BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Buck and the Preacher

Among the more successful elements of Jordan Peele’s flawed, ambitious space-cowboy foray Nope (2022) is the film’s intelligent engagement with cinema history and visual culture. A particularly sig...

February 8, 2025 | BLACK RODEO
A HISTORY OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN WESTERN

Les Rendez-vous d'Anna

With Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, her most accessible and ‘commercial’ film to date, Chantal Akerman will presumably reach a much wider public than hitherto (the film was the success of the 1978 Paris F...

February 7, 2025 | CHANTAL AKERMAN
ADVENTURES IN PERCEPTION

Histoires d’Amérique

American Stories is not the first time Chantal Akerman has travelled to New York with her camera. Once again she is in search of an identity, that of a Jew and an immigrant, the universal family hi...

February 4, 2025 | CHANTAL AKERMAN
ADVENTURES IN PERCEPTION

Golden Eighties

Shopping precincts are as good an indication as any of our moral condition. Just as the Passage Choiseul, where in the early years of the century Céline’s anti-hero watched his parents sinking deep...

February 3, 2025 | CHANTAL AKERMAN
ADVENTURES IN PERCEPTION

News from Home

News from Home is a film shot in New York. The images are of New York. The soundtrack is partly composed of letters my mother sent me from Brussels. They’re love letters. My mother was asking when ...

February 2, 2025 | CHANTAL AKERMAN
ADVENTURES IN PERCEPTION

Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000

+ intro by Alfonso Cuáron Intelligent without being cerebral, political without being dogmatic, cloaking its epic view of history in a wealth of burlesque domestic details, Jonah is perhaps the mo...

January 26, 2025 | ALFONSO CUÁRON ON ALAIN TANNER

In the White City

Alain Tanner is an endangered species: a European filmmaker fiercely resistant to the seductions of the Euro co-production in an age when that seems the only alternative to transatlantic funding. T...

January 26, 2025 | ALFONSO CUÁRON ON ALAIN TANNER

The Salamander

A salamander, Alain Tanner tells us during his film, is an attractive but venomous lizard which can go through fire and emerge unscathed. By fire Tanner doesn’t mean passion or catastrophe; rather ...

January 25, 2025 | ALFONSO CUÁRON ON ALAIN TANNER

Gösta Berling’s Saga

+ intro by writer Paul Joyce Some stories lend themselves well to a three-hour running time and the episodic saga is perfect for it. The word saga might imply stodginess but in fact the time speed...

January 19, 2025 | SILENT CINEMA

Sneakers

The many tributes published following Sidney Poitier’s death on 6 January 2022 tended to focus, naturally enough, on the actor/director’s status as a pioneering figure in 20th century American cine...

January 18, 2025 | SIDNEY POITIER
HIS OWN PERSON

Rebel without a Cause

‘It’s a great coming-of-age melodrama with an incredible cast.’ – Luke Hemmings, BFI Member ‘Whatever’s inside making me what I am, it’s like film. Film only works in the dark. Tear it all open an...

January 18, 2025 | MEMBER PICKS

Stir Crazy

On a crisp March morning, some 90 newcomers went into the maximum-security block of the Arizona State Penitentiary. Leading the party the way were Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. They were in the j...

January 17, 2025 | SIDNEY POITIER
HIS OWN PERSON

Ludwig

Shown at the sweeping, epic length Visconti initially intended, and not without some vague parallels to his own life, this stately biopic focuses on the life of wildly eccentric, closeted gay royal...

January 12, 2025 | LUCHINO VISCONTI
DECADENCE AND DECAY

Death in Venice

In this classic depiction of queer desire and mortality, adapted from the novel by Thomas Mann, Visconti captures the aesthetic pleasures and exquisite longing of an ageing intellectual following t...

January 11, 2025 | LUCHINO VISCONTI
DECADENCE AND DECAY

Nightbeat

+ intro by Josephine Botting, BFI Curator Britain’s first blonde bombshell: celebrating the centenary of Christine Norden The story of Christine Norden’s road to fame is a publicist’s dream. Whil...

January 8, 2025 | PROJECTING THE ARCHIVE

From Here to Eternity

It took James Jones 858 pages to tell From Here to Eternity’s story of the US army in the last months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but the film is as lean and powerful as its star Bu...

January 8, 2025 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Videodrome

A contemporary review David Cronenberg’s audacious attempt at conflating medium and message produces more than just the time-honoured confusion of illusion and reality: it actually tests the audien...

January 6, 2025 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

Desperately Seeking Susan

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Although Desperately Seeking Susan has been sold as a Madonna vehicle directed at the teenage market, its success in the US has been...

January 5, 2025 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS

The Leopard

The casting of Burt Lancaster in the title role threatened to poison the production from the very beginning, since Goffredo Lombardo, head of the production company Titanus, had made the decision t...

January 4, 2025 | LUCHINO VISCONTI
DECADENCE AND DECAY

The Wizard of Oz

On 13 October 1938 Production No.1060 on the MGM’s Culver City lot went before the cameras. A full six months later than the moneymen wanted, the film had already notched up the kind of budget MGM ...

January 3, 2025 | BIG SCREEN CLASSICS