Safety Last, USA 1923

Jun 20, 2015 / keith1942 / Leave a comment

Screening on Sunday June 21st at 3 p.m. from a 35mm print with live musical accompaniment

Friends who have seen Martin Scorsese’s Hugo will have seen a clip from this film. It is famous for the stunts performed by its star Harold Lloyd. Lloyd was one of the three great comic stars of Hollywood in the 1920s; along with Chaplin and Keaton. He had his own distinctive persona with a straw boater and earnest and spectacled visage and a sort of ‘college boy’ character. He shared his mentors’ gift for timing but was especially skilled in stunt work.

This is ‘small town’ boy makes good in the big city. Much of the film uses the setting of the Department Store, one of the canonic images in 1920s cinema. The film offers the romantic sweetheart back home, the trials and tribulations which the hero must overcome, and some of the most dare-devil stunts in films of that era. The screenplay moves deftly from gag to gag whilst developing an increasing drama and tension.

The last time I saw a print it had an added soundtrack, but this can be switched off. Certainly when it originally played at the Picture House it would have had a musical accompaniment. And the same pleasure will be available this Sunday with an accompaniment by Darius Battiwalla. Darius is an experienced and accomplish accompanist and he has a particular skills in adding to the action and pointing up character.

This is a film that is a ‘must’ for your ‘have seen’ list.

Masterpieces of Polish Cinema

Jun 17, 2015Jun 19, 2015 / keith1942 / Leave a comment

Ashes and Diamonds Thursday 18th June 6.20 p.m.
A Leeds Movie Fans Meetup is planned for this screening.

Between June 18^th and September 22^nd the Hyde Park Picture House will be presenting eight films produced in Poland over three earlier decades. Masterpieces of Polish Cinema presented by Martin Scorsese, together with The Film Foundation and the Polish Film Institute and supported by a number of other agencies. Scorsese is not only a respected and important filmmaker, he is also a collector, archivist, educator and, through his involvement in The Film Foundation, responsible for restoring and distributing key films from World Cinema.

In the case of these films the focus is on the work of the Polish National Film School at Łódź. Numerous and talented film artists have studied here. And the work that has emanated from the school has influenced not only Scorsese but also other filmmakers such as the UK’s own Lindsay Anderson.

The programmes commence with Ashes and Diamonds / Popiół i diament , 1958,

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Timbuktu

Jun 8, 2015Oct 16, 2016 / keith1942 / 1 Comment

Directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, Mauritania, 2014.

Screening from Saturday 13th June

This film is set in Mali and depicts the occupation of the titular ancient city by Jihadists. The director, Abderrahmane Sissako [Bamako, 2006] avoids the crude representation found in many Western films and its media. This is a subtle and complex portrait of both the local people and the rather disparate army of religious warriors. In an interview reprinted in Sight & Sound (June 2015) Sissako explains:

“Generally, when the world speaks about my country, or indeed Africa in general, it does so in a tone which is, quite frankly, condescending, as if there’s one continent which is simply wretched and others which are rich. The world may speak about Ebola on a daily basis, but it hardly ever mentions that the African is also beautiful, strong and moving forward.”

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Citizen Kane, USA 1941

May 20, 2015May 23, 2015 / keith1942 / Leave a comment

Screening on Monday May 25th at 3 p.m.

The film is screening in a 35mm print, the original format, though unfortunately it is not possible to use a nitrate print. The characteristics of this format will do proper justice to one of the classics of cinema. It managed for fifty years to come top of the Sight & Sound critics’ polls, held every decade. It turns up again and again, to the delight of those familiar with the film, and as a treat for those who have never seen it before, at least on the large screen and in the darkened auditorium. This occasion follows on from the centenary of Orson Welles, the director, on May 6th.

The script by Herman J. Mankiewicz [with Orson Welles] is at once witty and complex, with a distinctive structure. The cinematography by Gregg Toland makes exceptional use of both deep staging and deep focus, and has passages of beautiful chiaroscuro. And there are impressive special effects by a Hollywood veteran, Vernon J. Walker. The art direction by Van Nest Polglase offers range of fabulous settings from Xanadu to the great opera House in Chicago. Whilst the costumes cover the late C19th up until the present of the film. The cast are terrific, a fine actress like Agnes Moorehead has only a short scene on screen. She, like many of the cast including Joseph Cotten, had worked with Welles in the New York Theatre and radio. The editing by Robert Wise and Mark Robson [both to later become directors in their own right] is finely done: watch the sequence of breakfast scenes between Kane and his first wife Emily. The film is a key innovator in the use of sound, recorded by Bailey Fesler and James G. Stewart, but also benefitting from Welles own experience on radio. And this enjoys the first score in the career of Bernard Herrmann, one of the greatest of Hollywood composers.

All this is orchestrated by Welles, himself appearing as Kane. Both are characters with immense talent and giant egos. Welles claimed that on the night of the premiere he shared a lift in his hotel with William Randolph Hearst, the basis for the film’s fictional press baron. Welles offered Hearst a ticket to see the film, which was declined. Welles remarked:

“Kane would have accepted”.

Hearst got his revenge with a virulent press campaign, aided on the quiet by Hoover’s FBI. So the only Academy Award for the film was Best Screenplay. It did though win the New York Film Critics’ Award for Best Picture. And since then the film has enjoyed success after success. Moreover viewers and critics alike still discuss and argue over the film’s portrait and the famous single word in the opening scene.

A favourite term of praise for me is ‘panache’:

style – swagger – dashing manner

magnificence – brilliance – brazen exhibitionism

Welles had it by the bucketful, as does his most memorable film.

New release – Phoenix

May 14, 2015May 14, 2015 / keith1942 / Leave a comment

Directed by Christian Petzold, Germany 2014.

Screening from Friday May 15^th till Thursday May 21^st, every evening.
A Leeds Movie Fans Meetup is happening at the 6pm screening on Monday 18th

Friends will probably be familiar with the director Christian Petzold and star Nina Hoss from their excellent earlier films Yella (2008) and Barbara (2012). Phoenix offers the same absorbing and entertaining play on a familiar genre, the world of noir, here set in post-war Berlin. The Guardian review was rather lukewarm including the suggestion that the plot was implausible. This misses the point of Petzold’s films: they appear naturalistic but they are not primarily realist. Thus, Yella is a ghost story: Barbara is set in East Germany, but it is the DDR from film dramas.

Shortly after the end of the war and the liberation of the concentration camps Nelly returns to Berlin to seek out her previous life and her friends and family. Nina Hoss plays Nelly with real verve and is ably supported by Ronald Zehrfeld (also in Barbara) as Johnny and Nina Kuzendorf as Lena.

The Phoenix in the title is a night-club for troops of the allied occupation. One of the pleasures of the film is its use of the ‘lieder’ from Berlin’s popular musical culture. There is a particular skilful play with songs by Kurt Weill.

The film builds to a gripping and likely unexpected climax. Endings are often a let-down in many contemporary films: Phoenix and its cast deliver with superb aplomb.

Au Revoir Les Enfants

May 5, 2015Oct 16, 2016 / keith1942 / 2 Comments

Directed by Louis Malle, France, 1987
Screening on Sunday 17^th May at 3.30p.m as part of the Friends AGM.

This is in many ways the most personal film of the distinguished French filmmaker Louis Malle. The basic story is taken from experiences in his early years during World War II.

What happened in January 1944 was instrumental in my decision to become a filmmaker. It’s hard to explain, but it was such a shock that it took me several years to get over it, to try and understand it – and, of course, there was no way I could understand it. What happened was so appalling and so fundamentally opposed to the values that we were being taught that I concluded that there was something wrong with the world, and I started becoming very rebellious.

The film is set in a boarding school in occupied France, rather like the one that Malle actually attended. The film develops a narrative depicting a tragic chain of events, but as he recalls, one that was traumatic for the participants as well as the victims.

Malle started out in filmmaking in the 1950s. Even for a noted European director he has worked in unusually wide variety of industries and settings: in France, but also in the UK, in North America and on documentaries made in Asia. Malle comments that he had three great passions: Music, Literature and Film. The role of music in his work is exemplified by the marvellous score improvised by Miles Davis for his first feature, Lift to the Scaffold (Ascenseur pour l’echafaud, 1957). A good example of the contribution of literature is in the very fine Vanya on 42^nd Street (1994) with its exploration of and homage to Anton Chekhov. Film itself crops up regularly: in today’s feature there is a sequence when the school students watch old movies:

…it was in the following years that they showed films in the school on Sundays, that’s when I saw the first Chaplin shorts. They were projected in this strange format that was rather popular in the late 1930s and 1940w, the 9.5 mm, which had a perforation in the centre – a terrible invention. Chaplin was forbidden during the war by the Germans, not only because he was Jewish but also because he’d made The Great Dictator. But his films, I was told, were still being shown, very discreetly, in schools and cine clubs. It was one of the great memories of my childhood, those Sunday evening, we’d darken the room, there’d be a white sheet, and everyone would sit and watch those films. I chose The Immigrant because, first, it was one of the great ones, and second, it was an evocation of freedom for those Jewish children when they see the Statue of Liberty, America being the Promised Land.

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Fruit of Paradise

Apr 15, 2015Oct 16, 2016 / keith1942 / Leave a comment

(Ovoce stromu rajských jime), Czechoslovakia/Belgium, 1970.
Thursday 30th April 7:00pm at The Hyde Park Picture House

This avant-garde classic comes courtesy of the Czech National Film Archive and the Czech Centre in London where film buffs have enjoyed a major retrospective of the work of Vera Chytilová. She was one of the outstanding filmmakers in the Czech New Wave and, whilst she rejected the label of feminist, an important female director in times when they were even rarer than at the present.

The Czech New Wave was notable for its observational approach to cinema: an important influence on our own Ken Loach. And the filmmakers were also drawn to unconventional techniques and forbidden topics. The later led to regular attempts to ban or censor films, something that afflicted Fruit of Paradise. Following on from this film Chytilová became a ‘non-film person’ for six years.

But there has also always been a strong surrealist strand in Czech art and film. Since the 1930s Prague has been an important centre for this movement, tying in to a longer tradition of mannerism. Jan Švankmajer is certainly the most important surrealist filmmaker in the contemporary world.

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