ABBA: THE MOVIE

Dir: Lasse Hallström, Australia/Sweden,
1977, 96 mins, 35mm, col., English/Swedish
with Eng. subtitles (G)

What was Swedish director Lasse Hallström’s (What’s
Eating Gilbert Grape) first hit movie? The answer’s
straight from Trivial Pursuit: ABBA’s version of A Hard
Day’s Night, made on their 1977 Australian tour. With
a script by Robert Caswell that finds the supergroup
trying to avoid pushy DJ Robert Hughes (Hey Dad),
plus the presence of Neighbours’ Tom Oliver, this was
Australia’s first on-screen declaration of love to Benny,
Björn, Agnetha and Frida. New Dolby print from the
Swedish Film Institute.

EL TOPO

Dir: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Mexico, 1970, 125 mins,
35mm, col., Spanish with Eng. subtitles (MA15+)

French/Chilean mime artist and surrealist comic book
writer Alejandro Jodorowsky took most of the 1960s
to write, direct, and star in this brilliantly obscure
allegorical take on the Spaghetti Western and the
Japanese Baby Cart series. Almost the defining work
of cult cinema, the film’s signature gallery of grotesque
symbols and deformed characters took the US college
film screening circuit by storm, sending Jodorowsky’s
career from obscurity to the status of international
celebrity cinema mystic. Brand new print.

THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS

Dir: Roman Polanski, UK, 1967, 108 mins,
35mm, col., Eng. (PG)

Vampire expert Prof Abronsius and his dim assistant
Alfred invade the deadly castle of Count Krolock in
Polanski’s satirical poke at the absurdity of Gothic
horror cinema. Like a Hammer Horror but starring
characters from a Samuel Beckett play (especially Jack
MacGowran as the dithering vampire hunter), it is camp
and very funny but also often fatalistic, penetrating the
same absurdist universe as the director’s earlier films,
from Knife in the Water to Repulsion. Print courtesy
of the British Film Institute.

BRINGING UP BABY

Dir: Howard Hawks, USA, 1938, 102 mins,
35mm, b&w, Eng. (G)

Who’s Baby? And why is Cary wearing a negligee?
These and other crazed questions are answered
when daffy Connecticut heiress Katharine Hepburn
hunts palaeontologist Cary Grant, in one of the first
benchmarks of high-speed screwball comedy. With
the stand-back-and-watch-the-mayhem direction of
Howard Hawks, the flirtatious dialogue has the velocity
of His Girl Friday, whilst Hepburn’s knack for wrecking
any occasion, car, career or dinosaur has the visual
genius of silent slapstick. From the collection of the
National Film and Sound Archive.

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS & 2 DAYS (4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile)

Dir: Cristian Mungiu, Romania, 2007, 113 mins, 35mm, col., Romanian with Eng. subtitles (MA 15+)

In the last years of the Ceausescu regime, amongst
the stark edifices of Communist Bucharest, a young
student tries to arrange an abortion for her university
roommate. The most acclaimed film of 2007, winning
top prizes at Cannes and the European Film Awards,
Mungiu’s work is the most urgent of an exciting new
wave of Romanian national cinema, one that takes on
the ‘big’ moral themes long neglected by European art
cinema. Canberra premiere.

MACBETH

Dir: Roman Polanski, UK, 1971, 140 mins, 35mm, col., Eng. (M)

Funded by Playboy magazine and scripted by drama
critic Kenneth Tynan, Polanski’s version of the Scottish
Play is nightmarish, remorseless and hyper-aware of
its era’s political code-words: Vietnam, Prague, and
the assassinations of political leaders and intimates
(including the director’s own wife Sharon Tate).
Underrated and always menacing lead Jon Finch is the
regicidal tyrant; whilst Francesca Annis’ Lady Macbeth
is one of cinema’s most haunting essays in neurotic
sexual power. Print courtesy of the UCLA Film and
Television Archive.

THE GODLESS GIRL

Dir. Cecil B. De Mille, USA, 1929, 113 mins, 35mm, b&w, silent, (unclassified 15+)

Bigotry (and unresolved sexual tensions) between the firebrand leader of a college atheist society and two student Christian evangelicals leads straight to the hell of a reform prison and its sadistic warden, Noah Beery. DeMille’s strange mix of his silent religious epics and racy pre-Code social melodramas is a giddy and baroque cocktail of the God of Love, the gods of desire and tabloid sensation. New restored print, courtesy George Eastman House. Live accompaniment by Mauro Colombis, star pianist of Pordenone Silent Film Festival.

DIXIE CHICKS: SHUT UP AND SING

Dirs: Barbara Kopple & Cecilia Peck, USA, 2006, 93 mins, 35mm, col., Eng. (M)

What begins as a straight pop-umentary runs headlong
into controversy, as the lead singer of country music’s
feistiest all-girl group announces she’s ashamed George
Bush is a Texan. From this most unlikely vehicle, Oscar®-
winning documentarian Barbara Kopple (co-directing
with Gregory Peck’s daughter Cecilia) makes an equally
feisty study of the glass ceiling above even the most
successful American working girls, as the ‘Chicks’ ride out
the perfect storm of right-wing media attacks to assert
their musical talent and partnership. Canberra premiere.

LONESOME COWBOYS

Dir: Andy Warhol, USA, 1968, 109 mins, 16mm, col., Eng. (R)

The last film in which Warhol was directly involved (before franchising his name and filmmaking to director Paul Morrissey) stars Joe Dallesandro heading a loose posse of trash cowboys and hookers. Reputedly shot on the studio ranch where John Wayne made many films, Factory regulars (including Viva and Taylor Mead) play-act the genre’s clichés in the usual throwaway Warhol house-style, exposing much of the Western’s implicit homoeroticism. Print courtesy of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, with thanks to the Australian Cinematheque/GoMA, Brisbane.

THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (La cité des enfants perdus)

Dirs: Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France, 1995, 112 mins, 35mm, col., French with Eng. subtitles (M)

Mixing comic-book design and Jean Cocteau, the makers of Delicatessen outdid themselves with this bejewelled follow-up, set in a floating city whose sleep-deprived ruler tries to forestall death by stealing the dreams of children. In his own right Jeunet was later to make the fantasy blockbusters Alien 4 and Amelie. But the delightful (yet sometimes gothic) childishness of the films from his earlier partnership with designer Marc Caro still stand out for their baroque imagination and risky production design.

FARGO

Dir: Joel Coen, USA, 1996, 98 mins, 35mm, col., Eng. (MA15+)

The Coen Brothers’ journey from indie curios to art cinema auteurs was completed in this tragic-comedy reinvention of In Cold Blood, with Frances McDormand in her Oscar®-winning role as a heavily pregnant sheriff investigating a kidnapping conspiracy between car salesman William H. Macy and drifters Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare. Transcending their previous, fun but- frivolous Hollywood-genre parodies, Fargo shares with the brothers’ new triumph No Country for Old Men a haunting understanding of lurking violence within the American dream.

BAD BOY BUBBY

Dir: Rolf de Heer, Australia, 1994, 114 mins, 35mm, col., Eng. (R)

Bubby’s been Mom’s favourite for 30 years, locked away with her and her mad conviction that the world outside is choked with poisons. But then Pop reappears and Bubby’s coddled life changes forever. Beginning with possibly the most risk-taking opening sequence in Australian cinema, director de Heer (Ten Canoes) and actor Nicholas Hope invented a very daggy Australian Candide, one of the few Australian films genuinely amongst the pantheon of cult movies. From the collection of the National Film and Sound Archive.

THE WILD ONE

Dir: László Benedek, USA, 1954, 79 mins, 35mm, b&w, Eng. (PG)

Headed by Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin – two of the great role models of 1950s American masculinity – rival motorcycle gangs invade a small American town. Meant to be Hollywood’s centred response to the moral panic over outlaw motorcycle gang violence, The Wild One is one of those great moments in Hollywood when audiences took control of the meaning of the movie, and its leather rebellion inspired the style of a whole range of emerging alternative and youth subcultures.

AKIRA

Dir: Katsuhiro Ôtomo, Japan, 1988, 124 mins, 35mm, col., Eng. version (M)

Telepathic super-children fight for the future of Neo- Tokyo 2019 in Ôtomo’s adaptation of his own series of manga novels. Akira set a new big-budget standard in the production values of Japanese animation and, with its success in the West, for the raw experience of anime. Updating and post-modernising the apocalyptic vision of Japanese monster movies like Godzilla, it has an earth-shattering scale of imagination that liberates the moving image in a way CGI never can. From the collection of the National Film and Sound Archive.

HELLBOY

Dir: Guillermo del Toro, USA, 2004, 122 mins, 35mm col., Eng. (M)

I is a child of Satan, conjured by mad Nazi science and then snatched away by US military intelligence. Sixty years on, all grown up but emotionally stunted, he’s on retainer from the FBI to keep the Devil at bay. Pan’s Labyrinth director del Toro’s excursion into big-budget SFX Hollywood filmmaking has the required quota of hellish but often comically surreal CGI effects. Yet (characteristically for its director) it is a tender study of innocence, and showcase for bestially beautiful Ron Perlman.

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?

Dir: Robert Aldrich, USA, 1962, 135 mins, 35mm, b&w, Eng.(G)

Shut away in a decaying mansion, forgotten child star Baby Jane (Bette Davis) maintains a sadistic rage against crippled sister Blanche (Joan Crawford), seething over the ancient insult that Blanche got the adult stardom Jane craved. Aldrich was the master melodramatist of Hollywood Babylon and fascinating on-screen torturer of its leading ladies. Baby Jane’s gossipy trade in the celebrity of two Hollywood icons was a breakthrough in self-referential filmmaking, and renewed the careers of both stars. From the collection of the National Film and Sound Archive.

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (La belle et la bête)

Dir: Jean Cocteau, France/Luxembourg, 1946, 96 mins,
35mm, b&w, French with Eng. subtitles (PG)

Cocteau’s transcendent adaptation of de Beaumont’s fable, produced only months after the end of the War, begins with titles written on a blackboard; conscious of its childish innocence, it is a new film for a new world. The belle (Josette Day) and the bête seem to levitate above the screen, and Cocteau’s acting alterego Jean Marais glides between characters, inhabiting a trio of roles including the Beast. Music by Georges Auric. Supported by the French Embassy in Australia and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

IRMA VEP

Dir: Olivier Assayas, France, 1996, 99 mins,35mm, col., English/French with Eng. subtitles(M)

Contemporary French cinema’s spokesman, Assayas makes perhaps the definitive statement about the exhaustion and renewal of world cinema, in his fantasy of a veteran Parisian director who decides to remake a great French silent movie serial. As the director, Jean-Pierre Léaud seems to be playing a half-mad and completely burnt-out amalgam of himself and the last 40 years of French cinema. As the heroine, Maggie Cheung plays herself: diva of Hong Kong action movies, possible saviour of French cinema.

JULES ET JIM

Dir: François Truffaut, France, 1962, 105 mins, 35mm, b&w, English/German/French with Eng. subtitles(PG)

Classical Hollywood costume drama meets French cinematic play in Truffaut’s sensual story of two artists (Oskar Werner, Henri Serre) and the woman (Jeanne Moreau) who loves both but cannot love them simultaneously. A film about the ease of expressing emotions through art but the problem of living them in life, it’s maybe the most influential work of the French Nouvelle Vague, often cited as a model for the stylistic liberation of Hollywood in the 1960s. Supported by the French Embassy in Australia and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

VERTIGO

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1958, 129 mins, 35mm, col., Eng. (PG)

Still clearly the key achievement of Hitchcock’s late and high career of the 1950s, Vertigo has become the emblem of the dark forces that often empower his narratives. James Stewart’s loss of professional nerve, and dream-like compulsion to recover it by the pursuit of Kim Novak through San Francisco’s vertiginous streets, seems to expose all the constrained desires of 1950s American middle-class male sexuality. Music, of course, by Bernard Herrmann; art direction by Clint Eastwood’s later collaborator Henry Bumstead.

THE CHANT OF JIMMIE BLACKSMITH

Dir: Fred Schepisi, Australia, 1978, 120 mins, 35mm, col., Eng. (M)

Hauntingly beautiful and brutally disturbing in its use of the anamorphic frame, director Schepisi and author Thomas Keneally’s fictionalised history of the Governor brothers’ 1900 murder spree remains one of Australian cinema’s most controversial films about race relations. Drawing on his own writing on the history of Australian frontier violence, renowned historian Professor Henry Reynolds comes to Arc to introduce the screening and his new monograph on the film, part of the Currency Press/NFSA Australian Screen Classics series. Print from the National Film and Sound Archive collection, Atlab/Kodak Project.

THE 400 BLOWS (Les quatre cents coups)

Dir. François Truffaut, France, 1959, 99 mins, 35mm, b&w, French with Eng. subtitles (PG)

Antoine Doinel is a wild child of the Parisian slums, resisting the teachers, police, parents and other shackles placed on a childish but possibly brilliant imagination. Introducing the savant talents of the then 16-year-old actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, and initiating the cycle of autobiographical movies that would follow his erratic life and loves, The 400 Blows also triggered the revolution in liberated cinematic storytelling that was the French New Wave. Supported by the French Embassy in Australia and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (Fa yeung nin wa)

Dir: Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong, 2000, 97 mins, 35mm, col., Cantonese with Eng. subtitles (G)

Passionate but utterly chaste, a poignant bond builds between journalist and secretary (Hero stars Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Maggie Cheung) as they find a shared fate of being cheated on by absent spouses. Inspired by the lost world of 1960s colonial Hong Kong – evocated through Chris Doyle’s cinematography and subtle reference to the elegant music, fashion, and melodramas of its popular cinema – director Wong’s masterpiece is a fable of a moral love, and emotions bounded by a rigid epoch and social codes.

FACES

Dir: John Cassavetes, USA, 1968, 130 mins, 35mm, b&w, Eng.(M)

As the first real collaboration between director John Cassavetes and actress/wife Gena Rowlands, Faces demonstrates the vérité immediacy and idealistic filmmaking independence that characterise their films. Shot in the Cassavetes-Rowlands household over many months, this improvisational film follows the fracturing life-paths of a husband and wife (John Marley, Lynn Carlin), as one goes in search of understanding from a prostitute (Rowlands), whilst the other seeks cheap solace in a one-night stand. New print courtesy of the British Film Institute.

SUNLESS (Sans soleil)

Dir: Chris Marker, France, 1983, 100 mins, 35mm, col., English (M)

Illusive French documentary visionary Chris Marker almost single-handedly invented the Essay Film with this legendary work, transformating footage from the director’s restless film career into a meditation on “…remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining”. Structured around letters from (or to?) an anonymous friend, it seeks the transcendental and personal meanings that connect the planet’s nodes of human experience, from the Cape Verde Islands through to the cacophonous signs of modern Japan. From the collection of the National Film and Sound Archive.

ASHES AND DIAMONDS (Popiól i diament)

Dir: Andrzej Wajda, Poland, 1958, 103 mins, 35mm, b&w, Polish with Eng. subtitles (R)

In the chaotic first days of Poland’s liberation, anticommunist resistance fighter Maciek (played by Poland’s James Dean, Zbigniew Cybulski) is ordered to settle a score< with a local Communist official. Botching the first attempt, Maciek’s nerve goes and events spiral out of control, as the deadline approaches and his identification with his target grows. As Polish cinema’s postwar master, Wajda established his international reputation and the revival of Polish national cinema with this brooding feature. Print courtesy of Filmoteka Narodowa, Poland.