Programme Notes

BFI Southbank

Under the Tower Trilogy by William Raban

+ William Raban in conversation Foreword to William Raban’s Nautical Twilight. Fifty Years an Artist Filmmaker. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). By William Fowler. (Extract) Beware: once you open it a...

Avanti!

Jack Lemmon plays a Nixonian corporate stiff who travels to an Italian island to retrieve the body of his recently deceased father, only to fall for the daughter of the woman his dad was having an ...

The Hourglass Sanatorium

The Hourglass Sanatorium began life as Sanatorium pod klepsydrą (the film’s Polish title), a 1937 novella by the writer and painter Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) that is so elusive and elliptical that i...

The Only Game in Town

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Perhaps because of its Las Vegas locale, George Stevens’s The Only Game in Town improves as the stakes in its story are raised. Base...

The Liberation of L.B. Jones

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The title of William Wyler’s final film, The Liberation of L.B. Jones, is as ironic as that of his most famous work, The Best Years ...

A Time to Live and a Time to Die

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. A Summer at Grandpa’s, which Hou Hsiao-Hsien made in 1984, is his sunniest picture, a nostalgic recollection of a childhood that was...

Red Line 7000

I was trying to do something, I tried an experiment. I had three good stories about the race track – I used to race, I know it pretty well – but none of them would make a picture, so I thought mayb...

Okja

Bong Joon Ho on ‘Okja’ It was quite strange: three different ideas came together seamlessly. Some 16 or 17 years ago, when I’d finished my first feature, I had the idea for a story about a little ...

Goodbye to the Past

Although Wojciech Has had already featured strong female characters in his films, (notably Maria Wachowiak’s Lidka in 1958’s Farewells), his fourth feature Goodbye to the Past – also known as Parti...

Mother

Bong Joon Ho on ‘Mother’ What was it about mothers and the maternal instinct that you wanted to explore in this film? I always try to look for another side to that which we always praise or worsh...

The Merry Monarch

+ intro by Josephine Botting, BFI Curator SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Contemporary reviews Emil Jannings as a jovial royal buffoon in a fantasy-extravaganza. ...

Cheyenne Autumn

The Iron Horse to Cheyenne Autumn… what a career it is! John Ford’s world is a reincarnation of the pioneer spirit recollected and diffused by time and memory: the coming of the railroads, the insu...

One Room Tenants

While The Noose (1957) was set in the then present and Farewells (1958) in 1939 and 1944, Wojciech Has’s third feature One Room Tenants (also known as Roomers and Roommates) goes back further, to t...

The Host

The Host provides a perfect introduction to several of the key facets of Bong Joon Ho’s filmmaking that wind their way through his entire oeuvre and make the films feel distinctly his. First is his...

Hulk

‘One of the finest superhero films ever made, infused with complexities of comic book mythology, it remains a misunderstood epic that was ahead of its time.’ – Samrat M, BFI Member At first glance...

Farewells

The title of Wojciech Has’s second feature is given in the plural – appropriately, because there are numerous farewells threaded throughout its length. Some farewells are bid between people, others...

Volver

Pedro Almodóvar has let his hair go grey. Though his bushy locks remained suspiciously dark well into his fifties, now ‘the snows of time have silvered his temples.’ This poetic description comes f...

Parasite

Last year at Cannes, Lee Chang-dong held up a magnifying glass to Korean society and unveiled his critique on the one per cent vs the 99 per cent in Burning. Now it’s Bong Joon-ho’s turn. Of course...

The Noose

Although less known internationally than it deserves to be, Wojciech Has’s The Noose (1957) was arguably the strongest feature debut made in Poland between the rebirth of the country’s national ci...

A Hole in the Head

When a popular and distinguished director returns to the commercial cinema after an eight-year absence, one is bound to feel some qualms, especially as his best work belonged to a period far remove...