BFI Southbank Programme Notes

The Cloud-Capped Star

The Cloud-Capped Star iconically represents the angst of the Partition and affective impacts of the resultant refugee crisis on women. In this film, Ritwik Ghatak politicised melodrama to embody th...

December 14, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

The Silences of the Palace

In its new year issue Time magazine listed the ten best movies of 1994. Predictably, Pulp Fiction was at number one. Less predictably, eight of the other nine were made outside the United States, t...

December 13, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Four Nights of a Dreamer

Robert Bresson on ‘Four Nights of a Dreamer’ You first turned to Dostoevsky for A Gentle Creature and returned to him for White Nights , which you called Four Nights of a Dreamer . Why? It was pa...

December 13, 2025 | UK Premiere of 4K Restoration

Boom!

The screening on Monday 8 December will be introduced by Charlotte Frances Burton, Richard Burton’s granddaughter Dubbed ‘The Angel of Death’, Burton’s wandering-poet-cum-gigolo washes up on the i...

December 8, 2025 | Muse of Fire
Richard Burton

The Terminator

Four decades ago, a filmmaker with one previous director credit to his name changed the face of science-fiction movies forever. James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) effortlessly blended the slashe...

December 7, 2025 | James Cameron

Look Back in Anger

A contemporary review Is Richard Burton too old for Jimmy? At the time I found his performance in Look Back in Anger so compelling that I did not question his physical suitability. And there is no ...

December 6, 2025 | Muse of Fire
Richard Burton

At Berkeley

‘Faculty meetings, generally speaking, are just awful. I’ve spent half my life in the United States government in meetings, and the other half in faculty meetings. And I can tell you, faculty meeti...

December 6, 2025 | Frederick Wiseman

Evolution

Lucile Hadzihalilovic on ‘Evolution’ Were you always going to set the film in and out of, or beside, the sea? No. It seems strange but in the beginning it was only the hospital – a hospital in a ...

December 4, 2025 | Lucile Hadzihalilovic

Tea and Sympathy

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away plot details for Tea and Sympathy and Home from the Hill (1960). Filmmakers David Siegel and Scott McGehee on ‘Tea and Sympathy’ Neither of us believe...

December 3, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Pillion

+ intro by Diana Cipriano, BFI Flare Programmer The coupling up of a six-foot-four Swedish sex god with Harry Potter bully boy Dudley Dursley may sound like a lurid work of fan fiction but that is...

December 3, 2025 | Seniors Paid Matinee

Innocence

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. For her debut feature Lucile Hadzihalilovic has produced a film of distinctive aesthetic quality and mystery. Innocence charts a yea...

December 3, 2025 | Lucile Hadzihalilovic

Beyond Camp - The Queer Life and Afterlife of the Hollywood Melodrama

Old Hollywood ‘women’s pictures’ have been a part of queer culture for decades, with stars like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford still reigning as gay icons. Fassbinder, Almodóvar and Haynes have all ...

December 3, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Antonio das Mortes

Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes is surely one of the most astonishing films to come out of Brazil in the 1960s. A well-deserved Palme d’Or winner at Cannes in 1969, it starred Maurício do Valle ...

November 29, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Disgraced Monuments + 23rd August 2008

+ discussion with directors Laura Mulvey, Mark Lewis and Faysal Abdullah Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’ essay film Statues Also Die (1953) infamously opens with the pronouncement: ‘When people di...

November 27, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Mephisto

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. It is helpful to know the historical background of Mephisto, and then perhaps as helpful to forget it. Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto a...

November 26, 2025 | Restored

Le Vent d’est

The cinema cannot show the truth, or reveal it, because the truth is not out there in the real world, waiting to be photographed. What the cinema can do is produce meanings, and meanings can only b...

November 24, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Madonna of the Seven Moons

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Contemporary critics almost universally derided Madonna of the Seven Moons for its ridiculous plot, crude melodramatics and ‘purple ...

November 23, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

The Bridegroom, the Actress and the Pimp + The Woman’s Film

Jean-Marie Straub describes The Bridegroom, the Actress and the Pimp as ‘the most aleatory of my films, and the most political’. The element of randomness or chance in its genesis is well documente...

November 22, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Benediction

Benediction explores the turbulent life of First World War poet, Siegfried Sassoon, through the eyes of the revered filmmaker Terence Davies. Sassoon was a complex man who survived the horrors of f...

November 22, 2025 | Love, Sex, Religion, Death
The Complete Films of Terence Davies

The Bad Sister

The screening on Saturday 22 November will be introduced by Laura Mulvey The Bad Sister has its origins in a 1978 novel of the same name by Emma Tennant (1937-2017), a writer preoccupied by ‘goth...