BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Experimenta Mixtape
Secret Santa Edition

W: Hi everybody, we hope you enjoyed the Experimenta Mixtape Secret Santa edition. Kristina and I have put together a whole load of different material which of course you’ve just seen. So today you...

December 16, 2022 | EXPERIMENTA

Decision to Leave

Decision to Leave begins with the detective Hae-joon investigating the death of a man who fell from a mountaintop. When he meets the deceased man’s wife Seo-rae, he starts to suspect her at the sam...

December 16, 2022 | NEW RELEASES

Dead of Night

+ intro Horror films or stories of the supernatural were little attempted in British cinema prior to the days of Hammer in the 1950s. There are the exceptions of course, such as The Ghoul (1933) a...

December 16, 2022 | SENIORS

The Banshees of Inisherin

The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Cripple of Inishmaan, The Lieutenant of Inishmore… In titling his gritty, west coast Irish dramas, Martin McDonagh certainly has a type. All three aforementioned pl...

December 16, 2022 | NEW RELEASES

Ghosts Christmas Special

We are pleased to welcome the following guests for a Q&A following tonight’s screening: Lolly Adefope, Mathew Baynton, Martha Howe-Douglas, Jim Howick, Laurence Rickard, Charlotte Ritchie, Kiel...

December 15, 2022 | TV PREVIEW

The Babadook

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Post-millennial horror has proven to be particularly accommodating to women directors, from the Soska Sisters, Jen and Sylvia (Dead ...

December 15, 2022 | WOMAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA

Twelve Monkeys

Dangling in mid-air, the bald man works diligently, sifting through clues to a monumental puzzle, piece by piece. Across one wall of a forbidding 21st century archive he has pasted the headlines of...

December 14, 2022 | MEMBER PICKS

Arrebato

A key movie from the movida madrileña, the explosion of countercultural creativity that erupted in Spain in the years following the death of Franco, Iván Zulueta’s second film is a radical, unpredi...

December 14, 2022 | IN DREAMS ARE MONSTERS

This Man Is Mine

+ intro by film historian Carole Sharp This Man Is Mine is based on the hit stage play A Soldier for Christmas which opened in the West End from 3 February 1944 and ran for most of the year. It wa...

December 13, 2022 | PROJECTING THE ARCHIVE

Every Day Except Christmas

+ intro by Patrick Russell, Senior Curator, BFI National Archive A new wave of documentary art and an affectionate appreciation of the hard-working. Tonight we explore Lindsay Anderson’s landmark ...

December 13, 2022 | ART IN THE MAKING

The Muppet Christmas Carol (Relaxed Screening)

+ intro and discussion. Michael Caine plays Ebenezer Scrooge in this Christmas comedy favourite that appeals across the generations. The exuberant Muppets take on Dickens’ characters, offering th...

December 12, 2022 | RELAXED SCREENING

Goltzius and the Pelican Company

+ extended intro by Peter Greenaway (Saturday 10 December screening only) Peter Greenaway, one of the most inventive, ambitious and controversial filmmakers of our time, returns to the cinematic a...

December 10, 2022 | FRAMES OF MIND
THE FILMS OF PETER GREENAWAY

The Incantation of Casanova

As part of our Centenary salute to the BBC, we present this very special screening of a major BBC production that resides in the BFI National Archive. We have remastered sound and visual elements f...

December 9, 2022 | BBC CENTENARY SPECIAL

Peter Greenaway in Conversation

Peter Greenaway’s career as an artist, writer and filmmaker has spanned six decades. Throughout, he has consistently challenged established forms of narrative filmmaking, never compromising, while ...

December 9, 2022 | EVENTS

Black Sunday

The often imaginative and stylistically rich world of Italian horror has been enjoying a critical and popular renaissance in recent years, with several marginalised directors of the 1960s and 70s r...

December 9, 2022 | IN DREAMS ARE MONSTERS

The Shining

+ extended introduction by Lee Unkrich SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away most of the plot. Jack Torrance applies for the job as caretaker at the Overlook Hotel high in the Colorado Ro...

December 8, 2022 | EVENTS

The Lure

Introduced by Dr Catherine Wheatley, Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London Director Agnieszka Smoczyńska on ‘The Lure’ The film’s primary setting is the dance hall in which Silver and ...

December 7, 2022 | IN DREAMS ARE MONSTERS

Eisenstein in Guanajuato

Peter Greenaway on ‘Eisenstein in Guanajuato’ I discovered the films of Eisenstein by accident when I was 17 in 1959 in an East London cinema. My first amazement was Eisenstein’s Strike, made in 1...

December 7, 2022 | FRAMES OF MIND
THE FILMS OF PETER GREENAWAY

Cat People

Everyone agrees that the title came first: Cat People. In March 1942, Russian-born Val Lewton – formerly a pulp novelist, pornographer, publicist, story editor and second-unit producer – left a jo...