We have nothing but praise for this year’s edition of Cinema Rediscovered. In the podcast, we discuss the pleasures of seeing Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) and Le Samourai (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967) in beautiful prints on the opening night; the pleasure in seeing restorations with an audience where every time someone responds differently it raises a question one might not have thought of before; thus, a pleasure that begins in the realm of the aesthetic and moves on and combines with the the real of dreams and thoughts.
We talk about the two Edward Yang films screened, A Confucian Confusion (1994) and Mahjong (1996) and praise Ian Wang for doing such a terrific job of introducing the films: interesting, entertaining, succinct and opening up ways of entering the film, a challenge in the age of Wikipedia.
We discuss the Ninon Sevilla cabaretera films, possibly the hit of the festival. There was a fantastic programme of ‘New’ Hollywood films — Out of Their Depth: Corruption Scandal and Lies in the New Hollywood — and we discuss the only two films in the programme that we did manage to see: Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975) and The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973). We hope to catch up with the rest when it tours. The festival offers a great balance tween the more esoteric strands and those appealing to a larger audience. It was wonderful to see The Wizard of Oz (1939) with an audience full of children, some of them dressed up as Dorothy. We also touch on the Jeff Barnaby and Bill Douglas cycles as well as the Sergei Parajanov restorations and other strands of the festival such as the J. Lee Thompson restorations. We will be doing a separate podcast on the Queer Cinema from the Eastern Bloc programme.
There were several revelations in this festival that we discuss in the podcast: The Student Nurses (Stephanie Rothman, 1970) the only woman to direct a film in Hollywood between Ida Lupino and Elaine May; Charles Burnett’s The Annihilation of Fish (1999); Ehsahn Khoshbakht’s beautiful and very personal Cellulloid Underground; and Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s Il Mare (1962), which David Melville Wingrove in his introduction argued had been a formative influence on Jarman as well as Bill Douglas and, we later learned on Tony Richardson as well as Pedro Almodóvar. Quite a queer package.
Lastly, we praise how the festival makes use of the city, the different venues, It’s part of a concerted effort to bring the city into the festival and the festival into the city. The festival seems an incubator for curators, some programming a single film, some a strand. The community feel, the social engagement, the educational component of talks and workshops, a teaching people how to do things, all meshed together to form a very impressive and entertaining festival. Many congratulations to all. Some of the strands will be touring. Oh, and no one used their phones during the screenings. Big Gold Star.
The podcast may also 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
Our Preview of the Festival may be heard here:
Strands of the programme we have previously podcast on written on include:
Bill Douglas Films: The Bill Douglas Trilogy, Comrades
Edward Yang Films: The Terrorizers, Taipei Story, That Day on the Beach, Desire/ Expectations in IN OUR TIME,
Listeners may also be interested in Hal Young’s video essay on Yi Yi: ‘Yi Yi and the Power of long Fixed Shots’.
A short note on THE PARALLAX VIEW
A conversation with Ehsan Khoshbakht
