Centenary screening of Grass (1925) with live music by Payman Yazdanian

Grass

Screening at Kings Place, London, on May 11, 2025. Book here.

Grass (1925), one of the canonical greats of the silent era by the directorial team of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack—today mostly remembered for their iconic sound-era cult film King Kong—is a documentary on the heroic annual migration of the nomadic Bakhtiari tribes of Iran. It is an epic film about people who live epic lives. The restless filmmakers identify with the people they follow, transforming their journey into some of the grandest vistas of silent cinema ever captured on film.

British Postwar Cinema: Five Personal Favourites

The Passionate Friends

Five personal favourites from the upcoming British Postwar Cinema 1945-1960 retrospective at Locarno.

The Passionate Friends (David Lean, 1949)

Lean was a painter with his camera even before he could open up his canvas to the widescreen glory of deserts and icy steppes. He was already a painter in this ravishing melodrama, with Ann Todd at its center. Her mature bitterness and the film’s rich visual details (plus a narrative link to Switzerland) make it essential viewing. This is a restored version from a few years ago.

​Understanding the Dark Edge: British Postwar Cinema at Locarno – A Conversation

(c) Locarno International Film Festival

A conversation with Locarno’s Christopher Small about my new curatorial project for the festival's 2025 retrospective, Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945-1960. A slightly different edit of the conversation can be accessed here on Locarno’s website.

Locarno: Was there a single film that catalysed the idea for this retrospective in your mind?

Ehsan Khoshbakht: A Diary for Timothy (1945) by Humphrey Jennings. It is a remarkable film made during the final stages of World War II, with the knowledge that the war would soon end. The film then asks, 'What next?' It shows a child being born and poses the question: What will happen to this child? How can we make the world a better place for Timothy? I immediately thought of doing a retrospective to explore what happened to that child, following his life and the lives of the people around him.

Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945-1960 | Variety Interview

"August’s Locarno Film Festival will go British with its latest retrospective: Great Expectations: British Post-War Cinema, 1945-1960. 

The retrospective forms a major strand of the film festival’s programming and for many festival goers is a standout and popular attraction. Boasting fresh restorations and rare screenings of difficult to get prints, past seasons have been devoted to filmmakers such as Douglas Sirk or studios such as last year’s retrospective, The Lady with the Torch, which celebrated the centenary of Columbia Pictures. 

Great Expectations: British Post-War Cinema, 1945-1960 is organized by the Locarno Film Festival in partnership with the BFI National Archive and the Cinémathèque Suisse, with the support of Studiocanal. The film curator responsible for the last program, Ehsan Khoshbakht, returns this year with Great Expectations. He spoke exclusively with Variety about the lineup and the rules dictating his selection."

READ THE INTERVIEW HERE

Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh, 1932)

Written for Sight & Sound, December 2023. – EK

If Raoul Walsh's action films are imbued with poetry, his comedies are charged with anarchy. A prime example of the latter is Me and My Gal, a pre-Code delight in which a New York cop (Spencer Tracy) fights both to bring order to the waterfront and win over a blonde (Joan Bennett). It's a madcap, riotous affair with a contempt for the rich - a proletarian air runs through its deep focus cinematography (easily lost on the eye, if not viewed on 35mm). Walsh turns vulgar jokes into unassuming art and mocks the world. It is as much about the joy of cinema as it is about the artistry of it.

Demetrius and the Gladiators (Delmer Daves, 1954)

A very Scope film

Note on Demetrius and the Gladiators, in the occasion of the new restoration of the film premiered at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024. It was restored in 4K by The Walt Disney Studios and The Film Foundation in collaboration with Academy Film Archive at Cineric and Audio Mechanics laboratories from the 35mm original negative, a 35mm interpositive and a 35mm internegative. – EK

The trials and tribunals of Demetrius (Victor Mature), from a freed slave to the protector of the robe of Jesus, to gladiatorship and the illicit relationship with Claudius’s wife, Messalina (Susan Hayward). Straying away in a life of debauchery, Demetrius is reawakened to Christian values thanks to Peter the Fisherman while there is a good dose of lust, blood and tiger-fighting in between. This Bible pulp (“I never thought of Jesus being so tall”) culminates in the assassination of Caligula and a return to reason after Claudius becomes the new Caesar. Sequel to the first CinemaScope film The Robe (1953), this is the 1950s “muscular Christianity” that the late Terence Davies, who saw this film when he was nine, described as “dazzling and profane” and belonging to a time when God was in every cinema, “like a drug." Muscular indeed as Mature fights three tigers at once and profane as the film’s campy theology takes him to sermon a lascivious Hayward lying down in her designer dress.

How to Make Use of Leisure Time: Painting – A Film NOT by Abbas Kiarostami

How to Make Use of Leisure Time: Painting (1977), a short educational documentary widely credited to and distributed as a film by Abbas Kiarostami, has nothing to do with him. He is not the director of this film.

Currently, MK2, which holds the international rights to the Kiarostami catalogue owned by Kanoon, rents this film as a Kiarostami work. Who first misattributed it, and why—whether intentionally or by mistake—is unclear. But here’s my guess:

Lewis Milestone Retrospective at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2025

Milestone (left) on the set of Rain with Joan Crawford

Lewis Milestone: Of Wars and Men

A milestone of visual flair and virtuosity in American cinema, the career of Lewis Milestone – a Russian Jewish émigré – bridged silent cinema and the 70mm spectacles of the 1960s. Renowned for having one of the most distinctive and eclectic styles of his generation, his popular and dazzlingly original work ranged from the anti-war magnum opus All Quiet on the Western Front to the popular-front musical Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!. As dense, dark, and daunting as his films could get, they were often laced with wit, camaraderie, and bravery amid mass atrocities. Yet, he barely survived the Hollywood blacklist, which forced him to drift into mediocre assignments. This programme, covering his silent films up until the blacklist, features new restorations and archive prints, aiming to recover the artistry of a man who fought many battles of humanity in the 20th century with a sense of wisdom and poetry that can still shake us.

Merrily We Go to Hell (Dorothy Arzner, 1932)

Originally titled Jerry and Joan during production, this charming and exquisitely directed pre-code melodrama was later renamed to the slightly controversial Merrily We Go to Hell. The film features Sylvia Sidney as a wealthy woman who marries a journalist (brilliantly portrayed by Fredric March), only to struggle with her husband’s alcoholism and his unexpected reunion with an old flame. Typical of its studio of production, Paramount, and reflective of some of the bolder pre-code films, the marriage—which quickly deteriorates—is depicted in an open, sophisticated manner, set against the backdrop of lavish art deco sets.

Ebrahim Golestan and the Restoration of Iran’s Cinematic Heritage [A free evening of film and discussion at V&A]

Ebrahim Golestan and the Restoration of Iran’s Cinematic Heritage at Victoria & Albert Museum

Ebrahim Golestan (1922–2023) is widely regarded as one of Iran’s most significant filmmakers and a pioneer of the movement later dubbed the Iranian New Wave. Join us for a screening of three of his ground-breaking documentary films, produced prior to the 1979 revolution and recently restored to their original brilliance:

• Yek Atash (A Fire, 1961)

• Teppeh-ha-ye Marlik (The Hills of Marlik, 1964)

• Ganjineh-ha-ye Gohar (The Crown Jewels of Iran, 1965)

While exploring Iran’s history, geography, and the arts, Golestan’s documentaries are both politically subversive and visually striking.