All posts by NotesonFilm1

About NotesonFilm1

Spanish Canadian working in the UK. Former film journalist. Lecturer in Film Studies. Podcast with Michael Glass on cinema at https://eavesdroppingatthemovies.com/ and also a series of conversations with artists and intellectuals on their work at https://josearroyoinconversationwith.com/

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 451 – Friendship

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We talk adult male friendships, stress and surreality in our discussion of Friendship, in which oddball everyman Tim Robinson finds himself enamoured with effortlessly cool new neighbour Paul Rudd, but lacks any of the social nous to naturally bond with him. The film gets huge laughs from meaningful subject matter, a far cry from our experience with The Naked Gun. Its tone is idiosyncratic and its observations on human nature ring true in their exaggerated way, and Robinson is a fascinating and hilarious presence on the cinema screen. Friendship won’t be for everyone, but we highly recommend it.

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Thinking Aloud About Film: Maskerade (Willi Forst, 1934)

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The MASKS AND MUSIC: THE FILMS OF WILLI FORST strand of last year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato, curated by Lukas Foerster, was so popular that I was unable to see any of them. Richard is more organised and came out raving about two: MASQUERADE/ MASKERADE (1934) and TOMFOOLERY/ ALLOTRIA, (1936). Luckily for us The Internet Archive has a very good copy of Maskerade which enabled us to see it (or in Richard’s case, to see it again). In the podcast below we talk about the film in relation to the Wiener Genre, Authorship, Anton Walbrook’s career (he is here billed as Adolf Walbrook), the difficulties of dealing with works from authoritarian regimes, how it was the most popular film of its year in the German-speaking world. More specifically we discuss the rhythms of the opening scene, Anton Walbrook’s introduction, the narrative invention of the narration of the publication of the muff drawing, the mise-en-scéne, the influence of vaudeville and the film’s intent on pleasing. We relate the film to Lubitsch’s work and comment on how a particular shot of a camera seeming to float through a window  might have influenced Minnelli (in Meet Me in St. Louis) and, according to Mark Fuller, Powell & Pressburger (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp). All this and much more may be listened to in the podcast below:

The podcast may be listened to below:

he podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

The Film may be seen through the Internet Archive here:

https://archive.org/details/maskerade-1934

Richard recommends the following SENSES OF CINEMA article on Willi Forst https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2006/great-directors/forst/

 

The book we mention on Anton Walbrook is:

Maskerade won the award for best screenplay at the Venice Film Festival and was remade as a vehicle for William Powell and Louise Rainer in Hollywood as ESCAPADE (Robert Z. Leonard, 1935)

José Arroyo

José Arroyo in Conversation with Cinema Mentiré on Maria Luisa Bemberg

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I was lucky enough to see Maria Luisa Bemberg’s SEÑORA DE NADIE (NOBODY’S WIFE, 1982)and YO, LA PEOR DE TODAS (I, THE WORST OF ALL, 1990) at this year’s CINEMA REDISCOVERED in Bristol, in gorgeous prints, with an  appreciative and enthusiastic audience. I’m a long-time fan of Bemberg’s but I’d never had the opportunity to see  SEÑORA DE NADIE and I’d never seen YO LA PEOR DE TODAS in such a beautiful version.

 

The films surprised and delighted. But what I was most taken with was the effervescence, energy and brilliance of Amina Ferley Yael and Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha who introduced the two films. They along with Marta Calderon Quiñones are Cinema Mentiré. This podcast is the result of my wanting to know more about Cinema Mentiré, who they are, what they do; and also, of my wanting to publicise the re-circulation of such marvellous films by a legendary female filmmaker in new restorations (which films? What are they about? What are they like? Why are they worth seeing now?), and with new subtitles undertaken by Cinema Mentiré themselves.

Cinema Mentiré was founded in 2023 by Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha, Amina Farley Yael, and Marta Calderon Quiñones with the mission to redress the relative low circulation of Latin American Films in the UK. In the podcast they talk about how even when the films they screen are decades old, they are often still UK premieres. The name  of their group was inspired by  Colombian filmmaker Luis Ospina. Latin American cinema is often associated with the solemn, the serious, the tragic. They wanted to bring out the more playful side, inherent in the title of their group. If for Godard ‘Photography is truth; cinema is truth 24 times a second’; For Ospina cinema is ‘de mentiras’, the way Godard’s phrase is misremembered as ‘cinema is lies 24 frames a second’,  a fiction, a web of inventions and lies that could convey deeper truths, often accompanied by a skewy, questioning stance that acts as a pinprick to pomposity.

It is with this this purpose and spirit of fun that Cinema Mentiré is now providing some of the key works of a Maria Luisa Bemberg, a seminal Latin American filmmaker,  working with an equally seminal female producer, Lita Stantic, on the wings of second-wave feminism , producing works in a popular vein that continue to move, engage, surprise. A lesbian scholar sitting next to me at the screening of YO, LA PEOR DE TODAS turned to me after the screening and said ‘I can’t believe I’d never heard of this filmmaker or this film until now.’ We talk about all of this and more in  podcast below:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

All the details on Cinema Mentiré may be found on their home page here: https://www.cinemamentire.co.uk/

 

Their programme of screenings of Maria Luisa Bemberg films may be found here: https://www.cinemamentire.co.uk/daring-to-dare-the-films-of-maria-luisa-bemberg

 

Books on Bemberg:

 

Books by Lita Stantic:

On Luis Ospina and Cinema Cali:

Cine Club de Cali

Agarrando Pueblo/ The Vampires of Poverty (Luis Ospina/ Carlos Mayolo, Columbia,1977)

200 – Luis Ospina on MUBI – The Vampires of Poverty, A Paper Tiger, and It All Started at the End

José Arroyo

 

 

José Arroyo in Conversation with Ryan Gilbey on IT USED TO BE WITCHES: UNDER THE SPELL OF QUEER CINEMA

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Sometimes you read a new book and love it so much you want to speak to its author and find out more. This is what happened to me in relation to Ryan Gilbey’s IT USED TO BE WITCHES: UNDER THE SPELL OF QUEER CINEMA. What I liked most is that I learned a lot from it – all these new films and filmmakers I’d never heard of – and that it was great fun to read: Ryan’s got an enviable turn of phrase. If the narrative is posited as a process of discovery, the book also has an interesting mode of narration: it’s partly personal, sometimes he writes of himself in the third person in a way that reminds me of Èdouard Louis’ novels . This has the effect of delineating events whilst also questioning them and his own perspective on them. It’s a book that interrogates its own mappings, with a loose structure that seems to flow from one filmmaker to another, very inclusive, sensitive to the nuances of race and gender and with a spotlight on trans cinema; with a British perspective but on world –rather than Anglo-American – cinema; and with the big names (Almodóvar, Haynes, Van Sant), not quite absent but playing a supporting role to filmmakers like: Jenni Olson, Jessica Dunn Rovinelli, Elizabeth Purchell, Campbell X, Isabel Sandoval and others. I think it a landmark book, one of interest not only to those wanting to know more about, cinema and/or ‘queer’ but also by anyone interested in the current cultural landscape. It seems to succeed in doing what I previously thought undoable, which is to get enough of a grip on the increasing and seemingly ceaseless stream of new queer works in order to lay out a a constantly changing field of cinema whilst offering multiple, tentative, questioning perspectives on it. A landmark book by a wonderful writer. We discuss all of this and more in the podcast below:

The podcast may also be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

Ryan Gilbey was named the Independent/ Sight and Sound Young Film Critic of the Year in 1993, won a Press Gazette award for his reviews at the New Statesman, where he was film critic from 2006 until 2023, and he has written for the Guardian since 2002. His books on cinema include:

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 450 – The Naked Gun (2025)

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The Naked Gun is rebooted with Liam Neeson in the part that was once Leslie Nielsen’s, and he shows just how hard comedy can be. We discuss everything the film gets wrong. If only they’d asked us for help.

 

Listen on the players below Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

Thinking Aloud About Cinema: Absolute Beginners (Julien Temple, 1986)

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A discovery at Cinema Rediscovered. Julien Temple’s marvellous ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS. When the film was first released we both thought it extraordinary but a mess; we still feel the same except the focus is now on the extraordinary. In the accompanying podcast we discuss the film’s relationship to the classic Hollywood musical and to the cinema of Powell and Pressburger. Richard compares it to Colin MacInnes’ novel. We discuss the film’s critical reception and speculate on where all the bile came from. We talk about the opening number in some detail as well as  Ray Davies’ marvellous ‘Quiet Life’, Bowie’s ‘That’s Motivation’, Sade’s ‘Killer Blow’ and much else. The film now seems to us audacious, endlessly inventive, dazzling to look at. It’s no surprise both Janet and Michael Jackson were fans. We also speak of the experience of watching it at Cinema Rediscovered and how Temple himself and producer Stephen Woolley enhanced our experience and understanding of the film. It was an emotion-filled screening; it’s a film that continues to be appreciated and enjoyed forty after its first release; it’s a film that will last long after much of the cinema of that period. It’s a film that deserves to be rediscovered.

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

Richard recommends the following links:

Interview with Temple about that from the time, talking about his love for old Hollywood musicals

 

Nightclub scene from “Sapphire” (1959) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNxVPm6hFl4

Nightclub scene from Beat Girl (1959) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhr-zPTP250

Front Row with Temple and Woolley interviewed on Absolute Beginners (28 minutes in) https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002g37j

These are some images (from a very bad copy) that captured Jose’s attention enough to grab them. Worth thinking about what they reveal about the film’s visual inventiveness:

 

 

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 449 – Bring Her Back

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YouTubers-turned-directors Danny and Michael Philippou demonstrate a real eye for visual design and an ability to create imagery to truly disgusting effect in Bring Her Back, in which Sally Hawkins plays a foster parent whose daughter’s death leads her to search for answers in the occult. The filmmaker twins are 32 years old, which, perhaps unfairly, leads us to ascribe the film’s lack of depth and prioritisation of visual shock to their youth. Bring Her Back shows a certain immaturity, but great potential, and we’re interested to see if the pair’s storytelling and sensitivity to theme improves.

We also discuss child actors in horror, as the film drives Mike to question the ethics of using children as Jonah Wren Phillips is here, both in terms of the desired effect on the audience and the potential unintended effect on the child. Not all unease is good unease, and Bring Her Back makes us ask: what cost is too high for such entertainment?

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

THINKING ALOUD ABOUT CINEMA: CINEMA REDISCOVERED 2025 WRAP-UP

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If a week ago we podcast on what we were looking forward to at the CINEMA REDISCOVERED festival, this is the bookend reflecting on what we actually saw. We are once again full of praise for the organisers, the friendliness of the staff at the Watershed, the originality and diversity of the programme, the community aspect, the educational component and the way that it trains young people up to programme and curate and then gives them an opportunity to exercise those skills.

Emotional highlights included a reunion of Stephen Frears, Hanif Kureishi and Gordon Warnecke at the MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE screening and Stephen Woolley and Julian Temple getting back together to reminisce about Palace Pictures and ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS, which we liked so much we plan a separate podcast on it.

We appreciated the mini programs scheduled on single days (Carlos Saura, Maria Luisa Bemberg, Anna Mae Wong) and the longer ones (the AGAINST THE GRAIN: 1980s BRITISH CINEMA, MASUMURA x WAKAO). It was fantastic to be able to see some films at the BRISTOL MEGASCREEN (THE FALL OF OTRAR, DIVA, THE BEAST TO DIE, MANJI). We talk at some length on individual films as well (ROSA LA ROSE, FILLE PUBLIQUE; THEMROC, DESERT HEARTS, ONE POTATO TWO POTATO and others. In such a full program, there are also films we both missed, such as the great HANDSWORTH SONGS.

We praise the way Sheldon Hall designed his talk on films on Channel 4 for this particular audience, including broadcast dates on every film at the festival and under which strand; for Stephen Horne’s fantastic, multi-instrument accompaniment to the Anna Mae Wong programme; and the care in curating the introductions to the films, with most speakers understanding that the intro is not about them or their interests but about enhancing the audience’s experience and appreciation.

The festival left us wishing for a fuller programme the last evening but being left wishing for more is not a bad thing.

 

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 448 – Jurassic World Rebirth

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The seventh instalment in the Jurassic Park (now Jurassic World) series, Jurassic World Rebirth might be the first of the sequels to really come close to capturing the kind of wonder, excitement and horror that the 1993 original offered. That might be in part because it cribs liberally from it, with both moments and entire sequences closely evocative of their 32-year-old counterparts. But there’s plenty else that’s new here, and Rebirth is a characterful expansion to the Jurassic Park story.

Thoughts of containment have finally been totally discarded – dinosaurs have now been roaming the Earth for some time, to the point that they’re dying out everywhere other than a narrow band around the equator, which is illegal for human travel. So that’s where we’re headed, of course, as a pharmecutical exec seeking to make a fortune from dino-sourced drugs hires a team of mercenaries to extract blood from three creatures: one that swims, one that walks, and one that flies. It’s a decent structure that tells you what to expect and allows for a variety of settings and action, into which are placed such charismatic stars as Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey and Rupert Friend. Director Gareth Edwards builds the world beautifully, exploiting it for that sense of scale that so defines his aesthetic, and reminding Mike in particular of his feature debut Monsters; and although in simple terms – this is, ultimately, a blockbuster sequel – the film has a moral message worth expressing.

Jurassic World Rebirth is easily the best of the Jurassic sequels and equally easy to recommend. Just try not to focus too much on how it reminds you of a better film from 1993.

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

 

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 447 – Superman (2025)

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DC, which for the best part of two decades has failed to put together a cinematic universe of comic book adaptations to rival Marvel’s MCU, regroups and goes again with director James Gunn in charge of what will be known as the DCU – and what better superhero to introduce the new brand than the original: Superman.

David Corenswet’s performance and physique are extremely appealing, recalling an era before steroids and dehydration were considered compulsory in order for a man to be thought of as sexy. We appreciate the film’s lightness of tone and sense of humour, although one of us argues that the whole experience is so audiovisually hyperactive and loud that the tone doesn’t support all the jokes, and it’s simply exhausting to endure. We also discuss wokeness, the right wing’s determination to have a culture war, and obvious parallels between Lex Luthor’s villainy and that of Donald Trump; destruction of cities and the concomitant human cost; what made the previous Lex Luthor interesting; and why putting on glasses is an effective method of disguise.

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

José Arroyo In Conversation with Sam Shahid, director of HIDDEN MASTERS: THE LEGACY OF GEORGE PLATT LYNES

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George Platt Lynes is arguably the most significant artist in a long and distinguished line of great 20th Century queer photographers of the male nude which includes George Hoyningen-Huene, Horst P. Horst, Clifford Coffin, Robert Mapplethorpe and Bruce Weber. All in some sense worked in the interstices of fashion, portraiture, art photography and the nude. Yet, though Platt Lynes is at least their equal, he is arguably the least well known, a situation Sam Shahid aims to rectify in his gorgeous new film, HIDDEN MASTERS: THE LEGACY OF GEORGE PLATT LYNES.

Sam Shahid is Creator Director, Principal and president of Shaid/Kraus & Company, a full branding, advertising and design agency founded inn 1993. Before that he was Creative Director of in-house advertising for Calvin Klein in the 1980s, did work for Abercrombie and Fitch in the 90s that still inspires today (some of the catalogues have become much sought-after collectors’ items). In the aughts he worked as Creative Director of INTERVIEW magazine and he’s since edited dozens of books of photographs by the likes of Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts. He knows about images, and he puts that knowledge to use in his first film,  the beautiful HIDDEN MASTERS: THE LEGACY OF GEORGE PLATT LYNES.

In the accompanying podcast, we talk about how Platt Lynes was at the centre of practically every current of modernism in America and how Sam found the only existent film footage of the photographer. We ask why Platt Lynes is relatively so little-known today.  Is it because his greatest work is of the male nude? Is there homophobia involved? Sam talks about how difficult it was to get a hold of the photographs, tensions between controllers of major holdings and the family; the reticence of institutions and individuals to make public such an incredible body of work that feels so contemporary. Isn’t it time that a major museum undertake a retrospective of George Platt Lynes’ work?

What Sam doesn’t say is what a ravishing film he’s made, full of some of the most beautiful black and white images of men ever made. A film to see. It’s currently on release from Picadillo Pics and available on demand from Amazon and other major digital outlets.

 

The podcast may be listened to here:

 

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

Those of you who are interested in knowing more on George Platt Lynes might be interested in the following links:

On the biography by Alan Ellenzweig’s biography. Ellenzweig is featured in the film:

On Platt Lynes’ famous thrupple with Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Westcott as well as their circle (Paul Cadmus, Pavel Tchelitchev, Jared French, George Tooker ): David Leddick’s INTIMATE COMPANIONS: A TRIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE PLATT LYNES, PAUL CADMUS, LINCOLN KIRSTEIN AND THEIR CIRCLE

On his connection to American Modernism: The Young and the Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930-1955, edited by Jarrett Earnest, David Zwirner Books, 2020

 

 

The film may be seen through Peccadillo films at: https://peccadillo.film/pages/films/hidden-master-the-legacy-of-george-platt-lynes

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 446 – F1

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Hollywood collaborates with the FIA, the motorsport governing body, to try to convince us that Formula One is not, in fact, televised Microsoft Excel, but actually very exciting indeed. To this end, it brings in accomplished genre action director Joseph Kosinski, star Brad Pitt, and every cliché under the sun. And it’s great fun.

There’s hardly anything realistic about this story of a sixtysomething has-been given an unexpected shot at glory in racing’s most prestigious competition, despite the extraordinary effort that’s been made to evoke the world of F1, including shooting during real races and race events, with real drivers filling the scenes and even the real commentary team of Crofty and Brundle talking us through the action. The ironic curse of such detail is that the audience most attuned to recognising it is precisely that which will take issue with the film’s inaccuracies; José, on the other hand, doesn’t know F1 from a hole in the ground, and has no such problem.

We discuss the incredibly intense action and praise the cinematography that captures it; Pitt’s perfect fit for the role of a veteran driver who once had promise, made a series of mistakes, but nonetheless carries himself with a casual, appealing ease; whether the film is a corporate biopic, a term Mike is pretty sure he invented and is desperate to catch on; how you can’t call yourself an artist when you’re just selling a product; and whether Kosinski can make a film that depicts complex human interactions.

F1 is far from a great film, but it pretends to be nothing other than what it is: a deeply derivative, expensively made, fabulously shot and entertaining advert for Formula One. It’s easy to recommend. See it!

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

José Arroyo in Conversation with Daniel Bird on THE FALL OF OTRAR (Ardak Amirkulov, 1991)

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My choice for must-see film of this year’s Cinema Rediscovered is Ardak Amirkulov’s THE FALL OF OTRAR (USSR, 1991), which will have its UK Premiere in Bristol’s old IMAX cinema, now called the Bristol Megascreen, on Sat 26th of July. As Daniel Bird says in the podcast, ‘it’s a once in a lifetime occasion’. I wanted to talk to Daniel about the film because he knows more about it than anyone I know, because he speaks so articulately and with such an expansive frame of reference, and because he’s the one who proposed the restoration to Cecilia Cenciarelli, one of the four artistic directors of Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato and part of The World Cinema Project, whose goal is to restore great film from around the world. Such as this one.

 

 

THE FALL OF OTRAR is an epic set in the 13th Century where an obedient servant of the state Undzhu (Dokhdurbek Kydyraliyev) is persecuted for telling Kaiyrkahn (Tungyshpai Zhamankulov), his ruler, what he doesn’t want to hear, which is that Otrar is soon to be invaded by Genghis Khan. The film is an extraordinary aesthetic experience, a film of great style, structured in two halves, with the last part depicting the siege of Otrar and battles sequences that clearly use Kurosawa’s KAGEMUSHA (1980) as a reference point whilst transforming before our eyes into something else altogether. The film has crane shots that rival Leone’s, poetic compositions that recall John Ford’s, and a selective use of sepia and colour that recall some of the masters of the late Soviet era. A beautiful film that feels epic and yet very intimate as well.

 

In the accompanying podcast Daniel tells me of THE FALL OF OTRAR’s fascinating production history (it was part of a national search for ‘new blood’ from the ‘regions’; it began filming just as the Soviet Union was unravelling, it started off as Amirkulov’s graduation project, it is now one of the key works of Kazahkstan cinema); his own involvement with the project; how the film can be seen as the result of a Russian influence in the dramaturgy and an East Asian, particularly Japanese, influence in the visual aesthetic. We talk too of the film’s initial distribution at home and in New York, Martin Scorsese’s involvement, and how this new release is demonstrating how the film is also one that speaks to our times, and the various ways it does so. There are digressions (Russian Formalism, Deleuze and Guattari’s A THOUSAND PLATEAUS: CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA, showing vs telling in cinema….and much more. It can be listened to below:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

The trailer for the film may be seen here:

José Arroyo

Incompresso (Luigi Comencini, 1966).

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A beautiful film about childhood, quite restrained in its telling but very successful as a tearjerker. The film begins with the British Consul in Florence (Anthony Quayle) at his wife’s deathbed deciding how he’s going to tell the news to his children. He decides on telling the oldest, Andrew, who he feels can handle it, but not the youngest, Miles, who is not yet in school and, in his view, more sensitive, like his mother. This decision results in structural miscommunication in this otherwise loving family to the point that Andrew, who dearly loves his father, gets so little attention that he begins to feel unwanted. According to Michel Ciment in one of the extras, the film was damned at Cannes for being too popular. Ciment offers an interesting critique of film critics arguing that they devote too much time to theme and too little to mise-en-scene. He argues that opera is melodrama and critics of opera would never think of restricting their critique to the libretto, yet how film critics often damn melodrama without dealing seriously with the direction, which Ciment finds to be perfect in INCOMPRESSO, as do I. Milo, the younger son is depicted with all the freedom from restraint that Tootie is in MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, just as sharp and equally capable of wickedness. The absent mother is figured regularly through the house the family inhabit, absent, but with constant reminders through décor, paintings, forgotten messages, and a much-valued recording of her reading Eliot’s THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK. The first scene had me welling, and in spite of all the humour in the film, I remained that way until the end, when the floodgates opened. David Cairns has an excellent video essay on the depiction of Childhood in Comencini films, A CHILD’S HEART. The film is based on a Victorian novel by Florence Montgomery published in 1869. It was remade in Hollywood as MISUNDERSTOOD (Jerry Schatzberg, 1983) with Gene Hackman in the Quayle part.

José Arroyo

THE SUNDAY WOMAN/ La donna della Domenica (Luigi Comencini, 1975)

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A mystery with a comical bent set in Turin’s high society based on a best-selling novel by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini. A man is killed with a giant dildo. Inspector Santamaria (Marcello Mastrioanni), polite, middle-aged, Roman, with a structured life which includes having sex on Sundays with women he doesn’t care to have stay until Monday, is the detective. Jacqueline Bisset, at the peak of her beauty here and very glamorous plays Anna Carla Dosio, so uppity she’s turned in by her servants, and is the first suspect. Her best friend is super-rich closet-case Massimo Campi (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Richard Dyer does a wonderful intro where he remarks that whilst there’s nothing to mark Campi out as gay, that’s not quite the case with his lower-class lover Lello (Aldo Regianni), and had he seen the film when it came out he would have found that depiction homophobic, whereas now, in the context of greater representation, he finds the characteristics attributed to Lello – a homebody who likes exotic vacations, a dress sense that is on the too-much spectrum of elegance, his relative ‘effeminacy’, loving, loyal, rather hysterical,  living his follie d’amour in a frenzy that sometimes embodies his boyfriend – endearing. In the end, the case is not about art or sex but, even in Turin’s high society, crude cash. There’s an interesting twist too in that Mastrioanni becomes Bisset’s Sunday Man whilst she continues to reap all the benefits of being married to her rich industrialist husband. Lovely film, that adds to my appreciation of  Comencini’s work with actors and control of tone . Radiance has produced a lovely disc of it which I see many friends have worked on.

Jose Arroyo

THE IRON PREFECT/ IL PREFETTO DI FERRO (PASQUALE SQUITIERI, 1977)i

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A popular and political film based on a real person, Claudio Mori, who was sent by Mussolini to Palermo in 1925 to eradicate the Mafia. Mori, humourless, systematic, efficient and ruthless begins to smoke them out; first the peasants, then the landowners followed by the churchmen, bourgeois and aristocrats. But it’s no use, at the end all his troubles have been for nothing because all the money leads to the Fascist Party and the State. His goal had been to make people respect the law by making citizens fear the state as much as they fear the Mafia. In the end, they do but only because the State is already the Mafia.

A gripping film with no particular visual razzmatazz but with an eye for both scale and intimacy and a superb Ennio Morricone score. Giuliano Gemma is good in a role meant for his idol, Burt Lancaster. The presence of Claudia Cardinale, second-billed in a tiny role that would seem worthless of her if she didn’t represent ‘the people’ (and have ‘the people’ ever been more beautifully represented?), was a complete mystery to me — why would such a big star take this small and far from challenging role?  — until I learned she was Squitieri’s partner at this time. The extras on the Radiance disc are excellent and I learned from Alex Cox’s intro that Giuliano Gemma was so popular in Japan he had a range of motorcycles and scooters named after him by Suzuki.

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: Cinema Rediscovered 2025 Preview

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Richard and I are once more excited about the prospect of Cinema Rediscovered, which begins next week on the 23rd and runs right to the 27th at the Watershed in Bristol. This year’s is a beautifully balanced programme with directors (Carlos Saura, Maria Luisa Bemberg, Stephanie Rothman, Yasuzō Masumura) and stars (Anna Me Wong) ripe for rediscovery; but also featuring key exemplars of queer cinema (MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDERETTE, DESERT HEARTS, THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION; ostensibly the first film to feature queer representation in India, BADNAM BASTI (NEIGHBOURHOOD OF ILL REPUTE); black cinema (HANDSWORTH SONGS, THE KILLER OF SHEEP), feminist exploitation cinema (THE WORKING GIRLS, THE VELVET VAMPIRE); key works from classic directors (Sam Fuller’s THE HOUSE OF BAMBOO, John Ford’s YOUNG MR. LINCOLN; a whole strand of 1980s British Cinema (from ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS to A ZED AND TWO NOUGHTS),  newly restored masterpieces (THE FALL OF OTRAR, YEELEN); and a smattering of films from practically every hemisphere. A great program, which includes not only films but workshops, talks, introductions; for Cinema Rediscovered is not only about seeing films in the best possible conditions but also about learning about cinema from filmmakers, curators, programmers, critics, academics and other practitioners.

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

One of the lunchtime talks will be A BRIEF HISTORY OF FILM ON CHANNEL 4 with Sheldon Hall. I interviewed Sheldon Hall on his book on films on his book ARMCHAIR CINEMA: FEATURE FILMS ON BRITISH TELEVISION, 1929-1981 here:

In the accompanying podcast Richard and I go through the programme day by day and highlight those  films we have already seen at Ritrovatto or elsewhere and can recommend. These include:

Jose Arroyo

 

A MAN ON HIS KNEES / UN UOMO IN GINOCCHIO (Damiano Damiani, 1979).

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Like a Warners 30s Gangster Film. Giuliano Gemma is former car thief now gone straight. He’s out of jail, running a street stall and doing well for his family, when a place he delivers coffee to becomes the site of a mafia hit. A coffee cup carelessly left there implicates him and puts him on a mafia hit list. The film is all about how society dictates what a man should be and the impossibility of living up to it. The hero loses everything, is forced on his knees to kiss the mafia don’s ring in public, all so he could get back what had been robbed from him but with the addition of now being at the Mafia’s beck and call. But the hitman hired to off him (Michele Placido) is in no better position: the sole breadwinner of a rural family taking lives because he has no other way of maintaining his own.  How to get out of this one? Will he get out this one? An exciting male melodrama, visually inventive with long takes, hand-held camera, and film noir lighting, shot on the streets of Palermo, where a man constantly tries to do right by his family even as the society that requires that from him prevents him from doing so. Interesting too in that the mafia is here seeing exploiting poor people, pitting them against each other, extracting everything possible from the already poor and desperate. A film to see.

 

Jose Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: DELITTO D’AMORE (Luigi Comencini, 1974).

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DELITTO D’AMORE (Luigi Comencini, 1974), also known as CRIME OF LOVE or SOMEWHERE BEYOND LOVE in English, is along with VOLTATI EUGENIO (1980), my favourite of the Comencini films shown at this year’s Ritrovato in Bologna.

Two factory workers fall in love. He’s from a family of Anarchists from the North. She’s an immigrant from South. They both live with their families but she’s a woman so all her movements are monitored. They split up because she needs to be married in a Church whilst he can only consider City Hall. Factories spewing smoke is a constant background to the development of their romance.

In the accompanying podcast Richard and I discuss: how it is a MARXIST romance in which two factory workers fall in love even as the factory spews poison all over them (one of the titles considered for the film was LOVE AND POISON); how rare it is for a political film to deploy such a delicate tone, a mixture of humour/romance/enchantment; the relative rarity of having working class workers depicted so lovingly and glamorously (by Guliano Gemma and Stefania Sandrelli).

The film’s been compared to LOVE STORY (Arthur Hiller, 1970) and also ALI, FEAR EATS THE SOUL (Fassbinder, 1974). We bring up Visconti’s ROCCO E I SUOI FRATELLI (1960). None of the comparisons convey the humour, the romance, the enchantment that this very political film evokes. We hope we do in the podcast that follows:

The podcast may also be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

Many thanks to David Cairns for his help with this. He’s done a wonderful video essay on children in Comencini films called A CHILD’S HEART, that  may be found in the Radiance’s disc of Comencini’s INCOMPRESSO.  The article from SENSES OF CINEMA on the film that Richard refers to, The Aesthetics and Politics of Melodrama, Reconsidered: Delitto d’amore/ Crime of Love by Thomas Austin, may be found here.

José Arroyo

Thinking Aloud About Film: Ritrovato Round-Up 2025 with Pamela Hutchinson

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For this year’s Ritrovato Round-Up we are joined by the witty, incisive and all-around fabulous Pamela Hutchinson, editor of the Silent London website, author of two marvellous BFI Classic monographs (The Red Shoes, Pandora’s Box), producer of the Weekly Film Bulletin for Sight and Sound and one of the jurors for Ritrovato’s DVD Awards since 2018.

In the discussion that follows we touch on all the strands of the festival, praise Cecilia Cenciarelli for her programming, Mariann Lewinsky for her illuminating introductions and Ehsan Khoshbakht for his superb programme notes on Lewis Milestone. We touch on the Willi Forst and Nordic Noir programmes, so popular José couldn’t get into any of them. We have a lively debate on Molly Haskell’s Hepburn programme, agree on our love of Naruse, discuss how Comencini’s Delitto de amore  highlights issues of class and made us want to see more Comencini films and delight in the early cinema and silent cinema strands. Sumitra Peries’ Gehenu Lamai (The Girls) is a film we all adored. We touch on memorable experiences, such as watching Coline Serrau introduce Trois hommes et un couffin at the Piazza Maggiore, or the incredible response to Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, the impact of Silvana Mangano in Bitter Rice, the intensity of the colour in Duel in the Sun, or the spontaneous applause for Shirley MacLaine in Artists and Models.

All this and much more can be listened to in the podcast below:

The podcast may also be listened to here (above):

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

If you can’t get enough of Pam discussing Hepburn, she goes into much greater depth here for the BBC 4’s History’s Heroes series: Katharine Hepburn: Queen of the Screen

The Laczic sisters have also done a wonderful podcast on the festival here:

 

José Arroyo