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PERSONAL PROBLEMS 12 CC copynew

Personal Problems, dir. by Bill Gunn (USA, 1980)

By Russell Banfield Bill Gunn had little time for Hollywood. After achieving some success with the screenplay to The Landlord, dir. by Hal Ashby (USA, 1970), Gunn’s directorial debut, Stop (1970), so incensed Warner Brothers who claimed Gunn deviated far from his own script that the film was never released. His next film, Ganja and Hess (1973), fared slightly better, in that it was released, but was panned by critics to the extent that the film was taken away from Gunn and recut, retitled, and reissued. Gunn was so angry that he allegedly stormed into the producer’s office and trashed the place. From then on, Gunn was labeled…

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highway hearing

BIMI-PITT Research Workshop: “Displacement in Film and Visual Culture”

By Russell Banfield Friday 17thMay, Panel #5: Displacing Communities Over the course of three days, the third edition of the BIMI-PITT Research Workshop, a joint venture between the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image and the University of Pittsburgh to share and develop research, covered a wide range of subjects, all based around the notion of displacement. For the fifth panel, Displacing Communities, John Taylor and William Ackah took the theme of displacement at its most literal, focusing on the countless people, homes, and communities that have been removed, destroyed, or divided by US government social policy in the 1950s and 1960s, namely the construction…

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laura mulvey in conversation bimi event

Art at the Frontier of Film Theory Workshop: Laura Mulvey and Lucy Reynolds

  By Russell Banfield Strange and Magical. That’s how Laura Mulvey described this exhibition of her and Peter Wollen’s extraordinary impact on film theory, art history, and avant-garde filmmaking. Letters, diagrams, sketches, scripts, and notes are all displayed relating to four of the six films Mulvey and Wollen made together: Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974), Riddles of the Sphinx (1977),Crystal Gazing (1982), and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1983). Also included are outlines to three unmade film projects, notes and catalogues of Wollen’s exhibitions of ‘Komar & Melamid: History Painting’ (1985), ‘On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International’…

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Crafting Resistence: Interview with Jasmine Gideon

‘Crafting Resistance: the art of Chilean political prisoners’ examines how craftwork made by political prisoners during their internment in the 1970s by the military regime led by General Pinochet has contributed to the mental health and well-being of those involved, particularly following their exile to the UK. The film engages with important issues around forced migration, well-being and resistance, showing how even in the most extreme circumstances it is sometimes possible to exert a degree of agency and demonstrate resistance. Given the longevity of the Chilean experience, the film illustrates how people live with the aftermath of torture and incarceration. The film is directed by…

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Tragedy and Sexuality: Black Narcissus

by Billy Stanton On Friday 15th June the ‘Tragedy and Sexuality’ series at Birkbeck cinema, organised by James Brown and on this occasion introduced by Carmen Mangion, concluded its current program of screenings with the classic Black Narcissus, one of the jewels in the crown not just of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger but of the wider British cinema. The film itself glows on the big screen, even without the benefit of a 35mm print; Jack Cardiff’s cinematography, his exquisite balancing of bright and misty blues and overheated, fire-and-brimstone reds, is a marvel of design, deliberation and deep understanding of the ways colour can signal,…

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Ulrike Ottinger: Director’s Statement on Chamisso’s Shadow

Across the weekend of July 20th-22nd we will be presenting the UK premiere of Chamisso's Shadow in partnership with The Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), the Goethe-Institut and LUX and with support from the Open City Documentary Film Festival, and in association with the German Screen Studies Network. Below, reproduced from the director's website, is Ulrike Ottinger's statement on the film:  "Despite all their differences, the native groups living along the coast have one thing in common: they live from and with the ocean. I would like to observe their current living conditions, get to know and talk to them and…

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BIMI Children’s Film Club: Lotte Reiniger

by Billy Stanton Saturday 9th June saw the return of the Children’s Film Club to Birkbeck Cinema with a special presentation of six fairytale animations from German film-maker Lotte Reiniger, hosted and presented by Esther Leslie. Screened were Puss in Boots (1954), Aladdin and the Magic Lamp (1954), Cinderella (1954), The Sleeping Beauty (1954), Hansel and Gretel (1955) and Jack and The Beanstalk (1956). The last of these was the only film made in colour (however the colour only stretches as far as background paintings, Reiniger’s familiar silhouetted characters remaining steadfastly black and shadowy). As Esther Leslie explained, the films were chosen specifically to offer…

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Tragedy and Sexuality: L’Éternel Retour

By Billy Stanton May 26th saw a rare screening of Jean Delannoy’s  L'Éternel Retour at the Birkbeck Cinema as part of the ongoing ‘Tragedy and Sexuality’ season. Written by Jean Cocteau, the film serves as a sort of a predecessor to his famous La Belle et La Bete (1946), drawing upon similar fairy-tale elements and medieval myth in its retelling of the Tristan and Isolde tale. But this film is more ambivalent and more troubling than the Villeneuve adaptation, its ambiguities teased out by Dr Ruth Austin of UCL in her introduction. L'Éternel Retour was made during the German occupation, but may immediately seem to…

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Cinephiles: The Bad and The Beautiful

by Billy Stanton Friday 1st June marked the screening of a beautiful 35mm print of Vincente Minnelli’s 1952 ‘The Bad and The Beautiful’ as part of the ongoing Cinephiles strand programmed by Dr Michael Temple. The strand focuses on films about film-making, and Minnelli’s work represented a move for the series from the silent era to the sound era, delving into the Hollywood system of the talkies through the tale of the fall-rise-and-fall of Kirk Douglas’ determined, morally ambivalent movie producer. Taking on a structure similar to a sort of simplified Citizen Kane (the amount of speakers giving their account of the lead character is…

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CLUES, HISTORIES, MYSTERIES AND MYSTORIES

by Billy Stanton On the 28th of April the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image hosted “Clues, Histories, Mysteries and Mystories”, an event dedicated to essay films focusing on international, personal and familial history in the first-person mode; what was demonstrated by the films shown and the speakers arguments was the potential held by this specific form to probe and present suppressed and buried histories, both general and individual. San Sabba  The event opened with an introduction from the chair Professor Catherine Grant, before a screening of San Sabba, a 2016 documentary by Dr. Romana Turina. Dr Turina followed the screening by discussing her work and…

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