There are three sure-fire must-sees at the 55th London Film Festival which runs from October 12-27 at the BFI and various satellite venues around the capital. These are Andrei Zvyagintsev’s superbly modulated study of domestic moral turpitude in contemporary Russia, Elena Miranda July’s genuinely hilarious cockeyed hipster-romance The Future and fast-rising German writer-director Christoph Hochhäusler’s dark, searingly ironic thriller One Minute of Darkness.
The latter is just one part of an ambitious three-movie project made for German television, Dreileben, alongside Christian Petzold’s Beats Being Dead and Dominik Graf’s Don’t Follow Me Around, which are also showing
The contribution from Hochhäusler, the youngest of the three directors, is emphatically the pick of the trilogy. It’s one of 2011’s finest new films from any source, although it only fully makes sense if you’ve seen the other two segments beforehand.
In general, the soundest battle-plan when navigating LFF’s sprawling programme is to concentrate on the two most reliably excellent strands: “Experimenta” (“Cutting-edge cinema, artists’ film and video and the avant-garde”) and “Treasures From the Archives” (“Recently restored and rediscovered classics from archives around the world.”)
From the former, note should be made of two recent works by Ben Rivers, perhaps Britain’s most adventurous and admirable cinematic pioneer – though his excursions, via the magic of 16mm film, are invariably journeys into the recent or bygone past. His short, Sack Barrow, is an intimate and yet detached study of a small Chesham electroplating factory’s final days. His first feature-length offering is Two Years At Sea. An exploration of the beauties of black and white, widescreen celluloid, this portrait of an Aberdeenshire hermit picked up a Fipresci prize (awarded by a jury of international film critics) at the Venice Film Festival.
The other feature-length Experimenta offering to note is the British premiere of Twenty Cigarettes by James Benning – a truly great American filmmaker and a giant of the avant garde for four decades. Twenty Cigarettes, composed of 20 shots in which in one individual smokes one cigarette (the duration of the cigarette dictates the duration of the shot) is his most rewarding enterprise since he switched from 16mm to digital video four years ago. And it’s certainly among the wittiest, most accessible recent examples of his structuralist, mathematically-inspired output.
Outside the Experimenta section, new movies worthy of attention include Mark Jackson’s psychological chiller Without, Andrea Arnold’s radically austere take on Wuthering Heights, Andreas Dresen’s movingly unsentimental Stopped On Tracks and Rúnar Rúnarsson’s elemental study of grief, Volcano.
The BFI is renowned for its delves into cinematic history, and LFF’s Treasures From the Archives invariably yields a gem or six. The sensible approach is to aim for the earliest stuff – films which one might never get another chance to see again on the big screen. This year the most vintage offering is 1916’s Shoes: a silent, colour-tinted Russian film by Mikhail Kalatozov showing in a double-bill with The Nail in the Boot (1931)
Moving ahead to 1925, we find The Goose Woman by Clarence Brown. Greta Garbo, who worked with him six times in her truncated American career, often called him her favourite director. The LFF website describes how this silent dramatises “a key component of a notorious 1922 US murder case – namely, a witness dubbed ‘The Pig Woman’, who gave unreliable testimony to solicit media attention. Bitter at the loss of celebrity, [former opera singer] Mary hatches a plan to seek publicity from a murder committed next door to her derelict ranch, unintentionally ensnaring her son as the prime suspect.”
Connoisseurs of old-time Americana will already have reserved their seats for the Roy Rogers double-bill of Rainbow Over Texas (1947) and Under Western Stars (1938). Both are newly-restored prints of these 65-minute films, classic examples of those oft-derided “sagebrush sagas” which during and after the Depression sustained several studios and many cinemas on both sides of the Atlantic.
There’s the chance to catch rather more august fare in the form of legendary Japanese auteur Kenji Mizoguchi’s Shein-Heike Monogatari from 1955, one of only two colour films by the man extravagantly praised by one respected critic as “cinema’s Shakespeare, its Bach or Beethoven, its Rembrant, Titian or Picasso”.
If you only get the chance to check out one archive classic at LFF 2011, let it be Barbara Loden’s magnificently rough-edged Wanda from 1970. Written and directed by Loden, this glorious one-off follows a Polish-American housewife from a notably grimy corner of coal-mining Pennsylvania as she embarks on a wild journey of self-realisation, and is now rightly consecrated as a high water-mark of US independent cinema.
