hysterical, as it evidently isn't the greatest film ever made, and wasn't then. In it, nothing happens, many times, as opposed to Beckett's Godot - first seen eight years before - often vilified for tedium and in which at least, as critic Vivian Mercier pointed out, "nothing happens, twice". Beckett was a funny Irish poet-playwright. Robbe-Grillet (the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Of all the curdled classics made during the neo-noir wave of the Seventies and early Eighties - including Klute, The Long Goodbye, Mean Streets, Chinatown, The Conversation, Night Moves, Farewell My Lovely, Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and The Postman Always Rings Twice - Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way is the most neglected. That’s partially a result of United Artists’ attempt, according to the Czech émigré Passer, to “murder” the independently produced movie by intentionally botching the initial US release (as Cutter and Bone, the title of Newton Thornburg’s source novel) in March 1981, though Read more ...
graham.rickson
The first part of Patrick Keiller’s trilogy, an attempt to address the "problem of London", begins just before the 1992 re-election of John Major. It’s a pseudo documentary ostensibly narrated by an acquaintance of one Robinson, a part-time art lecturer at the University of Barking. Nearly 20 years on, not much has changed – we’re in a place of bombings and bomb threats, with chaotic, privatised public transport. It’s a once civil society stretched to breaking point.
Paul Scofield’s arch commentary is so mellifluous that you’re willing to believe everything he says. Is there really a tunnel Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bill Morrison’s film, mostly edited together from archive material, serves as an elegy to Britain's recent industrial past. The older footage has been handsomely restored, and often it’s only the clothes that give a sense of period. It focuses on the Durham coalfields, where the last mine closed in the early 1990s. There’s little left to show for it – the film is framed by aerial sequences where we search in vain for any trace of the industry. Collieries have been replaced by retail parks, artificial ski slopes and football stadia. We still use coal for a third of our energy needs, but it’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The credits unfold against a backdrop of a tall, exotic plant, down whose length the camera slowly pans. The African Queen, in glorious Technicolor, based on a novel by CS Forrester, directed by John Huston, shot by Jack Cardiff, starring two of the great names of the cinematic age. Katharine Hepburn, the female face of the screwball comedy, and Humphrey Bogart, the hardbitten star of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. If you’re reading carefully, you’ll note that the credit for continuity goes to Angela Allen. Sixty years later, I sit in a cinema in Soho with Angela Allen and watch Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For a while in the 1990s, the NASDAQ of polar exploration knocked Scott off his plinth and installed Shackleton as Britain’s favourite Antarctic hero. To a modern sensibility, survival seemed a more laudable pursuit than sacrifice. Better a live donkey, as Shackleton phlegmatically put it when turning home 90 miles from the South Pole, than a dead lion. For decades Scott has been comprehensively, even vindictively rubbished by the revisionist historian Roland Huntford. He was the one who pointed out that someone would have had to undo those tent ties for Oates to go outside and be some time, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
An English teacher in a brand-new Hertfordshire secondary school is about to lose his rag. “You said ‘relaxed, like,’” he storms at a boy. “Why like? Like what? Why do you use that expression? What does it mean?” This is 1962. It’s a scene from Our School, sponsored by the National Union of Teachers, one of four documentaries made between 1953 and 1964 by John Krish in the BFI’s Boom Britain: Documenting the Nation’s Life on Film, a project that celebrates the neglected heritage of the post-war documentary.It’s usually Humphrey Jennings’s work for the Crown Film Unit in the 1940s, with its Read more ...
judith.flanders
This is the second part of a series that has passed a little too quietly for comfort. The V&A’s grand Diaghilev show has received all the noise in the press – “fabulous”, “sumptuous”, “exotic” – in fact, all the words that were used at the time to describe Diaghilev’s company. The only word that isn’t being used is “dancer” – we get relatively little chance to think about movement in South Kensington. However, Jane Pritchard, curator of that show, has now redressed the balance on the South Bank with a remarkable collection of films.
At first glance, the season might seem ordinary – Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Of all the schools of film which were allowed to sprout behind the Iron Curtain, it was in Czechslovakia which contrived to export its work most successfully to the West.Poland had Andrzej Wajda. Hungary had István Szabó. But Czech cinema seemed to sprout out of a fertile collaboration with its national literature. Before he wrote The Joke, lest we forget, Milan Kundera was a lecturer in world literature at the Film Faculty of Charles University in Prague. There are certainly other ways to measure these things, but Jiří Menzel won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1967 with his magnificent Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Patagonia’s Welshness was a nagging issue for Gruff Rhys, mainman of Welsh psych-nauts Super Furry Animals. His distant cousin, the folk singer René Griffiths, was born in the desert-filled southern reaches of Argentina, but visited Wales and appeared there on TV in the mid-Seventies. Remembering those appearances, Rhys decided to visit Patagonia to search for Griffiths amongst the region’s Welsh-speaking community. Given a Rhys-hosted outing at the BFI, the resulting film Separado! was billed as being followed by a live set with Brazilian Furry Freak Brother-lookalike Tony da Gatorra.Da Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
"Change" has been the watchword of the past few months, the standard flown hopefully aloft by every political party. A week spent anxiously waiting for a political conclusion, worrying about its impact, and heatedly debating its validity has made for a more than usually vulnerable sense of British nationhood: an apt time indeed for the UK release of Triomf, a brutal South African parable about political prejudice, social intolerance, and above all the fear of the new.Set in the days leading up to South Africa’s first free elections of 1994, Michael Raeburn’s film yokes the story of a nation’s Read more ...
Veronica Lee
We are in the far north of somewhere, where it's freezing and rains for most of the year. As if the weather isn’t bad enough, the sturdy Viking community of the island of Berk have a pest problem - not mice or foxes, but feral dragons who, with their huge talons and fiery breath, steal their sheep and set fire to their houses as they attack on a regular basis. The opening scenes of How to Train Your Dragon, presented by DreamWorks Animation SKG (Shrek, Madagascar) in 3D, which portrays such an attack, are certainly vivid.The story by Will Davies, Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders (Lilo & Read more ...