On Sunday, the Rio’s birthday celebrations continue with a screening of Bette Gordon’s Kathy Acker-scripted Variety, preceded by a talk by Andrew Woodyatt on the cinema’s less salubrious previous life as the Dalston Tatler.
Monday, Hackney’s Broncko Bianchi hosts LUX RITUS, six short films and a live performance on rituals of maturing and transformation, introduced by artist and director Charlie Jimenez. Accompanying the exhibition Orchard Documents at Cell Project Space, Close-Up has a screening of Preiss and McElheny’s The Secret World, a portrait of gallerist Christine Burgin told through her “Borgesian library” of esoterica, preceded by the short Beckoning Cats and followed by a Q&A between Preiss and Dan Kidner. Caveh Zahedi’s I Am a Sex Addict plays at the Nickel. Devils and Shamans: The Films of Andrzej Zulawski continues into its final week at the Garden with a last chance to see his macabre debut The Third Part of the Night. My Darling Clementine is the Regent Street Cinema’s Monday Classic Matinee.
Tuesday, the Castle marks Black History Month with Rye Lane, Raine Allen-Miller’s candy-coloured Peckham meet-cute. Coldharbour Blue screens Robert Eggers’ The Witch. Over at the Prince Charles, Funeral Parade presents A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge with an intro from programmer Sarah Cleary. Lola, Jacques Demy’s debut, a bittersweet Nantes cabaret romance shot by Raoul Coutard, is at Rotherhithe’s Sands Films. The Nickel has Jeff Kanew’s Natural Enemies, a midlife crisis gone particularly wrong.
Wednesday, Kennington Noir returns to the Cinema Museum with Abraham Polonsky’s numbers-racket noir Force of Evil: half gangster picture, half Marxist allegory, all John Garfield in a good suit. After Queer Edward II at LFF, the newly Jarman-curious can find Sebastiane, his entirely Latin, very homoerotic portrait of the arrow-beset martyr, at the Rio, introduced by Gar O’Dwyer. Bertha DocHouse’s retrospective on Christine Choy opens with a double bill of From Spikes to Spindles, her history of New York’s Chinatown, and Bittersweet Survival: Southeast Asian Refugees in America. TRANSMISSIONS presents Alien 3 at Dalston Superstore. John Waters’ scrappy broadside against multiplex Hollywood, Cecil B. Demented, is at the Nickel.
Kennington Noir, the Cinema Museum’s occasional noir strand, screens Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil, his directing debut before the blacklist: John Garfield’s Wall Street lawyer folds the numbers racket into a “legitimate” monopoly and drags his small-time brother under — capitalism as protection racket. Andrew Sarris called it “one of the great films of the modern American cinema”.
Thursday, Tate Modern is putting its cinema to use: with a programme of Ana Mendieta shorts accompanying the museum’s blockbuster exhibition, among them Burial Pyramid, Door Piece and Flower Person, Flower Body, introduced by her niece Raquel Cecilia Mendieta and followed by a Q&A. Ghost Light Cinema screens Elio Petri’s Kafkaesque Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion at the Cinema Museum. Bernard Rose’s Clive Barker adaptation Candyman Candyman Candyman is at the Rio. Bar Trash at the Genesis has a double bill of Cronenberg’s Shivers with Creepozoids, David DeCoteau’s “iconic” Alien rip-off. Over at the Nickel, there’s Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, his gutter passion play with an abject Harvey Keitel.
Eight filmworks, mostly shot on Super 8 and usually glimpsed on gallery monitors, here given a cinema: a survey of Mendieta’s preoccupations with the elemental, the body, presence and absence — works described by art historian Karen Fiss as “the beating heart of her practice”. Introduced by Raquel Cecilia Mendieta; Q&A with Tate’s Elsa Collinson follows.
Friday, Birkbeck screens Portrait of Mr. O, the first of Chiaki Nagano’s films with butoh co-founder Kazuo Ohno, for the Rebellious Bodies Festival. At the Cinema Museum, Some New Kind of Kick serves up The Fat Black Pussycat, a cheap beatnik crime flick featuring a very young Dr John. The Annihilation of Fish, Charles Burnett’s nearly lost, gently unhinged boarding-house romance with James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave, is at the Garden. Romance X gets a matinee, no less, at the Nickel. Tsai’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, an elegy for a dying Taipei picture palace, is introduced by Ben Whishaw at the Rio, which is still very much open.
Saturday, the Barbican’s kaiju season rolls on with a King Kong double: King Kong vs. Godzilla, in its dubbed US cut, is joined by King Kong Escapes, Ishirō Honda’s Bond-ish robot-ape spin-off. Shall We ダンス?, Masayuki Suo’s mild-mannered comedy of salaryman ballroom shame, is at the Ciné Lumière. The Prince Charles has Wes Craven’s full run of the Scream franchise, Scream, Scream 2, Scream 3 and Scream 4, with the first three on 35mm. The Rio screen’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s quietly devastating recession-era family drama Tokyo Sonata. The Code, starring the sadly uncancellable Dasha Nekrasova, gets a rare London outing at – where else – the Nickel.
Sunday, Variety, Bette Gordon’s feminist inversion of the peep show, written by Kathy Acker, featuring Nan Goldin and scored by John Lurie, closes the week at the Rio, preceded by Andrew Woodyatt’s talk on the cinema’s years as the Dalston Tatler. The Cinema Museum follows Long Take highlight The Hart of London with The Return of the Living Dead, Dan O’Bannon’s punk zombie comedy, as the venue’s fundraising continues. The Doll is at the Nickel. Mike Figgis is at the Garden for a Q&A after Internal Affairs, his sleazy, glistening LAPD neo-noir with Richard Gere at his most reptilian.
Continuing its birthday celebrations, the Rio recalls its 1970s life as the Dalston Tatler porn club in a talk led by Pink Palace’s Andrew Woodyatt, before a screening of Bette Gordon’s Kathy Acker-scripted, Nan Goldin-featuring Variety: a Rear Window made at the height of the feminist sex wars, in which a Times Square ticket-seller claims the gaze Mulvey assigned to men.
Until next time