On Sunday, the BFI Southbank presents a fresh 4K restoration of Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary, introduced by Photoplay’s Patrick Stanbury.
Monday, the latest NFTS graduate season, Classroom Cinema, a survey of films about school and teaching, opens at the Lexi with Laurent Cantet’s 2008 Palme d’Or winner The Class. At BFI Southbank, Fear of the Dark: Lola Young on Race, Gender and Sexuality in Cinema continues with a namesake lecture in NFT3, with Young discussing the impact of her book; it’s followed by Roy Ward Baker’s 1961 problem picture Flame in the Streets. Close-Up hosts The Festival of (In)appropriation #14, a showcase of experimental, found-media film and video, this year featuring work by Krista Leigh Steinke and Yinan Wang, as well as Michael Morris’ Riding Day — a materialist reworking of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom by way of Malcolm Le Grice. The Nickel plays Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer. George Stevens’ Dreiser adaptation, A Place in the Sun, is the Regent Street Cinema’s Monday Classic Matinee.
Tuesday, the Barbican’s William Greaves season reaches one of its centrepieces: the increasingly timely Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, a film about the making of a film, in which the crew’s mutiny becomes its subject; the screening is introduced by filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland. BFI Southbank’s Corman centenary offers X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes on 35mm. Early digital film connoisseurs Distorted Frame return to the Castle Cinema with Lake Mungo, Joel Anderson’s found-footage mock-documentary, with an intro by Dr Lindsay Hallam. Sands Films plays Jules Dassin’s Never on Sunday, starring Melina Mercouri as a Piraeus sex worker and Dassin himself as the American pedant out to reform her: Pygmalion with bouzouki. The Nickel screens Shinya Tsukamoto’s Hiruko the Goblin, the Tetsuo director’s yōkai romp. Coldharbour Blue has Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the buzzy Persian-language vampire western.
A centrepiece of the Barbican’s William Greaves season and timelier than ever: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, shot in 1968 and unseen for two decades after a bungled Cannes screening, follows a couple in the throes of a crisis, and the Black director of that film-within-a-film, feigning incompetence to goad his largely white crew into revolt. Introduced by filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland.
Wednesday, the ICA celebrates the release of a new edition of Anaïs Ngbanzo’s Who Are You Dorothy Dean? with an excerpt from Warhol’s Prison, featuring Dean alongside Superstars Bibbe Hansen and Edie Sedgwick, followed by Ngbanzo in conversation with Róisín Tapponi on one of the few Black women at the heart of Warhol’s New York. Over at Dalston Superstore, TRANSMISSIONS offer a pairing of Hellraiser, introduced by novelist Alison Rumfitt, and The Dysphoria, a gender-trouble horror: Clive Barker by way of bottom surgery. Accompanying Monika Sosnowska’s exhibition, the South London Gallery presents Psychobuildings, a programme pairing Emily Richardson’s tower-block study Block with Charlotte Ginsborg’s The Mirroring Cure, a construction-site documentary that drifts into fiction. BFI Southbank screens Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied, the 1989 essay on Black gay life whose broadcast became a culture-war cause. Jellied Reels are back at the Castle Cinema with Alena Lodkina’s Petrol.
Celebrating a new edition of Who Are You Dorothy Dean?, Anaïs Ngbanzo’s text on one of the few Black women in Warhol’s circle, the ICA offers a 40-minute excerpt of Prison, one of six Warhol films Dean appeared in. Little seen, it survives largely in Jonas Mekas’s laconic description: “Edie and Bibbe are sitting on a box in a bare room, Bibbe telling her jail experiences… Women guards come in and rob them of their belongings. The camera is static.”
Thursday, up at the Rio, there’s a chance to see Aria, the portmanteau film featuring ten directors set loose on the opera repertoire — Godard on Lully, Jarman on Charpentier and man-of-the-hour Ken Russell tackling Puccini. The Barbican’s Cinema Restored strand has the UK premiere of María Antonia, Sergio Giral’s Carmen transposed to Havana and his last film before leaving Cuba. Ciné-Real brings a 16mm Halloween double to the Castle: Dead of Night followed by Sam Raimi’s frenetic The Evil Dead. The ICA’s Imamura season reaches his breakthrough, Pigs and Battleships, a NikkatsuScope state of the nation set among Yokosuka’s gangsters, hustlers and occupying sailors. The 1925 Phantom of the Opera is at the Regent Street Cinema.
Friday, Universal’s 1923 spectacle The Hunchback of Notre Dame plays at the City of London church St Katharine Cree, accompanied by David Ivory tickling the ivories of the church’s 340-year-old organ. BFI Southbank’s Wilder season has Mitchell Leisen’s Midnight, a Brackett-and-Wilder-scripted screwball featuring Claudette Colbert as a stranded showgirl and an indecent proposal. The ICA celebrates the publication of Erika Balsom’s The Edges of Cinema with the London premiere of James Benning’s little boy, a walk back through American history in popular song, political speech and architecture. At the Rio, Category H’s Halloween offering is William Crain’s Blacula followed by Ma, the “much-meme’d but little screened” Tate Taylor horror. The Nickel hosts a double screening of Ms. 45 (6:30pm & 9:30pm) followed by a nunsploitation party ’til late down in the basement — if you dare!
Saturday, it’s Halloween: BFI Southbank serves up Price, Lorre, Karloff and a young Jack Nicholson for Corman’s loose Poe riff on The Raven, screening on 35mm; The Masque of the Red Death follows for those not sufficiently unsettled by the rapping at the chamber door. Over at the Garden Cinema, Vincent Price also stars in Theatre of Blood, Douglas Hickox’s bad-taste comedy-horror, playing critic-homicide for laughs. The ICA’s Imamura season moves on to The Insect Woman, the director’s elliptical rendering of Japan’s twentieth century through the eyes of one woman, with the screening introduced by Irene González-López; later in the afternoon, The Edges of Cinema: Book Launch + Panel Discussion continues with Balsom, Lola Lemke, Maria Palacios Cruz and Jonathan Romney in conversation on the book and trends in experimental cinema. Hideo Nakata’s Ringu is at the Phoenix, presented by Japanese Film Club.
Sunday, BFI Southbank has Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary, the silent haunted-house-big-inheritance picture that set the template, in a new 4K restoration introduced by Patrick Stanbury. Close-Up screens René Clément’s Delon-starring take on Ripley, Purple Noon. The ICA’s Imamura season continues with Intentions of Murder. And if you missed it at LFF, there’s another opportunity to see DAO, Alain Gomis’ docu-fictional diptych, screening at the Rio and followed by a Q&A with actor D’johe Kouadio.
BFI Southbank screens a fresh 4K restoration of Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary, the German Expressionist’s debut under Universal Pictures. Called “the cornerstone of Universal’s school of horror” by film historian Carlos Clarens, the film follows a group of grasping heirs summoned to a decaying mansion to hear a millionaire’s will, producing something like Caligari as country-house farce with greed scarier than any ghoul. Introduced by Patrick Stanbury.
Until next time