Summer Festivals: In this show Alex Fitch interviews a trio of independent film directors whose latest movies have premiered at recent festivals. Presenting their films at the London Sundance Film Festival, Miguel Arteta talks about his film Beatriz at Dinner, a drama about class conflict and environmentalism featuring John Lithgow and Salma Hayek, while Michael Almereyda discusses his elegiac science-fiction movie Marjorie Prime, adapted from the play of the same name and starring Lois Smith and Tim Robbins. Plus, with translation by Jason Yu, Korean director Bong Joon-Ho talks about his latest film Okja, which proved controversial when it screened at Cannes in May, and features Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal in an uproarious tale of GM food.
The Electric Sheep Film Show is broadcast every third Wednesday of the month, 5.30-6.30pm at Resonance FM 104.4. Next date: Wednesday 19 July 2017.
This show was first broadcast on Wednesday 21 June 2017.
Director Matt Harlock (American: The Bill Hicks Story) and controversial comic artist Steve Martin have just made available their latest film Ink, Cocks & Rock’n’Roll online. In the 15-minute documentary Martin is being interviewed about his artistic alter ego – the perverted monster that is Krent Able. But where does Krent stop and Steve start…and just who is in control?
The documentary coincides with the launch of a Kickstarter campaign to support their next project Deep Clean. You can donate to the campaign on www.kickstarter.com.
In this month’s show we’re looking at poisonous plants and post apocalyptic cannibalism, with two ‘revenge of nature’ film Q&As recorded at this year’s SCI-FI-LONDON film festival. Alex Fitch talks to director Sasha Louis Vukovic about his Canadian period drama Flora, which depicts an expedition by 1920s botanists into uncharted territory, only to find their new environment is completely toxic and they’ve run out of food. Also, guest presenter and host of the Arthur C Clarke Awards, Tom Hunter discusses the film adaptation of acclaimed British zombie drama The Girl with all the Gifts and its print prequel The Boy on the Bridge with author Mike Carey.
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The Electric Sheep Film Show is broadcast every third Wednesday of the month, 5.30-6.30pm at Resonance FM 104.4. Next date: Wednesday 21 June 2017.
This show was first broadcast on Wednesday 17 May 2017.
The 70th anniversary editoion of the Cannes Film Festival promises to be as intriguing, fun and unpredictable as ever.
Opening on Wednesday 17 May with Arnaud Desplechin’s latest offering Ismael’s Ghosts, the Competition line-up continues to follow the slighter darker, more adventurous direction introduced last year, this time including exciting new films such as Sofia Coppola‘s The Beguiled, Todd Haynes‘ Wonderstruck, the Safdie brothers’ Good Time, and Snowpiercer-director Bong Joon-ho‘s Okja.
Yorgos Lanthimos follows up his acclaimed The Lobster with The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a Kubrickian version of a modern Greek tragedy starring Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman, while Michael Haneke has teamed up again with Isabelle Huppert for his latest offering Happy End . We also very much look forward to Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless, Fatih Akin’s thriller In the Fade and You Were Never Really Here, the new film by Lynne Ramsay, which sees Joaquin Phoenix’s killer protagonist plunging deep into conspiracy and crisis.
In comparison, this year’s Un Certain Regard strand looks somewhat pale at first sight. However, the two titles that stand out are Before We Vanish by veteran director Kiyoshi Kurosawa as well as Wind River, the directorial debut by Sicario and Hell or High Water writer Taylor Sheridan. Also worth checking out seems Western by German director Valeska Grisebach, who worked as a writer on last year’s Cannes favourite Toni Erdmann.
Out of Competition titles include Takashi Miike’s Blade of the Immortal and the new film by Hedwig and the Angry Inch director John Cameron Mitchell, How to Talk to Girls at Parties, while the Midnight Screenings strand seems to offer equally intriguing fare with Jung Byung-Gil’s The Villainess and Byun Sung-Hyun’s The Merciless. Plus, this year two episode’s of David Lynch’s upcoming season of Twin Peaks and two episodes of Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake will be screened, despite the fact that there is usually little television on show at Cannes.
As always, one must also take note of the usually excellent Directors’ Fortnight strand, which this year opens with Claire Denis‘ Un Beau Soleil Interieur, starring Juliette Binoche. However, the slate also includes new films from Abel Ferrara (Alive in France) and Sean Baker (The Florida Project), as well as Sundance frontrunner Patti Cake$ by Geremy Jasper, which serves as the closing film.
Pamela Jahn
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Check out the full Official Selection line-up below.
Competition
Loveless – Andrey Zvyagintsev Good Time – Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie You Were Never Really Here – Lynne Ramsay A Gentle Creature – Sergei Loznitsa Jupiter’s Moon – Kornél Mundruczó L’Amant Double – François Ozon The Killing of a Sacred Deer – Yorgos Lanthimos Radiance – Naomi Kawase The Day After – Hong Sang-soo Le Redoutable – Michel Hazanavicius Wonderstruck – Todd Haynes Rodin – Jacques Doillon Happy End – Michael Haneke The Beguiled – Sofia Coppola 120 Battements Par Minute – Robin Campillo Okja – Bong Joon-ho In the Fade – Fatih Akin The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) – Noah Baumbach
Un Certain Regard
Barbara – Mathieu Amalric The Desert Bride – Cecilia Atan and Valeria Pivato Closeness – Kantemir Balagov Beauty and the Dogs – Kaouther Ben Hania L’Atelier – Laurent Cantet Lucky – Sergio Castellitto April’s Daughter – Michel Franco Western – Valeska Grisebach Directions – Stephan Komandarev Out – Gyorgy Kristof Before We Vanish – Kiyoshi Kurosawa The Nature of Time – Karim Moussaoui Dregs – Mohammad Rasoulof Juene Femme – Léonor Serraille Wind River – Taylor Sheridan After the War – Annarita Zambrano
For more information on the full line-up, visit the Cannes website.
Since the first descriptions of bizarre ceremonies witnessed by the French colonial historian Moreau de Saint-Méry, Haitian Vodou has been characterized by most European and American commentators as a deplorable and dangerous African atavism that, if allowed to flourish, could eventually corrupt and destroy the economic and social order of the New World. Such omens were spectacularly affirmed by the Haitian Revolution of 1791, which, according to legend, was triggered by a Vodou ceremony in which a blood-sacrifice was offered to the ‘demon gods’, and the slaves, in a state of trance-like possession, butchered their white masters in a ‘racial holocaust’. Since then Haiti has held a special place in colonial imaginings of all that is macabre, sinister and maniacally savage, a land of irredeemable barbarism and ‘Voodoo Terror’.
This class will trace a history of such representations, discussing how they continue to shape xenophobic and neo-colonial imaginings of Haiti as a country mired in superstition and incapable of enlightened self-governance, and the importance of the zombie figure for these ‘chimerical optics’.
About the instructors:
John Cussans
John Cussans is an artist, writer and researcher based in London. Since 2009 he has been involved with the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, often working with the Haitian video collective Tele Geto. He is the author of Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie-Complex (Strange Attractor).
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.
In this episode we’re looking at the work of four independent filmmakers whose work celebrates eclectic personalities and mixes genres to beguiling effect: First, Alex Fitch talks to husband and wife directing team Jörg Tittel and Alex Helfrecht about their dystopian debut film The White King, starring Jonathan Pryce and Agyness Deyn, and to Nicolas Pesce about the influences on his monochrome thriller The Eyes of my Mother, from Béla Tarr to Tobe Hooper. Also, in a Q&A recorded at Chichester Cinema, Film Festival programmer Roger Gibson interviews Robert Mullen about his exploration of R.D. Laing’s anti-establishment psychiatric facility Kingsley Hall in Mad to be Normal.
The Electric Sheep Film Show is broadcast every third Wednesday of the month, 5.30-6.30pm at Resonance FM 104.4. Next date: Wednesday 17 May 2017.
This show was first broadcast on Wednesday 19 April 2017.
Dead by 37, openly bi-sexual, constantly controversial: Rainer Werner Fassbinder was arguably post-war Germany’s greatest filmmaker. Now the BFI celebrates the maverick director with a major retrospective. Here’s the line-up announcement:
Running from Monday 27 March – Wednesday 31 May, BFI Southbank’s major Fassbinder retrospective will celebrate the constantly controversial and fearless filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, arguably post-war Germany’s greatest director. This extensive retrospective will feature most of the great auteur’s huge body of work, from gangster movies to melodramas, social satires to queer dramas. Fassbinder is perhaps one of the most prolific filmmakers of the 20th century; his first 10 features were astonishingly made in less than two years, and he went on to make another 30 by the time he died young at 37. A fearless artist who knew no taboos, Fassbinder combined scathing social criticism with profound psychological insight.
The season kicked off last month with a special screening of Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) and an introductory talk Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Wunderkind, Iconoclast, Star by Martin Brady (King’s College London, GSSN), followed by the re-release of Fear Eats the Soul (1973) on Friday 31 March. Playing on extended run during the season, this was Fassbinder’s international breakthrough. A bold reworking of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Fear Eats the Soul is an unconventional love story which combines lucid social analysis with devastating emotional power; arguably Fassbinder’s best loved film, it is still, 40 years on, burningly relevant.
Forthcoming highlights in April and May include a Fassbinderian Politics Study Day and The Bitter Tears of Fassbinder’s Women: A Symposium. There is also a Fassbinder collection available on BFI Player+ from 31 March, comprised of 10 of his best-loved films including Fear Eats the Soul (1973), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) and Fox and His Friends (1974). BFI and Arrow Films, who will be distributing the re-release of Fear Eats the Soul, have also worked together to make a number of the films available across the UK in new DCPs.
An insatiable film addict from early childhood, Fassbinder drew inspiration from the French New Wave and, later, from the Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk and others. Running alongside the season, the BFI’s regular Big Screen Classics series will showcase some of these films; Fassbinder’s Favourites will include Sirk melodramas All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959), pioneering French New Wave films Vivre sa vie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962) and Le Signe du lion (Eric Rohmer, 1962), as well as Hollywood classics such as All About Eve (Joseph L Mankiewicz, 1950) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953). The series will also continue in May with further titles Fassbinder has cited as influential to him.
Study Day: Fassbinderian Politics
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films – whether about rebellious housewives, gay hustlers, or communist terrorists – are all deeply political. But he was a contradictory and provocative artist who defied categorisation. At this study day we’ll attempt to reveal what Fassbinder really stood for. Through thoughtful presentations and engaging discussion, we’ll examine his preoccupation with marginal figures (and intersectional solidarity among them), re-evaluate his provocative representations of LGBT characters, and consider how his forensic analysis of class exploitation contrasts with his critique of left-wing institutions. Join us to discover a radical filmmaker whose complex politics have profound relevance today.
Tickets £6.50 Sat 22 April 12:00-15:30 NFT3
Fassbinder: Television Pioneer
From ambitious series like Berlin Alexanderplatz to TV-movie melodramas, Fassbinder embraced television as a medium and a platform. In this talk, film scholar Mattias Frey (University of Kent) explores how Fassbinder exploited TV’s artistic potential, how the funding it offered made his career possible (he would surely be making Netflix series today), and how he seized upon TV as a way of communicating provocative ideas to a
mass audience, in their own homes.
Tickets £6 Tue 2 May 20:30 Library
The Bitter Tears of Fassbinder’s Women: A Symposium
TRT 210min
Stories of female desire, pain, and resilience are at the heart of Fassbinder’s films. The glamorous divas, heartbroken cleaners, rebellious housewives, and transsexual sex workers that populate his cinematic world were forged in the heat of vital (and sometimes turbulent) creative collaborations with female actors who would return again and again to work with him. Join us at this essential symposium to explore Fassbinder’s
complex creative and personal entanglements with key female actor-collaborators (such as Hanna Schygulla, Margit Carstensen, Brigitte Mira and Irm Hermann), and the mixture of cruelty, fascination and empathy he showed for his vital and compelling female characters. Sat 13 May 12:00-15:30 NFT3
Philosophical Screens: Repression and Release in Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette
TRT 70min
In the latest in our popular series exploring cinema through a philosophical lens, we consider Fassbinder’s spiky, provocative critique of German bourgeois values. Chinese Roulette depicts a savage world riven with infidelity and loathing, where people cruelly goad each other into revealing their deepest secret thoughts and desires – but what truths does Fassbinder unearth? Join film philosophers William Brown, John Ó Maoilearca and Catherine Wheatley as we explore how Fassbinder gives expression to the darkest chambers of the German soul via his repressed characters and their relation to space, objects and each other.
Free to ticket-holders of Chinese Roulette on Wed 10 May (but must be booked via the box office due to limited capacity), otherwise £6
Wed 10 May 20:00 Blue Room
BFI Course: The Many Faces of Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Martin Brady and Erica Carter (King’s College London, GSSN) will co-ordinate guest speakers and present sessions themselves in this eight-week course to accompany our Fassbinder retrospective. Illustrated discussions and lectures will take a closer look at Fassbinder’s obsession with Hollywood genres, the stars he cast and the West German context from which his films emerged – from student revolts, through queer
culture to terrorism! Beginners and experts welcome.
Course fee £96, concs £80 *No session on Thu 18 May Every Thu* from 13 April – 8 June 18:30-20:30 Studio
Full listings and booking details for all the films included in the Fassbinder season as well as ‘Big Screen Classics: Fassbinder’s Favourits’ can be found on the BFI website.
Often considered the bastard step-child of the theatrical motion picture, TV movies have long been relegated to the dusty corners of our childhood memories. However, despite its scorned status, telefilms could be thoughtful and, at times, subversive. And, in this compact, mass marketed form, the TV movie reached millions of viewers, generated discussion, and aided in the development of our collective consciousness.
Some of the dismissive tone of critics may come from the fact that made for TV films look surprisingly superficial, relying heavily on B movie film techniques to produce and market themselves. Using tawdry titles such Satan’s School for Girls (1973) or salacious taglines like, ‘He’s found the perfect prey… A young defenseless human’ (Savages, 1974), telefilms sought to grab audiences by any means necessary. And, it was this desire to entertain and win Nielsen rating points that allowed the medium to cross over into a wide spectrum of sub-genres, tackling everything from the supernatural to the very real terrors of everyday life. This lecture offers an exploration into several facets of the made for television movie, surveying its cultural touchstones and analyzing the influence the telefilm had on Americans during the run of the network made for television movie produced between 1964 – 1999.
This class will be taught by visiting TV scholar Amanda Reyes, along with Jennifer Wallis and Miskatonic founder Kier-La Janisse, who both contributed to her new book Are You in the House Alone? A TV Movie Compendium 1964-1999 from Headpress, who will have copies available for sale at the event.
About the instructors:
Amanda Reyes
Archivist by day, film lover by night, Amanda Reyes is also a freelance author who has been published online and in print. She recently edited Are You in the House Alone? A TV Movie Compendium: 1964-1999 (Headpress, 2017) which celebrates the made for television film, and expands upon her TV movie-centric blog, Made for TV Mayhem and its companion podcast.
Jennifer Wallis
Jennifer Wallis is Lecturer in Cultural and Intellectual History at Queen Mary University of London where she teaches modules on the history of psychiatry, Victorian values and controversies, and the history of the supernatural. She also writes on film and music and has contributed to several volumes in recent years including Are You in the House Alone? (2016) and Gathering of the Tribe: Music and Heavy Conscious Creation (2013). She is the editor of Fight Your Own War: Power Electronics and Noise Culture (Headpress, 2016).
Kier-La Janisse
Kier-La Janisse is a film writer and programmer, the founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies and Owner/Editor-in-Chief of Spectacular Optical. She has been a programmer for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas, co-founded Montreal microcinema Blue Sunshine, founded the CineMuerte Horror Film Festival in Vancouver (1999-2005) and was the subject of the documentary Celluloid Horror (2005). She has written for Filmmaker, Shindig!, Incite: Journal of Experimental Media, Rue Morgue and Fangoria magazines, has contributed to The Scarecrow Movie Guide (Sasquatch Books, 2004) and Destroy All Movies!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film (Fantagraphics, 2011), and is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (FAB Press, 2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (FAB Press, 2012). She recently co-edited and published the anthology booksKid Power! (Spectacular Optical, 2014) and Satanic Panic: Pop Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (Spectacular Optical, 2015). She is currently working on A Song From the Heart Beats the Devil Every Time, about children’s programming from 1965-1985.
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.
The Canadian micro-publisher Spectacular Optical is pleased to announce a new book focused on the career of French fantasy and horror filmmaker Jean Rollin, Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin, penned by all women critics, scholars and film historians. Set to be released in the summer of 2017, this collection of essays covers the wide range of Rollin’s career from 1968’s Le viol du vampire through his 2010 swansong, Le masque de la méduse, touching upon his horror, fantasy, crime and sex films—including many lesser seen titles. The book closely examines Rollin’s core themes: his focus on overwhelmingly female protagonists, his use of horror genre and exploitation tropes, his reinterpretations of the fairy tale and fantastique, the influence of crime serials, Gothic literature and the occult, as well as much more.
Lost Girls is the third book in Spectacular Optical’s ongoing series of limited run film and pop culture books, which includes Kid Power! (2014) and Satanic Panic: Pop Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015) and will precede the previously announced Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror in Film and Television, which will be released in fall of 2017.
Curated and edited by Samm Deighan (Diabolique), contributors to Lost Girls include some of the most important critical voices to emerge over the last decade of genre journalism: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (Senses of Cinema), Kat Ellinger (Diabolique), Virginie Sélavy (Electric Sheep), Alison Nastasi (Satanic Panic: Pop Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s), Marcelline Block (Art Decades), Rebecca Booth (Diabolique), Michelle Alexander (Cinemadrome), Lisa Cunningham (The Laughing Dead: The Horror-Comedy Film From Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland), Heather Drain (Dangerous Minds), Erin Miskell (That’s Not Current), Gianna D’Emilio (Diabolique)—and more to be confirmed.
More details, including cover art, full table of contents, and information about the book’s forthcoming crowdfunding campaign will be announced in April 2017.
About Spectacular Optical:
Owned and operated by film writer and programmer Kier-La Janisse (House of Psychotic Women) with managing editor Paul Corupe (Canuxploitation.com), Spectacular Optical is a Canadian indie press that specialises in film and pop culture books, in addition to featuring articles, essays and interviews on the Spectacular Optical website on a year-round basis. www.spectacularoptical.ca
Women-In-Horror Special: In this film show editor Virginie Sélavy talks to Nicole McControversy, director of the Boston Underground Film Festival, Kat Ellinger, editor in chief of horror magazine Diabolique, and Brazilian-born actress and producer Marcia do Vales.
The Electric Sheep Film Show is broadcast every third Wednesday of the month, 5.30-6.30pm at Resonance FM 104.4. Next date: Wednesday 19 April 2017.
This show was first broadcast on Wednesday 15 March 2017.
Summer Festivals: In this show Alex Fitch interviews a trio of independent film directors whose latest movies have premiered at recent festivals. Presenting their films at the London Sundance Film Festival, Miguel Arteta talks about his film Beatriz at Dinner, a drama about class conflict and environmentalism featuring John Lithgow and Salma Hayek, while Michael Almereyda discusses his elegiac science-fiction movie Marjorie Prime, adapted from the play of the same name and starring Lois Smith and Tim Robbins. Plus, with translation by Jason Yu, Korean director Bong Joon-Ho talks about his latest film Okja, which proved controversial when it screened at Cannes in May, and features Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal in an uproarious tale of GM food. 
