BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Tropical Malady

Tropical Malady was the title under which the artist and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2004 feature was distributed in the UK and elsewhere. Its original Thai title, Sud Pralad, in fact mea...

January 7, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Spirited Away

Spirited Away sets its intimations of mortality, the decline of a culture and the loss of nature against one of the most sumptuous and dazzling mises en scène ever created in cinema – in the bathho...

January 7, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Histoire(s) du cinéma

A contemporary review Almost twenty years ago, Godard stated what we can now see as a first draft of Histoire(s) du cinéma. His so-called ‘Introduction to a veritable history of cinema and televisi...

January 7, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Empire of Light

Academy Award® winner Sam Mendes (1917, Revolutionary Road, Road to Perdition, Jarhead, American Beauty) writes and directs Empire of Light: ‘For most people, their most formative period is their t...

January 7, 2023 | PREVIEW

Blue Velvet

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Contemporary reviews In terms of David Lynch’s work, Blue Velvet marks a huge leap forward, almost magically establishing him as the...

January 7, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Symptoms

Despite being full of visual clichés and horror tropes, this feels entirely unique; it must be down to the command Larraz has over the medium, crafting a haunting and unnerving descent into madness...

January 6, 2023 | MARK JENKIN’S THE CINEMATIC DNA OF ENYS MEN

The Shining

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away most of the plot. A contemporary review Jack Torrance applies for the job as caretaker at the Overlook Hotel high in the Colorado Rockies during the w...

January 6, 2023 | SIGHT AND SOUND GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME 2022
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Rashomon

Unreliable narration is taken to a new level in this landmark film, one of Akira Kurosawa’s finest, which introduced post-war Japanese cinema to international audiences. A murder takes place in a ...

January 6, 2023 | RE-RELEASES

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