Scotland Film Event Highlights – February 2016

Big screen farewells to Bowie, Haskell Wexler and Vilmos Zsigmond, and warm up for the Glasgow Film Festival with the equally ace Glasgow Youth Film Festival

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 01 Feb 2016

Masters of Light, RIP

For film fans, the deaths of Haskell Wexler and Vilmos Zsigmond, two of cinema’s greatest cinematographers, within days of each other over the Christmas holidays felt like a gut punch. It was through their gimlet-eyed lenses that 70s American cinema was born. American Graffiti, Days of Heaven and Medium Cool were among Wexler’s best (he also directed the latter) while Zsigmond shot McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Hired Hand and Blow Out – and that’s just a handful of their achievements. Filmhouse pays tribute with a double-bill of Deliverance (shot by Zsigmond) and In the Heat of the Night (shot by Wexler) on 7 Feb. Head along to say goodbye to these masters of light.

David Bowie on Screen

There was, of course, another death in January that rocked the world. David Bowie’s film career wasn’t as celebrated as his music, but it was fascinating nonetheless. Filmhouse are screening a trio of movies in their tribute: The Man Who Fell To Earth (27 Feb), Labyrinth (29 Feb) and concert doc Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (3 Mar). Like his music, Bowie's film roles were always changing, and he was always magnetic.

Valentine’s Day Screenings

Valentine’s Day is upon us again, and Scottish cinemas have done a decent job of avoiding the really mushy stuff. DCA, for example, offer up a heartbreaking classic (Brief Encounter) and a spiky cult favourite (True Romance). Filmhouse have taken a similar approach. Golden oldie Casablanca screens along with some more recent studies in amour – Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster. (All screenings 14 Feb.)

Blacklist Season

Trumbo, a new biopic about screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the ten filmmakers blacklisted by Hollywood in 1947 for alleged connections to the Communist Party, opens this month and Filmhouse and GFT are taking the opportunity to screen two of the films with which he defied the blacklist – Spartacus (7 Feb, GFT; 21 Feb, Filmhouse) and Roman Holiday (9 Feb, GFT; 29 Feb, Filmhouse) – as well as Martin Ritt’s The Front (1&2 Feb, GFT; 2&3 Mar, Filmhouse), in which Woody Allen plays a man who acts as a pseudonym for a number of his writer friends who’ve been similarly blacklisted.

Glasgow Youth Film Festival

And finally, the always inventive and inclusive Glasgow Film Festival returns at the end of the month, but don’t forget about its younger sibling, the Glasgow Youth Film Festival. We’d encourage you to make it to its heart-stopping opening film The Witch (12 Feb), which follows a family in 17th century New England who are turned against each other by evil forces. We also like the look of Cronies (13 Feb), produced by Spike Lee, and When Marnie Was There (14 Feb), reportedly the final ever film from Studio Ghibli.