BFI Southbank Programme Notes

News from Nowhere

+ intro by Rowan Bain, Principle Curator at William Morris Gallery William Morris, artist, writer and socialist, died in 1896. His doctor said that he had died of simply being William Morris; he h...

January 5, 2023 | ART IN THE MAKING

A One and a Two

Yang’s warm, witty and wise look at how the members of an extended Taiwanese family deal (or not!) with various everyday problems has the scale, depth and attention to detail of a great novel. It s...

January 4, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Madame de...

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Opulence exudes from every frame of this tale of adultery and deception, sparked by the debt-induced sale of earrings in 19th-centur...

January 4, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Jeanne Dielman
23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

It took a reference to Jeanne Dielman in an Enys Men review to make me consider the impact of this film upon my own work. The confrontational camera, the sparse dialogue, the performances devoid of...

January 4, 2023 | MARK JENKIN’S THE CINEMATIC DNA OF ENYS MEN

Ugetsu Monogatari

One of Mizoguchi’s greatest films, Ugetsu Monogatari intertwines two ghost stories into a shiveringly beautiful masterpiece whose pictorial accomplishment (were it not for the fluidity of his camer...

January 3, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Pierrot le Fou

It would be as hard to remake Pierrot le fou as it would be to forget it. Somehow its rueful lovers have to be reconciled to changed times. The film is 44 years old now [at time of writing], which ...

January 3, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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My Neighbour Totoro

Hayao Miyazaki, the co-founder and driving visionary behind Japan’s Studio Ghibli, is renowned for his world-spinning, fecund and furious animated fantasies: across his 11 features he has conjured ...

January 3, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Black Girl

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away the film’s ending Ousmane Sembène (1923-2007), often regarded as the father of African cinema, came to moviemaking late. He was 40 before he released ...

January 3, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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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...

January 3, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Touki Bouki

John Akomfrah on ‘Touki Bouki’ Until I saw Touki Bouki, I hadn’t understood an African Cinema to be political by its very nature, being born out of the process of cultural and post-colonial renewal...

January 2, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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The Stone Tape

This selection is all about Nigel Kneale’s script, which gave birth to the endlessly intriguing stone tape theory, along with the unmistakable work of Desmond Briscoe and the BBC Radiophonic Worksh...

January 2, 2023 | MARK JENKIN’S THE CINEMATIC DNA OF ENYS MEN

Seven Samurai

When Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai premiered in Japan on 26 April 1954, it was the most expensive domestic production ever, costing 125 million Yen (approximately $350,000), almost five times the ...

January 2, 2023 | KUROSAWA

The Red Shoes

5 things to know about ‘The Red Shoes’ 1 It’s a spectacular rejection of realism The Red Shoes, which premiered on 6 September 1948, followed a tremendous run of films by Michael Powell and Emeric ...

January 2, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Once upon a Time in the West

It may not be the definitive western, but it might just be the most western: part parody, part eulogy, part apotheosis, Once upon a Time in the West is every narrative and formal cliché, every gran...

January 2, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Get Out

Thrilling and thought provoking, Get Out takes the concept of meeting-the-parents to horrifying new heights. Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris becomes increasingly aware that the overly accommodating behaviou...

January 2, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Walkabout

When it comes to Nic Roeg’s influence upon my own work, there are probably more obvious choices: the red coat of Don’t Look Now, the fractured identities of Performance, the time slip of The Man Wh...

January 1, 2023 | MARK JENKIN’S THE CINEMATIC DNA OF ENYS MEN

Sunset Blvd.

Gloria Swanson on ‘Sunset Blvd.’ When we started Sunset Blvd. we had only 26 pages of script. [Screenwriter Charles] Brackett and Wilder were determined I should do it. I didn’t want to. Because in...

January 1, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Metropolis

Urban Modernity, Berlin’s ‘Golden 20s’, the Cinematic City: no film evokes these clichés of the past century more vividly than Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s flawed masterpiece from 1926-7. Feeding on it...

January 1, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail

Kurosawa’s final film of the war years (in fact Japan surrendered while it was still being made) is the shortest of all his features. They Who Step on the Tiger’s Tail (1945), running just under an...

January 1, 2023 | KUROSAWA

The Leopard

Against a 19th-century backdrop of radical Italian Nationalism, Visconti’s masterful epic recreates a tumultuous period when the aristocracy lost its grip and the middle classes rose up to form a u...

January 1, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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