Showing Soon; A BFI Special… July 4, 2008
Posted by John Hodson in : Film General, DVD News & Info, Showing Soon , trackbackShowing Soon has been in stasis, mutely twiddling his thumbs while the rest of the world fizzed and zoomed around him; then, shrugging off the stifling torpor and with one mighty bound - he was free!
Time to play catch-up; first with a focus on BFI releases of the recent past, present and near future:
In the musty back catalogue world of classic film, frankly not a huge amount of import has been stirring as the larger studios seem to consign niche titles to the back burner, on both sides of The Pond. Their output shrinking as the effects of the ‘credit crunch’ combine with the hike in world oil prices (engineered by speculators, gentle reader, or ‘bastards’ as we are wont to call them…) sending The Suits into a tailspin.
But the plucky BFI, displaying all the obdurate grit, determination and sheer suicidal benightedness that make Britons great (or incredibly stupid; only time will tell…), ploughs on regardless to the delight of movies fans most everywhere…
Chris Petit’s cult classic Radio On (1979), released on DVD in May by the BFI, is ‘one of the most striking feature debuts in British cinema – a haunting blend of edgy mystery story and existential road movie, crammed with eerie evocations of English landscape and weather’:
Stunningly photographed in monochrome by Wim Wenders’ assistant cameraman Martin Schäfer, Radio On is driven by a startling new wave soundtrack featuring David Bowie, Kraftwerk, Lene Lovich, Ian Dury, Wreckless Eric, Robert Fripp and Devo, and reveals an early screen performance by Sting.
Following a young London DJ (David Beames) on the road to Bristol to investigate the mysterious death of his brother, Radio On offers a unique, compelling and even mythic vision of a late 1970s England, stalled between failed hopes of cultural and social change and the imminent upheavals of Thatcherism.
Previously Film Editor at Time Out magazine, Chris Petit interested the BFI Production Board and Wim Wenders in backing his first feature despite having no previous filmmaking experience. He went on to make more films during the 80s and in recent years has worked in collaboration with psychogeographer Iain Sinclair. His most recent film was Ideal Love (2006). Chris has also published several novels and regularly reviews books for The Guardian.
Extras
• New filmed interview with Chris Petit and producer Keith Griffiths
• radio on (remix) (Petit, 1998, 24 mins): a digital video essay – with radical disruption of the original soundtrack by Wire’s Bruce Gilbert
• Original trailer
• Illustrated 28-page booklet with contributions from Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, John Patterson, Ian Penman, Chris Petit, Sukhdev Sandhu, Jason Wood and Rudy Wurlitzer; director biography and credits
You can read the DVD Times review here.
One of the very last silent films to be made in Britain before the talkies revolutionised cinema, A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) is a virtuoso piece of film-making, a final passionate cry in defence of an art form soon to be obsolete. Restored from film materials preserved in the BFI National Archive, this little-known gem was released on DVD for the first time in the UK in May by the BFI, and presented here with a specially commissioned score by Stephen Horne.
Directed by Anthony Asquith (better known for The Browning Version and The Way to the Stars) A Cottage on Dartmoor is an embroiled melodrama, a tale of love and revenge, set on the bleak landscape of Dartmoor.
In a small-town hairdressing salon, a young barber, Joe (Uno Henning) is trying to court Sally, the beautiful manicurist (Nora Baring) and asks her out. She rejects him in favour of the security offered by an older, wealthier farmer. In a jealous rage Joe slashes the farmer with a razor and is sent to Dartmoor prison for attempted murder. He escapes over the moors to find Sally, who does not know if he has come to kill her or ask her forgiveness, and it’s at this point that the film begins. The rest of the story is told in flashback.
Overlooked by critics more eager to heap praise upon his contemporary, Hitchcock, (who made Blackmail during the same year), Asquith’s films display the same skill in inventive story-telling and technical artistry. Steeped in the work of the Soviet avant-garde and German expressionism, Asquith adopts these styles whilst instilling the film with a particularly British sensibility.
Extras
• Insight (1960) – Study of Anthony Asquith at work featuring on set footage and interviews
• Rush Hour – Comedy film from the BFI National Archive about Britain’s workers coping with the transport system during the War (Asquith, 1941)
• Fully illustrated booklet including essays by Bryony Dixon and Geoffrey Macnab
Intriguingly, the BFI press release adds:‘More films by Anthony Asquith will be released by the BFI in the future.’ A Cottage on Dartmoor has been reviewed at DVD Times here.
Combining elegance and wit, Lubitsch’s last film, Cluny Brown, set in 1938 London, is one of his most engaging romantic comedies. In partnership with Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment and Hollywood Classics, the BFI made it available on DVD for the first time on 26 May.
Jennifer Jones and Charles Boyer team up as the plumber’s niece (later housemaid) and the intellectual Czech refugee, who throw English society into disarray with their disregard for conventions.
This charming satire, aided by a wonderful script taking in snobbery upstairs, downstairs and in the middle classes, is given a jolly run around by a cast comprising most of Hollywood’s British stalwarts from Sir C. Aubrey Smith and Peter Lawford to Sara Allgood and Una O’Connor.
Extras
• Original trailer
• Illustrated booklet with original publicity photos, film review by A.H Weiler of the New York Times from 1946, a director biography by Thomas Elsaesser; cast and credit details
• Dolby Digital mono audio (320 kbps)
You can read the DVD Times review of Cluny Brown here.
A ‘lost’ late 60s’ cult classic by John Huston (The African Queen, The Misfits, The Night of the Iguana), A Walk with Love and Death stars his daughter Anjelica Huston aged 17, in her first acting role
‘In the 14th Century, England and France were engaged in a war that would last a hundred years. Claudia and Heron were born after the war began, and would die before it ended…’
With this brief prologue begins John Huston’s A Walk with Love and Death, a story of a student, Heron (Assi Dayan), who leaves Paris to walk to the sea but encounters Claudia (Anjelica Huston), a young noblewoman with whom he falls in love and pledges to protect after her home is destroyed in a peasant revolt.
Filmed in 1968, (the same year as Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet) Huston’s tale of young lovers adrift in France during the Middle Ages owes more to the spirit of the late 1960s in its questioning of authority and insistence on love, not war.
Based on Hans Koningsberger’s novel of the same name it stars a 17-year-old Anjelica Huston in her first acting role and features a wonderful score by Georges Delerue with one of his most haunting love themes.
Special features
• Walking with Love and Death (1968): Behind-the-scenes footage of Huston on set, directing the actors
• Illustrated booklet with an original essay by Hans Koningsberger on the filming of his book (from Film Quarterly, Spring 1969); a review from Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1977; cast and credits
• Dolby Digital mono audio (320 kbps)
Mike Sutton’s DVD Times review of the disc is here.
In June the BFI released the Bill Douglas Trilogy; My Childhood, My Ain Folk, My Way Home:
Three of the most compelling films about childhood and adolescence ever made – released for the first time on DVD
Bill Douglas’s award-winning films – My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home – which the BFI releases together in a two-disc DVD set with special features, are three of the most compelling and critically acclaimed films about childhood ever made.
The narrative is largely autobiographical, following Jamie (played with heart-breaking conviction by Stephen Archibald) as he grows up in a poverty-stricken mining village in post-war Scotland. In these brutal surroundings, and subject to hardship and rejection, Jamie learns to fend for himself. We see him grow from child to adolescent – angry and bewildered, but playful, creative and affectionate.
In My Childhood (1972), eight-year old Jamie lives with his granny and elder brother in a Scots mining village in 1945. With his mother in a mental home, and his father absent, he is subject to the hardships of poverty. In My Ain Folk (1973), Jamie is sent to live with his paternal grandmother and uncle; a life full of silence and rejection. My Way Home (1978) sees Jamie’s ultimate victory over his circumstances; after a spell in foster care, and a homeless shelter, he is conscripted into the RAF, where he embarks on a redemptive friendship with Robert, which allows him to emerge from his ineffectual adolescence to pursue his artistic ambition.
Watching the Trilogy is far from a depressing experience. This is cinematic poetry: Douglas contracted his subject matter to the barest essentials – dialogue is kept to a minimum, and fields, slag heaps and cobbled streets are shot in bleak monochrome. Yet with its unexpected humour and warmth, the Trilogy brims with clear-eyed humanity, and affection for an ultimately triumphant young boy.
Special features
• Bill Douglas: Intent on Getting the Image (2006, 63 mins), a new documentary about Bill Douglas’s life and work
• Come Dancing (1970, 15 mins), Douglas’s remarkable, rarely-seen student short
• Rare archive interview with Bill Douglas (4 mins)
• Illustrated booklet containing newly commissioned essays, notes and credits
This super set is reviewed at DVD Times here.
Restored by the BFI National Archive and released on DVD for the first time with commentary by Terence Davies, The Terence Davies Trilogy (Children, Madonna and Child, and Death and Transfiguration) comes to DVD at the end of this month.
While at Coventry Drama School in the early 1970s, Terence Davies wrote the script for Children which he directed in 1976. He subsequently took up a place at The National Film School and with the support of the BFI Production Board, made his graduation film Madonna and Child (1980). Three years later, also part-funded by the BFI, he completed the Trilogy with Death and Transfiguration.
Restored by the BFI National Archive who worked closely with Terence himself, the films are preserved by the BFI and are now released on DVD for the first time alongside The Long Day Closes (1992).
Before Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes confirmed Terence Davies’ status as one of the cinematic masters of our day; these three early shorts reveal a filmmaker of great promise.
In stark black and white, Davies excavates the life of his fictional alter ego, Robert Tucker, in a narrative that slips between childhood, middle age and death, shaping the raw materials of his own life into a rich tapestry of experiences and impressions.
Over the course of these three films, we witness the emergence of Davies’ singular talent and style, the refinement of his technique, and a director growing in confidence, soon to become fêted as British cinema’s greatest film poet.
Special features
• Full feature commentary by Terence Davies
• Filmed interview with Terence Davies by Geoff Andrew
• 10-page illustrated booklet including essays by Derek Jarman and Distant Voices, Still Lives producer Jennifer Howarth on Terence Davies at Film School
The BFI will release Terence Davies’ new film Of Time and the City in cinemas nationwide on 31 October and on DVD in 2009. The BFI DVD Distant Voices, Still Lives is out now.
Released on DVD for the first time, Terence Davies’ follow-up to Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, extends his autobiographical memoirs into the ’50s
Following his prize-winning debut feature film Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), in 1992 Terence Davies made The Long Day Closes, now released by the BFI on DVD for the first time, alongside The Terence Davies Trilogy.
Terence Davies’ lyrical hymn to childhood revisits the same territory as Distant Voices, Still Lives, this time focusing on his own memories of growing up in a working-class Catholic family in Liverpool.
Eleven-year-old Bud (a heartbreaking performance from Leigh McCormack) finds escape from the greyness of ’50s Britain through trips to the cinema and in the warmth of family life. But as he gets older, the agonies of the adult world; the casual cruelty of bullying, the tyranny of school and the dread of religion, begin to invade his life.
Time and memory blend and blur through Davies’ fluid camerawork; slow tracking shots, pans and dreamlike dissolves combine to create the world of Bud’s imagination and the lost paradise of his childhood.
Special features
• Full feature commentary with Terence Davies and Director of Photography Mick Coulter (Sense and Sensibility, Love Actually)
• On-set interview with production designer Christopher Hobbs (Velvet Goldmine, Orlando)
• Previously unseen behind-the-scenes footage of Terence Davies directing
• 18-page illustrated booklet with essays, director biography and credits
• Fully uncompressed PCM stereo audio
Black Five, to be released July 21, is three films by Paul Barnes that celebrate and regret the final days of steam on the railways – preserved by the BFI National Archive and newly re-mastered for DVD release to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of steam in Britain.
In 1968, enginemen faced the last months of steam haulage on Britain’s mainline railways. For those who worked on the Black 5 locomotive the inevitable progress to diesels and electrics prompted mixed feelings.
Black Five (1968) directed by Paul Barnes, records their reminiscences as they faced this great change in their lives – of craftsmanship, camaraderie, and of the ‘personality’ of these great machines. The workers’ comments are an elegy to a time gone by, to skills no longer needed, and they make a poignant background to the beautifully filmed images of the heavy iron beasts trundling their way to the end of the line.
Black Five is filmed around Carnforth station in Lancashire, a location which had been the setting for the archetypal railway romance, David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) over 20 years earlier.
The DVD also contains two other short films by Paul Barnes. The Painter and the Engines (1967) follows painter David Shepherd’s race against time to record on canvas the magic and romance of steam during the locomotives’ last weeks at South London’s Nine Elms sheds. King George V (1970) charts the history of the celebrated locomotive, which was taken out of service in 1965 but offered a length of siding at Bulmers of Hereford to continue running, in steam.
Special features
• Illustrated booklet containing newly commissioned essays and notes
At the end of July, the BFI release Jacques Demy’s 1967 ’scope musical Les Demoiselles de Rochefort as a two-disc SE.
An effervescent and captivating celebration of life, Jacques Demy’s much-loved musical stars Gene Kelly, Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac
Following the huge success of Les Parapulies de Cherbourg (1964), Jacques Demy went on to make Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, a large scale tribute to the Hollywood musical featuring screen legend Gene Kelly. Released in the UK on DVD for the first time by the BFI, the 1996 restoration is presented in a 2-disc set that also features an hour long documentary by Agnès Varda and other special extras.
Jacques Demy was one of the most distinctive directors to emerge from the French New Wave in the late ’50s and early ’60s. The films he made up until his untimely death in 1990 constitute one of the most extraordinary bodies of work of that era, much of which was screened in a career retrospective at BFI Southbank last November.
Les Demoiselles de Rochefort centres on twin sisters Delphine and Solange (played by real life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac). Tired of their humdrum existence in the picturesque seaside town of Rochefort, they dream of leaving to find success and romance in Paris, just as a carnival and an American composer (Gene Kelly) hit town.
The superb ensemble cast also features Danielle Darrieux, Michel Piccoli, Jacques Perrin, George Chakiris and Grover Dale.
With a plot of pure Shakespearean farce, witty dialogue and lyrics by Demy and a magnificent jazz score by three-times Academy Award winner Michel Legrand, this has to be one of the most joyously ebullient movies ever.
Special features
• Les Demoiselles ont eu 25 ans (Agnès Varda, 1993, 64 mins) – documentary mixing on-set footage, home movies and footage from the 25th Anniversary celebrations in Rochefort
• Extracts from the Guardian Interview in which Catherine Deneuve talks about working with Jacques Demy and his influence on her career
• Audio extracts from Gene Kelly’s Guardian Lecture on the Hollywood Musical
• Illustrated booklet containing original publicity photos and production stills
• Fully uncompressed PCM stereo audio
On August 18, the BFI releases a brace of films by Jean Cocteau; first, the 1946 classic La Belle et la bête:
Visionary filmmaker and poet Jean Cocteau responded to the terrors and creative constraints of occupied France with this elaborately realized take on the classic fairy tale BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. Suggested by his longtime collaborator and muse, French actor Jean Marais, the cinematic version of the fable first penned by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont became Cocteau’s most celebrated film. Cocteau renders the story of a gentlehearted beast in love with a simple and beautiful girl in the style of the luminous paintings of Dutch master Vermeer.
From the quaint and humorous scenes of Beauty’s happy home to the ominous surreal spectacle of the Beast’s enchanted estate, Cocteau transforms the simple tale of tragic love into a surreal vision of death, desire, and beauty. Marais is chilling as the lonely and tormented beast, projecting a wounded love for the glacial yet endearing Beauty (Josette Day), whose simple request for a rose from her father brings tragedy crashing down on her whole family. Cocteau expands upon the cinematic inventiveness first seen in his masterpiece Belle et la bête with mirrors made of water, living statues, and candelabras fashioned from living arms, transforming a children’s fable into a complex and radiant cinematic classic.
The second Cocteau release is 1950’s Orphée:
Cocteau’s luminous adaptation of the famous Greek myth, set in post-occupation Paris, remains one of the most stunning achievements of the auteur’s career. Orphée (Jean Marais) is a successful Parisian poet, whom–despite popular acclaim–feels isolated and uninspired. When his wife Eurydice (Marie Dea) is stricken down by leather-clad bikers, he pursues them into the underworld, where he falls into a romantic entanglement with the dark-haired beauty Death (Casares). Stunning cinematography and surrealist flairs punctuate this beautiful, hypnotic masterpiece.
The same date, and John Maybury’s Love Is The Devil: Study For A Portrait Of Francis Bacon, gets the BFI treatment:
An intriguing biographical look at British painter Francis Bacon (Derek Jacobi), focusing on his turbulent and tragic relationship with lover and model George Dyer (Daniel Craig), a former boxer and small time thief who competes for Bacon’s affections so passionately that it eventually destroys him. Tilda Swinton also stars.
Slightly less exotic, the BFI has scheduled a busy August 18 for British Transport Films: Volume 8 - Points and Aspects:
Continuing the BRITISH TRANSPORT FILMS COLLECTION, POINTS AND ASPECTS is a fond look back at the history and evolution of the locomotive, as well as a fascinating documentary in its own right. Topics covered in this volume include: ‘Single Line Working’, ‘Day To Day Track Maintenance Pt.1′, ‘Day To Day Track Maintenance Pt.2′, ‘The Signal Engineers’, ‘Mishap’, ‘Spick And Span’, ‘The Long Night Haul’, ‘Care Of St Christopher’, ‘Measured For Transport’, ‘Channel Islands’, ‘Under The Wires’, ‘Points And Aspects’, ‘Scotland For Sport’.
Almost there; and the BFI has announced the UK two-disc SD SE and all-regions Blu-ray Disc releases of Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom on 22nd September 2008 priced at £22.99/£24.99. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final and most controversial film has been banned, censored and reviled the world over since its first release in 1975. It did not receive UK certification until late 2000, when it was passed uncut.
The film is a brutal allegory based on the novel 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade. Special features (these apply to the Blu-ray set - specs and art for the SD set can be found at the DVD Times link provided below):
Disc 1: Main Feature
Fully Complete & Uncut, telecined from original Italian restoration negatives
1.85:1 (1080p, 24fps) / BD25 / PCM mono
Original Italian language version (with optional English subtitles)
Original English language version (with optional HoH subtitles)
Original Italian trailer (with optional English subtitles)
Coil - Ostia (the Death of Pasolini) The original 1987 track from Coil’s celebrated second album, Horse Rotorvator, with a newly created video accompaniment, shot especially for this release, by Peter Christopherson.Disc 2: Extra Features - A standard definition PAL DVD with the following content:
On set footage and interviews (1974, 25m) – newly created documentary using full colour footage shot in 1974 by acclaimed film journalist and Pasolini expert Gideon Bachmann.
Whoever Says the Truth Shall Die (1981, 58m) Philo Bregstein’s classic documentary on the life and death of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Fade to Black (2001, 25m) – documentary with Mark Kermode exploring the ongoing relevance and power of Pasolini’s controversial masterpiece, with Bernardo Bertolucci and other leading directors.
Ostia (1991, 25m, with optional director commentary track) – Julian Cole’s short film about the last days of Pasolini, starring Derek Jarman.Fully illustrated booklet
Newly commissioned essay by Sam Rohdie (Italian film scholar and author on Pasolini)
Sight & Sound article by Gideon Bachmann incorporating his on-set diary
1979 review of the film by Gilbert Adair
James Ferman letter to the Director of Public Prosecutions
Cast and credits for the film
Pasolini biography by Italian film specialist Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
Photographs of Pasolini at work on set
Artwork (this has a Showing Soon ‘busty substances’ alert) for Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom can be seen at DVD Times here. Also looking forward to September, and three more documentary sets from the BFI; Manufactured Landscapes, GPO Volume 1 (2-DVD) and Animal Films, but more on those another time.
That’s the end of this ‘BFI special’ Showing Soon; the next blog in this strand will be posted here next week (no fear of overwork then…), and Showing Soon will take a look at the rest of the upcoming releases he feels are of note in the UK.
Deserved Award For BFI Project
The BFI National Archive’s ‘Documentary Centenaries’ project which included the restoration and release of the BFI DVDs Night Mail Collector’s Edition and the 4-disc box-set Land of Promise: The British Documentary Movement 1930 - 1950 won the Award for the Best Archive Restoration or Preservation Project at the Focal International Awards 2008, presented recently.
Marking the centenaries last year of five pioneer documentarists, this ambitious project of great importance to the UK’s cultural heritage involved the curatorial assessment of each of the film-makers’ entire surviving output. Some 84 titles were then selected for restoration, preservation and programming for exhibition, touring and release on DVD.
In addition to a major ‘Documentary Centenaries’ season at BFI Southbank last September and an international tour of Humphrey Jennings: Finest Hour, a Collector’s Edition DVD of Night Mail was released in partnership with The British Postal Museum & Archive (BPMA) and the Royal Mail, instantly becoming a BFI best-seller. The critically-acclaimed Land of Promise 4-disc box-set, in deluxe packaging complete with a 96-page book, was released in April 2008 and quickly sold out. It is already on its second manufacturing run.
Patrick Russell, Senior Curator for Non-Fiction at the BFI National Archive, accepted the award on behalf of the BFI and said: “It’s apt that this project celebrating a collective movement of film-makers was itself deeply collaborative. This award is gratifying recognition of a lot of hard work by many colleagues across different teams in the BFI over the last two years. We are delighted that the essential contribution of our technical archivists, and the sheer quality of their work, is valued so highly in the archival community. And it is immensely encouraging that there is such a public appetite for archival documentary – an important part of our national film-making heritage”
A much deserved award.
At the Movies…
Hailed as one of – if not the most – sophisticated film ever to come out of Cuba in the early days of Castro’s revolution, Memories Of Underdevelopment (Memorias Del Subdesarollo) is visionary Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1968 tour de force and is coming to UK cinemas, on limited release, in a few days time.
The blurb:
Listed at number fifty-four on Derek Malcolm’s 100 Greatest Movies, this cinematic masterpiece will receive its UK theatrical release on 11 July 2008.
Memories Of Underdevelopment follows Sergio (Sergio Corrieri - Soy Cuba), through his life following the departure of his wife, parents and friends in the wake of the Bay of Pigs incident. Alone in a brave new world, Sergio observes the constant threat of foreign invasion while chasing young women all over Havana before finally meeting Elena (Daisy Granados), a young virgin girl he seeks to mould into the image of his ex-wife, but at what cost to himself?
Even though director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea was a staunch and devoted supporter of the revolution, Memories of Underdevelopment makes a raw and uncompromising analysis of the newly formed system of government. Through a moving blend of narrative fiction, still photography and rare documentary footage, Alea catalogues the intricacies of the early days of the Castro regime; producing a stirring and enigmatic work that feeds from the culture of the very subject it is studying; Cuba.
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