Brighton Cinematheque

[For extra screenings not included in the printed or current programme please see the "News" section]

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Sunday 10th October at 8pm
Battle of Algiers
Gillo Pontevorco Algiers/France
1965 120 mins 35mm.
Shot in a gripping, quasi-documentary style, Algiers depicts the violent struggle in the late 1950s for Algerian independence from France, where the film was banned. The heady, insurrectionary mood of the film is enhanced by a relentlessly pulsating Ennio Morricone soundtrack. Using a cast of untrained actors, Pontevorco balances cinematic tension with grimly acute political insight, managing a rare even-handedness in his dipiction of the adversaries. The advent of the ‘war against terror’ has only intensified the film’s relevance. ‘Among a handful of the finest movies ever made.’ David Stubbs.
In collaboration with Fabrica Gallery.

Wednesday 13th October at 8pm
The God of Cookery
Steven Chow Hong Kong
1996 95 mins digital
From the director of Shaolin Soccer. ‘This crowning jewel of Chow’s brilliant ‘94-96 run will go down as the pivotal point in his career. Boasting one of his most classic scripts and without compromising either the loose feel he prized or the scruff he idealized, the result was the film everyone picks to acquaint Chow with their friends. ‘God..’ humorously charts the fall and rise of a disgraced world-class chef cast out when his portly apprentice double-crosses him and steals all his assets. Rescued from oblivion by the vendors and bungling triads who populate Kowloon’s night markets, he divines the secrets of P-Funk Cooking and confronts his betrayer in a supernatural culinary smackdown.’ Kevin Sun
+ Iron Chef (2002 Japan)
Hosted by the flamboyant Takeshi Kaga in the ‘Kitchen Stadium’ - an extract from the cult, ultra-camp TV culinary battle.
Presented by Black Ice

Thursday 14th October at 8pm
Certain Women
Bobby Abate + Peggy Ahwesh
USA 2004 75 mins digital
Brighton Cinematheque is proud to present the UK premiere of Certain Women, Bobby Abate and Peggy Ahwesh’s first collaboration, an experiment in sordid melodrama shot on multiple video formats and peppered with sardonic wit, sharp satire and low-tech lyricism.
‘Based on the novel by Southern genre writer Erskine Caldwell. Caldwell´s pulp storytelling, proto-feminist stance and unabashed social dramatisation provide a distinct vision of the condition of women — specifically working class women. His broadly drawn themes of small-town hypocrisy and restrictive moral values contextualize the titular characters struggle for sexual expression, stability and independence. There is little redemption in Caldwell’s tales, but loads of over-the-top despair at the reality of human wickedness.
Abate and Ahwesh´s adaptation exaggerates the clichés of femininity and men in power, creating a disconcerting parable that pays tribute to, but also defies Caldwell’s Eisenhower-era style, here transposed into a contemporary yet timeless setting. The cast is comprised of non-professionals chosen by the directors for their unique personalities, stock character looks and on-screen magnetism.’ NYUFF

Sunday 17th October at 8pm
Wizard People, Dear Reader
Brad Neely USA 2003 150 mins digital
Brighton Cinematheque is honoured to present the UK premiere of Brad Neely’s unauthorised re-envisioning of ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’. Plundering a family friendly icon of popular culture, Neely has-synced the films entire soundtrack with his own gravely voiced, drunken utterances. Far from an obsessive fan, he appears to be ‘an over excitable, misinformed individual who not only has not read the book but apparently recorded his version while watching the movie for the first time.’ It shouldn’t work but, as sell-out audiences at this years NY Underground Film Festival will testify, it’s not only very funny but attains a mesmerising quality the original can only hint at.

Monday 18th October at 8pm
Gang Gang Dance
+ Blood Stereo
A night of ear and eye confusion: Gang Gang Dance are a four piece from NYC comprised of Brian DeGraw (angelblood/cranium), Liz Bougatsos (angelblood/actress), Josh Diamond (jackie-o mf) and Tim Dewitt (cranium, white magic). Combining the stylistic elements of Asian, Middle Eastern, Ethiopian, hip-hop, rock, experimental & electronic music, they synthesizes a vital and wholly new type of music; rigidly structured yet fluid enough to allow for the members to improvise and take the music in a different direction at a moments notice. + Fresh from their Olympic show in Athens, Brighton’s Blood Stereo (Karen Constance of Polly Shang Kuan band, Dylan Nyoukis of Decaer Pinga) will be opening the nights events with their own take on ear occultism. Both bands will be performing to their own hi-8 strangeness. Show starts 8.30pm. All tickets £4.

Thursday 21st October at 8pm
Flicker Rate
A pulsating programme of flashing frames and flicker with short stroboscopic films and animation originated with super 8, 16mm and video. Hold onto your seats and take a no holds barred audio-visual ride to the outer limits of experimental cinema.
Blazes (Robert Breer USA 1961 16mm 3 mins)
69 (Robert Breer 1969 USA 16mm 4`25 mins)
Two abstract animations from the acclaimed US filmmaker.
Landscape (Jules Engel 1971 4 mins)
Rumble (Jules Engel 1975 3 mins)
Patterns of Interference (Ian Helliwell 2000 3 mins)
Optical Action (Helliwell 2004 4 mins)
Two Super 8 works including the premiere of Helliwell`s new hand drawn/found footage flicker film.
Trama (Christian Lebrat 1980 12 mins)
Black and Light (Pierre Rovere 1974 8 mins)
A computer driven abstract work with close attention to image and sound.
Word Movie (Paul Sharits USA 1966 4 mins)
Early film from the noted flicker exponent.
Symmetricks (Stan Vanderbeek 1971 USA 6`15 mins)
Pulsing patterns hand-drawn and computer generated.

Sunday 24th October at 8pm
When it is Dark
Lot In Sodom
Webber + Watson USA 1933 27 mins digital
Semi-clad bodies, delirious revelries, and a searing, cataclysmic finale, depict the fall of a city devoted to sins of the flesh. A sensual, incoherent multi-layered adaptation of the Biblical tale, screened with it’s original experimental soundtrack from Alec Wilder.
Bells of Atlantis
Ian Hugo USA 1932 10 mins 16mm
Hugo and pioneering animator Len Lye superimpose densely coloured imagery against Louis and Bebe Barron’s evocative electronic score. Based on Anais Nin’s prose poem ‘The House of Incest’ - Nin also appears in the film.
Gymnopedies
Lawrence Jordan USA 1965 6 mins 16mm
The theme is Weightlessness. Objects and characters are cut loose from habitual meanings, also from tensions and gravitational limitations. The lyrical Erik Satie track accompanies the film. ‘Jordan’s approach was meticulous...a strangely seductive pantomime of life.’ Gary Morris
Once Upon a Time
Lawrence Jordan 1974 16 mins 16mm
A cobweb castle. Spirits appear on the screen and are heard on the soundtrack. Gradually a female guide emerges and escorts a young man into an antechamber to another world. ‘Pulsating lights, undulating objects, combined with a rich and full colour sense.’ Donald Miller.
Les Vampires
Louis Feuillade France 1915 25 mins digital
An episode from Feuillade’s ten part serial. Championed by the surrealists for its dazzling lapses of logic, anarchic spirit and the glamourisation of a mysterious criminal underworld that would see it banned. Shot in actual locations, Les Vampires headed by the alluring Irma Vep seduce, corrupt and steal their way through the Parisian elite.

Thursday 28th October at 8pm
Dan Geesin:
Dissolving the Index
and Telling Stories
Dan Geesin is a British artist based in Amsterdam, coming to Cinematheque to present his work from the last ten years. The evening will show the chronological progress of his work from minute observational films through to elaborate ways of telling stories, including live action, drawing and the animation of hundreds of slides.
Included in the evening will be two recent films:
Clods - A rhythmic visual fantasy inspired by the wondrous paintings of Jacob Maris about peasant life and mysterious beets. On a stretch of land, the daughter of a farmer is busy planting beets that the farmer has lovingly cut in their small hut. The rhythm and monotony of their everyday activities resounds in the cyclic rhythms of the land. But then a 'Living Clod of Earth' emerges from a nearby lake...
The Garden - is like a collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Martin Arnold pitched into the medium of video. A ‘perfect’ European haute bourgeois family plucked from the pages of Vanity Fair play out a melodrama of utter inconsequence observed by a vaguely ominous and watchful servant. Geesin generates a series of psycho-sexual tensions by presenting the ‘narrative’ in tableaux, which oscillate between two still frames – the oscillation amplified by the video resolution lines which enhance the ‘stillness’ of each frame. The Garden quietly erupts, evoking in the viewer a series of quiet, dreadful expectations and anticipations.

Sunday 31st October at 2pm
The Halloween Horror
Undead
Spierig Brothers 2003 Australia 90 mins digital
As meteorites bombard the small town of Berkeley , the dead are bought back to life to feast on the living. A small band of survivors prepare to battle it out with the rotting hordes. The premise may sound familiar, but the Spierig Brothers debut soon veers wildly off course tearing open genre conventions and gnawing on the remains. A low-budget horror festival favourite destined to become a zombie classic. ‘Hilarious, original and gory as hell. If you consider yourself even the mildest fan of
horror, you must see this movie.’ angelfire.com. Thanks to Black Ice.
+
Low budget experiments in terror:
Ursula(Lloyd M. Williams USA 1961 12 mins)
A lurid, fog-shrouded tale of a young girl's torment at the hands of her cruel mother.
Journey into the Unknown (Kerry Laitala USA 2002)
A phantasmagoric, optically printed rumination.
Tuning the Sleeping Machine (David Sherman USA 1996)
A riotously irrational exposition on the horror film.
Dawn of the Evil Millennium (Damon Packard USA 2002)
A bizarre iconoclastic vision - demonic creatures swagger and blast themselves, turbo-charged, across time and space. Packard’s incredible feature length debut screens here on the 18th Nov.
The Ironworks (Ben Rivers UK 2004 7 mins)
Deep in the woods a boy explores a long disused ironworks. Something is waiting. A beautifully shot, quietly malevolent marvel of escalating dread.

Sunday 31st October at 8pm
Devil Daddy
For Halloween, Cinematheque is thrilled to host a live presentation of Mark Ferelli's ‘Devil Daddy’; a re-interpretation of Piers Haggard’s neglected 70’s UK horror classic Blood On Satan’s Claw.
Utilising spoken word, sound, and the medium of the Magic Lantern - the simple optical projector originally conceived in 1646 by Athanasius Kircher, which at its height of popularity in the nineteenth century represents the very beginnings of cinema - Ferelli shapes the physics of glass, kerosene flame and shadow-play. Weaving original film stills with new shots taken at the location of one of the film’s most vital scenes, he navigates a personal journey through layers of simultaneity and memory. With sound by Andy Irritant of Irritant Records, this is a one off Cinematheque must see.
The performance lasts one hour - there is no admittance once it is underway. All tickets £4.

Monday 1st November at 8pm
US Election Special: Outfoxed
Robert Greenwold USA 2004 80 min digital
With one day to go: Outfoxed examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News - champions of Bush’s neo-conservative agenda - have been running a ‘race to the bottom’ in television news. This film provides an in-depth look at Fox and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public's right to know. It explores Murdoch's burgeoning kingdom and the impact on society when a broad swathe of media is controlled by one person. ‘Robert Greenwald has crafted a sobering and timely documentary.... the film joins the ranks of other recent incendiary left-leaning political docs, and represents activism at its healthy cinematic best.’ Seattle Times
All tickets £2

Tuesday 2nd November at 7.30pm
Accidental Cinema: - Chance Operations in Film and Digital Media
Films by Brighton based and international film-makers who have creatively explored the possibilities offered by the use of chance operations and generative processes in film. Some works have been created by artists whose practice radically re-orientates the use of traditional analogue film, and some have been
created by new media artists whose use of digital technology explores novel filmic structures. Many of the filmmakers will also be present at the event to discuss their work. The program will begin at 7.30 and last for about 100 minutes.
Films from: David Gatten, Guy Sherwin, Nick Collins, Nicky Hamlyn, Alex Evans, Lev Manovich, Paul Brown, Andy Webster Semiconductor, Ian Helliwell.

3rd – 10th November: Critical Positions
Cinematheque in association with nuisance.org.uk presents a season of documentaries featuring some of the ‘heavyweights’ of contemporary theory. These analysts of 20th century thought and vision become themselves the objects of our gaze as they are interviewed about psychoanalysis, deconstruction, notions of biography, the future and belief. Critical viewing for those who want a new sense of Lacan, Derrida and Zizek or who want to exercise the grey matter.

Wednesday 3rd November at 8pm
+ Saturday 6th November at 2.30pm
Derrida’s Elsewhere
Safaa Fathy France 2003 68 mins Digital
A highly personal exploration of the parallels between the personal life and the work of Jacques Derrida, arguably the most important philosopher of the 20th Century. Drawing from his book ‘Circumfession’ the film traces a number of seemingly disparate themes including hospitality, religion, sexuality and the place of the subject in philosophy. ‘Elsewhere’ takes viewers into Derrida's worlds - that of his work in present day Paris and, using stills and super 8 footage, of his childhood and adolescence in Algeria and Spain. ‘A film that preserves on one level the coherence and cogency of Derrida's work, highlighting it against a vivid series of autobiographical backdrops. A unique and intensely personal examination.’ Theory and Event

Thursday 4th November at 8pm
Jacques Lacan’s Psychoanalysis: Part One
Benoit Jacquot France 1972 60 mins digital
In 1972 Jacques-Alain Miller, then an analyst in training, approached French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to request a television interview. ‘I wanted Lacan, just once, to speak to the common man’, said Miller. ‘Psychoanalysis’ has survived as the only document of Lacan on film, the only record of the once-notorious lecture style that Lacan showcased at his infamous seminars in Paris during the late 60s to early 70s. It exposes with unexpected simplicity his most complex theories of the unconscious; the cure; the difference between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, love and women. For those aiming to understand the institutionalisation of Freudian thought and the challenge Lacan represents, this is an essential work.

Sunday 7th November at 2.30pm
The Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord France 1972 85 mins video
At the heart of Situationist theory is the idea that capitalism has subsumed creativity by responding to desires with commodities, heralding an era of ‘banalisation’. Situationist strategies sought to disrupt this passivity. This is Debord’s adaptation of his own 1967 polemic - an assemblage of crudely re-appropriated Spectacle iages from Hollywood through to soft porn. Non-linear, mismatched and disorientating, with a voice over from Debord himself.
+ L’Anti-Concept (G.J.Wolman France 1951) Wolman was a key figure in the Lettriste Movement, precursor of the Situationists. L’Anti-concept is an anti - film originally projected onto a balloon. There are no sub-titles to distract you from the play of light and Wolman’s energised narration - a printed translation will be available.

Sunday 7th November at 8pm
Ashura: This Blood Spilled in my Veins
Jalal Toufic Lebanon 2002 104 mins Beta SP.
‘Al-Husayn, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad and the son of the first Shi‘ite imam, Ali, was slaughtered alongside many members of his family in the desert in 680. This memory is torture to me. The memory that the yearly commemoration of Ashura is trying to maintain is not only or mainly that of the past, but the memory of the future, namely the promise of the Parousia of the twelfth imam, the long-awaited Mahdi, as well as the corresponding promise of Duodecimal Shi‘ites to wait for him. Ashura: a condition of possibility of an unconditional promise’. Toufic. Ashura was one of the outstanding films at this year's International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam. Alternately visceral and intellectual the film follows the preparation and religious procession during the Islamic commemoration of Ashura. The sequences are punctuated by interviews with Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze.

Wednesday 10th November at 8pm
Slavoj Zizek: The Reality of the Virtual
Ben Wright UK 2004 70 mins 16mm
In this tour de force filmed lecture, Slavoj Zizek lucidly and compellingly reflects on belief - which takes him from Father Christmas to democracy - and on the various forms that belief takes, drawing on Lacanian categories of thought. In a radical dismissal of today’s so called post-political era, he mobilises the paradox of universal truth urging us to dare to enact the impossible. It is a characteristic virtuoso performance, moving promiscuously from subject to subject, but keeping the larger argument in view. Based at Ljubliana University, Slavoj Zizek's main body of work includes ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’ and, most recently, ‘The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity’.
Thanks to Lux for this screening.

Thursday 11th November at 8pm
Wonderful Days
Moon-saeng Kim / Park Sunmin Korea 2003 90 mins digital
Civilization has been destroyed by war and pollution, but the survivors have built the last city of Ecoban. With most natural resources exhausted, Ecoban is itself powered by the pollution its citizens actively create. As conflict rages with the neighbouring Marr, one man wants to clear away the clouds and see the sky.
Touted by many as the ‘best Korean anime ever’, its combination of traditional hand-drawn animation, computer graphics and miniatures are breathtaking. The plot seems to obeys no sense or logic. It doesn’t matter. ‘One of the most beautiful films ever made’ AsiaCine.
Presented by Black Ice

Sunday 14th November at 8pm
Light Readings
Throughout the 60s and 70s a radical womens film movement emerged as an alternative to what Joyce Wieland described as the ‘avant-garde boys club’. Diverse distribution networks were formed, and, within this loose-knit coalition, experimental filmmakers attempted to create new forms of expression and representation.
Fuses (Carolee Scheeman USA 1964 - 67 25 mins 16mm)
Scheeman and James Tenney film each other in every manner of sexual embrace. Scheeman later treated the film with paint and chemicals - the lovers emerging through ‘nebulous clusters of colour and light’.
Rat Life and Diet in North America (Joyce Wieland Canada 1968 16 mins 16mm)
Oppressed by cats, imprisoned Gerbils break free to Canada where they take up organic gardening and hold cherry pie parties. ‘One of the oddest and most moving films of the avant-garde...what makes it affecting are the free-floating relationships between images--and images and text.’ Fred Camper
Notebooks Marie Menken USA 1962 10 mins 16mm
Fragments of film Menken had been making since the 40’s reveal the value of the commonplace and personal. ‘Film poetry free of obvious symbolism’ Jonas Mekas
Shapes (Annabel Nicholson UK 1970 7 mins 16mm) An exploration of the incidental tactile process of film itself. Co-founder of distribution network ‘Circles’ , Nicholson would later explore expanded cinema in performances such as ‘Reel Time’.
Light Reading (Liz Rhodes UK 1979 20 mins 16mm) Used typewriter tape printed onto film and a voice searching for clues. An experiment into the ‘optical sound’ of words. ‘...has the density,concentration and allusiveness of poetry.’ Sylvia Paskin.
Plumb Line (Carolee Scheeman USA 1968 - 72 15 mins 16mm) A film diary of daily moments and the disintegration of a relationship. Scheeman again treated the film frames with a variety of processes, finally flames.
Thanks to Lux and Lisa Fannen.

Monday 15th November at 8pm
Light Readings 2:
Invisible Adversaries
Valie Export Austria 1977 112 min 16mm
Set in ‘70s Vienna, Valie Export's controversial feature has been called a feminist ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’. Anna (Susanne Widl), a Viennese photographer, discovers that extra-terrestrial beings are colonizing the minds of her fellow citizens by raising the human aggression quotient. The outer world immediately becomes disjointed, but the inner world does too, as Anna and her love (Peter Weibel) try to hang onto their deteriorating relationship. A unique and totally original work by Austria's foremost filmmaker, Invisible Adversaries is at once philosophical and funny, psychologically revealing and sexually frank.
‘A witty and visually brilliant essay on gender and experience, culture and environment’ (National Film Theatre). ‘Funny, violent, sexual…It makes you reconsider what you and everyone else is doing in life and in art’ Amy Taubin.

Thursday 18th November at 8pm
Reflections of Evil
Damon Packard USA 2002 120 mins Digital
We are honoured to present the UK premiere of Packard’s epic auteur vision. Packard spent the whole of a sizeable inheritance on this film then gave 29,000 copies away for free. Broke, and with his web site down - all proceeds will go to the filmmaker. ‘George Kuchar overdosing on sugar meets George Romero. It is about the indignities of being socially irrelevant, overweight, a Mama’s boy, and a pedestrian to boot – about watching too much TV, having paranoid neighbours and seeing Steven Spielberg’s career unfold from the exploitation of horror to the exploitation of the Holocaust. A collage of dizzying impressions of Los Angeles, found footage and parody of pop culture images, the film pays homage to these cheap exploitation films of the seventies we hated to love – yet upstages them by being even cheaper, sleazier, more disjointed and having more body matters splattered on the sidewalk.’ Bérénice Reynaud

Sunday 21st November at 8pm
and Thursday 25 November at 8pm
Germany Year Zero
Roberto Rossellini Italy/West Germany
1947 74 mins 16mm
The final part of Rossellini's neo-realist trilogy made in the immediate aftermath of WWII, Hitler's death and Berlin's devastation. A long opening tracking shot through the ruins is both stunning document and hallucinatory voyage through a stone-age city. 13 year old Edmund, a former Hitler Youth, struggles to survive under the Occupation in 1945. Whilst Edmund runs errands and gets involved with black marketeers and adolescent crooks, his sister Eva turns to prostitution. The image of post-war Germany is bleak and unforgiving, summed up in one of the most shocking endings you’re likely to see.

Sunday 28th November at 7pm
Nuclear Sunday
To celebrate the imminent destruction of Cinematheque as we have know it, we present a chilling and powerful look at another apocalyptic possibility - and a timely reminder for all the sabre-rattlers in positions of power.

The War Game
Peter Watkins
UK. 1965 47 mins
Few films have caused such controversy as Peter Watkins’ The War Game, a drama documentary made for BBC TV in 1965 about a ‘limited’ nuclear attack on Kent, England. Blending fiction and fact to create a moving and startling vision of the personal as well as the public consequences of such an attack, Watkins exposes the inadequacy of the nation’s Civil Defence programme, and questions the philosophy of the nuclear deterrent. Conspicuously absent from TV screens until 1985, it was mainly through cinema release in 1966 – and its Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1967 – that it gained a loyal and vociferous following, providing a sharp focus for CND and other peace movements.
Crossroads
Bruce Conner
USA 1976 36 mins
Connor spliced together the US Military's documentation of the Bikini Atoll A-Bomb tests in 1951. The evocative power of Crossroads is blatantly inherent in the staggering physics of nuclear fission. Beyond the simple Romantic spectacle of the mushroom cloud, however, the film finds a strangely sublime place between scientific reportage and concentrated media presentation - the obsessive power of observation.
Threads
Mick Jackson
UK 1984 90 mins
‘The connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable’
This award-winning British docudrama pulls no punches in tackling the subject of nuclear war. Set in the industrial city of Sheffield, Threads depicts the holocaust through the eyes of Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher) and her fiancee Jimmy Kemp (Reece Dinsdale) from two months before to thirteen years after the holocaust.
A graphically disturbing portrayal of the medieval conditions that would prevail after such a conflict; starvation, nuclear winter, disease, psychological trauma, illiteracy and both mental and physical mutation.

Thursday 2 December 8pm
Einsturzende Neubaten: Listen With Pain
Birgit Herdlitschke and Christian Beetz
Germany 2000 57 mins digital
Berlin's Einsturzende Neubaten, one of Germany's most influential bands along with Can, Faust and Kraftwerk, sprang into life in 1980 using electric drills, jackhammers, metal, wood and all manner of found objects to make their music. This revealing documentary, spanning 20 years of the band, features original footage and interviews with all the main players plus label boss Stevo, collaborator Nick Cave and former tour managers.
Der Platz
Uli M Schuppel
Germany 1997 52 mins digital
A compelling and evocative portrait of the workers behind the massive urban reconstruction of Berlin's Potsdamerplatz, coupled with a soundtrack from FM Einheit of Neubaten fame. Over images and sounds of construction the workers are tell tales of their favourite places from their homelands.

Saturday 4 December and Sunday 5 December at 1pm
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Rainer Werner Fassbinder West Germany 1979/80,
15 hours
Episode times see below
A special all-weekend screening of the whole 15 plus hours of Fassbinder's rarely seen masterpiece. Last shown to packed houses at the ICA 10 years ago.
An astonishing monumental work, the screenplay was adapted by Fassbinder himself from Alfred Doblin's classic 1929 novel of low life in Berlin in the twilight days of the Weimar Republic. The seamy decadent society in which Nazism was already spreading is brilliantly evoked in dark, expressionist settings. Berlin Alexanderplatz is that rare paradox - like Reitz's Heimat - a film masterpiece made for television.
Berlin Alexanderplatz is not merely Fassbinder's longest and most ambitious film; it represents the crowning of the director's lifelong obsession with Döblin's novel, and is considered by many to be his greatest film. Fassbinder identified closely with his protagonist, released murderer Franz Biberkopf. In fact, many of Fassbinder's familiar preoccupations are explored in depth; the destructive pressures of society and the inevitability with which people exploit and hurt those they love. ‘If Fassbinder had never done anything but Berlin Alexanderplatz, he would fully belong in the Pantheon.’ (Andrew Sarris). Please note – it is possible to see individual episodes or to come and go as you please, as they work as individual pieces. Though the dedicated will be rewarded.
Free tea and biscuits! Don’t miss out!
For all films playing throughout the festival please see www.cine-city.co.uk

1pm-3pm - Parts 8&9
3.30pm-5.30pm - Parts 10 & 11
6.30pm-10.30pm - Parts 12,13 & Epilogue.

Wednesday 8th December at 8pm
The Beaver Trilogy
Trent Harris USA 1979 – 1985 90 mins
‘Beaver Trilogy is so perfect, so odd, and so affecting that you feel you're in the presence of a minor miracle.’ New York Times. The storyline appears simple enough; In 1980 Harris, then a TV cameraman, encounters a young man known as ‘Groovin’ Gary’ who energetically explains his love of impersonation and his fascination with the world of stardom. He has an alter ego named ‘Olivia Newton Dawn’ and invites Harris to a small town talent show in Beaver, Utah where he transforms himself into the simulated superstar. Over the next five years Harris then re-filmed his short documentary twice, firstly with a then unknown Sean Penn in the lead, and finally with an uninhibited Crispin Glover taking the role into the realms of high melodrama. With each remake truth and
fiction reshape themselves as two of Hollywood's most idiosyncratic talents try to keep pace with the original. ‘A rivetingly strange, multilayered inquiry into celebrity, obsession and serendipity.’ A. 0.
Scott / NY Film

Thursday 9th December at 8pm
The White Hell of Pitz Palu
GW Pabst/Arnold Frank
Germany 1929 16mm
On the 12,000ft Pitz Palu precipice, a honeymooning couple are trapped by an avalanche and encounter Krafft, a climber searching for the bride he lost on the mountain years earlier. A stunning testament to Pabst’s visual mastery of silent cinema, ‘White Hell’ is the pinnacle of the hugely popular ‘mountain’ films of the ‘20s. Pabst and mountaineer Frank stopped at nothing to capture the landscape’s mysterious and terrifying beauty - lead actress Leni Riefenstahl suffering injuries she would never fully recover from. Prepare yourself for torch lit searches, transcendental self sacrifice and, to the rescue, real life flying ace Ernst Petersent.

Sunday 12th at December at 2.30pm
Margaret Tait: Subjects and Sequences
As we go to press a last minute addition to the line up: Over two consecutive Sundays we’re screening the beautiful, unique and spellbinding short films of Margaret Tait. Since the 50’s, Tait has created precise but tender evocations of individuals and landscape in and around Orkney. Full details will appear on our website (to follow sooon) and on a separate leaflet. Thanks to the Lux for these special screenings.

Margaret Tait was one of Britain's most unique and individual artist filmmakers. After studying at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematographia in Rome, at the height of the Neo-Realist movement, in the early 1950s she returned to Scotland and founded her film company Ancona Films at a time when there was little in the way of a film industry in Scotland thus most of her work remained self-funded. Over the course of 46 years she produced over 30 films including one feature, Blue Black Permanent (1992) and published four books of poetry and short stories, while living between the Island of Orkney and Edinburgh. Margaret described her life's work as consisting of making film-poems, and denied suggestions that they were documentaries or diary films. She often quoted Lorca's phrase of 'stalking the image' to define her philosophy and method, the idea that if you look at an object closely enough it will speak its nature. This clarity of vision and purpose with an attention to simple commonplace subjects combined with a rare sense of inner rhythm and pattern give her films a transcendental quality, while still remaining firmly rooted within the everyday. Margaret once said of her films, with characteristic modesty, that they are born of 'of sheer wonder and astonishment at how much can be seen in any place that you choose...if you really look'.

Available on both days will be
Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader
Edited by Peter Todd and Benjamin Cook with contributions by Ali Smith, Gareth Evans, Lucy Reynolds, David Curtis, Ute Aurand, Janet McBain and Alan Russell. Published by LUX, November 2004. ISBN 0-9548569-0-2
Subjects and Sequences gathers together new essays on Margaret Tait's work, interviews, reprints of key poems, a story and texts as well as detailed filmography, chronology, bibliography and resources.
A5, paperback, 184 pages, fully illustrated in colour with over 100 illustrations. Programme Details

Programme 1: Film Poems
Film explored as a portrait medium with an early work made while studying in Rome, two affectionate portraits, and two ground breaking film poems.
Three Portrait Sketches .
1951. 5.6 mins. 16mm. Black and White. Silent.
Three portrait sketches. Made in Italy. Portraits of 1: Claudia Donzelli; 2: Fernando Birri, 3: Saulat Rahman.
Portrait of Ga.
1952. 4.16 mins. 16mm. Colour. Sound.
Portrait of the film maker’s mother. Filmed back on Orkney.
Aerial.
1974. 4 mins. 16mm. Sound. Colour.
“Touches on elemental images; air, water, (and snow), earth and fire (and smoke) all come into it.” MT.
Hugh MacDiarmid A Portrait.
1964. 8.05 mins. 16mm. Black and White.
Music by Francis George Scott. Singer: Duncan Robertson. Piano: Olive Ogdon. Poems by Hugh MacDiarmid spoken by C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid). The poems heard are “You Know Not Who I Am”, “Somersault”, “Krang”, and some lines out of “The Kind of Poetry I Want”. The music is Francis George Scott’s setting of MacDiarmid’s “The Eemis Stane”. An affectionate study of the poet who was seventy-one at the time seen at home and in Edinburgh.
Colour Poems.
1974. 11.20 mins. 16mm. Sound. Colour.
Music by Monia Liter.
“Nine linked short films. The titles within the film are: Numen of the Boughs, Old Boots, Speed Bonny Boat, Lapping Water, Incense, Aha, Brave New World, Things Found, Terra Firma. Memories which effect chance observation. A poem started in words and continued in images - Part of another poem read as an addition to the picture - Some images formed by direct-on-film animation - Others “found” by the camera.” MT.
Where I Am Is Here.
1964. 32.48 mins. 16mm. Sound. Black and White.
Music, the song “Hilltop Pibroch” (words by Margaret Tait) composed by Hector MacAndrew, played by Hector MacAndrew (fiddle) and Lilane (accordian), and sung by Lilane.
A film poem in seven parts: Complex, Here and Now, Interlude, Crocodile, Come and See, Out of this World, The Bravest Boat. “Starting with a six-line script which just noted down a kind of event to occur, and recur, my aim was to construct a film with its own logic, its own correspondences within itself, and its own echoes and rhymes and comparisons, all through close exploration of the everyday, the commonplace, in the city of Edinburgh.” MT.

Sunday 12th December at 8pm (A Nuisance Event)
Once Upon a Winters Night…
(A Story -Telling Event)
As the coastal knife wind bites and the darkness creeps in early, the winter season lends itself to imaginings spooky, uncanny and strange. To embrace the more spectral side of Christmas, Cinematheque is staging an open story telling event of ghostly tales written by local authors and short story writers. Set in a traditional Victorian drawing room scene with a free mug of hot chocolate.
If you would like to read your short story please send an email to cinematheque@yahoo.com with your name and the title.
+ Whistle and I’ll Come to You
Jonathan Miller UK. 1968 42 mins Digital
To round off the evening. Michael Hordern delivers an extraordinary performance as a mumbling, perplexed middle-aged bachelor haunted by a strange figure that follows him along a beach…and appears in his dreams, and makes rustling noises in his bedroom. 40 beautifully crafted minutes of superior chills.

Thurs 16th December at 8pm
Open Reel
The open submission film event. If you made it and like it we will screen it. From the sublime to the ridiculous, if it’s ten minutes or under it will be played. All formats catered for. Everyone screening their films comes in for free, everyone else pays £2. Your no-fi experiments are always particularly welcome.

Sunday 19th December at 2.30pm
Margaret Tait: Subjects and Sequences: Islands
People and the places they live, from childhood to a last film. Please see the 12th for details and do not miss.

Programme 2: Islands
People and the places they live, from childhood to a last film.
The Drift Back.
1957. 10.56 mins. 16mm. Black and White. Sound.
Music, The Orkney Reel and Strathspey Society. Signature tune , “The Turn of the Tide” composed by Ronald Aim. Commentary written by Margaret Tait, spoken by Harald Leslie. Produced for Orkney Education Committee and Rural Cinema. Records the return to the island of Wyre by Neil Flaws, a farmer, and his family.
Happy Bees.
1955. 16.07 mins. 16mm. Colour. Sound.
Music, The Orkney Reel and Strathspey Society.
“Happy Bees was intended to be an evocation of what it was like to be a small child on Orkney; when, one (wrongly) remembers, it was sunny all the time, and everything is bursting with life. A film about what surrounds a child, so quite a lot of it is watched at the child level.”MT.
Place of Work.
1976. 29.56 mins. 16mm. Colour. Sound.
Music by Trevor Duncan.
“An exploration of the ambience of a house (Buttquoy House, Kirkwall, Orkney) in the 4/5 months before it had to be vacated...allows Margaret Tait to present not only aspects of the present but something of the nature and intensity of her experiencing and re-experiencing a place that was, for half a century, the family home, and, for the past seven years the centre of her film-making.” Alex Pirie.
Tailpiece.
1976. 9 mins. Black and White. Sound.
“Tailpiece, a coda to Place of Work, is more personalised, more allusive and less naturalistic. The house is being vacated, it is now clear. Children’s voices repeating handed-down rhymes and rigmarole's suggest past time as well as now, and there are other reverberations into past and future coming from the handling of objects, revealing of marks of walls, mirroring of myself in a room and shadows in rooms.”
MT.
Garden Pieces
1998. 11.30 mins. Colour. Sound.
Music, John Gray.
“A set of three pieces “Round the Garden” is literally a look right round a back garden, from a central point, “Garden Flyers” is an animation piece, scratched-on, with added dyes, and “Grove” studies and contemplates a group of trees planted maybe sixty years ago in a disused quarry.” MT.

Sunday 19th December at 8pm
Ask a Policeman
Marcel Varnel UK 1938 82 mins 35mm
Will Hay is England’s greatest comedy actor. Despite the general consensus that ‘Oh Mr Porter’ is his best film - we reckon this is his all time funniest. True to form, Hay is the bumbling, corrupt and inefficient chief of Turnbottom Round police station. With help from the incomparable team of ancient Moore Marriott and ‘fat boy’ Albert Graham Moffatt, they set about engineering a crime wave they can be seen to solve. A Headless Horseman then appears.
All three are on top form; Hay’s humour stemming from rambling exchanges, evasive hesitant speeches, sniffs, coughs and querulous looks - the perfect foil for Marriott’s dodderings (and in this he plays his own bed ridden Dad too) and Moffatt’s youthful loutishness. This could be the final show ever at our Middle St premises and there can’t be a better way to go...