PASSPORT TO CINEMA
Autumn season 2010
September | October | November | DecemberOpen to the public and NFTS students alike, our programme of Monday night screenings at the BFI Southbank is brought to you by the National Film and Television School.
There's a screening most Monday evenings at 6.10pm (in term time) and you can find out what's showing month by month by viewing the schedule above. Designed to give a continuous and comprehensive overview of every facet of cinema, from its beginnings to the present day, the programme showcases key films from the classic, mainstream and avant-garde of European, American and world cinema, mixing the familiar with the experimental and rediscovering forgotten gems. Guest speakers introduce each programme and there's often a lively discussion in the café after the film. For current ticket prices, reservations and further information, call the BFI Southbank box office on Tel 020 7928 3232 or visit the BFI website - www.bfi.org.uk. BFI Southbank: Belvedere Road, South Bank, London SE1 8XT. Map
Passport to Cinema - Autumn 2010
(films 6 September - 13 December)
Welcome to our Autumn season of Passport To Cinema...
Edge of the City - download pdf (with pictures)
“I love this dirty town” says J.J. Hunsecker, in Alexander Mackendrick’s quintessential city movie, Sweet Smell of Success, in a moment that seems to capture cinema’s fascination with the contradictions of urban life. This autumn, Passport to Cinema presents a programme of films that occupy the city and its margins. We open with Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog, where an inexperienced cop tries to reclaim his honour by journeying into the lower depths of post-war Tokyo to recover his stolen gun. The urban criminal milieu also provides the backdrop to John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, where a jewel heist is the catalyst for a story about dishonour among thieves in a film whose title encapsulates the grubby glamour of mid-century city life. The city can disguise its dangerous undercurrents, as in Alfred Hitchcock’s pre-war reimagining of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Sabotage, where petit-bourgeois London hides a terrorist cell; or in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, where the aisles of a suburban Los Angeles supermarket provide a clandestine meeting place for two murderous lovers. In Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold, Jeanne Moreau wanders through night-time Paris lost in a dream of love and murder, unaware that her lover is trapped in a lift at the crime scene, and in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse the architecture of Rome is the backdrop to alienation and a doomed affair.
We are showing two city documentaries in this season: in Dziga Vertov’s soviet classic, Man with a Movie Camera, the rhythm of the city (actually several cities) is evoked in revolutionary display, rapid editing, split screen, dissolves and slow motion, while in Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été the citizens of Paris are the subject of an ethnographic investigation. While not a documentary, beneath the frenetic physical comedy of Harold Lloyd’s Speedy, a vivid picture of 1920s New York emerges from the film’s remarkable use of location footage. On screen the city can be conjured through confined spaces, like Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, where the tensions of a New York summer reach breaking point in the airless claustrophobia of a jury room, or Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, where a young woman hides from the city in a Kensington flat, only to fall prey to her own disintegrating mind. In The Third Man, Carol Reed shows us the divided post-war Vienna from atop the Wiener Riesenrad Ferris Wheel or beneath the city’s sewers. And for our final film of the season, Vincente Minnelli’s sumptuous musical, An American in Paris creates a dream of Paris on the MGM lot.
Dominic Power
Head of Screen Arts, National Film and Television School
Autumn Season - Accompanying Texts:
Speedy - Kevin Brownlow on Harold Lloyd's last silent masterpiece html | pdf
