BFI Southbank Programme Notes

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...

December 7, 2022 | IN DREAMS ARE MONSTERS

Transness in Horror

Panellists: Sarah Cleary, Fey Kapur, Sam Moore, and Alison Rumfitt will be in conversation, with Jaye Hudson hosting. Many of the twentieth-century’s most notable depictions of gender-nonconformin...

December 6, 2022 | IN DREAMS ARE MONSTERS

Let the Right One In

According to Mexican maestro Guillermo del Toro, creator of the award-winning Pan’s Labyrinth, it’s ‘a chilling fairytale, as delicate, haunting and poetic a film as you’ll ever see’. For Hollywoo...

December 6, 2022 | IN DREAMS ARE MONSTERS

Happy Valley

+ Q&A with James Norton, Siobhan Finneran, Will Johnston and Jessica Taylor Sally Wainwright’s multi-BAFTA award winning hit Happy Valley features Sarah Lancashire in her iconic role of Sergea...

December 6, 2022 | TV PREVIEWS

Nightwatching

Like Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell, Peter Greenaway is a cinematic adventurist who for several decades wowed the British arthouse with a succession of challenging and deeply idiosyncratic films, onl...

December 3, 2022 | FRAMES OF MIND
THE FILMS OF PETER GREENAWAY

Night of the Eagle

Growing up with a fascination for the macabre, I sat up alone watching every horror film that turned up on late night TV. My education included the Universal horrors of the 1930s and 40s and Jacque...

December 2, 2022 | IN DREAMS ARE MONSTERS

Lynch/Oz

A fascinating, multi-perspective documentary that looks at the influence of The Wizard of Oz on the thoughts and working methodology of David Lynch. From The Alphabet to Twin Peaks: The Return the ...

December 2, 2022 | NEW RELEASES

Haunted Generations - The Lingering Legacy of the Public Information Film

Introduced by author and Fortean Times columnist Bob Fischer Lingering eerily in the imagination of those who grew-up haunted by the warnings of danger and death, public information films occupy a...

December 2, 2022 | FRAMES OF MIND
THE FILMS OF PETER GREENAWAY

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

+ Q&A with directors Peter Baynton and Charlie Mackesy, and producer Cara Speller When Charlie Mackesy published his book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse in October 2019, he started a...

December 2, 2022 | PREVIEWS

Bones and All

‘Whatever you and I got, it’s got to be fed,’ Lee (Timothée Chalamet) tells his lover Maren (Taylor Russell) in Luca Guadagnino’s deliciously dark cannibal road movie, something of a return to the ...

December 2, 2022 | NEW RELEASES

The Uninvited

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The Uninvited was, famously, Hollywood’s first authentic ghost story. It’s a slick, romantic, sometimes even campy potboiler that, i...

December 1, 2022 | IN DREAMS ARE MONSTERS

Mulholland Dr.

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. For all its mood shifts from black wit to sheer terror (Peter Deming’s camerawork creeps around corners and into darkened rooms to d...

December 1, 2022 | OVER THE RAINBOW

Kwaidan

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. From Masaki Kobayashi, best known for his socially conscious dramas (Black River, 1957; The Human Condition, 1959-61) and intense sa...