BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Never Apologize
A Personal Visit with
Lindsay Anderson

No actor was more associated with Anderson than Malcolm McDowell, the ‘Mick Travis’ of the director’s great trilogy, and friend through thick and thin. In this filmed one-man stage performance, fir...

May 24, 2024 | O DREAMLAND!
LINDSAY ANDERSON’S DARK BRITISH CINEMA

La chimera

At one point in Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera, Josh O’Connor’s brooding English grave-robber grips a makeshift divining rod with both hands and slowly, reverently, walks through the local Tuscan wo...

May 24, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

Stand Up! Stand Up!

Momma Don’t Allow In March 1954, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson submitted a proposal to the BFI Experimental Film Fund for a short documentary. At the time, Reisz was working for the BFI as progra...

May 23, 2024 | O DREAMLAND!
LINDSAY ANDERSON’S DARK BRITISH CINEMA

Lindsay Anderson vs
the Short Films Industry

+ intro by Patrick Russell, Senior Curator of Non-fiction, BFI National Archive Anderson spent some time toiling in Britain’s sponsored shorts industry. This screening explores the intriguing rela...

May 23, 2024 | O DREAMLAND!
LINDSAY ANDERSON’S DARK BRITISH CINEMA

The Magic Flute

Originally produced for television, Ingmar Bergman’s rendering of Mozart’s beloved opera is a cinematic spectacle. The film blurs the boundaries of theatre, between audience and stage, as Tamino ...

May 20, 2024 | RELAXED SCREENING

Chi-Raq

In more than three decades as a filmmaker, Spike Lee has tackled topics as far-ranging as college fraternities, jazz music, the Son of Sam murder spree and influential Black nationalist Malcolm X, ...

May 20, 2024 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Billy Connolly - Big Banana Feet

Murray Grigor on ‘Big Banana Feet’ Billy Connolly was already the talk of the town in the late 60s with his wry, outrageous re-enactments of the Crucifixion, complete with such heresies as Christ b...

May 20, 2024 | EVENTS

The Vagabond Queen

+ intro by BFI curator Bryony Dixon Before we had the universes of Star Wars, DC, Marvel etc, there was the fantasy land of Ruritania, a make-believe central-European kingdom in which princesses w...

May 19, 2024 | SILENT CINEMA

Germany Year Zero

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. ‘The city was deserted, the grey of the sky seemed to run in the streets and, from the height of a man, you could look out over all...

May 19, 2024 | CHASING THE REAL
ITALIAN NEOREALISM

Bicycle Thieves

A contemporary review Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, like Rossellini’s Paisà, came to London with a fabulous reputation to live up to, and, in a way, to live down. To Paisà, a film made in a s...

May 19, 2024 | CHASING THE REAL
ITALIAN NEOREALISM

You've Got Mail

You’ve Got Mail began with executive producer Julie Durk, who, after watching the classic film The Shop around the Corner, thought it would be a great movie to remake. She brought it to the attenti...

May 18, 2024 | MEMBER PICKS

Rome, Open City

‘The overwhelming experience of 1945 was Rome, Open City,’ wrote influential film critic David Shipman in his book Cinema: The First Hundred Years, ‘it made every movie made until then seem old-fas...

May 17, 2024 | RE-RELEASES

Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry

After I Am Truly a Drop of Sun on Earth (2017) and Wet Sand (2021), it’s no surprise that the title of Elene Naveriani’s third feature makes poetry of natural imagery. If Ingmar Bergman hadn’t got ...

May 17, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

Shoeshine

The screening of Shoeshine on Tuesday 14 May will be introduced by season curator Giulia Saccogna. In the devastation of post-war Rome, two street kids shine shoes to escape starvation. Dreaming t...

May 14, 2024 | CHASING THE REAL
ITALIAN NEOREALISM

La Règle du jeu

‘For us there was only one French director, and that was Jean Renoir’, said Claude Chabrol, while François Truffaut called Renoir ‘the greatest filmmaker in the world’. New Wave directors, as criti...

May 13, 2024 | MEMBER MONDAYS

Mulholland Dr.

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. For all its mood shifts from black wit to sheer terror (Peter Deming’s camerawork creeps around corners and into darkened rooms to d...

May 13, 2024 | MEMBER MONDAYS

Cinema Is Evil
Welcome to the World of Legendary, Queer Occult Filmmaker Kenneth Anger

Kenneth Anger, who died on 11 May 2023 in Yucca Valley, California, produced a body of work unique in cinema. His films never brought him a mass audience, even though they are as beautiful and tech...

May 11, 2024 | EXPERIMENTA

Bushman

+ intro with Journey Mercies director Tomisin Adepeju David Schickele’s 1971 film Bushman begins in enigmatic fashion. We’re greeted by sounds of a dog barking, trees swaying in the wind, melodiou...

May 11, 2024 | AFRICAN ODYSSEYS

Made in England
The Films of Powell and Pressburger

No filmography is an island, but the peak works of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger so tower over British cinema that they might constitute a loftier realm. For some years, too, they were shro...

May 10, 2024 | NEW RELEASES

Hoard

A visceral, pungent and playfully macabre coming-of-age story, Hoard plays nimbly with both meanings implied by its title – hoarding as madness, a hoard as treasure. When eight-year-old outsider Ma...