Programme Notes

BFI Southbank

Lancelot du Lac

It won’t be to all tastes, but there’s an aesthetic purity to Robert Bresson’s approach that gives Lancelot du Lac a startling, timeless quality. He chooses to shoot only parts of the body, often c...

June 16, 2022 | OF SIN AND SALVATION
THE CINEMA OF ROBERT BRESSON

Earwig

+ Q&A with director Lucile Hadžihalilović There is no straight story coming any time soon from David Lynch’s closest filmmaking heir, Lucile Hadžihalilović. Her new film – her first in English...

June 13, 2022 | PREVIEW

Stranger by the Lake

Imagine Bresson making an explicit gay erotic thriller. Unlikely, but Alain Guiraudie may have had him in mind when making this tale of a man disappointed by his encounters on a cruising beach unt...

June 12, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Swan Song

Director’s Statement Back in 1984, I walked into my small-town gay bar for the first time – The Universal Fruit and Nut Company. There he was, glittering on the dancefloor. Wearing a teal feather ...

June 10, 2022 | NEW RELEASES

Rosetta

I saw Rosetta three weeks ago, and haven’t recovered from it since. In fact, I didn’t see any film since the Dardennes’, except films for work. It moves me to the heart of my heart, this film about...

June 10, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Bergman Island

Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth are ‘Chris’ and ‘Tony’, a couple on a summer retreat to Fårö, the Swedish island home of Ingmar Berman. Both are filmmakers hoping to make progress on their respective scr...

June 10, 2022 | NEW RELEASES

All My Friends Hate Me

Just because you’re paranoid, Joseph Heller noted, doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. This is birthday boy Pete’s own Catch-22: invited by his old university crew to a country mansion celebration,...

June 10, 2022 | NEW RELEASES

Une femme douce

Dostoevsky wrote A Gentle Creature in 1876 (five years before his death) and included it in his Writer’s Journal. He had heard of three suicides, young women who had died within a matter of months....

June 9, 2022 | OF SIN AND SALVATION
THE CINEMA OF ROBERT BRESSON

Wot! No Art

Introduced by BFI National Archive Curator Steve Foxon Christopher Mason’s documentary presents a retrospective of the arts in the immediate post-war years (1945-51), when patronage for ‘public ar...

June 7, 2022 | ART IN THE MAKING

Thief

On paper, Michael Mann’s feature debut Thief is nothing groundbreaking, fit to be consigned to that vague category of ‘neo-noir’. Certainly the basic materials of the plot – the hood looking for a ...

June 7, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Style, Anti-style
and Influence
Robert Bresson Re-assessed

Good evening, and welcome to this event devised to serve as an introduction to our retrospective of the films of Robert Bresson (1933-1999). Though I am the programmer of the BFI Southbank season, ...

June 7, 2022 | OF SIN AND SALVATION
THE CINEMA OF ROBERT BRESSON

Escape from Alcatraz

Who knows whether Don Siegel saw A Man Escaped, but this account of a prisoner’s quietly determined attempts to escape the renowned island penitentiary feels surprisingly Bressonian, partly due to ...

June 6, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The Spirit of the Beehive

In rural Spain under Franco, a small girl watches James Whale’s Frankenstein shortly before encountering a fugitive soldier; the ideas growing in her lively mind stand in contrast to the listless b...

June 5, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

L'Argent

Where L’Herbier’s L’Argent began with the stock exchange, Bresson’s starts from the very opposite end of the financial spectrum: with a schoolboy who gets too little pocket money, whose father is t...

June 5, 2022 | OF SIN AND SALVATION
THE CINEMA OF ROBERT BRESSON

A Man Escaped

The subject is simple. It comes from an escape story by a member of the French secret service called André Devigny. In 1943 he was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo at Lyons. He made an atte...

June 4, 2022 | OF SIN AND SALVATION
THE CINEMA OF ROBERT BRESSON

Au hasard Balthazar

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Contemporary reviews After the impurities and simplifications of Proces de Jeanne d’Arc, Au hasard Balthazar is a welcome return to ...

June 4, 2022 | OF SIN AND SALVATION
THE CINEMA OF ROBERT BRESSON

The Wizard of Oz

What’s it about? Our Judy Garland season provides us with the perfect opportunity to travel with Dorothy, somewhere over the rainbow, from monochrome Kansas to the multi-coloured land of Oz. With t...

June 3, 2022 | BFI FAMILIES

Mouchette

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending. After the manifold splendours of Balthazar, Mouchette seems an altogether thinner experience, exquisite but frail, as though Bresso...

June 3, 2022 | OF SIN AND SALVATION
THE CINEMA OF ROBERT BRESSON

Meet Me in St. Louis

The closer you look at most famous Hollywood productions, the harder it is to see how they turned out all right – let alone to believe that anyone was in charge. Just as on any set the crew trusts ...

June 3, 2022 | JUDY GARLAND - A STAR IS REBORN

The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty

Sent off during a match in Vienna, a German goalkeeper (Arthur Brauss) leaves the stadium, wanders around the city, visits a cinema and ends up committing a wholly unexpected murder… Wenders – a Br...

June 3, 2022 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

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