Best Film Screenings in the North (22-29 July)
The best film events happening in Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds this week
Pandora’s Box
GW Pabst's vivid silent film stars Louise Brooks as Lulu, a free-spirited single woman with no shortage of men drawn to her. We understand the pull. Brooks in close-up, with her short, dark, razor-sharp haircut, is one of the most magnetic actors to ever have graced the screen. An aspiring showgirl in Berlin, Lulu loves life and loves sex, but the various weak men who adore her want to tame her, to extinguish her passion – with increasingly tragic results.
Brooks had presence to burn, and Pabst knew how to make her sparkle on camera. The creative partnership between the American actor and the German director was a once in a lifetime pairing: they only made two films together (the other is the similarly erotic and magical Diary of a Lost Girl) and neither was able to match these successes later in their careers. We’re glad they found each other – cinema is all the richer for it.
24 Jul, Hyde Park Picture House, 3.30pm; screening as part of Yorkshire Silent Film Festival, with live musical accompaniment by Jonathan Best.
Silent Running
Douglas Trumbull's 1972 film set on board a spaceship carrying massive greenhouses with Earth's last remaining trees was not much fancied on its original release. Four decades later, it’s rightly seen as a deeply moving sci-fi classic. Much of the film rests on the shoulders of Bruce Dern, who plays an intergalactic tree-hugger who has to choose between his beloved plants and his fellow crewmembers when they’re ordered to jettison their endangered cargo into space.
The script, by Deric Washburn and the late Michael Cimino (who went on to cowrite The Deer Hunter a few years later) and Steven Bochco (who would go on to create NYPD Blue), manages to deliver the heavy-handed ecological message with humor and grace, while Trumbell – still best known for his special effects work on 2001: A Space Odyssey – creates a much warmer, more humane film than Kubrick’s chilly masterpiece. Also worth watching for three of the cutest robots in cinema (Huey, Dewey and Louie) and two haunting songs by Joan Baez.
25 Jul, HOME, Manchester, 6.20pm; part of HOME's Science Friction season, which also includes The Man in the White Suit (26 Jul) and The Iron Giant (30 Jul).
Tampopo
This Japanese gem from Juzo Itami is a lusty comedy about noodles. The titular Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto) runs a modest little truckstop cafe, but she’s sent into a tailspin when a laconic stranger named Goro (Tsutomu Yamazaki) wanders into her joint and gives a brutally honest critique of her product: her raman have sincerity, he tells her, but they lack guts.
So begins a kind of Rocky story – but with noodles – as Goro schools Tampopo in the art of cooking so she can fulfil her dream of being the best noodle chef in Tokyo. If this all sounds very simple, don’t worry: Itami’s film is as twisty and freeform as Tampopo's house special. This wild film is also a romance, a western and a sadistic satire of Buñuelian proportions. Word of warning: don’t walk into this foodfest on an empty stomach.
28 Jul, FACT, Liverpool, 6.30pm; part of the Liverpool Biennial 2016 film programme, 'Another Version of Events'
Daisies
Of all the great European auteurs to emerge in the 1960s, few were as invigorating as Czech filmmaker Vera Chytilová; with her madcap farce Daisies she created one of the wildest stylistic eruptions of the decade. The film is a delightfully psychedelic trip following two young women who, witnessing the world go to seed around them, decide to join in the debauchery and put two fingers up to polite society. Provocative and bizarre, this cinematic enigma needs to be seen to be believed.
28 Jul, Liverpool Small Cinema, 7pm; screening with a selection of Chytilová's short films.
Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass
The Yorkshire Silent Film Festival continues with Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass, an avant-garde doc filmed around the mining towns in Eastern Ukraine. A true poet of the industrial age, Vertov loves machinery and technology, as anyone who’s seen his stunning Man with a Movie Camera will attest.
This first foray into sound sees him create a soundscape as dizzying as his collage of images. Charlie Chaplin was certainly a fan. “I would never have believed it possible to assemble mechanical noises to create such beauty,” he said when he first saw Vertov’s film. “It’s one of the most superb symphonies I have known. Dziga Vertov is a musician.” Leeds and Bradford based duo That Fucking Tank have a hard act to follow, then. They've created a new score for the film that responds to the idea of the acceleration of everyday life under mechanisation.
If you've a film event you'd like us to know about, send details to jamie@theskinny.co.uk