Five to see at GFF, 18 Feb: High-Rise

Feature by Film Team | 18 Feb 2016

After last night's opening gala, Hail, Caesar, GFF kicks off proper with the new film from Ben Wheatley and the opportunity to discover a filmmaker who was once a cornerstone of French cinema

Today's Highlights

Glasgow Film Festival's secret Con Air event, where patrons will be put in orange jumpsuits and shackled in chains before being taken to a clandestine location to watch the film, has sadly long sold out, but there's still plenty to see at the first day of the festival proper.

Libeled Lady

GFT, 10.30am

A rarely-screened sardonic screwball, this is the first of the Dream Team on the Silver Screen strand, although in this case the duo of Myrna Loy and William Powell are joined by Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow. Screening from 35mm and FREE.

Suffice to say, we'd recommend you make it to all these free early morning screenings. Here's GFF's poster for the strand to remind you of the ten classics on offer.

La belle équipe

GFT, 6.30pm

The first of three films from Julien Duvivier, a peer of Marcel Carné and Jean Renoir’s, who seems to have fallen through the cracks of critical opinion. These are films ripe for rediscovery.

Read our interview with GFF co-director Allan Hunter, who gives us the lowdown on Julien Duvivier's importance to the history of French cinema

Altered States

The Old Hairdressers, 7pm

Cult classic from Ken Russell about a nutball scientist who uses himself as a guinea pig. Like the doctor, your senses will be overwhelmed.

High-Rise & Ben Wheatley Q&A

GFT, 8pm

Our reviewer called Ben Wheatley's new film "a hedonistic whirlwind; imagine a lone location Mad Max film with less motors and more upper-class twits, as filtered through a cocktail of the creative sensibilities of Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Joseph Losey and Ken Russell."

Read our full High-Rise review

We also caught up with Wheatley when High-Rise screened at London Film Festival. Here he is talking about the film's very distinct style:

“We didn’t want to get into the world of things being too nostalgic or too obviously art design from the 70s. You see it in TV stuff sometimes where people have just gone for the greatest hits of what the 70s looked like. And that kind of collective memory isn’t really true, I don’t think, as someone who lived through it. If you look at design magazines now and go through them, you realise they don’t really reflect the period we’re living in at all. And yet in 30 years time, those magazines will be used by films to recreate this period. And I think that that’s the problem. A lot of the eclectic memory of the 70s is now being formed from an idea of a 70s that never existed.”

Read the full interview with Ben Wheatley

11 Minutes

CCA, 8.45pm

11 Minutes, the new film from great Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, is a dazzling multi-strand thriller concerned with chance and chaos. Best remembered for the cult films he made in the UK in the 1970s (Deep End, The Shout), it's great to see Skolimowski still working through his very particular brand of Eastern European angst on screen. 

Read our full 11 Minutes review

We also spoke to Skolimowski ahead of the film's screening at GFF, and he opened up about his 17 year self-imposed hiatus from filmmaking:

“I’d felt that I’d burnt out,” he says of his break from cinema. “I’d started making movies that I didn’t want to make. I wasn’t an artist any longer.”

He charged his batteries by taking up painting – and he proved pretty good at it. “Quickly I reached a level where people were buying my paintings,” he recalls. “When I realised it had been more than 15 years of not making movies I had begun to feel like an artist again, and a young artist, so I went back.”

Read the full interview with Jerzy Skolimowski

Notes from the Twitterati

Film fans have been going gaga about the cast for the new Coens' flick, Hail, Caesar. It's got George Clooney as a sword and sandels star, Channing Tatum as a song and dance man, Tilda Swinton as twin Hollywood gossip columnists, and Scarlett Johansson wearing a "fish ass", but GFF regular and Marvel talisman Mark Millar spotted the Scottish connection. 

Glasgow Film Festival: runs until 28 Feb. Keep up to date with what's going on at Glasgow Film Festival in The CineSkinny – in print at Glasgow Film Festival venues and online at theskinny.co.uk/film/cineskinny

The CineSkinny is brought to you by MUBI, the online cinema bringing you hand-picked film gems every day.