We continue our partnership with Rich Pickings for their series of science and film events, which bring together filmmakers and scientists to explore various aspects of the human experience. View a list of all events in this series here.
A screening of ’70s masterpiece The Parallax View and discussion with experts in conspiracy theory psychology and cinema.
The Parallax View (Dir. Alan J Pakula, 1h38m, Cert 15)
Newspaper reporter Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) begins investigating the assassination of a presidential candidate from several years ago, and is drawn into a dangerous world of conspiracy and cover-up. Going undercover and assuming a new identity, he finds himself at the centre of a new and terrifying plot…
The screening is followed by a panel discussion on some of the themes in the film, and its political and creative context. Speakers include Prof. Karen Douglas, Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Kent, who studies the psychology of conspiracy theories and the social consequences of conspiracism as well as Dr David Archibald, Senior Lecturer in Theatre, Film and Television Studies at University of Glasgow.
Now in it’s 66th year, the Berlinale opens on 11 February 2016 with Hail, Caesar! , the latest offering by Joel and Ethan Coen, starring George Clooney and other Hollywood greats, which sets the tone for a star-studded festival that still promises to offer plenty of discoveries, some true gems and real treasures across the sidebars as well as in the main Competition line-up.
Screening in Competition, we particularly look forward to Midnight Special by Jeff Nichols, director of Mud and Take Shelter. Starring his long-time collaborator Michael Shannon in another leading role, the film centres on a father and son who go on the run after the dad learns his child possesses special powers. Also competing for a Golden Bear are Boris Without Béatrice, from Denis Côté, who presented his eccentric debut Vic + Flo Saw A Bear at the 2013 Berlinale, Bosnian director Danis Tanović’s Death In Sarajevo (aka Looking For Europe), a film based on the play by French philosopher and writer Bernard-Henri Levy, and Thomas Vinterberg’s The Commune, which centres on a Danish commune in the 1970s.
Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, a modern day adaptation of the ancient Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes, will play out of competition, alogside Dominik Moll’s News From Planet Mars, his long-awaited follow-up to The Monk. Plus, we look forward to the latest from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Creepy, which screens in the Berlinale Special strand.
Under the title “Hachimiri Madness – Japanese Indies from the Punk Years”, the Forum is showing a special programme of newly digitised and subtitled Japanese 8-mm films from 1977 to 1990 which breathe the rebellious spirit of that era, very few of them have ever been shown internationally. The series includes Sion Sono’s I am Sion Sono!!, in which the then 22-year-old introduced himself to audiences as a punk poet in nonchalant, self-confident style, and Shinya Tsukamoto’s The Adventure of Denchu-Kozo, a hugely creative, wild cyberpunk drama, while also taking in the largely unknown early works of directors such as Sogo Ishii (today Gakuryu Ishii) and Shinobu Yaguchi, alongside Masashi Yamamoto’s anarchic feature debut Saint Terrorism and Nobuhiro Suwa’s gangster ballad Hanasaseru Gang.
The Berlinale Classics section will open with Fritz Lang’s 1921 silent film classic Der müde Tod (Destiny), presented in a digitally restored version and with new music, which will be performed live by the Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin. Also screening in the strand are John Huston’s classic Fat City (1972), The Road Back (1937) directed by James Whale, and Heiner Carow’s East German semi-autobiographical film Die Russen kommen (The Russians are Coming, 1968), which is set in the waning days of World War II and was originally banned before completion by the GDR authorities.
Pamela Jahn
For more information about the programme and how to book tickets visit the Berlinale website.
Brain Pickings and Cigarette Burns: Virginie Sélavy and Alex Fitch talk to Rich Pickings director Carla MacKinnon, about their new series of science and art events titled Inside Out, which explore the human experience through film and discussion. They also talk to Josh Saco, head of celluloid promotion outfit Cigarette Burns, about their Twisted Valentine screening of 1965 seedy gem Who Killed Teddy Bear at the Barbican Cinema. Plus, an interview with female-centred erotic filmmaker Erika Lust.
The Electric Sheep Film Show is broadcast every third Wednesday of the month, 8-9pm at Resonance FM 104.4. Next date: Wednesday 17 February 2016.
This show was first broadcast on Wednesday 20 January 2016.
In the December Electric Sheep Film Show, Virginie Sélavy and Alex Fitch explore film and pop culture. In a special interview recorded at the Film Museum London earlier this year, 90-year-old legendary British actress Honor Blackman talks about her roles in Goldfinger, Doctor Who and the cult 1960s TV series The Avengers. Also in this show, producer Sean Hogan discusses Future Shock: The Story of 2000AD, a documentary that charts the development of the seminal British comic, while curator Helen Melody gives an insight into the Alice in Wonderland exhibition at the British Library, and the varying adapations of Alice on screen over the years.
The Electric Sheep Film Show is broadcast every third Wednesday of the month, 8-9pm at Resonance FM 104.4. Next date: Wednesday 20 January 2016.
This show was first broadcast on Wednesday 16 December 2015.
In the November Electric Sheep Film Show, Virginie Sélavy and Alex Fitch talk to visual artist Graham Humphreys, best known for his posters for The Evil Dead, Dream Demon and Sante Sangre, about his new book, Drawing Blood. Festival director Nag Vladermersky looks ahead at the highlights of this year’s London International Animation Festival, which runs at the Barbican from 4 to 10 December. Plus an interview with Peter Strickland, director of Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy, about his new ‘3D sound’ adaptation of Nigel Keale’s The Stone Tape for BBC Radio 4.
In the October Electric Sheep Film Show, Virginie Sélavy and Alex Fitch present a two-part Halloween special:
In this extended first part of the show, Alex Fitch talks to director Richard Stanley and composer Simon Boswell about their legendary 1990 sci-fi tale Hardware, the former’s plans to direct an adaptaion of H.P.Lovecraft’s The Colour out of Space and the latter’s scores for other genre classics such as Sante Sangre and Shallow Grave, while director Jeff Lieberman discusses his 1976 worm horror Squirm during his visit to last year’s Cine-Excess at the University of Brighton.
In the second part of the show, Virginie Sélavy talks to Canadian writer Kier-La Janisse about the new anthology book she has edited called Satanic Panic, which explores how the fear of a Satanic conspiracy spread through 1980s pop culture, followed by a round-up of this year’s London Film Festival with film critic and cartoonist Mark Stafford.
The Electric Sheep Film Show is broadcast every third Wednesday of the month, 8-9pm at Resonance FM 104.4. Next date: Wednesday 18 November 2015.
A condensed version of this show was first broadcast on Wednesday 21 October 2015.
Running from 7 to 18 October with screenings spread across central London and a number of participating local cinemas, the 2015 edition of the BFI London Film Festival opens with Sarah Gavron’s women’s rights drama Suffragette and closes with Danny Boyle’s biopic of Steve Jobs, starring Michael Fassbender as the tech-wizard and former Apple CEO. In between, the line-up is packed with oddities, thrills and freaks, and some fine visceral horror.
Our top picks this year include festival hit The Forbidden Room, the latest offering from Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson, who co-directed this busy, chaotic and occasionally perplexing nightmare in which plot, characters and locations constantly flow into one another enigmatically. We also highly recommend Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier’s impressive follow-up to Blue Ruin, the dazzling 140-minute one-take-wonder Victoria, directed by German director Sebastian Schipper, and Eva Husson’s striking first feature Bang Gang, which premiered in Toronto last month.
Other titles seen on the festival circuit include Robert Egger’s underwhelming The Witch, Yorgos Lanthimos’s bizarre first English-language film The Lobster, Alex van Warmerdam’s twisted contract killer comedy Schneider vs Bax and Takashi Miike’s new action fantasy Yakuza Apocalypse.
We look forward to Sion Sono’s spaced-out Love & Peace, along with Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel High Rise and Evolution, the long-awaited second feature by Lucile Hadžihalilović (Innocence). Also worth checking out are German body horror Der Nachtmahr, Spanish necrophilia drama The Corpse of Anna Fritz, horror Western Bone Tomahawk, Danish chiller What We Become, and The Invitation, a disturbing chamber piece from Jennifer’s Body director Karyn Kusama. Plus, screening as part of ‘Sonic’ strand, we’ll be taking a look at Ruined Heart: Another Love Story between a Criminal and a Whore by punk filmmaker Khavn De La Cruz and John Pirozzi’s compelling documentary Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock’n’Roll.
The archive screenings include Make More Noise, a selection representing women on film in the first decades of the 20th century, alongside a restoration of Edward Dmytryk’s stylish 1959 Western Warlock, Jean Cocteau’s Gothic fantasy La Belle et la Bête (1946), Thorold Dickenson’s Gaslight (1940), and Joan Fontaine in her last big-screen appearance in the Hammer production The Witches (1966).
On 9 October 2015, there will be a special screening of three new 35mm prints of films by the Brothers Quay, alongside a new short by Christopher Nolan featuring the twin filmmakers ever inspiring work. Plus, in the Experimenta strand, Anthology Film Archives offer a sampler programme of an eclectic array of artists active in New York City from 1975-1990.
For more information about the programme and how to book tickets visit the LFF website.
This year again, Film4 FrightFest offered a brilliantly diverse programme that encompassed all aspects of horror and fantasy, with some great category-defying gems. Interestingly, female protagonists widely dominated the line-up, and many of them were appealingly diverse, complex and nuanced characters, ranging from troubled temptresses to tragic mothers, babysitters to scientists, confused teenagers to imperious mistresses.
One of the highlights was Ben Cresciman’s beautifully crafted psychological thriller Sun Choke, which was the most cinematographically and thematically accomplished of the festival. An ethereal, dreamlike, elliptical portrayal of a possibly psychotic young woman, it intelligently and chillingly explored the tortuous, ambivalent relationship she has with her domineering carer, played by the superb Barbara Crampton.
Sun Choke is available on the premium streaming video service Shudder from 9 March 2017.
Darkly erotic and intemperately stylish, Goddess of Love was also centred around a psychotic woman. Co-scripted by lead actress Alexis Kendra, it plunged into the delusional obsessiveness of an unstable woman as she increasingly loses her grip on reality after her lover leaves her. Sadly, the overly explanatory ending undermined the seductively unstable reality created until then.
For its part, Nina Forever offered a highly unusual take on female darkness. One of the great surprises of the festival, it was a bittersweet, melancholy and inventive tale of love, grief and the difficulty of getting rid of one’s ghosts. When morbidly inclined checkout girl Holly falls in love with the suicidal Rob, it seems like he may finally be able to put the death of his girlfriend Nina behind him. But Nina won’t go away so easily, and they have to deal with her very tangible, bloody, sardonic presence in their bed. Although the tone shifting between offbeat comedy and horrific drama is at times a little clumsy, it is a truly original, and very affecting film that treads a fresh path.
Not all female-led films were successful. After a compelling, unsettling first part, in which a new babysitter introduces chaos and sexual tension into the conventional suburban world of her charges, Emelie descended into an unconvincing and predictable thriller fodder about thwarted maternal desires. Also themed around maternity, Bruce McDonald’s Halloween tale Hellions, his follow-up to 2008’s Pontypool was equally disappointing. On Halloween, a teenager who has just found out she is pregnant must fight evil childlike monsters who come knocking on her door, demanding not sweets, but her unborn child. As she steps out into the strange light of a blood moon, the image is drained of colour and becomes startlingly artificial. This is not a bad thing in itself, but with a plot that jerks incoherently into varying directions, the visual effects that are meant to support it remain contrived and hollow.
Interestingly, Bernard Rose’s modern update of Frankenstein transferred the focus of the monster’s love and anguish from the male creator to the scientist mother figure, making explicit the maternal anxiety that had originally fed Mary Shelley’s novel. Extrapolating on the possibilities of modern technology while based on a close reading of the novel, the film is seen from the perspective of the inarticulate creature. Originally given perfect beauty, he falls from grace and is forced into desperate, squalid survival after a flaw in the procedure of its creation causes horrific disfigurement. A visually ravishing poetic take on the misunderstood hideous monster despite a somewhat bombastic ending.
The focus was also on the mother in New England ghost story We Are Still Here. An openly referential film that played like a cross between House by the Cemetery and The Fog, it stars Barbara Crampton as a grieving mother who moves to an old isolated house with her husband in a bid to get over her son’s death. Expressive and poignant, Crampton was ably seconded by Larry Fessenden, who was his usual brilliant self as one half of the hippie couple who try and help her to contact the spirit of her dead son. All slow-burn creepiness in the first part, culminating into a blood bath at the end, it was a well-crafted, enjoyably eerie tale that used its influences smartly.
After the emergence of Israeli horror in the last few years, the surprise geographical discovery this year was Georgia with Landmine Goes Click. One of the most divisive films of the festival, it set a trio of American tourists up for trouble in a remote Georgian mountain when one of the party accidentally steps on a mine. After apparently heading for a rape and revenge kind of story, it veers unexpectedly away to offer instead a scalpel-cold study of the terrible chain of causes and consequences that leads to the shocking, tragic ending. In a world dominated by betrayal, distrust and abusive power, the main characters are all guilty and provoke their own downfall through the cruel games they play with one another.
Among the documentaries, the fascinating story of Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD was more than worth a look while our friends at the Duke Mitchell Film Club presented the excellent Remake, Remix, Rip-Off, about low-budget Turkish remakes of Hollywood blockbusters in the 1960s-70s. This was followed by the Duke Mitchell Film Party, which proved as deliriously entertaining as last year’s extravaganza, with guests, among which Barbara Crampton, presenting clips of new work or hilariously dubious trailers.
The diverse retrospective programme included Brian Clemens’s 1970 Hammer swashbuckling horror adventure Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, Sergio Martino’s seductively perverse gialloYour Vice Is a Locker Room and Only I Have the Key, with the stunning Edwige Fenech, Clive Barker’s classic Hellraiser, Philip Ridley’s startling 1990 debut The Reflecting Skin and Uli Lommel’s 1970s serial murderer tale Tenderness of the Wolves.
The 72nd edition of the Venice Film Festival is underway and opening this year’s festival is Baltasar Kormákur‘s survival thriller Everest, while Scott Cooper’s highly anticipated gangster drama Black Mass, screens out of Competition.
Among the 21 titles competing for the Golden Lion this year are Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl, a love story inspired by the live of the artist Einar Wegener, who became one of the world’s first transgender women, and Thomas McCarthy’s Spotlight, starring Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo in the true story of how the Boston Globe revealed a child molestation cover-up within the local Catholic Archdiocese. Other promising titles include Drake Doremus’ Equals, a futuristic love story set in a world where emotions have been eradicated, along with A Bigger Splash, Luca Guadagnino’s star-studded remake of Jacques Deray’s superb 1969 thriller La piscine, 11 Minutes by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski (Essential Killing), and Heart of A Dog, the feature debut of experimental performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson. We will also check out Atom Egoyan’s revenge thriller Remember, Marco Bellocchio’s Sangue Del Mio Sangue (Blood Of My Blood), Charlie Kaufman’s animation feature Anomalisa, and Pablo Trapero’s crime family story El Clan, produced by Pedro and Augustin Almodóvar.
Beyond its Competition line-up, Venice has a strong penchant for documentaries which are almost always worth a watch. This year Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow will present their co-directed documentary De Palma, while documentary-veteran Frederick Wiseman returns with In Jackson Heights. Plus, one of the most controversial works on show could be Helmut Berger, Actor, a relentless, yet intimate portrait of the legendary actor and former Luchino Visconti “muse” Helmut Berger.
The Horizons sidebar, another competitive section that runs parallel, features The Childhood Of A Leader by actor-turned-director Brady Corbet, alongside Danish drama A War, about an officer who is put on trial upon his return from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, directed by A Hijacking director Tobias Lindholm.
Pamela Jahn
For more information about the programme visit the Venice website.
‘An awful lot of people are going to miss all that gusto and kindness and fun,’ reflected distributor Derek Hill when Balch died in 1980. Critic Tony Raynes remembered a ‘lively, interesting, engaged, vigorous’ man who ‘threw a hell of a party’.
An extraordinary figure of 1960s-70s British film, Antony Balch was a true original. His love of cinema was infectious and he worked across nearly all the different areas of the business. Best known for directing the camp, grisly Horror Hospital and for collaborating with William Burroughs, he also ran two London cinemas, directed ads, made trailers, wrote reviews and distributed exploitation movies such as Don’t Deliver Us from Evil, Truck Stop Women and Massacre for an Orgy.
Horror and weird cinema fans should celebrate him for securing the first ever UK release of Tod Browning’s banned Freaks (with the help of Kenneth Anger). The 70s were a heady time for boundary pushing and he played an important part, resisting criticism whilst calling the press ‘the number one exploiter of fear, horror, hate and violence in the world’.
In this wide-ranging illustrated lecture (part of Scalarama 2015), William Fowler will explore Balch’s holistic approach to cinephilia as well as his ideas about censorship. Selected short films by Antony Balch will screen as part of the evening.
This is the first lecture of the autumn semester of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London.
About the instructor:
William Fowler is a writer, film historian and musician. He is Curator of Artists’ Moving Image, BFI National Archive and the co-founder and co-programmer of The Flipside at BFI Southbank. His seasons and restoration projects at the BFI have included GAZWRX: the films of Jeff Keen, Queer Pagan Punk: Derek Jarman and This Is Now: Film and Video After Punk, the latter of which is currently touring internationally through LUX. He has written for The Guardian, Sight&Sound and Frieze, appeared on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, and he also contributed chapters to Inside Out: Le Cinéma de Stephen Dwoskin and The Edge is Where the Centre: David Rudkin and Penda’s Fen (which he co-edited). He programmes the monthly BFI strand Essential Experiments and has since 2013 been the co-programmer of Experimenta in the London Film Festival.
About the Miskatonic Institute:
Named for the fictional university in H.P. Lovecraft’s literary mythos, The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies is a non-profit, community-based organization that started in Canada, founded by Kier-La Janisse in March of 2010. The school currently has branches in Montreal and London, with Miskatonic London operating under the co-direction of Kier-La Janisse and Electric Sheep Founder/Editor Virginie Sélavy.
All classes take place at the historic Horse Hospital, the heart of the city’s underground culture. Season ticket is £35 and will be available shortly. Individual class tickets are £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concessions and will be available 30 days in advance of each class.
For full details of the next courses please check the Miskatonic website. For all enquiries, please email Miskatonic.london[at]gmail.com.
