I still try to keep up
with the current cinema but more than ever my time and money is being
spent at the repertory houses these day. I probably saw twice as many
old films as new releases on the big screen this year, with films
actually being projected on film being the biggest draw – I
attended 142 35mm screenings in 2015, and I also caught eleven on
16mm and three on 70mm.
Many of these were
revisits, and I was delighted to catch fantastic projections of films
such as Night Moves, The Thin Red Line, Showgirls, All That Heaven
Allows, Klute, Le mépris, Frenzy The Awful Truth, In the Mood for
Love, Seventh Heaven, Yojimbo and many other old favourites. I
haven't included them on this list, though, and I haven't included the
repertory cinema events that I had a hand in making happen as part of
The Badlands Collective, though I'm incredibly proud of of what we
have achieved this year, particularly our recent 35mm Barry Lyndon
event and our exclusive UK screening of Rivette's amazing Out 1.
Instead, this list
(which I have already started counting down here) is all about
discoveries; films I had never seen – and in some cases had never
heard of – before this year. I'd like to extend a special thank you
to the BFI, the Prince Charles Cinema, The Barbican, the ICA, Tate,
Close-Up and all of the other London venues keeping film projection
alive and continuing to be adventurous in their programming. It has
been a wonderful year and I can't wait to make more great discoveries
in 2016.
24 - Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Harun Farocki, 1989) - Tate Modern, 16mm
23 - Cheyenne Autumn (John Ford, 1964) - Cinémathèque française, Paris, 70mm
22 - Bless Their Little Hearts (Billy Woodberry, 1983) - Tate Modern, 35mm
21 - Mandingo (Richard Fleischer, 1975) - BFI Southbank, 35mm
20 - Street of Crocodiles (Brothers Quay, 1986) - BFI Southbank, 35mm
19 - Variety (EA Dupont, 1925) - BFI Southbank, Digital
18 - The Cool World (Shirley Clarke, 1963) - Fabrica, Brighton,. 16mm
One of my major discoveries of recent years had been Shirley
Clarke. Her 1961 film The Connection appeared on this list last year and everything
I’ve seen by her so far has been daring, singular and memorable. The Cool World
is a more naturalistic film from Clarke, away from the staginess of The
Connection and the faux-documentary styling of Portrait of Jason, as she takes
her camera out onto the streets of Harlem to tell the story of a black teenager
trying to make his way in a world of guns and drugs. The rambling story didn’t
always hold my attention, but Clarke’s depiction of everyday life in ‘60s
Harlem certainly did, and the whole film has a restless rhythm, with Baird
Bryant’s energetic camerawork and Mal Waldron’s jazz score contributing to the
film’s vivid atmosphere.
16 - Stage Door (Gregory La Cava, 1937) - BFI Southbank, 16mm
15 - Sherman's March (Ross McElwee, 1985) - BFI Southbank, 16mm
14 - Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969) - BFI Southbank, 35mm
13 - Bush Mama (Haile Gerima, 1979) - Tate Modern, 16mm
Another of the key works from the LA Rebellion group of
filmmakers, Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama looks at a poor community in 1970s Los
Angeles and challenges the systematic and societal constraints that prevent
people from breaking out of poverty. The film is shot with a documentary-like
urgency but is also full of grace notes, and elevated by dreamlike interludes
and scenes that break the fourth wall, with letters from a prisoner being read
directly to the camera. At the film’s centre is Barbara O. Jones, an incredible
screen presence who was also magnificent this year in two films by Julie Dash:
the 1977 short Diary of an African Nun and her beautiful 1991 feature film
Daughters of the Dust, which was also shown at Tate Modern on a gorgeous 35mm
print.
The BFI’s Robert Siodmak season offered us a great chance to
indulge in some classic film noir, with the highlight for me being this
atmospheric and vividly realised tale of a man fighting to clear his name
following his wife’s murder. The plot has plenty to offer in terms of surprises
and suspense, but it’s the style here that intoxicates the viewer;
shadow-filled bars, dingy backstage nooks and crannies, intimate clubs where
jazz drummers beat out an infectious rhythm. Phantom Lady is full of instantly
memorable sequences with Elwood Bredell’s expressive black-and-white camerawork
making almost every scene visually striking. While this was my pick from the
Siodmak retrospective, I also enjoyed discovering The Dark Mirror and The
Spiral Staircase this year.
One of the major events in London’s repertory calendar this
year was a fantastic retrospective of Luis Buñuel films at the ICA, including
this bitterly funny film from his Mexican period. Arturo de Córdova is Francisco, a wealthy bachelor who becomes obsessed with the beautiful Delia Garcés and pursues her
relentlessly, eventually winning her from the man she was engaged to. However,
now that he has his prize, Francisco becomes consumed with paranoia and
jealousy, believing every man who so much as glances at his wife to be a
threat. Él is an incisive examination of male ego which is played a lot
straighter than many Buñuel films, but as a result the more surreal and comic touches –
such as a hilarious late scene in the church – have a startling impact. This is
one of his greatest and most under-seen films.
10 - Providence (Alain Resnais, 1977) - Barbican, 35mm
Did any director explore notions of memory and the passage
of time with as much wit, creativity and acuity as Alain Resnais? His 1977 film
Providence comprises of the recollections and imaginings of an ailing author
(John Gielgud), whose stop-start attempts to tell a story are personified by Ellen
Burstyn, David Warner and a hilariously bitchy Dirk Bogarde. As the author
struggles to keep his story together the film’s scenes have a habit of falling
apart or being repeated in odd ways, and characters from one part of the
narrative keep popping up unexpectedly from another, or else they are
interrupted by a 1970s English footballer. Providence is a strange, beguiling
film that is both one of the funniest Resnais made and ultimately very moving;
and Gielgud – in a film that he often described as his favourite – is just
marvellous to watch.
In the same year that they collaborated on Dirty Harry, Don
Siegel and Client Eastwood made this extraordinary Civil War drama in which Yankee
soldier Eastwood, injured behind enemy lines, finds himself recuperating in a
house full of Southern women. As Eastwood attempts to engineer the situation to
his advantage by seducing and manipulating each of the women (including a 12
year-old girl), he refuses to soften his portrayal of this dark character or
make any appeal for audience sympathy. Siegel keeps this gothic melodrama on
the boil with his tight and provocative direction and the film boasts some
truly remarkable scenes towards the end as Eastwood’s character finally gets
his comeuppance. It’s a bizarre entry in both director and star’s bodies of
work, but it stands as one of the most interesting and impressive films that
either have made.
Getting its first
theatrical release in 2015 after being hidden from public view for
decades, Les Blank's A Poem is a Naked Person is ostensibly a profile of Leon Russell, following him as he performed at a series of gigs and recorded in his studio in
the early '70s. Blank, however, finds much more to interest him away
from Russell's music, and his film becomes a portrait of Oklahoma and
the people that lived in this particular place at this particular
time. There's a wedding and a pie-eating contest, we watch a swimming
pool being painted and a building being demolished, a snake eats a
chicken and a man eats glass (eventually), and Blank's uncanny
ability to capture idiosyncratic characters and spontaneous moments
makes every scene in the picture a surprise and a joy. Russell didn't
like the film, but I can pretty much guarantee that everyone else
will.
One of the undoubted highlights of 2015 was getting to spend an evening with Crispin
Glover at the ICA. It began with an onstage performance piece and
slideshow in which he recited extracts from a series of books, and it
ended with a Q&A session that threatened to go on all night, with
Glover giving each question an exhaustive and rambling answer. In
between, we were treated to the singular film he co-wrote with Steven
C. Stewart, a man suffering from cerebral palsy who portrays a sexual
deviant and serial killer here. Despite the provocative subject
matter and hardcore sex scenes, the film actually ends up being a
very tender, funny and beautiful experience, with the knowledge that
Stewart died just a month after shooting the film adding a sense of
sadness to this realisation of his dreams. It's heartening to know that
something valuable came out of McG's Charlie's Angels film, with Glover using
that paycheck to fund this utterly unique and bizarre personal
odyssey.
How wonderful it was to
see the BFI devoting a retrospective to the 'Pope of Trash' John
Waters. The biggest treat for me was the chance to see a film I had
wanted to see for many years, his ultra-low budget 1970 film Multiple
Maniacs, and it certainly didn't disappoint. Led by the incredible
Divine, Multiple Maniacs features some of Waters' most inspired and
gleefully blasphemous sequences, including the notorious 'rosary job'
that Divine experiences in a church and a brilliant depiction of
Jesus performing the miracle of the loaves and the fishes (here using
sliced loaves from a supermarket and cans of tuna). Every time you
keep thinking the film has reached its peak, it aims higher, with
Divine being raped by a giant lobster and then rampaging through the
streets as a Godzilla-type monster. It's outrageous, hilarious and
one of Waters' best films.
Hou Hsiao-Hsien's
extraordinary film examines the history of Taiwan through the
memories and anecdotes of the great puppeteer Li Tian-Lu and forms a
great companion piece to his previous work A City of Sadness.
Unfolding through Hou's static but beautifully composed images and
measured pacing, the film combines interview segments with dramatic
recreations to probe the lines between memory and reality, between
fact and fiction. While the more intricate political aspects of the
material might be hard to follow for those not well-versed in the
period of history being explored, the personal journey being
undertaken here is both fascinating and deeply moving, and the film
is simply a gorgeous cinema experience, particularly as projected on
35mm, with the splendid cinematography and entrancing rhythm being
hard to resist.
"She's got more
money than the World Bank!" is the cry when an African village
hears that a former inhabitant is returning after prosperous decades
abroad. They see her as the answer to all of their prayers, and she
may well be, but she will only give them the money they yearn for on
one condition – that they kill the popular local shopkeeper whom
she blames for her exile. Djibril Diop Mambéty's incisive adaptation
of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play The Visit exposes the greed,
hypocrisy and deceit that money inspires in men. The gradual shifts
in loyalty among the townspeople is depicted with a lot of humour but
also with a bleak cynicism and irony, with the film succeeding as
both a touching human story and a wider parable about African
society. I still feel largely ignorant of African cinema but all my
ventures into that territory keep serving up gems, with Souleymane
Cissé's Finye being another great discovery this year.
I had never heard of
Chick Strand before Tate devoted a weekend to her work and that of
her contemporaries, so Soft Fiction, on a brand-new 16mm print, hit
me like a bolt from the blue. In this film, Strand asks five women to
relate stories from their sexual histories directly to the camera.
These stories are presented in a way that is sometimes unsettling and sometimes comical, but they are
connected by the way they gave these women a greater understanding of
their own sensuality and became key memories in their lives. These
confessionals are intercut with a variety of poetic images as strand
creates a stimulating and provocative portrait of complex emotions
and subjective memory. It is a unique film from a director whose work
clearly should be more widely celebrated than it is.
This magnificent
documentary by Marcel Ophüls begins with the Nuremberg trials and
ends with America's involvement in Vietnam, and in the intervening
five hours he interrogates notions of guilt, complicity and judgement
by looking at a variety of atrocities committed in times of war. The
film is an exploration of moral grey areas, with Ophüls asking
questions about both individual and collective responsibility and
drawing some incredible contributions from his interviewees, not
least Albert Speer, who smiles with the calm authority of a man who
knows what he managed to get away with at Nuremberg. Almost every
scene in The Memory of Justice is riveting, challenging and devoid of easy
answers. It is a masterpiece of documentary filmmaking and its new restoration allows us to view it as a truly essential work that feels
as relevant today as it ever has.
Also known as Two in the Shadow, this was the last film made
by the great Mikio Naruse two years before he passed away. It’s a beautifully
measured portrait of two characters brought together by tragedy and finding an
unlikely but deep romantic bond, with Naruse detailing the shifts in their
relationship in beautifully subtle ways and drawing magnificent performances
from his two leads, Yûzô Kayama and Yôko Tsukasa. Scattered Clouds is a film
about love, guilt, responsibility and the external pressures that define
whether or not a relationship can survive. One of the film films that Naruse
made in colour, the film’s images are filled with melancholy beauty and Naruse’s
compositions are always so potent. Scattered Clouds is a deceptively
straightforward and simple film that reveals its enormous emotional power only
at the end, with the succession of the three final scenes constituting a
devastating climax. This is a final masterpiece from a director who – judging by
my still too-limited knowledge of his work – made a habit of them.
