BFS 2001 themes:

Woody Allen - Film noir - Stanley Kubrick - French cinema


Woody Allen – the actor & director -

by Harry Oldmeadow
Woody Allen's oeuvre is by now prodigious: he has played over fifty lead roles as an actor (including a handful of distinguished performances in other directors' films, perhaps most notably Martin Ritt's The Front, 1976), written nearly fifty film scripts and directed thirty-odd features. It's been a long trip from stand-up schmiel comic to one of the contemporary cinema's most respected directors. He is, of course, best known in his screen persona (on full display in Annie Hall and Manhattan) whilst his off-screen life has attracted some lurid media coverage in recent times. But none of this should obscure the fact that Allen can lay claim to being one of a very small handful of contemporary American directors whose work bears serious comparison with the great masters of both Hollywood and European "art cinema". Critical opinion is divided over Allen's attempts at Bergmanesque dramas (Interiors, Another Woman, September, Shadows and Fog) and not everyone responds to the absurdist farces of his early directorial career (represented in our program by Everything you always wanted to know about sex (1972). Perhaps his most satisfying films are those in which comic and dramatic elements fuse, and in which Allen gives free-rein to a risk-taking and innovative style of film-making — Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) rank highly amongst such works. Zelig (1983) exemplifies Allen's penchant for off-beat, stylistically experimental and reflexive films which are more redolent of Europe than Hollywood.


Film Noir -

by Harry Oldmeadow
From the early 1940s to the early '50s many of the most interesting Hollywood films fell into the "film noir" category. Film historians argue over whether film noir is best regarded as a style of film-making, a Hollywood genre or a movement. Perhaps it doesn't much matter! In any case, we can easily recognise the recurrent features of film noir: "hard-boiled" crime stories and melodramas set in the American urban underworld; the world-weary male protagonist (usually a private-eye or cop) and the femme fatale/spider-woman; a moral climate which is pessimistic, bleak, cynical, anti-romantic, anti-heroic; a film-making style drawing on German Expressionism and making innovative use of low-key lighting, deep-focus photography, oblique camera angles, and elaborate and claustrophobic mise-en-scene. In psychological and sociological terms film noir can be seen as the shadow of the Walt Disney-General Motors vision of the American Dream (ie, Happy Families residing in beautifully-manicured suburbs). The paradigmatic noir texts include such well-known classics as The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep and Touch of Evil. The BFS selection showcases films from two of Hollywood's masters, Hitchkock's Notorious (1946) and Fritz Lang's neglected but highly potent The Big Heat (1953). Curtis Hanson's 1997 L.A. Confidential is a contemporary re-working of noir themes while Polanski's Repulsion (1964) and Chinatown (1974) also offer fascinating inflections on the thematic and stylistic repertoire of noir as well as being major landmarks in the career of this creative, idiosyncratic and disturbing director.


Stanley Kubrick – director (and show-off) -

by Harry Oldmeadow
Stanley Kubrick is one of the great show-offs of the American cinema - "Hey! Look, no hands!" His films are marked by a stylistic bravado and technical derring-do which is sometimes radically innovative, sometimes simply bombastic. But as with that other stupendous egotist of the American cinema, Orson Welles, much can be forgiven a director of such prodigious talents and immense ambitions, even when aspiration and realisation fail to meet. Kubrick's career is punctuated by acclaim, controversy, and failure (again, the comparison with Welles is irresistible). In my view his most successful films were Paths of Glory (1957), Dr Strangelove (1964), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Full Metal Jacket (1987) - in each of these he found the appropriate style with which to work through a intense thematic preoccupation -whilst Lolita (1962) , Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) have accumulated both admirers and detractors. Kubrick was also involved in several grandiose projects which never came to fruition, including an epic about Napoleon, and came to grief as a short-lived director of Spartacus (1960) and One-Eyed Jacks (1961). It is no surprise to discover that Kubrick was a chess enthusiast and an avid photographer, these interests signalling his rather cerebral approach to film-making and his preoccupation with visual creativity. The three films on offer in the BFS program constitute some of Kubrick's most arresting work, and it is particularly pleasing to see the neglected Paths of Glory being screened again.


French Cinema -

by Harry Oldmeadow
Over the century of the cinema's development France has been one of the power-houses of European film-making. French cinema has accumulated a reputation for elegance, panache, romance, and joi de vivre - but it is also a cinematic tradition marked by radical and experimental film-making styles and a penchant for darker "existentialist" and political themes. The BFS program this year spans a number of important French films from Jean Renoir's ground-breaking Rules of the Game (1939) - a film of the most extraordinary kinetic élan and stylistic extravagance - to Robert Guediguian's engaging Marius and Jeannette (1997) and Catherine Breillatt's challenging exploration of sexual disturbance in Romance (1999). Chris Marker's La Jetee (1962) and Alain Resnais' Night and Fog (1956) exemplify a tradition of "experimental" and innovative film-making which challenges our usual assumptions and critical categories (How do we categorize a film like La Jetee?) whilst Murmur of the Heart (Louis Malle, 1971) is the kind of witty and sophisticated drama at which the French excel.