La Ballade d'un fataliste

Hugo Fregonese

Hugo Fregonese : la Ballade d'un fataliste

Hugo Fregonese est l'une des figures les plus insaisissables de l'histoire du cinéma. Ses films, ardents et singuliers, brassent fatalité, mythes et violence crue, dans les canons esthétiques de la série B. Cette version enrichie de la rétrospective présentée à Bologne lors de la dernière édition d’Il Cinema Ritrovato rassemble des films réalisés dans cinq pays différents, dont des joyaux en version restaurée (L’Affaire de Buenos-Aires, Quand les tambours s’arrêteront) ou en copies 35 mm flambant neuves (Mardi ça saignera). Il est temps de faire entrer Fregonese, cinéaste errant et secret, dans la cours des grands.

Entouré de condamnés à mort comme lui, un prisonnier noir fredonne une chanson tout en battant la mesure : Black Tuesday. Les autres détenus, tels des lions en cages, font les cent pas au rythme de la musique. Un travelling passe de cellule en cellule, les barreaux dessinent des ombres dansantes sur les visages fiévreux. « Ferme-là, t’entends ? » s’exclame bientôt un prisonnier glacé par ce chant funèbre. Alors que son cri résonne dans les couloirs déserts de la prison, le titre du film emplit l’écran dans un grondement glaçant de musique symphonique. Ainsi commence Mardi ça saignera (1954), chef-d'œuvre resté invisible des décennies durant. C'est aussi l’instant où Hugo Fregonese, fataliste de génie, entre en scène.



Dans l’adaptation par Fregonese de l’histoire de Jack l'Éventreur, L'Étrange Mr. Slade (1953), le tueur de l’est londonien professe qu’« en vérité, il n'y a pas de criminels, il n'y a que des gens qui font ce qu'ils font parce qu'ils sont ce qu'ils sont. » Et ainsi faisait Fregonese parce que c’est ce qu’il était : un metteur en scène frénétique, toujours en cavale. L’Argentin (1908-1987) changeait de pays aussi facilement que certains passaient de studio en studio. Incarnation du cinéaste vagabond, Fregonese n’aura eu de cesse d’aller et venir, enchaînant les films de fuite ou d’évasion. Un déracinement, une inquiétude que l’on retrouve chez ses héros – individus solitaires, sur la route par choix ou parce que le destin les a condamnés à l’exil.

Né dans une famille d’immigrés Italiens, Fregonese fut l’artisan d’un cinéma de genre vif et implacable, en particulier western et polar. Sa carrière, injustement sous-estimée, pour ne pas dire totalement occultée embrasse quatre décennies et de nombreux pays : de l’Argentine son pays natal à l’Espagne, l’Italie, le Royaume-Uni ou encore l’Allemagne de l’Ouest.

Mais son nom est le plus souvent associé à son séjour hollywoodien et aux dix films qu'il y réalisa dans les années 1950 – parmi lesquels Le Raid, évocation brutale en Technicolor de la guerre de Sécession et Mardi ça saignera, « l’Edward G. Robinson le plus impitoyable de tous les temps », tous deux tournés en 1954.

L’artiste, solitaire et taciturne, ne s’épanouira jamais totalement à Hollywood. Il sillonnera ensuite l’Europe où, à l’inverse d’autres cinéastes errants comme Edgar G. Ulmer il se maintiendra à flot, obtenant même plusieurs succès dans les années 1960, dont son western allemand Les Cavaliers rouges (1964), un triomphe dans plusieurs pays européens ainsi qu'en Union Soviétique.

Le Blues du bourreau

Le monde, dans les films de Fregonese, ne tient souvent qu'à un fil — et la vie de ses héros à un nœud coulant. Jouant sur la menace de l’invisible et de la fatalité qui plane, son œuvre est construite comme un crescendo de tension dont le point d’orgue constitue un finale d’une violence physique inouïe, à l’image de la dernière scène de Quand les tambours s’arrêteront (1951), récemment restauré avec le soutien de la Film Foundation de Martin Scorsese. Pourtant, chez Fregonese, la violence est le plus souvent psychologique, hormis dans quelques-uns de ses films, plus lyriques ou spirituels, comme Le Vagabond et les Lutins (1950).

Le vacillement du monde selon Fregonese se joue aussi dans son utilisation toute personnelle des conventions. Il arrive que récit, atmosphère et perspective volent en éclat au cours du film. L’Affaire de Buenos-Aires (1949) passe brusquement du film noir au thriller d’évasion, quand Le souffle sauvage (1953), autre grand film hybride, commencé comme un néo-western, se termine en pseudo-noir. Fregonese entrelace dans son langage cinématographique fragments de vie et situations dramatiques a priori sans rapport les uns avec les autres, avec pour seul ciment une ironie douce-amère et une fascination morbide pour la débâcle et la chute de ses héros. Leur mort aussi : « quelles que soient les larmes que l’on puisse verser, le rendez-vous sera honoré » annonce sans ambage le carton d’ouverture de L’Impasse maudite. Flotte dans l’air un constant sentiment de malheur à venir, comme une ballade aux accents fatalistes.

Dans l’architecture de Fregonese, tout évoque l’enfermement : les angles de vue et l’utilisation des diagonales contribuent à tisser une toile où s’enferrent ses personnages, même lorsqu’ils sont en mouvement. Ainsi dans Les Sept Tonnerres (1957), la ville entière semble se transformer en prison.

C’est dans les espaces clos que le maître de la claustrophobie est dans son élément : décors de prison et de planques sont le théâtre d’un destin implacable. Sa maîtrise des espaces devient alors une métaphore de la mise en scène, où chaque élément est contrôlé par le cinéaste et où la violence se reflète dans le morcellement des espaces – plans cassés, plateaux effroyablement vides où tuyaux, câbles et conduits démesurés sapent tout sentiment de confort et d’appartenance.

Il est temps de réhabiliter Fregonese et d'honorer son génie discret de la série B. Voici un manifeste en six points initialement rédigé pour le festival de Bologne comme une feuille de route utile au spectateur désireux de s’orienter et de naviguer dans les films de Fregonese :


1) Vous devez vous échapper, même si vous n'avez rien à fuir. La fuite est un mode de vie.


2) Passé et mort sont une même chose – on ne peut échapper ni à l’un ni à l’autre, et il existe une étrange intimité entre les deux.


3) L’argent et l’or sont des maladies infectieuses – incurables.


4) "S'enfoncer paisiblement vers l'infini". Ce n’est pas le vers d’un poète, mais un dialogue de Fregonese : c’est ainsi que s’expriment chez lui les tueurs en série, qui philosophent régulièrement sur leur condition.


5) La plupart des choses se produisent deux fois. La seconde fois, votre chance est passée.


6) Nous nous retrouvons souvent dans des espaces vides et clos, où se joue notre destin. Ce moment arrivé, cherchez les fenêtres.


Ehsan Khoshbakht

Khaspush (Hamo Beiknazarian, 1928)

The original poster in Russian

 A Soviet production by the Armenian director Hamo Beiknazarian, Khaspush dramatises the Tobacco Revolt of 1890 in which an influential clergyman issued fatwa and banned the use of Tabaco after a Qajar king offered tobacco concession to the United Kingdom.

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2022 – Opening Speech

Screening of Vittorio De Sica's Sciuscià [Shoeshine] at Arlecchino cinema

Among the whole range of trigger warnings that tend to appear at the beginning of films nowadays, there was one I saw recently that I found genuinely moving. 

It was a warning that only Aussie viewers are likely to be familiar with, addressing as it did the Australian Aboriginal peoples. It read: "This film contains images and voices of people who are no longer alive."

I needed to catch my breath. It awakened something in me in connection with this festival. What we do very often involves looking at and listening to the images and voices of the dead. Are we breaking taboos, upsetting long-lost souls?

And that’s not to mention film restoration, which brings those sights and sounds even closer to their origins, heightening the resemblance. 

"Pictures for Peanuts" by Nick Grinde

From the Saturday Evening Post,  December 29, 1945, vol. 218, no. 26

 

PICTURES FOR PEANUTS

By NICK GRINDE

Over on Stage 6 a million-dollar picture is starting this morning. The call was for nine little well-placed optimism you could say that the epic is beginning to show promise of getting under way. A lot of departments with a whale of a lot of mighty fine technical abilities have been working for weeks toward this very day. Propmen, grips, gaffers, electricians, boom men, recorders, mixers, cameramen, assistant cameramen, a script clerk overflowing her rose-colored slacks, a company clerk, an assistant director, his assistant and his assistant are functioning with the occupational movements that will find each one ready when the moment-finally comes to record the suspensive scene where Nancy says, ‘I am tired of wearing other people’s clothes. From now on I will wear my own or nothing!”

This confused efficiency, laced, of course, with a fine sense of self-preservation, is going on, all unnoticed, around, above and in between the associate producer and the director, who already are trying to see who can stay calm the longer. The pattern is familiar to everyone. Too much has been written about the habitat of the colossal picture for anyone to have escaped a willing or unwilling education on the subject.

But over on Stage 3 in this same studio another picture was scheduled to start this morning: at eight-thirty. It’s ten-thirty over there, too, and they have exactly two hours’ work under their belts. There are no press agents or fan-magazine writers hovering around. No newspaper columnists are harvesting their succulent crop. You’d think it said “Contagious” on the door instead of “Quiet, Please! Shooting!”

The difference is that this is just another little picture. A B picture, if you please. B standing for Bread and Butter, or Buttons, or Bottom Budget. And standing for nearly anything else anyone wants to throw at it. But it’s a robust little mongrel and doesn’t mind the slurs, because it was weaned on them. If the trade papers give a B the nod at all, they usually sum up their comments by saying it will be good for Duals and Nabes, which is why you'll find them on a double bill in the neighborhood theaters.

A B picture isn’t a big picture that just didn’t grow up; it’s exactly what it started out to be. It’s the twenty-two-dollar suit of the clothing business, it’s the hamburger of the butcher shops, it’s a seat in the bleachers. And there’s a big market for all of them.

Only by perpetual corner cutting can these often quite presentable cheaper pictures be made to show the profit that is so very agreeable to the studios which invested their money in them.

Like the less expensive suit of clothes, the cloth from which they are fabricated is not all wool, the buttonholes are machine made, and the buttons themselves are more or less synthetic. But when you are all through, you have a suit or a picture which goes right out into the market with its big brothers and gives pretty good service at that. The trick is to judge them in their class and not by A standards.

In the finer pictures, results are all that are aimed at, let the costs fall where they may. The best possible actors are hired to articulate the finest lines the top writers can conjure up. And the best directors mount the stories in convincing and appropriate settings. Of course, occasionally somebody’s aim is a little off, but that’s beside the point.

In making a program picture, all this is different. Cheaper raw materials are used and a more thrifty approach is indicated. No expensive best seller or Broadway play is bought. That’s out; it’s not even thought about. The whole picture will be made for much less than the cost of such a property. The story used will be an original submitted by one of the freelance writers who knows just what and whom he is slanting it for. Or it may be a magazine story from one of the pulps or a fifteen-minute radio program purchased for its basic idea or twist. These properties are then blown up into script form and length by a writer who either works at the studio already or is brought in for the job. If he gets six weeks’ work out of it, he’s lucky. If he takes much more, he had better buy bonds with the money, be- cause he won’t be back very soon.

There are all kinds of ways of writing a story besides good and poor. It can be written up or written down. It can be costly to produce or slanted on the frugal side. If the cast of characters can’t be held down in numbers, it’s the wrong story for limited money. And if they can’t be kept out of busy places like night clubs, railroad depots and football games, look out for the budget.

Iranian New Wave: 1962–79 at Melbourne International Film Festival

Dead End by Parviz Sayyad

Iranian Cinema Before the Revolution, 1925-1979, a landmark retrospective held last year at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, was an eye-opener that traced a national cinema still largely unknown to a wide international audience. Thanks to the availability of new restorations and rare archival film prints, the majority of which now banned in Iran, an immensely creative period was revisited in splendid detail, revealing the roots of a rich and visionary cinematic tradition. While the New York program featured over five decades of Iranian cinema encompassing the avant-garde and the popular, this selection for the Melbourne International Film Festival, curated by the original team behind the MoMA exhibition, focuses on works associated with Cinema-ye Motafavet, or the Iranian New Wave.

William Cameron Menzies Production Design Sketches

https://cinearchitecture.tumblr.com/post/755713676700483584/william-cameron-menzies-production-design-sketches

The Lady with the Torch: Columbia Pictures, 1929-1959 | The Locarno Film Festival 2024 Retrospective

The Lady with the Torch

Columbia Pictures, 1929-1959

The Locarno Film Festival 2024 retrospective

HE Who Gets Slapped (Victor Sjöström, 1924)

A chilling study of humiliation and obsession, blending circus-world spectacle with symbolism and philosophical undertones, HE Who Gets Slapped was Swedish master Victor Sjöström’s second Hollywood film. This is a tale of the fickleness of social status and a treatise on “man as clown”. There were major transformations at work in and around this seminal silent: Sjöström’s full transformation into Seastrom, a major Hollywood director; the merger of Goldwyn Pictures and Metro Pictures Corporation into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with this film as the new company’s first production; and, in the story, Lon Chaney’s metamorphosis from a heartbroken and disillusioned scientist researching the origins of mankind, into a clown letting lions loose on evil men.

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024: Favourites & Discoveries

70mm projection of North by Northwest in the Piazza Maggiore

The XXXVIII edizione of Il Cinema Ritrovato ran from June 22 to 30. In reality, it started a few days before the official date and stretched into one extra day at the tail end of it. Four hundred-plus titles were screened, from early cinema to documentaries made in 2023-2024, from great classics to obscure gems, from experimental films to pornography. This edition also finally saw the opening of the restored Cinema Modernissimo which now has turned into the heart of the festival.

5,700 from 72 countries acquired the festival pass, 700 higher than last year.

The title of all the films and moving images screened can be accessed here.

I asked some of the attendees about what they had taken from the festival. They generously sent me the titles they have liked and those they have discovered, or those they have rediscovered and now loved. 155 festivalgoers –  including curators, archivists, festival bums, film historians, 35mm fanatics, programmers, writers and critics – have responded to this call for building a new canon based on what we played this year.

The Lady with the Torch: Columbia Pictures, 1929-1959 [book]

THE LADY WITH THE TORCH

Columbia Pictures, 1929-1959

Edited by Ehsan Khoshbakht

Published by Les éditions de l’oeil

Published on the occasion of the retrospective of the Locarno Film Festival 2024

288 pages, fully illustrated (rare stills from the collection of Sony/Columbia and the Cinémathèque Suisse

Contributors: Jeremy Arnold on Nick Grinde, Matthew H. Bernstein on the history of Columbia, David Cairns on Edward Dmytryk, Paola Cristalli on Richard Quine, Chris Fujiwara on Joseph H. Lewis & Robert Rossen, Philippe Garnier on Roy William Neill, Haden Guest on Phil Karlson, Milan Hain on Hugo Haas, Pamela Hutchinson on torch-bearers, Elena Lazic on Alexander Hall, Christina Newland on CP stars, Kim Newman on William Castle, Geoffrey O’Brien on Hawks, Jonathan Rosenbaum on Andre De Toth, Christopher Small on Capra, Farran Smith Nehme on John Sturges, Imogen Sara Smith on Boetticher and David Thompson on Charles Vidor.

The hyperrealist image of a lady on a pedestal holding a burning bright torch was an idealised vision of Americanism. It proclaimed the arrival of another Columbia Pictures film, very often in black-and-white, most probably short in length but fast and furious in tone and pace. The Columbia films, however, tended to drag this figurehead of liberty down and examine her more unglamorous side. American values were dissected and questioned through tales of fast-talking career women, existentialist cowboys, and prophetic anti-fascist quickies. Yet, the symbol of the still burning torch over The End title was an affirmation of the values being rebuilt through the skilful art of John Ford, Dorothy Arzner, and Nicholas Ray.

This book, accompanying a Locarno Film Festival retrospective celebrating the centenary of Columbia Pictures, follows the period of the retrospective, 1929-1959, but expands on its directors and directions.

The collection of essays to follow examines the particularities of Columbia in relation to what is generally known as the Genius of the System. This volume acknowledges the brilliance of the system but finds the genius somewhere between a filmmaker’s vision and the industrial infrastructure that allowed them to nourish.

Illustrated with hundreds of rare stills, the stories are as much in the images as in the words. Both words and images aim at reconstructing three exuberant decades of incessant creativity, evolution, and growth, reminding us that once upon a time there was a brilliant exchange between art and commerce, between the system and the artist.

L'Héritage de la chouette (Chris Marker, 1989)

L'Héritage de la chouette [The Owl's Legacy], directed by Chris Marker plays on July 28 at Closeup Cinema in London. For this screening I have selected three episodes of the series around the themes of memory, image and cinema. – EK

Chris Marker's rarely seen magnum opus about the influence of the ancient Greek culture on the contemporary world remains his most elaborate project for television. Produced by the Onassis Foundation, Marker found the budget and freedom to invite some of the world’s leading philosophers, writers, logicians, politicians, artists and filmmakers (very often with explicit links to Greece, such as Theodoros Angelopoulos and Elia Kazan) to sit in front of his camera and, in a clear act of creating a cinematic forum, discuss thirteen themes, including Democracy, Nostalgia, Music, Cosmogony, and Misogyny. There is an abundance of Marker’s usual wit and his use of the image of animals for linking his philosophical investigation, here, in the form of the owl which was the symbol of wisdom for the Greeks. Marker’s words, in the English version, are spoken by Bob Peck.

City for Conquest (Anatole Litvak, 1940)

A captivating and tragic symphony of New York, this precursor of Raging Bull tells the story of two brothers, one a boxer, the other a musician rising from the slums of the city. The elder, James Cagney’s Danny Kenny, is a prize-fighter who eventually loses both his girl (Ann Sheridan) and his eyesight. Only when his vision is gone, does he begin to see his place in the world and opens – perhaps in an allegorical move –a newsstand. It is from his modest kiosk that he listens to his kid brother’s triumphant debut classical concert. The idol of Madison Square Garden falls so the new god of Carnegie Hall can rise. Litvak’s nods to sophistication didn’t sit too well with Cagney who wanted Raoul Walsh to direct, and more rawness and action. Litvak’s re-examination of Cagney’s popular persona – similar to what he achieved with Edward G. Robinson in The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse – irked Cagney, as did his unfamiliar, camera-oriented style. Yet, it is not hard to see how much Litvak has toned down and sometimes even repressed his signature methods in favour of Warner’s fast-paced, editing-based house style. But who else could give Cagney the scene at the end when, in his blurred vision, the image of Ann Sheridan comes into full focus? It is one Litvak’s most lyrical moments and one of Cagney’s most moving.

L’Équipage (Anatole Litvak, 1935)

Opening with the same train whistle that closed Cœur de lilas (1932), Jean, a young officer in the French air force during WWI, bids farewell to his lover Denise and heads for the front. There he comes to admire the unpopular Lieutenant Maury whose gunner he becomes, only to discover that Denise is in fact Maury’s wife. Following this revelation, the two men head off on a suicide mission where the hard choice has to be made between fraternal loyalty and grand passion. The final sequence after the battle is pure Litvak: in a sacrificial gesture, Maury pretends he is not aware of his wife’s love for Jean. The deepest of emotions are swept under a rug, left unspoken.

Symphonies in Black: Duke Ellington Shorts

Black & Tan

Symphonies in Black: Duke Ellington Shorts

A programme by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Ehsan Khoshbakht (Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, June 2024)

Introductory note by Jonathan Rosenbaum

In 16 shorts made over a stretch of almost a quarter of a century (1929-1953), Duke Ellington and his Orchestra perform in a variety of settings, often with dancers and singers – including Billie Holiday in Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life. The latter cuts freely between Ellington alone in thoughtful composing mode, Ellington in a tux performing the same extended composition with his band at a concert, arty images of men engaged in heavy labour, a wordless church sermon, a nightclub floorshow, and even a short stretch of story showing Holiday being pushed to the ground by an ungrateful lover before singing there about her misery – a near replica of the musical setup accorded to Bessie Smith in her only film appearance six years earlier.

Indeed, although the pleasures to be found here are chiefly musical, the narrative pretexts for these performances offer a fascinating look at how both jazz and Black musicians were perceived and expected to behave during the first three decades of talkies. At least half of the films are Soundies made for sound-and-image jukeboxes in the 40s, but even these often trade on narrative details such as the adoring women digging the solos by Ray Nance, Rex Stewart, Ben Webster, and others at an “eatery” after hours in Jam Session (1942), or the spectacular dancing by athletic jitterbugging couples in Hot Chocolate (Cottontail) from the same year.

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024 | Almost All the Titles

Jean-Luc Godard at Il Cinema Ritrovato 1998

More or less all the titles to be screened during Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024. There might be some titles listed more than once, as well as potential typos and incorrect attributions, all my mistake. Between features and shorts, we will present close to 500 titles produced in 35 countries and sourced from more than 140 archives. – EK

Guide to Kozaburo Yoshimura at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024

Kozaburo Yoshimura

Guide to Kozaburo Yoshimura at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024

By Alexander Jacoby

Kozaburo Yoshimura (1911-2000) is one of the neglected masters of classical Japanese film. An almost exact contemporary of Akira Kurosawa and Keisuke Kinoshita, he was responsible for some of the postwar Japanese cinema’s most compelling films, which bear eloquent witness to social change in a rapidly modernising country. But these are dramas above all, which grip and move audiences; as Tadao Sato wrote, they are “not mere social criticism, but films that flesh out the human element of the story”.

Anatole Litvak Retrospective | The Schedule

Anatole Litvak (in the middle) with his buddies Billy Wilder and John Huston

JOURNEYS INTO NIGHT: THE WORLD OF ANATOLE LITVAK

Viaggio nella notte: il mondo di Anatole Litvak

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024

All the screenings at the Jolly cinema

The schedule subject to change until official announcement in early June

A couple more screenings will be added to other venues, including to Modernissimo's schedule

Where to Begin with Gustaf Molander | Jon Wengström​​'s Il Cinema Ritrovato Guide

Gustaf Molander

Jon Wengström​​, the archive Senior Curator of the Swedish Film Institute, has curated a programme dedicated to Swedish master Gustaf Molander. This retrospective will take place at Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato in June 2024. Jon has blogged here, giving you some tips about what to see in that strand, that is if you don't want to see every single Molander which I think you should. – EK

Guide to Gustaf Molander at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024

By Jon Wengström

Gustaf Molander made almost 70 films in a career that lasted more than half a century, and his trajectory as a director is parallel to that of the development of the Swedish film industry. He wrote the script to Terje Vigen (Victor Sjöström, 1917), which was the starting point of the Golden Age of Swedish silent cinema, and he directed the era’s epilogue with the Selma Lagerlöf adaptations Ingmarsarvet (1925) and its sequel Till Österland (1926). He was one of the very few Swedish directors who handled the transition to sound successfully, as proven by En natt (1931). During the 1940s, more than any other Swedish filmmaker, he made films that reflected the war and its aftermath, and after collaborations with a young Ingmar Bergman, including Woman Without a Face (1947), in the 1950s Molander made remakes of classic silent films in colour and Cinemascope, as a response to the advent of television.

Entezar (Amir Naderi, 1974)

Entezar [Waiting]

Playing at Il Cinema Ritrovato, June 25, 2024.

Entezar, Amir Naderi’s second film for Kanoon – the Iranian institution in charge of producing cultural goods, including films, for children and young adults – was a deft and calculated move away from the gritty street dramas and crime films of the early 1970s that made Naderi famous but also left him feel artistically unfulfilled.

The Sealed Soil [Khak-e Sar bé Mohr] (Marva Nabili, 1977)

The Sealed Soil

The digital restoration of The Sealed Soil [Khak-e Sar bé Mohr], directed by Marva Nabili, will be premiered at UCLA Film & Television Archive on June 15 and a week later at Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato.

Khak-e Sar bé Mohr chronicles the repetitive and repressed life of Roo-Bekheir, a young woman in a poor village in southwest Iran, and her resistance to forced marriage. It’s a formally rigorous, if emotionally distanced, critique of patriarchy and the spurious reform of Iranian agricultural life that was a factor in the 1979 revolution.

Jacques Tati, tombé de la lune (Jean-Baptiste Péretié, 2022)

Jacques Tati, tombé de la lune

 
Jacques Tati, tombé de la lune (2022) 

Directed by Jean-Baptiste Péretié

Jacques Tati needs no introduction but it is exactly the kind of "filmmaker who needs no introduction" that is worth revisiting repeatedly, in viewing, in film literature and now in the increasingly popular format of television documentaries. Jean-Baptiste Péretié, director of other works on Keaton, Al Pacino and John Wayne, has efficiently captured the jazzy architecture of Tati's universe in this fine introduction to a jolly genius.

Designed on Celluloid: Architecture in Silent Cinema

High Treason

Samantha Leroy, in charge of "la programmation et d’exploitation" at the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé in Paris asked me to curate a season on architecture and silent cinema. This short essay was written to accompany my 40-film selection for a retrospective which was held in conjunction with an architecture exhibition, dedicated to Renzo Piano's magical design for the Fondation's building in the south of Paris. – Ehsan Khoshbakht

A love story of sorts, the relation between cinema and architecture. Architecture saw in the cinema what it had dreamed of for centuries: being equipped with eyes more penetrating and observant than those of human beings, a tool that could examine architecture from every possible angle and measure it in time. Cinema, in return, found incredible potential in architecture when architectural monuments and soon studio-built sets added attraction, realism, and drama to the movies.

Always Goodbye (Sidney Lanfield, 1938)

https://cinearchitecture.tumblr.com/post/746274829205946368/always-goodbye-sidney-lanfield-1938-art

The Lady with the Torch | The Centenary of Columbia Pictures at Locarno Film Festival 2024

During its golden age, Columbia Pictures produced some of American cinema’s most iconic films across a panoply of varied styles and popular genres. In 1924, the relatively small-scale motion picture company Cohn-Brandt-Cohn rebranded itself as Columbia Pictures. This new studio would eventually feature, as its masthead and in the preamble before each film, the Lady with the Torch, the Statue of Liberty-like female figure who was, at first, draped nobly in the American flag and has become recognizable to film lovers everywhere.

Organized in partnership with the Cinémathèque suisse, The Lady with the Torch will present the studio in all its glory, shining a light on lesser-known genre filmmakers like Max Nosseck or William A. Seiter, as well as celebrating major auteurs like Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage, Fritz Lang, Frank Capra, George Stevens, and John Ford, who made some of their most characteristic as well as most surprising films while passing through the studio. So too did its movies do much to hone and define the screen presences of treasured stars like Rita Hayworth, Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, and William Holden, and lay the groundwork for the new era of more intensely psychological acting that would come to dominate in the 1950s, working with a new generation of directors coming from the theater, such as Joshua Logan. Columbia Pictures was the home – intermittent or otherwise – of figures as diverse as Boris Karloff, the Three Stooges and George Cukor, Ben Hecht and William Cameron Menzies. Notably, it is also where Dorothy Arzner, one of only two female filmmakers to work in the classical era of Hollywood, produced some of her most pioneering works. It is to this varied spectrum of artists, performers, and beloved figures of fun that the Festival pays tribute.

Celluloid Underground | The Guardian Review

 Read here.

The Runner's Second Run

A dazed boy is standing on the beach, hollering at the ships leaving the Persian Gulf for other worlds. The vessels of escape, carrying oil tanks and dreams, are fading ghosts on a pale horizon. To overcome a world full of hostility and indifference, the boy must learn to run.

Amir Naderi’s autobiographical masterpiece The Runner (1984) was one of the first postrevolutionary Iranian films screened and celebrated internationally. The epic scene of boys racing across the oil field toward a cube of melting ice, their trophy, became the emblem of the new Iranian cinema that emerged in the 1980s.

Amiro is an orphan living in the southern Iranian port city of Abadan, working odd jobs until he realizes that he has to better his life by learning to read and to run—the first in recognition that other worlds exist, and the second in order to reach them. Paradoxically, this film that sizzles with the desire for freedom was made in 1983–84, the darkest years of Iran’s recent history, when the grip of the Islamic regime on every aspect of life, including the newly nationalized Iranian cinema, became total.

The Walls Came Tumbling Down (Lothar Mendes, 1946)

The biblical title ("When the people heard the sound of the trumpet, they raised a great shout and the wall fell down." Joshua 6:20) has actually very little to do with the story of this drab and cut-rate mystery film, except its ending.

Something to Live For (George Stevens, 1952)

Playing on May 29 at Closeup Cinema in London. EK

This one of the crowning jewels of American cinema, nearly as good as the best of Roberto Rossellini with Ingrid Bergman, is strangely one of the least known masterpieces of the 1950s.

Anatole Litvak Retrospective at Il Cinema Ritrovato

Anatole Litvak with Deborah Kerr

JOURNEY INTO NIGHT: THE WORLD OF ANATOLE LITVAK

An unjustly overlooked master with an international career spanning six decades, Anatole Litvak made some of the most riveting and innovative films in the history of cinema that, save for a few titles, are hardly seen or discussed today. The Kyiv-born director of masterpieces such as L’Équipage and City for Conquest made films in Germany, France, UK and eventually Hollywood. This first-time overview of his dazzling career features films from all these bases of production, works that are ripe for rediscovery with their sweeping camera movements, long takes, ironic cutting, and splendid use of décor. Litvak’s films dive into a nocturnal world of flawed and unstable men and women whose identity crisis for Litvak reflects the crisis of the world between the Russian Revolution and the Second World War – a time of awakening and political turmoil that Litvak experienced first-hand.

La Notte Brava (Mauro Bolognini, 1959)

La Notte Brava

Dir: Mauro Bolognini, 1959, 95 min

Playing at Close-Up Cinema on December 30, 2023

Before embarking on a career as a director, Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote the script for La Notte Brava. The resulting film, about three hoodlums during a day out in Rome involving burglary and hooking up with sex workers, is considered one of the classics of Italian post-war cinema and like other works by Pasolini, a film not devoid of controversy when it was originally released. Directed by talented and visionary, if unjustly underrated Mauro Bolognini who has often been described as "the most Proustian of Italian film directors", the attention to details and the direction of an international cast have remarkably translated Pasolini's world of outcasts, prostitutes, petty criminals, and downtrodden youngsters into a vivid and tough portrait of Italy at the end of the 1950s, especially a sketch of Rome and the raw characters driven by their primary instincts.

Tabi’at-e Bijan [Still Life] (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1974)

Still Life

Tabi'at-e Bijan (Still Life). 1974. Iran. Written and directed by Sohrab Shahid Saless. With Zadour Bonyadi, Mohammed Kani, Hedayatollah Navid. 93 min.

An elderly railway signalman is unable to understand the meaning of “retirement” when he is handed over his retirement letter. Still Life, the film that shook Iranian cinema to its core and won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale, is an unforgettable, masterfully paced exercise in stillness and loneliness that doesn’t shrink from depicting exploitative tendencies within contemporary Iranian society. Shahid Saless uses the inarticulacy of his protagonist as an aesthetic strategy and finds poetry in seemingly dead moments. Made only in 11 days and shot with the painterly vision of the cinematographer Houshang Baharlou, this landmark work pushed the boundaries of cinema like no other Iranian film of the 1970s. – Ehsan Khoshbakht

Night of the Hunchback (Farrokh Ghaffari, 1964) | MoMA

Shab-e Ghouzi (Night of the Hunchback). 1964. Iran. Directed by Farrokh Ghaffari. Screenplay by Ghaffari, Jalal Moghadam. With Ghaffari, Pari Saberi, Paria Hakemi, Mohamad Ali Keshavarz.

Inspired by a tale in A Thousand and One Nights, this black comedy takes place over the course of one of those nights, as a troupe of traveling actors, the father of a bride, and a hairdresser and his assistant (played by director Farrokh Ghaffari himself) try to rid themselves of an unwelcome corpse while uptown Tehranis party to Ray Charles R&B. In a nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, Ghaffari, also a critic and film historian, intended this film as a critique of upper-class pretensions and an ode to simple folkloric pleasures, and while the film was a commercial flop the film nonetheless gained international attention and promised a new beginning for Iranian cinema. – Ehsan Khoshbakht

Dayereh-ye Mina [The Cycle] (Dariush Mehrjui, 1974)

The Cycle (Dariush Mehrjui, 1974-76)

Dariush Mehrjui and his wife were brutally murdered on October 14, 2023. MoMA screens this film on November 1.

This harrowing tale of poverty and drug addiction in the slums, in which people desperately sell their blood to survive, is based on Gholam-Hossein Sa’dei’s short story “Garbage Dump.” Banned due to objections from the Iranian Medical Association, The Cycle was shelved for three years before it was eventually shown at the Shiraz Arts Festival. The left saw the story of the poor selling contaminated blood for injection into new veins as a metaphor for the corruption of Pahlavis. For Mehrjui, however, this was more a candid investigation of a real problem, and it eventually helped inspire the formation of the Iranian Blood Transfusion Organization. The casting of the popular filmfarsi star Forouzan was controversial, but her fine performance proved the versatility of Iranian actors. – Ehsan Khoshbakht

The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969) | MoMA

The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969)

Dariush Mehrjui and his wife were brutally murdered on October 14, 2023. MoMA screens this film on October 26.

This milestone of the Iranian New Wave portrays, with heartbreaking intensity, the themes of solitude and obsession in the story of a poor villager (unforgettably played by Ezzatolah Entezami) whose only source of joy and livelihood is his cow. When the cow is mysteriously killed one night, the metamorphosis begins. Based on short stories by psychiatrist Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi, The Cow was smuggled to the Venice Film Festival in defiance of an export ban, where it was almost immediately and internationally recognized as a masterpiece. Poignantly wrapped in layers of religion and leftist politics (two major forces of the 1979 revolution), The Cow came under the spotlight more than a decade later, when Ayatollah Khomeini hailed it as an example of “good cinema,” as opposed to the many “corrupting films” of the Pahlavi era. – Ehsan Khoshbakht

Trailer for Celluloid Underground (2023)

 

Still Life (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1974) reviewed by John Gillet for Sight & Sound

Perhaps Berlin’s main achievement was to reveal the progress of the young Iranian director Sohrab Shahid Sales, with A Simple Event (reviewed from last year’s Tehran Festival) in the Forum and Still Life in competition. The new film continues his preoccupation with the lives of inarticulate people—in this case, an elderly railway signalman who receives news of his retirement with utter incomprehension— developed through lengthy scenes in which the characters are simply observed going about their daily chores. Without Sales’ extraordinary control, the result could be  intolerable, but for me the film’s exact placing and timing of shots, rather like a slow symphony scored pianissimo throughout, was entirely hypnotic. 

Sven Klangs kvintett (Stellan Olsson, 1976)

Playing at Close-Up Cinema in London on September 24, 2023. – EK

Voted by Swedish film critics as one of the "25 greatest Swedish films ever", Stellan Olsson's tender drama is based on a play by Henric Holmberg and Ninne Olsson, about the failed transformation of a dance band, formed by a group of young friends, into a proper jazz band in southern Sweden of the late 1950s. Excited by the discovery of a new musical language, they discuss Charlie Parker, and one of them, the saxophonist Lars Nilsson, goes as far as imitating his idol not only in his saxophone sound but also in his wild lifestyle. Shot in stunning black-and-white, many traces of the tableau-like compositions that Swedish cinema through figures like Roy Andersson became known for are already established here. So is the cracking humour. This gem of Swedish films is ripe for rediscovery.

San Sebastian Film Festival Retrospectives

Year Retrospective

1959 René Clair

1960 Masters of Nordic Cinema; Jean Grémillon

1961 Emilio Fernández; Georges Méliès; Japanese Cinema

1962 Florian Rey; Greta Garbo; The Cartoon World

1963 Bulls and Bullfighters on the Screen

1964 Elia Kazan

1965 Horror Cinema

1966 Buster Keaton; Science-Fiction Cinema

1967 New Spanish Cinema

1968 New American Cinema

1969 Josef von Sternberg

1970 Fritz Lang

1971 King Vidor

1972 Howard Hawks

1973 Rouben Mamoulian

1974 Nicholas Ray

1975 Henri-Georges Clouzot

1976 Dolores del Río; Humphrey Bogart; Film Noir

1977 Luis Buñuel; Pier Paolo Pasolini; Spanish Cinema from the 2nd Republic

1978 Cinema We Haven't Seen for Decades; Cinema as an Expression of National Culture; Cinema by Women

1979 The Cinema of Nationalities

1980 Stanley Kubrick; José María Berzosa

1981 Brazilian Cinema; Spanish Cinema from the 40s; Spanish Cartoons

1982 Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Leopoldo Torre Nilsson; Roberto Rossellini

1983 The Other Road 2; The Door of the Orient 2

1984 Richard Burton; Cinema and Video

1985 Roman Chalbaud; Ashes and Diamonds; The Vietnam War on Screen

1986 The Guys in the Photo; Luise Rainer

1987 Robert Siodmak; Forgotten Films; Chile

1988 Jacques Tourneur; ABC of Latin America; You Only Live Once

1989 James Whale; All Kieslowski; Great Latin American Melodramas

1990 Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast

1991 Richard Attenborough; Every Way… or Some Way? (5th Centenary of Ignatius of Loyola); Kurier

1992 The Other Shore; Welcome, Mr. Cassavetes

1993 William A. Wellman; The Best 100 Years; Chicano Cinema

1994 William Dieterle; The Best 100 Years (and 2): The European Adventure; John Sayles

1995 Gregory La Cava; The Best 100 Years (and 3): The Shop Around the Corner; Hou Hsiao-Hsien

1996 Tod Browning; The Red Nightmare; Eloy de la Iglesia

1997 Mitchell Leisen; A Long Absence; Getting to Know Peter Bogdanovich

1998 Mikio Naruse; Hunger, Humour and Fantasy; Terry Gilliam

1999 John M. Stahl; The Boom Italian-Style; Bertrand Tavernier

2000 Carol Reed; The TV Generation; Bernardo Bertolucci

2001 Frank Borzage; It Happened Yesterday; Getting to Know Otar Iosseliani

2002 Michael Powell; 50 from the 50s; Volker Schlöndorff

2003 Preston Sturges; Michael Winterbottom

2004 Anthony Mann; Woody Allen

2005 Robert Wise; Rebellious and Untamed; Abel Ferrara

2006 Ernst Lubitsch; Emigrants; Barbet Schroeder

2007 Henry King; Cold Fever; Philippe Garrel

2008 Mario Monicelli; Terence Davies; Japan in Black: Japanese Film Noir

2009 Backwash: The Cutting-Edge of French Cinema; Richard Brooks

2010 New Paths of Non-Fiction; Don Siegel

2011 America Way of Death: American Film Noir 1920–2010; Digital Shadows: Last Generation Chinese Film; Jacques Demy

2012 Very Funny Things: New American Comedy; In Progress: Ten Years with Latin American Cinema; Georges Franju

2013 ANIMATOPIA: New Paths of Animation Cinema; Nagisa Oshima

2014 Eastern Promises: Portrait of Eastern Europe in 50 Films; Dorothy Arzner

2015 New Japanese Independent Cinema 2000–2015; Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack

2016 The Act of Killing: Cinema and Global Violence; Jacques Becker

2017 Joseph Losey

2018 Muriel Box

2019 Roberto Gavaldón

2021 Flowers in Hell: The Golden Age of Korean Cinema

2022 Claude Sautet

2023 Hiroshi Teshigahara

2024 Violent Italy: Italian Crime Films

2025 Lillian Hellman

Retrospettiva

Locarno film festival retrospectives: A list

2025 — Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945-1960

2024 — The Lady with the Torch: Columbia Pictures, 1929-1959

2023 — Mexican Popular Cinema

2022 — Douglas Sirk

2021 — Alberto Lattuada

2020 — Kinuyo Tanaka

2019 — Black Light

2018 — Leo MaCarey

2017 —Jacques Tourneur

2016 — Beloved and Rejected: Cinema in the Young Federal Republic of Germany, 1949–1963

2015 — Sam Peckinpah

2014 — Titanus

2013 — George Cukor

2012 — Otto Preminger

2011 — Vincente Minnelli

2010 — Ernst Lubitsch

2009 — Manga Impact

2008 — Nanni Moretti

2007 — Retour à Locarno

2006 — Aki Kaurismäki

2005 — Orson Welles 

2004 — Newsfront

2003 — All That Jazz

2002 — Allan Dwan

2001 — Out of the Shadows: Asians in American Cinema

2000 — Une autre histoire du cinéma soviétique 1926–1968 

1999 — Joe Dante e l’altro cinema indipendente.

1998 — Marco Bellocchio

1997 — 50 +1 ans de cinéma américain

1996 — Youssef Chahine

1995 — Abbas Kiarostami

1994 — Frank Tashlin

1993 — Sacha Guitry

1992 — Mario Camerini

1991 — Jacques Becker

1990 — Lev Kuleshov

1989 — Preston Sturges

1988 — Alberto Cavalcanti

1987 — 40 ans de Festival à Locarno

1986 — Keisuke Kinoshita

1985 — Boris Barnet

1984 — Lux Film (1934–1954)

1983 — Mikio Naruse

1982 — Powell & Pressburger

1981 — American Cinema of the 1950s [?]

1979 — Yasujiro Ozu

1978 — Douglas Sirk

1977 — Citel Films Geneva

1976 — Pietro Germi [?]

1975 — Totò, Portrait of An Actor

1974 — Swiss cinema [?]

1973 — Swiss Cinema Retrospective 1920-1944

1972 — 25th Anniversary Retrospective

1971 — Cinéma et Résistance

1970 — Claude Autant-Lara

1969 — Luchino Visconti

1968 — Satyajit Ray

1967 — Tribute To Soviet Cinema

1966 — G. W. Pabst

1965  — Jiri Trnka + Manoel de Oliveira

1964 — Andrzej Munk + Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau + Louis Lumière

1963 — John Ford

1962 — Jean Vigo + King Vidor

1961 — Georges Méliès + Fritz Lang

1960 — Luis Buñuel

1959 — Ingmar Bergman

1958 — Humphrey Bogart + Norman Mclaren

1957 — Akira Kurosawa + G.W. Pabst + Francesca Bertini

1956 — Ethnographic Film Review [?]

1955 — Aspects of Italian Neorealist Cinema

1954 — Comic Cinema in the Silent Era

1947 — Reconstruction

1946 — Revue du film documentaire

Tranquility in the Presence of Others (Nasser Taghvai, 1969)

Tranquility in the Presence of Others

Nasser Taghvai, 1969, 84 min, Persian with English subtitles

Often seen as one of the indispensable films of the Iranian New Wave, Tranquility in the Presence of Others [Aramsh Dar Hozor-e Digaran] is a poignant and brisk cinematic adaptation of a story by leftist (and later exiled and banned) writer Gholam-Hossein Saedi, attacking the indecisiveness and empty rhetoric of Iranian intellectuals, as well as dissecting the patriarchal core of Iranian society. Banned after a single screening at the Shiraz Arts Festival of 1969 – a ban which was not removed until 1973 – it tells the story of a retired army general who travels to Tehran with his newlywed wife to visit his daughters, only to observe their unhappiness and casual affairs. As his mental condition deteriorates, the film’s tone shifts from sardonic to tragic. Tranquility in the Presence of Others delves into the anxieties of a country that is seemingly marching forward but retains a troubled, melancholic relationship with the past. The gender and social conflicts of Saedi's story are brilliantly translated into a bleak vision of Iranian society and the confusion of the middle classes.  – Ehsan Khoshbakht

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2023: Favourites & Discoveries

The 37th edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato concluded last week but its memories live on. 

In Silk Stockings (Rouben Mamoulian, 1957), a quintet of melancholic expats freshly returned from a seductive Paris to a drab shared apartment in Moscow start reminiscing about the joys of the high life in the French capital. Soon it turns into a competition in remembering. Getting too intense where disillusioned Marxist-Leninists accuse each other of stealing one another's memories, Ninotchka (Cyd Charisse), fervently dedicated to the equal distribution of all kinds of wealth, steps in and declares: "Comrades, there are enough memories for all of us." Judging from the range and diversity of this year's picks by festival attendees, it seems that we should not be too worried about running out of memories until next June.

Statistics tell me "120,000 spectators" have viewed "470 films [in] seven cinemas," a 12% increase in attendance compared to previous year. Feelings tell me billions of memories have been made.

Nearly 120 participants from 39 countries have picked their "favourite film" at the festival, as well as their "major discovery" this year. Some have accompanied their choices with additional notes. It's a delight to read.

See their picks below.

* * *

Peter Cowie on Gharibeh va Meh (1974)

"Two years in the making, it is a vast, symbolist drama, set in some remote historical period (hazy even to Iranians), and bursting at the seams with action and bloodcurdling confrontations. Why a young man arrives in a boat to disturb the ritual of a small village, why he is pursued by a band of ominous, black-clad strangers, and why he takes once more to the sea, seems unimportant, for Beizai’s [sic] dazzling technique, clearly influenced by Kurosawa, sweeps all before it. No other Middle Eastern cinema could sustain such an ambitious and visually exciting production."  Peter Cowie / Sight & Sound, April 1975

Il Cinema Ritrovato XXXVII – The Films

Il Cinema Ritrovato XXXVII – (Almost) All the Titles

Rouben Mamoulian, Lost and Found (André S. Labarthe, 2016)

Rouben Mamoulian, Lost and Found

Free admission screening of the film at Il Cinema Ritrovato, on June 23, 14.30, Sala Scorsese.

When it comes to filmed interviews, Mamoulian is one of the well-documented giants of classical Hollywood. His eloquence and wisdom can be heard in interviews shot for documentaries about his friends (George Stevens: A Filmmaker's Journey, shown at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2021) or horror cinema (The Horror of It All by Gene Feldman and Suzette Winter, 1983). There are films exclusively about him such as Patrick Cazals's Rouben Mamoulian, l’âge d’or de Broadway et Hollywood (2007) which also features brief clips of interviews that Iranian director of Armenian origins, Arby Ovanessian (a guest of Il Cinema Ritrovato 2022) conducted with Mamoulian. Television networks, too, since the revival of his films in the 1960s, have interviewed him as in BBC's Film Extra (1973). However, this French television interview, by one of the fathering figures of television documentaries on cinema, André S. Labarthe, was lost for decades until retrieved and made into the Rouben Mamoulian, Lost and Found. This is the most detailed career interview Mamoulian ever gave on film.

Cherike-ye Tara [The Ballad of Tara] (Bahram Beyzaie, 1979)

The Ballad of Tara

 

Bahram Beyzaie's seamless blend of myth, symbolism, folklore and classical Persian literature in The Ballad of Tara is unparalleled in its complexity. Yet, apart from Downpour (1972), which was restored and revived a decade ago, the director with the most consistent body of work in the Iranian cinema of the 1970s is also, unjustly, one of the most invisible masters of the Iranian New Wave. Here, as well as directing, he has also produced, written, set-, costume-designed and edited a mesmerising tale that fuses the ceremonial legends of the past with contemporary life. Tara, a strong-willed widow encounters the fleeting ghost of an ancient warrior in the forest next to her village. The ghost's appearances become more frequent and finally he talks to her, claiming a sword that she has found among her father's effects. Without the sword, the dead warrior can't rest. But when the sword is restored to him, it's his love for Tara that prevents him from returning to the land of the dead.

Rouben Mamoulian: A Touch of Desire

Silk Stockings | publicity still

Rouben Mamoulian: A Touch of Desire (1926-1957)

Retrospective at Il Cinema Ritrovato, June 24-July 2, 2023

Known for his ability to encode his vision in light, movement, and later in colour, the Tbilisi-born Armenian Rouben Mamoulian had one of the most consistent bodies of work in American cinema. Rightly celebrated for his invaluable contribution to Hollywood's transition to sound, he both unchained the camera and used dialogue like a work of musical accompaniment. His mobile camera was envied and imitated, and his style is instantly recognisable for its sophistication, humour and erotic undertone. Mamoulian was equally efficient in more sombre types of cinema, serving as a pioneering figure in both gangster and horror genres. This career retrospective showcases Mamoulian's work from his only silent film, to the early sound period, to his final musical, in colour and CinemaScope. Aside from a new digital restoration of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, everything else will be screened in 35mm.

Cry of Midnight (Samuel Khachikian, 1961)

Playing in Berlin (Sinema Transtopia) on May 11, 2023.

In 1961, the Iranian-Armenian Samuel Khachikian, a figure of enormous talent known for his strong female characters and the use of crime cinema motifs, the latter giving him the title of “Iranian Hitchcock”, was at the peak of his success. That year, both titles topping the Iranian box office were his. Indeed, other directors imitated his style and he became the first "name above the title" of Iranian cinema. Cry of Midnight [Faryade Nime Shab], internationally also known as Midnight Terror, was an unofficial remake of Charles Vidor's 1948 film, Gilda. It portrays one of the essential femme fatales of Iranian cinema, Parvin Ghaffari, appearing alongside the popular star Fardin as a young man who becomes entangled with a criminal gang but eventually finds his way back to the innocent girl that he's in love with. – EK

25 Fireman's Street (István Szabó, 1973)

25 Fireman's Street

István Szabó, 1973 | 98 mins

UK premiere of the new restoration at Close-Up Cinema (London) on May 28, 2023

István Szabó's agile camera is an uninvited guest peeking into the private and collective memories of the residents of an apartment building in Budapest that is due to be demolished the next day. In a Cocteauesque quest into the inner life of a house (which also bears trace of early surrealists in its splendid and puzzling juxtapositions) some 50 years is remembered overnight. The breath-taking long takes that have the fluidity of a dream reconstruct the recent history of nation through bricks, windows, walls and wooden panels. Like Jacques Tati's PlayTime, architecture is both the starting point and what frames every movement – it's a living organ. But here the building reflects people's desires and traumas more than similar voyeuristic investigations of architecture and film as it even bears the subtitle of a "Dream About a House".

Si j'avais 4 dromadaires (Chris Marker, 1966)

Playing at Closeup Cinema in London on January 29, 2023. There'll be some surprise shorts screened before Marker's film. – EK

Marker's underseen masterpiece, Si j'avais 4 dromadaires [If I Had Four Camels], with its originality and sole reliance on still photographs stands next to his best known work, La Jetée (1962). The photographs incorporated into the film were taken between 1956 and 1966 in many different countries (Greece, Russia, Iran, Cuba, China, France, Japan) as Marker was working for the Petite Planète travel guides or taking snap shots of his favourite people.  Here, he offers his own travel guide to a changing word, a "Marker Planet" narrated by a mysterious, world-weary traveller who speaks like a poet and thinks like a philosopher. The narration evolves into three voices with contrasting opinions about the role of photography in constructing collective cultural memory. With an endless sense of irony and the quiet investigating of photographic image, this is one of the great works of the 60s. – Ehsan Khoshbakht