After a two year hiatus, the BFI has revived the Flipside series with three notable releases: Val Guest’s musical satire Expresso Bongo, Edmond T. Greville’s juvenile delinquent exploitation movie Beat Girl, and Jose Ramon Larraz’s “lost” horror film Symptoms.
It’s remarkable that it’s still possible to discover a previously unknown yet major film from the silent era, but the BFI’s new release of Anthony Asquith’s first feature, Shooting Stars (1928) is a revelation; a fresh, self-aware film about filmmaking and the intersection of real and imaginary lives.
Although I saw fewer movies in theatres than ever, this year offered a rich array of films on disk, belying continuing prophecies of the medium’s demise in the face of on-line streaming.
In their Blu-ray set of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s first six features, the BFI provide a superb introduction to novelist and filmmaker’s radical and frequently controversial work which combines high art with lowly genre tropes in illuminating and surprisingly entertaining ways.
Despite perennial predictions of the demise of movies-on-disk, 2014 offered a rich and varied selection of new and old titles in often impressive editions from many different companies, though not necessarily from major distributors. The cream came from specialty labels like Criterion, the BFI, Arrow, Eureka/Masters of Cinema, Shout! Factory, Olive Films, Kino Lorber, Flicker Alley and Twilight Time.
Val Guest instills story and characters with gripping realism in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, one of the greatest of all British science fiction movies, now released in an excellent Blu-ray edition by the BFI.
The documentary impulse was integral to the evolution of film and a key element was the application of the new technology to the 19th Century impulse to explore and “conquer” far-off exotic places and cultures.
The latest Flipside release from the BFI, Bill Forsyth’s That Sinking Feeling, is like a cross between a gritty Ken Loach working class story and a Children’s Film Foundation fantasy of kid empowerment.
A survey of recent viewing covers approaches to realism, metaphor, horror and war in a range of films from the 1920s to the 2010s.
While some of the films and plays in the series of disks I wrote about last week, devoted to ghost and horror stories made for British television, reveal the budgetary and technical limitations of their time and medium (low budget sets, somewhat coarse and murky video recording), the BFI has lavished its attention on one […]