Programme Notes

BFI Southbank

Distant Voices, Still Lives

Terence Davies makes films in instalments. The 100-minute Trilogy – Children, Madonna and Child, Death and Transfiguration – which was begun in 1976 took eight years to complete. It won the 1984 BF...

Crooklyn

In an article for Sight and Sound, cultural theorist bell hooks famously referred to Crooklyn as a failure of ‘counter-hegemonic representation’. Originally pitched to mainstream audiences as a fam...

Camila

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. A contemporary review Camila gains much of its power from the circumstances of its production. Its story of a tragic love affair be...

The Terence Davies Trilogy

The screening on Tuesday 21 October will be introduced by season curator Ben Roberts In 1977, as new students at the National Film School, the first thing we had to do was watch one another’s fil...

Enamorada

We’re delighted to confirm this screening will be of the BFI Archive’s brand new 35mm print made with funding from the National Lottery and the additional support of donors to our Keep Film on Film...

7th Heaven

The screening at the [2018] BFI London Film Festival of Frank Borzage’s 1927 masterpiece 7th Heaven in a new restoration was cause for rejoicing. But Borzage, who directed movies from 1913 to the e...

Brief Encounter

The 80th Anniversary screening on Sunday 16 November will include a discussion with theatre director Emma Rice, filmmaker Barnaby Thompson and writer Oliver Soden SPOILER WARNING The following not...

The Counsellor

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. As Chekhov famously remarked, ‘If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired...

The Last Duel

A concern for truth lies at the heart of Sir Ridley Scott’s new epic film The Last Duel and it follows a thin red line connecting all his period films from The Duellists (1977) to Robin Hood (2010)...

Missing Believed Wiped
Associated-Rediffusion Special

Studio 5 The opening of Associated-Rediffusion’s Studio 5 was a BIG deal. So big that the opening itself was televised and we were given a guided tour of the studio and a look at the rehearsals for...

Ready Steady Go!

In the early 1960s, as pop music became the vanguard of a newly developing and revolutionary artistic and cultural movement, television producers began to tackle the task of inventing a format to c...

The Ice Storm

With its spare, circular story line, the ability to crystallise so much of what it is about in its visuals, and an exceptional cast delivering the most precise of spoken lines, The Ice Storm is cin...

Captive Cinema

+ intro by Lisa Kerrigan, Senior Curator of Television Shaking up the world of TV documentary, the features department of Associated-Rediffusion was the subject of the first TV season at the Natio...

Drama 3 - The Classics at Associated-Rediffusion

As an original ITV company, in the early years Associated-Rediffusion mined the classical theatre canon for many of its TV dramas. It has left us a fascinating historical legacy, acclaimed 1960s ac...

Matchstick Men

‘People are fascinated with con men like they’re fascinated with mobsters – at least the fictional kind,’ says novelist Eric Garcia, whose manuscript for Matchstick Men was being considered for the...

The Lost World of Children’s Programming

+ intro by Elinor Groom, Curator of Television This programme includes Television for Children, a featurette made exclusively for the NFT, which follows a version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice down the...

Gladiator

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The Encyclopaedia Britannica imperiously dismisses the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius as ‘an historically overrated figur...

Alien

In 1977, a heavily revised script optioned by Twentieth Century-Fox entitled Alien went through the hands of several Hollywood directors. Peter Yates passed on it. Robert Aldrich passed on it. The ...

Black Rain

After discovering the Black Rain screenplay by Craig Bolotin and Warren Lewis, Michael Douglas brought the project to producers Stanley R. Jaffe and Sherry Lansing, who had worked with him on the h...

Bad Education

Two children, Ignacio and Enrique, discover love, cinema and fear in a religious school at the start of the 60s. Father Manolo, the school principal and their literature teacher, is witness to and ...