BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Nuit et jour

Nuit et jour confirms the themes and ideas that have concerned Chantal Akerman over almost 20 years of filmmaking. Yet, in some ways, it can be seen as a capitulation to commercialism, a turning aw...

February 15, 2025 | CHANTAL AKERMAN
ADVENTURES IN PERCEPTION

Picnic at Hanging Rock

Haunting … it seems that in writing on Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, one cannot help but invoke this at once nebulous, yet appropriate description of the film’s aesthetic and affective force...

February 14, 2025 | RE-RELEASES

Love & Basketball

Director and screenwriter Gina Prince-Bythewood wrote the original screenplay for Love & Basketball while taking a sabbatical from her six years of writing various television series, including ...

February 14, 2025 | VALENTINES DAY

La Folie Almayer

Chantal Akerman’s final narrative film, this hypnotic adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel encountered unusual difficulties finding theatrical release – particularly surprising considering Akerman’s...

February 11, 2025 | CHANTAL AKERMAN
ADVENTURES IN PERCEPTION

Posse

Posse is a saga of the wild and untamed West about a tight-knit bunch of outlaws who ride together and fight together, seizing justice where it is not given and carving out their niche on the Ameri...

February 10, 2025 | BLACK RODEO
A HISTORY OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN WESTERN

Toute une nuit

Toute une nuit is made up entirely of a series of fragments. While apparently unconnected, they are all similar in tone. These amorous comings and goings, some happy, some unhappy, are all marked b...

February 8, 2025 | CHANTAL AKERMAN
ADVENTURES IN PERCEPTION

No Home Movie

No Home Movie, Chantal Akerman’s final film, is both a veering departure from the trajectory of her recent work and completely of a piece with what had come before. Where her last feature, Almayer’...

February 8, 2025 | CHANTAL AKERMAN
ADVENTURES IN PERCEPTION

Buck and the Preacher

Among the more successful elements of Jordan Peele’s flawed, ambitious space-cowboy foray Nope (2022) is the film’s intelligent engagement with cinema history and visual culture. A particularly sig...

February 8, 2025 | BLACK RODEO
A HISTORY OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN WESTERN

Les Rendez-vous d'Anna

With Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, her most accessible and ‘commercial’ film to date, Chantal Akerman will presumably reach a much wider public than hitherto (the film was the success of the 1978 Paris F...

February 7, 2025 | CHANTAL AKERMAN
ADVENTURES IN PERCEPTION

Histoires d’Amérique

American Stories is not the first time Chantal Akerman has travelled to New York with her camera. Once again she is in search of an identity, that of a Jew and an immigrant, the universal family hi...

February 4, 2025 | CHANTAL AKERMAN
ADVENTURES IN PERCEPTION

Golden Eighties

Shopping precincts are as good an indication as any of our moral condition. Just as the Passage Choiseul, where in the early years of the century Céline’s anti-hero watched his parents sinking deep...

February 3, 2025 | CHANTAL AKERMAN
ADVENTURES IN PERCEPTION

News from Home

News from Home is a film shot in New York. The images are of New York. The soundtrack is partly composed of letters my mother sent me from Brussels. They’re love letters. My mother was asking when ...

February 2, 2025 | CHANTAL AKERMAN
ADVENTURES IN PERCEPTION

Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000

+ intro by Alfonso Cuáron Intelligent without being cerebral, political without being dogmatic, cloaking its epic view of history in a wealth of burlesque domestic details, Jonah is perhaps the mo...

January 26, 2025 | ALFONSO CUÁRON ON ALAIN TANNER

In the White City

Alain Tanner is an endangered species: a European filmmaker fiercely resistant to the seductions of the Euro co-production in an age when that seems the only alternative to transatlantic funding. T...

January 26, 2025 | ALFONSO CUÁRON ON ALAIN TANNER

The Salamander

A salamander, Alain Tanner tells us during his film, is an attractive but venomous lizard which can go through fire and emerge unscathed. By fire Tanner doesn’t mean passion or catastrophe; rather ...

January 25, 2025 | ALFONSO CUÁRON ON ALAIN TANNER

Gösta Berling’s Saga

+ intro by writer Paul Joyce Some stories lend themselves well to a three-hour running time and the episodic saga is perfect for it. The word saga might imply stodginess but in fact the time speed...

January 19, 2025 | SILENT CINEMA

Sneakers

The many tributes published following Sidney Poitier’s death on 6 January 2022 tended to focus, naturally enough, on the actor/director’s status as a pioneering figure in 20th century American cine...

January 18, 2025 | SIDNEY POITIER
HIS OWN PERSON

Rebel without a Cause

‘It’s a great coming-of-age melodrama with an incredible cast.’ – Luke Hemmings, BFI Member ‘Whatever’s inside making me what I am, it’s like film. Film only works in the dark. Tear it all open an...

January 18, 2025 | MEMBER PICKS

Stir Crazy

On a crisp March morning, some 90 newcomers went into the maximum-security block of the Arizona State Penitentiary. Leading the party the way were Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. They were in the j...

January 17, 2025 | SIDNEY POITIER
HIS OWN PERSON

Ludwig

Shown at the sweeping, epic length Visconti initially intended, and not without some vague parallels to his own life, this stately biopic focuses on the life of wildly eccentric, closeted gay royal...

January 12, 2025 | LUCHINO VISCONTI
DECADENCE AND DECAY