Full Andrea Arnold retrospective at GFT

The Glasgow cinema crown the British filmmaker Andrea Arnold their newest CineMaster with a full retrospective of her features throughout March

Article by Jamie Dunn | 05 Mar 2019
  • Fish Tank

Glasgow Film Festival may be over, but there’s still plenty of cinematic action on screen for the city's film fans to enjoy in March, including a full retrospective of the features by Andrea Arnold as part of Glasgow Film Theatre’s regular CineMasters series.

Taking her cue from the social realist style of Ken Loach but adding her own poetic spin on the lives of people on the edges of society, Arnold’s four electric features have seen her quickly become one of the most distinctive voices in British cinema. Working with her regular cinematographer Robbie Ryan, she captures these lives in her trademark 4:3 ratio, the boxy frame accentuating her characters’ desires to escape their difficult lives.

Arnold has been a familiar face in the UK from her stint on kids’ TV shows in the 80s like No. 73 and Motormouth, although she admits presenting was never her forte. "Television was great fun and I went along for the ride, but I never felt that comfortable in front of the camera,” she told the Guardian in 2011. Arnold didn’t make her first mark in filmmaking until 2003’s Wasp. A curious blend of tough social realism and rom-com fairytale, it follows a 20-something single mother who’s desperately trying to reclaim her life back on a date night with an old flame, despite having four young daughters to take care of. This brilliant short won an Oscar, and Arnold hasn’t looked back since.

Red Road, from 2006, was Arnold’s knockout feature debut. Set in Glasgow around the now-demolished flats of the title, it’s a kind of social-realist Hitchcockian thriller following a professional voyeur – Kate Dickie’s CCTV operator – who begins mysteriously stalking a man she spots one night while on duty. Her prey turns out to be an ex-con, played by Tony Curran, and as we slowly realise how they’re connected Arnold adroitly shifts from thriller to dark psychological drama. Red Road won the 2006 Cannes Jury Prize and rightly dominated the Scottish BAFTAs that year. It’s still one of the great Scottish films of the millennium.

In 2009’s Fish Tank, Arnold applied her brutal poetics to a coming-of-age story, following an angry teen girl from a rough Essex council estate who has dreams of being a dancer. Michael Fassbender is memorably seductive as the boyfriend of the lead character's mother – he begins the film as a supportive father figure but their relationship soon moves toward the creepy. Another Cannes Jury Prize went the director's way.

Her next film was a literary adaptation: Wuthering Heights. The move to high literature didn’t dampen Arnold’s jagged sensibility one iota. Cathy and Heathcliff’s romance takes place in wind blasted moors and is peppered with mud and expletives. All Arnold’s films feel like physical experiences, but with Wuthering Heights you might feel you’ve just sat through a thunderstorm.

Finally there’s Arnold’s first cinematic trip across the Atlantic with American Honey, and of course she applies her style to that most American of genres: the road movie. Sasha Lane stars as a young woman on the breadline who swaps her life of poverty for the more exciting prospects of life on the road with a group of outsiders who are journeying across the country selling magazines door-to-door. The fresh locale sees Arnold make her most vibrant movie to date, with colour and music bursting from the screen.

You can catch these films at Glasgow Film Theatre throughout March, with Red Road and Fish Tank playing from 35mm prints. The full listings are below. For tickets, head to glasgowfilm.org/shows/cinemasters-andrea-arnold


Andrea Arnold CineMasters season at Glasgow Film Theatre

Red Road – Wed 6 Mar, 8pm

Fish Tank – Mon 11 Mar, 5.50pm; Wed 13 Mar, 5.50pm

Wuthering Heights – Mon 18 Mar, 6.10pm; Wed 20 Mar, 8.15pm

American Honey – Mon 25 Mar, 5.25pm; Wed 27 Mar, 7.35pm