Cinema Rediscovered 2018: Taking the train uptown with Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.

My second and final piece from my time at last weekend’s superb four-day Cinema Rediscovered festival at Bristol’s Watershed Arts Cinema looks a Leslie Harris’ wonderful film Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. This was the centerpiece movie of the festival, used as key art on the festival poster and presented on a lovely 35mm print brought over to the West Country from the US by the film’s director. Despite having won a major award at Sundance and being released to acclaim in the nineties, this print is now only one. A shocking state of affairs.

Event preview – Cinema Rediscovered, Bristol Watershed and other venues, Thur 26th – Sun 29th July

Entering its third year the Cinema Rediscovered film festival has established itself as one of the most exciting cinematic events in Bristol’s arts calendar.  The four day festival aims to present audiences with an opportunity to re-experience a range of cinema from contemporary classics to rarities in the big screen setting they were conceived for. Here follow some personal highlights chosen from this year’s programme.

Television, the drug of the nation: tuning back into Network

Part of the Cinema Rediscovered Festival at Bristol’s Watershed cinema, it was a pleasure to see Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film Network on the big screen for the first time. If you haven’t seen the film some mild spoilers follow…

Remembering Wes Craven and The People Under the Stairs

The news today (the 31st August 2015) of the death of the director Wes Craven came as something it was hard not to characterise with gallows humour as a ‘Shocker’, of all the directors classed as ‘Masters of Horror’ Craven was the one that had kept a candle burning for the horror genre. Whilst others either fizzled out after initial promise (Hooper), gradually got stuck in a genre rut (Romero), suffered a gradual decline (Carpenter), or left the genre for pastures new (Cronenberg), Craven demonstrated a remarkable resilience. 

Favourite films – Night of the Hunter

During the great American depression of the nineteen thirties to support his family young father Ben Harper is driven to crime. Arrested for robbery in front of his children, he is sentenced to hang. However, he has secreted the money he has stolen on his property and entrusted its whereabouts only to his children. Waiting for the gallows, Harper is enclosed in a cell with a preacher (Mitchum) incarcerated for automobile theft.

Favourite films – Invasion of the Body Snatchers

It’s a commonly recited refrain that the film industry’s fondness for recycling material is stifling creativity, or more simply ‘remakes suck ass dude’, but Jack Finney’s 1954 science fiction novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers has proved fertile soil for the cultivation of American nightmares. Don Siegel’s 1956 film slyly presented a paranoia that can be read as either fear of communism or McCarthyism. In Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake this becomes something else, expressing a fear of conformity, urban alienation, the breakdown of community and the social paranoia of being an outsider.

Favourite films – The Long Goodbye

With the recent release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, this seems like as good a time as any to re-post a review I wrote for Chris and Phil Presents last year of Robert Altman’s 1973 neo-noir The Long Goodbye which is a clear influence upon it.

Favourite films – Zero Dark Thirty

I originally wrote this review in a somewhat shaken state after a press screening just before Zero Dark Thirty’s UK release. The film had already become a lightning rod for political controversy in the US where it was subject to an orchestrated political campaign against it, a campaign that intensified as it emerged as an Oscar contender. Director Kathryn Bigelow was raked over the coals by film critics, some elements of Hollywood’s liberal vanguard, and politicians. The controversy even went so far as to drag in the White House with Republican critics claiming that the CIA and the US Defence Department had leaked classified information to the filmmakers. Curiously most of these claims evaporated into thin air post Academy Awards. 

Favorite films – The Stone Tape

Originally broadcast by the BBC on Christmas Day in 1972, The Stone Tape is part of a tradition of seasonal ghost stories that included such classic televisual chillers as The Signalman and Whistle and I’ll Come to You.

Hidden treasures – Possession

Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 film Possession is a daunting movie of which to attempt a synopsis, let alone a review, defying the conventions of mainstream western film making and acting while also aligning itself with the horror genre to produce a film that is as unique and disturbing as David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Despite winning major awards for its lead actress Isabelle Adjani (César Award for Best Actress, Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Award), Possession was banned in the UK on its video release as part of the Director of Public Prosecutions idiotic campaign against video nasties. In America, the film was drastically recut and re-scored with stupid optical effects added in a doomed attempt to make it appear more like a conventional demonic possession film. The films recent blu ray release (from Second Sight in the UK) offers an opportunity to sample one of the most singular of European genre films. Simply put, if you have never seen Possession then you have never seen a movie like it before. If you have seen Possession you know you have never seen anything like it since.