A Nos Amours joins forces with Kino Klassika Foundation to present:

Eisenstein in Mexico: thinking about birth, death and rebirth of film works

Sunday, 24th April 2016 from 15:00 to 22:00
Regent Street Cinema

Box Office ((by donation - £10 with gift aid is suggested)

We are delighted to confirm participation of
Erika Balsom, Ian Christie, Sophie Fiennes, Owen Hatherley and Laura Mulvey.

Cinephilia wants us to resuscitate older works, keep them alive somehow. But what kind of life can be breathed into an old work? Is restoration much more than a perverse form of taxidermy, preserving the appearance of life, but in fact only parodying life? What about the status of special editions, out-takes, and director cuts? And how can films live when not much seen, at best items ticked off on lists of great films, admired but visible only on a small screen competing with pop up ads?

Eisenstein shot 50 hours of footage on location in Mexico in 1931 and 32, but was not able to finish the film. Despite luminous, astonishing images that leap from the screen, the film became mired in proprietorial scuffles. The project is one of cinema’s most beguiling objects; what would it have been had master finished work?

This event will screen three hypothetical versions of Eisenstein’s film – as prepared by Marie Seton (Time in the Sun, 1939), by Pavel Sergeyevich Alexandrov (¡Que viva México!1979) and by Oleg Kovalev (Mexican Fantasy, 1998). The three versions offer wildly different approaches to what the film might have been. They range in run time between 90 and 50 minutes. They are structured differently. They built from different shot selections. And yet, we want to say that they stand for one imaginary film.

These screenings will hopefully provide a springboard to discussion of what exactly restoration can and should be, and what sort of thing we are looking at when we look at an old film, to a critique of the notion of authenticity, and to a consideration of nostalgia and the persistence of cinephilia despite the odds.

The participants:

Dr Erika Balsom is Lecturer in Film Studies and in Liberal Arts at King’s College London, who is working on the implications of the new forms of image distribution and circulation made possible by digitization, particularly as they have been both adopted and reflected upon in artists’ moving image. Her book Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013) includes chapters on ‘filmic ruins’ and film remakes.

Ian Christie is Professor of Film at Birkbeck College, a film scholar and curator, often writing in Sight & Sound. He has curate dthe current GRAD Gallery Unexpected Eisenstein exhibition. Among his several publications are studies of Powell and Pressburger, and of Martin Scorsese.

Sophie Fiennes is a film-maker whose collaboration with Slavoj Žižek has resulted in two films, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and , The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. She has also made the film Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010) exploring Anselm Kiefers’ sculpture project at Barjac, a vast complex of ruination and forlorn folly. Her film about Grace Jones is eagerly anticipated.

Owen Hatherley is a writer and journalist who writes on architecture, politics and culture. His book Militant Modernism was published in 2009. It has been described as an attempt to excavate utopia from the ruins of modernism, and by Jonathan Meades as the work of a “velvet-gloved provocateur nostalgic… for a world made before he was born, a distant, preposterously optimistic world which…has had its meaning erased, its possibilities defiled".

Laura Mulvey is the celebrated theorist and writer whose "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1973) is required reading for anyone interested in the moving image. She is also a film-maker whose Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) has recently been restored and rereleased by the BFI. She is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College.

Time in the Sun and ¡Que viva México! will screen from rare 35mm prints.

Kino Klassika Foundation raises funds to educate audiences about film and film materials from the countries of the former Soviet Union.

With thanks to Regent Street Cinema without whom this event would not be possible.
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There will be a break at around 5pm. Details about the running order will follow soon.

A Nos Amours is delighted to present Buñuel's rarely presented tale of violence, passion and necrophilia as part of the ICA season dedicated to Bunuel's work: Aesthetics of the Irrational

17th November, 18.45hrs
ICA Cinema
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Box Office
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Buñuel had adapted Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as early as 1931 – before he won international fame for Los Olvidados and Él. He wrote the adaptation with Pierre Unik – his collaborator on the screenplay for Las Hurdes. Brontë’s intensely melodramatic tale of passion and desire, mingled with themes of aristocratic bad blood and the opposing of instinct and culture, violence and domesticity, must have greatly appealed to former surrealists, avowed communists, and in Buñuel’s case, to a brilliant satirist.

Moreover – this film was a perfect fit for a very Mexican love of high drama and hysteria, murderous confrontation and amour fou.

What does the film deliver? Buñuel in Mexico was a disciplined and adaptable director. He could make do and cut his cloth. He was known to make of use only 125 shots, and maximum of two takes, in order to deliver a feature film. His shoots tended to wrap ahead of schedule. Such brisk ‘B’ movie approaches define something of the style and manner of much of his Mexican films: they are works of brio and velocity.
The film opens with gunfire, and ends with gunfire. The landscape dwarfs the human, tragedy is unstoppable. In Mexico, where the dead are treated as absent friends, the necrophilia hinted at by Brontë need not be concealed. In what other cinema than that of Buñuel and that of Mexico might love be fulfilled with the tender unveiling and kissing of a corpse?

Starring: Irasema Dilián & Jorge Mistral
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91 minutes
Spanish, with English subtitles
Screening from the best vaiable copy, likley to be video

The New York Times called it “the cinephile’s holy grail” and Eric Rohmer hailed it as “a cornerstone in the history of modern cinema”. After being impossible to see for many years, A Nos Amours and The Badlands Collective, in collaboration with Arrow Films, are proud to present the UK premiere of the new 2K restoration of Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: Noli me tangere in all its 773-minute glory.

Loosely inspired by Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, Out 1: Noli me tangere is an absorbing, multi-stranded epic involving a quest to uncover a secret society in post-May 1968 Paris.

Constructed as eight feature length episodes which run over almost thirteen hours, it was originally screened just once in its original cut in 1971, with rare subsequent screenings in the ‘90s and ‘00s becoming the stuff of legend in cinema circles.

​This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience this remarkable picture the way it should be seen – beautifully restored on the big screen.

Given the length of the film, please ensure that you arrive by the advertised start time on both days. There will be several breaks during each day.

Schedule for both days:

Day 1, Saturday 28th November

09:00 - Doors open
09:15 - Episodes 1-2 (199 minutes with a 10 minute break in between)
12:45 - Intermission (40 minutes)
13:25 - Episodes 2-4 (215 minutes with a 15 break in between)
17:15 - End of Day 1

Day 2, Sunday 29th November

09:30 - Door open
09:50 - Intro
10:00 - Episodes 5-6 (190 minutes)
13:10 - Intermission (60 minutes)
14:10 - Episodes 7-8 (171 minutes)
17:15 - End of Day 2

Box Office

The screening coincides with the release of Arrow Films’ The Jacques Rivette Collection on Blu-ray. The much-anticipated set features Out1: Noli me tangere, Out 1: Spectre, Duelle (une quarantaine), Noroit (une vengeance) andMerry-Go-Round, each restored and appearing for the first time on home video in the UK. The set can be pre-ordered here:http://www.arrowfilms.co.uk/shop/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=603

No Home Movie

Friday 30th October, 7: 30pm
Regent's Street Cinema

Box Office

​The UK premiere screening of Akerman's intimate, deeply affecting documentation of the last year of her mother's life. Nelly Akerman has figured in so many of Akerman's films (her letters to her daughter provided a script for Akerman's brilliant, much shown 1977 film News From Home).

Organised by A Nos Amours with the cinema and the University of Westminster.

The final Chantal Akerman retrospective screening

La Folie Almayer (Almayer's Folly)

Thursday 22nd October, 8: 15pm
ICA Cinema

Box Office

Chantal Akerman’s final foray into fictional film-making, her adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s tale of colonial ennui.
Almayer is not a well man. His house has seen better times and the jungle aims to take it back. His Malaysian wife is mad. Their daughter has been sent away for a better life and an education.

This is Conrad’s novel about the malaise of a prospector in the dog days of colonialism. Conrad would have his protagonist forget, forget his wife and daughter, and die happy. Akerman, as we might expect, allows her Almayer no such comfort. He will see the horror of it all and die in agony.

This is the end point of the two-year long retrospective at ICA.

Almayer’s Folly is therefore Akerman’s dramatic swansong, a final statement of her imagined worlds. The metaphoric image of a filmmaker sitting amid the ruin of cinema is inescapable.

The screening is dedicated to the memory of Chantal Akerman June 6, 1940 - October 5, 2015

Cast: Stanislas Merhar, Aurora Marion, Marc Barbé, Zac Andrianasolo, Sakhna Oum
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La Folie Alamayer, dir. Chantal Akerman, 2009, 127 mins

We continue the Chantal Akerman retrospective with screening #48

Demain on Déménage (Tomorrow We Move)


Thursday 17th September, 7.00pm
ICA Cinema


Box Office

Once they have at last agreed to keep on living together but to look for a more spacious apartment, a raggle-taggle band of potential buyers arrive. Doors open and close and rooms get very crowded indeed, as in Feydeau farce, until Charlotte finds herself an office and gets on with her work

Akerman has often dealt with the vicissitudes of mother/daughter relationships. She has also made comedies about writer's block, about the distractions of noises and about the appeal of rebellion in the face of insufferable constraint.

No doubt this is a film without many admirers in the mainstream critical community, yet a decidedly French comedic surface overlays a study of Akerman’s abiding themes.

Cast: Sylvie Testud, Aurore Clément, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Natacha Régnier, Lucas Belvaux

Demain on Déménage, dir. Chantal Akerman, 2004, 110 mins

#47
Continuing the Chantal Akerman retrospective

Avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton & A L'est Avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton


Thursday 16th July 2015, 6.40pm
ICA Cinema


Box Office

Nothing from a filmmaker as great as Akerman is ever trivial.

We believe these films have never been seen in the UK, and yet they are indelibly the work of Akerman. Music, and musical thinking, is always at the heart of Akerman's practice, and here she makes music the centre stage subject, in homage to her friend and collaborator. But there may yet also be a reparative purpose.

Avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton

The great cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton has been present in much of Akerman’s work since the 1980s, whether on soundtracks (a great  number), as a protagonist (in Rue Mallet-Stevens), and in this case as subject of an extended documentary showcase. In the traditional manner of French television cultural documentation, we begin with a voice over from the filmmaker, situating and describing her subject. Following this Wider-Atherton takes over the narrative, sitting before the camera for an extended presentation of her life and art. Of particular relevance, given her relationship with Akerman, are her thoughts on interaction and exchange between artists.

Following this, Akerman moves her camera around as music is made, creating lovely views and angles and framings at will.

The music played includes a Jewish folk tune, Monteverdi, Janáček, Berio, Schubert, and not least Wieder-Atherton’s famed partnership with the British pianist Imogen Cooper to play Brahms.

Perfomers: Sonia Wider-Atherton (cello), Imogen Cooper (piano), Sarah Iancu (violin), Matthieu Lejeune (violin)

Avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton, dir. Chantal Akerman, 2002, 52 mins

A l'est avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton parts 1&2 (In the East with Sonia Wieder-Atherton)

Sonia Wieder-Atherton announces her programme: to gather music from the east of Europe, from Mitteleuropa. First she reveals her approach to curation, to orchestration and arrangement. The composers she chooses and arranges include Rachmaninov, Dohnanyi, Tcherepnin, Franck Krawczyk, Martinu, Mahler and Martinů.

If these works have anything in common, it is above all a sense of longing, a honeyed lyricism that evokes distant horizons and resignation. Akerman is content to find a series of angles and to edit as little as necessary, above all to limit her presence. This is a tender offering. Wider-Atherton is a remarkable cellist. The plangent tone of the cello must bring tears to any eye.

In some ways this is a recovery, or reconfiguration, of Europe as a site of culture and expression, rather than as as site of devastation, pogrom and Shoah. 

Performers: Sonia Wieder-Atherton, Cyril Dupuy and others.

A l'est avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton parts 1&2,  dir. Chantal Akerman, 2009, 44+ 42 mins

# 44
Continuing the Chantal Akerman retrospective

23.4.15, 6.40pm
ICA cinema

Akerman 19: Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman (1997) & Sud (1999)

tickets here

Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman

Commissioned as part of the series:·Cinéma, de notre temps

The legendary series of film-maker portraits curated by Janine Bazin and André Labarthe offered Akerman a commission to make a portrait of a film-maker. She chose, entirely consistently with her approach to date, to make a study of herself as film-maker. Why not? She had turned film-making back on itself, and discovered a feminised and ‘other’ sensibility, another way of seeing the world and self.

Akerman delivers a monologue about her work and thinking. This is followed by a montage of clips from her work, including from·Jeanne Dielman,·Saute ma Ville,·Hotel Monterrey,·Histoires d'Amerique,·Toute une nuit,·Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles,·Les années 80 and so on.

Akerman closes with a simple statement of fact, without any of the usual biographical adornments of a film portrait: "I was born in Brussels, that’s the truth."

Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman, dir. Chantal Akerman, 1996, 63 mins

Sud·(South)

Inspired by a love of the literature of William Faulkner and James Baldwin, Akerman planned a meditation on the American South, to be modeled perhaps on her prior·D’est. But, just as she began work, James Byrd, Jr. was murdered in Jasper, Texas. A black man, he has severely beaten by three white men, chained to their truck, and dragged three miles through a black neighborhood.

Akerman’s approach is not that of news reportage. Jasper, the context for the crime, must be scrutinised. Patient interviews reveal the people and their attitudes. Byrd's funeral is a moment of deep feeling.

This is a film that finds an alternative to the forensic investigation of Capote's·In Cold Blood. This is a film that evokes a terrain, the folds of a psychological condition, the cold heart of white supremacism and the extraordinary nobility of the black community under attack.

Perhaps it is Akerma’s sense of exclusion, stemming from her family’s experience of the Holocaust, that enables her to see in this way.

Akerman has written:

How does the southern silence become so heavy and so menacing so suddenly? How do the trees and the whole natural environment evoke so intensely death, blood, and the weight of history? How does the present call up the past? And how hoes this past, with a mere gesture or a simple regard, haunt and torment you as you wander along an empty cotton field, or a dusty country road?

Sud, dir. Chantal Akerman, 1999, 71 mins

A live radio reading and discussion
on Resonance104.4FM FM and on-line

Wednesday March 11th, 8-9pm

With:

Justine Waddell (actor and screenwriter)
Joanna Hogg (curator and film-maker)
Gareth Evans (curator of film at Whitechapel Art Gallery)
Jonathan Romney (critic and film-maker)
Adam Roberts (curator and film-maker)

Who was Marivaux and why does he matter to lovers of Eric Rohmer's superb cinema?

The BFI are just coming to the end of a 2 month orgy of Rohmer - films that are adored by many for their poised dialogue scenes, where heart searching often leads to unexpected discoveries, where the human heart rarely if ever knows itself. Eric Rohmer's characterisations and plotting have been compared to that found in the plays of Marivaux - who straddled the 17th and 18th Centuries, and was best known for the drama he made for the Comédie-Française in Paris.

From his name comes the word 'marivaudage' - which indicates a comedy, with a romantic setting, nuanced dialogue and a concern for fine shades of feeling. This is achieved by means of deft and witty wordplay, perhaps of a rather precious kind. Which all sounds rather like a Rohmer film. This was first suggested by the critic Michel Serceau, although Rohmer resisted this claim in a 1994 Cinema de notre temps edition: Preuves à l'appui (see here)

This radio presentation offers a gathering of film writers, curators, actors and film-makers to read (very informally) through a play by Marivaux and then think about what is revealed - is Marivaux the source of the peculiar and distinctive style that Rohmer offered? The play selected isCareless Vows (originally Les serments indiscrets), translated by John Walters. With many thanks to Methuen.

A preview screening of Rohmer's Le rayon vert (The Green Ray, 1986), currently playing in various venues in a newly restored version, but also available on DVD, is recommended.