May 2008 - Repertory Cinema
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Monday 5th May 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. |
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Monday 12th May 9.15pm ANDREI RUBLEV (Andrey Rublyov) Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky 1962 | Russia | 96 mins Venue: Café 1001 Ticket Price: £3/£2 members |
| 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. |
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Monday 19th May 9.15pm RED BEARD (Akahige) Directed by Akira Kurosawa 1965 | Japan | 172 mins Venue: Café 1001 Ticket Price: £3/£2 members |
| A testament to the goodness of humankind, Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard chronicles the tumultuous relationship between an arrogant young doctor and a compassionate clinic director. Toshiro Mifune, in his last role for Kurosawa, gives a powerhouse performance as the dignified yet empathic director who guides his pupil to maturity, teaching the embittered intern to appreciate the lives of his destitute patients. Perfectly capturing the look and feel of 19th-century Japan, Kurosawa weaves a fascinating tapestry of time, place, and emotion. |
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Monday 26th May 9.15pm A MAN ESCAPED (Un condamne a mort s’est echappe) Directed by Robert Bresson 1956 | France | 1956 Venue: Café 1001 Ticket Price: £3/£2 members |
| Robert Bresson’s 1956 masterpiece, A Man Escaped, is based on a book by Andre Devigny, a Catholic French Resistance fighter in WWII. The book recounts Devigny’s true-life laborious escape attempt from the Gestapo’s Fort Montluc prison in occupied Lyon in 1943. A Man Escaped was the filmmaker’s first film with an entirely non-professional cast and it crystallized his mature aesthetic: automatic and barely-emotive performances, a heavy dependence on sound effects, isolated instances of music, brief dialogue, and elliptical editing that omits narrative detail in order to provoke mystery or avoid sensationalism. |
