March 2008 - Repertory Cinema

Monday 3rd March 9.15pm
ARMY IN THE SHADOWS (L’Armee Des Ombres)
Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville
1969 | France | 145 mins
Venue: Café 1001 | Ticket Price: £3/£2 members

Jean-Pierre Melville’s gripping adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s novel has been praised as one of the greatest and the most authentic film portrayals of the French Resistance. Set between the Autumn of 1942 and February 1943, the film follows the story of a band of Resistance fighters living under German-controlled France. As the war continues, the grip of the occupying force tightens and friendships, trust and loyalty give way to secrecy, suspicion and loss. A tense, atmospheric tour de force featuring powerful performances from Simone Signoret, Lino Ventura and Jean-Pierre Cassel.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s debut feature Ivan’s Childhood is an extraordinarily moving view of war and revenge. 12-year old Ivan is determined to avenge his family’s death at the hands of the Nazis, and he joins a Russian partisan regiment as a scout. The wonderful monochrome photography depicts Ivan’s war in a series of memorable sequences: from the opening shots of him creeping through a dead and submerged forest; the flashback to happier days by the seashore; his devastated home village, to the final sequences in the paper-strewn ruins of Berlin in 1945.

Widely regarded as Tarkovsky’s finest film, Andrei Rublev charts the life of the great icon painter through a turbulent period of 15th Century Russian history, which was marked by endless fighting between rival Princes and Tatar invasions. Made on an epic scale, it does not flinch from portraying the savagery of the time, from which, almost inexplicably, the serenity of Rublev’s art arose.

Monday 10th March 9.15pm
THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES (Zire Darakhatan Zeyton)
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
1994 | Iran | 103 mins
Venue: Café 1001 | Ticket Price: £3/£2 members

Director Abbas Kiarostami is celebrated internationally as one of the most important film makers at work today. Deeply humanistic and capturing the great beauty of the Iranian landscape, Through The Olive Trees is a simple story of forbidden love. When a film crew arrives in an earth-quake-devastated village to shoot a film, Hossein, a young, homeless and illiterate bricklayer, is given a small role and is amazed to find himself cast as the newlywed husband of the girl he adores, the sulky Tehereh.

Monday 17th March 9.15pm
LOVES OF A BLONDE (Lasky Jedne Plavovlasky)
Directed by Milos Forman
1965 | Czechoslovakia | 85 mins
Venue: Café 1001 | Ticket Price: £3/£2 members

With sixteen women to each man, the odds are against Andula in her desperate search for love-that is, until a rakish piano player visits her small factory town and temporarily eases her longings. A tender and humorous look at Andula’s journey, from the first pangs of romance to its inevitable disappointments, Loves of a Blonde immediately became a classic of the Czech New Wave and earned Milos Forman the first of his Academy Award nominations.

Monday 24th March 9.15pm
BREATHLESS (A Bout de Souffle)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
1960 | France | 90 mins
Venue: Café 1001 | Ticket Price: £3/£2 members

There was before Breathless, and there was after Breathless. Jean-Luc Godard’s debut fashioned a simultaneous homage to and critique of the American film genres that influenced and rocked him as a film writer for Cahiers du cinema. Jazzy, free-form, and sexy, Breathless helped launch the French new wave and ensured cinema would never be the same.

Monday 31st March 9.15pm
ACCATTONE
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
1961 | Italy | 120 mins
Venue: Café 1001 | Ticket Price: £3/£2 members

Accattone follows the tragic life of a young pimp in the slums of 1960s Rome. Accattone (Franco Citti) works very hard at never working. When he loses his prize prostitute, he despairs not for her but for his lost income. Pasolini’s brutally realistic first feature, assistant-directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, introduces his preoccupation with the marginalized segments of Italian bourgeois society that would characterize subsequent films like Mamma Roma and Theorem.