Best film screenings in the North (26 Aug-1 Sep)
The best film events happening in Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester this week, including Paris is Burning at FACT, the final film from Chantal Akerman at Hyde Park Picture House, and a one-day festival of African film at the Eagle Inn
Revolutionary African Film Festival
A one-day festival of great African cinema pops up at the Eagle Inn this weekend. On the bill is Concerning Violence, Göran Olsson's documentary based on the writings of Franz Fanon; Thomas Sankara The Upright Man, which traces the life of Sankara – known as the 'African Che' – and his Burkinabe socialist revolution; Cuba-Africa-Revolution!, a doc telling of the Cuban rebel alliance that helped defeat apartheid; and Moolaadé, Ousmane Sembene's great film centered on the strong-willed wife of a village elder who refuses to allow four little girls to undergo the traditional genital circumcision ceremony. Not only are the films top notch, but profits go to Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!
On the Silver Globe
Dir. Andrzej Żuławski
HOME have a bank holiday treat for you in the form of On the Silver Globe, a wild sci-fi fantasy from recently deceased Polish visionary Andrzej Żuławski (try and track down a screening of his recently released swansong Cosmos too). Richard Brody of the New Yorker reckons On the Silver Globe is “among the most visually extravagant films ever made.” Don’t miss this rare chance to see it on the big screen.
Deep Water
Dir. Michel Deville
This rarely-screened Patricia Highsmith adaptation centers on a bourgeois married couple whose conflict may have spilled over to murder when the younger wife’s lover ends up dead in a pool. The wife (played by Isabelle Huppert) suspects her husband (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is the murderer, but has no proof, and a typically Highsmithian chess match begins. Reports are that the film’s mischievous dark humour calls to mind Luis Buñuel and Claude Chabrol, which sounds pretty good to us.
Hyde Park Picture House, 29 Aug, 4.20pm
Soundtrack season at HOME
HOME’s great Soundtrack season comes to a close with a bona fide classic and a strange but fascinating remake.
Cape Fear
Dir. Martin Scorsese
First, the remake: Martin Scorsese’s lurid take on J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear, with Robert De Niro chewing the scenery as Max Candy, a recently emancipated ex-con terrorising the family of the defence attorney (Nick Nolte) who intentionally allowed him to get sent down. De Niro is channeling Robert Mitchum, who played Candy in the original film and who turns up here in a great cameo. A similar mirroring is going on with the soundtrack, with Elmer Bernstein retuning Bernard Herrmann’s chilling score.
Shadows
Dir. John Cassavetes
Later in the week there’s John Cassavetes’ rousing directorial debut, which saw the actor take inspiration from the life and energy of the kind of films bubbling across the pond, bringing it to New York’s art scene and in the process sowing the seeds for the American independent cinema to come. Charles Mingus’ great jazz score is the perfect accompaniment to this vivid beatnik drama.
AMY! & Crystal Gazing
Dirs. Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen
Beyond the Scorched Earth of Counter-Cinema, a mini-season on the films by legendary films theorists Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey, continues with a double-bill of their collaborations.
First up is short AMY!, an avant-garde portrait of Amy Johnson both commemorating and commenting on her epic solo flight to Australia in 1930. “AMY! is neither a drama nor a portrait in the conventional sense,” said Mulvey and Wollen about the film, “but an assembly of sounds and images which evoke the subject through historic documents and relics, re-enactments and metaphors.”
The second half of the bill is Crystal Gazing, from 1982, which follows a science fiction illustrator, a saxophonist, an analyst of satellite photography and a PHD student, whose lives are set against a background of recession London. “It's about the contrast between the 1960s and the 1980s,” Mulvey said about the film at the time. “As we actually made the film the moment of making it became more and more important – we wanted to inscribe the present, Thatcherism, cuts, unemployment into it.”
No Home Movie
Dir. Chantal Akerman
The final film by the great Chantal Akerman is a loving portrait, filled with loss and regret, of her Holocaust survivor mother, whose health is failing.
Our reviewer, Michelle Devereaux, wrote of the film: “Akerman has insisted her mother always remained at the centre of her work, and here their relationship is characterised by an ineffable emotional distance and incongruity of experience. Fittingly, in No Home Movie, she creates feelings of both intimacy and aloof documentation; the digital images often feel overly vivid, coldly austere, surveilling. Of course, as the title implies, this home movie is not a simple playact of a family relationship for the camera – it’s more of a coming to terms with personal and interpersonal history, and the larger cultural history that shaped it.”
Hyde Park Picture House, 30 Aug, 6.30pm
Holy Mountain
Dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky
One of the wildest visual concoctions ever put on celluloid, Chilean maverick Alejandro Jodorowsky might even have out-freaked his acid-western masterpiece El Topo with The Holy Mountain. Saturated with eye-searing colour and a succession of nightmarish vistas that make Dali look like John Constable, this phantasmagorical nonsense needs to be seen on the biggest screen possible.
Paris is Burning
Dir. Jennie Livingston
Jennie Livingston's cult doc following the voguing community of black and Latino gay and transgender New Yorkers in the late 80s is the perfect choice to kick off Liverpool’s wide-ranging Scalarama programme. FACT have a pretty special night planned for this 25th anniversary screening. The theme is party and dress code is everything, so carve your face for the gods and be prepared to experience this film in style! You can get voguing yourself after the film at the screening afterparty at Kazimier Garden.