Close-Up Cinema

"Because you're sick of knowing exactly what you're going to get and you're sick when you get it."
The Liberated Film Club continues its monthly fixture, featuring a special guest introducing an unknown short and feature. We're thrilled to welcome Chinese-British novelist, essayist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo as our special guest for this second instalment.
The Liberated Film Club began as a pirate DVD company, issuing irregular mail-order catalogues of lost, suppressed and impo...ssible films otherwise unobtainable. It held its first event in 2014 with Thurston Moore & Eva Prinz's Ecstatic Peace Library, and in 2016 curated a month-long season at Close-Up, with guests including John Akomfrah, Andrea Zimmerman, William Fowler, Tony Grisoni, Shama Khanna, Adam Roberts, Gideon Koppel, Damien Sanville, Chris Petit, Shezad Dawood, John Rogers and Ben Rivers (a documenting book was later published by purge.xxx). Neither the guests introducing, nor the audience, knew which film was screening.
*
Free to attend for Close-Up members, but booking is essential.
Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese British author and filmmaker. She has published several novels including A Concise Chinese English Dictionary for Lovers as well as story collections. Her memoir Once Upon a Time In The East won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography 2017 and shortlisted for Costa Book Award. She also directed several award wining feature films. She, a Chinese won the Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno Film Festival 2009. Her latest documentary Five Men and a Caravaggio premiered at the London Film Festival 2018. She was a guest professor at Bern University and is now a fellow of the Columbia Institute in Paris.
The Liberated Film Club is curated by Stanley Schtinter. Schtinter is an artist, writer and liberated filmmaker whose most recent work, Hotel Bardo, was dubbed by Iain Sinclair 'the last avant-garde anti-project at the end of time'. His 2018 recreation of Princess Diana's funeral (with a Mexican mariachi band in Salford) was widely celebrated as "the people's vote Turner Prize winner", and hailed by London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Daily Star and more. He also runs the anti-record label (anti-everything), purge.xxx.
BOX OFFICE (12:00 - 23.30): 02037847970
See More

"Because you're sick of knowing exactly what you're going to get and you're sick when you get it."
The Liberated Film Club re-launches as a monthly fixture, featuring a special guest introducing an unknown short and feature. We're thrilled to welcome Iranian filmmaker, actress, artist and writer Mania Akbari as our special guest for this first instalment.
The Liberated Film Club began as a pirate DVD company, issuing irregular mail-order catalogues of lost, suppressed and imp...ossible films otherwise unobtainable. It held its first event in 2014 with Thurston Moore & Eva Prinz's Ecstatic Peace Library, and in 2016 curated a month-long season at Close-Up, with guests including John Akomfrah, Andrea Zimmerman, William Fowler, Tony Grisoni, Shama Khanna, Adam Roberts, Gideon Koppel, Damien Sanville, Chris Petit, Shezad Dawood, John Rogers and Ben Rivers (a documenting book was later published by purge.xxx). Neither the guests introducing, nor the audience, knew which film was screening.
*
Free to attend for Close-Up members, but booking is essential.
Mania Akbari is an Iranian filmmaker, actress, artist and writer whose works mostly deal with themes of sexual identity, women, marriage, abortion, infidelity and lesbianism. As an actress, she is probably best known for her role in Abbas Kiarostami's Ten. Her film works include 20 Fingers, One. Two. One, From Tehran to London and Life May Be (with Mark Cousins), and have been the subject of retrospectives at BFI, DFI, Oldenburg Int'l Film Festival, Cyprus Film Festival and Nottingham Contemporary.
The Liberated Film Club is curated by Stanley Schtinter. Schtinter is an artist, writer and liberated filmmaker whose most recent work, Hotel Bardo, was dubbed by Iain Sinclair 'the last avant-garde anti-project at the end of time'. His 2018 recreation of Princess Diana's funeral (with a Mexican mariachi band in Salford) was widely celebrated as "the people's vote Turner Prize winner", and hailed by London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Daily Star and more. He also runs the anti-record label (anti-everything), purge.xxx.
BOX OFFICE (12:00 - 23.30): 02037847970
See More

Showing Tonight, 26 January 8.30pm: The Diary of a Worker
Rare #35mm screening. Released in the midst of an extremely grey period in the Finnish cinema, The Diary of a Worker was considered a revelation: the film had discovered realism, living people and vital milieu, none of them packaged in the trappings of entertainment; and what is more, Risto Jarva's work seemed to approach the standard of the best new European cinema. And it still holds up: its realism is not merely gre...y naturalism but a multi-levelled depiction in which dream, imagination, memories and various levels of reality converge. Over and above this, the film stands as a conscious compendium of turning-points in independent Finland: the Civil War of 1918, the traumatic wars, the history of the class struggle. The film renders particularly touching the strong presence of two people, a "marriage across class distinctions": a labourer (played by an amateur, the painter Paul Osipow) and an office worker (played by a professional, Selina Salo).
With thanks to Ehsan Khoshbakht, Antti Alanen, The Finnish Institute London and KAVI for making this programme possible.
bit.ly/2AWHUs6
See More

Showing Tonight, 26 January 6.30pm: The Village Shoemakers
Rare screening from a vintage #35mm print, with live accompaniment by Stephen Horne
"Erkki Karu specialized in briskly paced farces and light melodramas that were so popular with Finnish audiences they were largely responsible for keeping Suomi-Filmi, Finland's first film company, solvent in the 1930s when foreign films dominated the theaters. Based on a bittersweet, farcical play about unrequited love by Finland's fi...rst modern novelist and playwright, Aleksis Kivi, The Village Shoemakerscaptures the defiant lack of self-pity that distinguished Kivi's literary style. Axel Slangus, later to play the old man in Ingmar Bergman's Virgin Spring, gives an unsentimental performance as a brawny bachelor whose bungled attempts at winning the girl of his dreams leave him to the solitude of a whiskey bottle. The life of Slangus's character resembles that of Kivi, who never married and who died at the age of 38 from drinking and despair." – BAMPFA
With thanks to Ehsan Khoshbakht, Antti Alanen, The Finnish Institute London and KAVI for making this programme possible.
bit.ly/2R40PGy
See More

Jonas Mekas 1922-2019
"It's very important for me that those fragments of beauty, of Paradise, are brought to the attention of friends and strangers equally."
This sudden loss reminded me how fundamental Jonas Mekas’ work as a filmmaker, poet and founder of Anthology Film Archives has been for me and more importantly for Close-Up. My first meeting with him was in early 2000 when I saw a copy of Lost Lost Lost on VHS. I cannot describe how profoundly this film, and subsequentl...y his other films, affected me. As a young immigrant in London, the echoes were unfathomable. Yes, the little buzz of his Bolex in the 70s, somewhere on the Lower East side of New York, meant that my world would never be the same… To create pure poetry where technical imperfections and money restraints become the fabric of the oeuvre, was also a revelation for the aspiring filmmaker I was then. The intimate diary style of his films influenced my own practice so much, that a close friend of mine once said “seems like you got the Mekas bug”.
But it was also a decisive moment in that these films had to be shared, and the first screenings for friends and strangers alike started there and then, in remote warehouses where the attendance would rarely exceed two or three… The need to share, by any means, was in a great part initiated by seeing Mekas’ films and learning more about his work at Anthology. A few years later I started Close-Up. This brought me to Paris to meet Pip Chodorov, a dear friend of Mekas and the director of an extraordinary video distribution company, Re:Voir, which has released most of Mekas’ early films.
When we created Close-Up’s website, the introduction of our “about us” page was the quote of this obituary, which became our ethos. Reflecting on this now, what more defines the work of Mekas but those two words? About us. With two of his close friends, Louis Benassi and Ben Northover, we later organised a programme of his films, with Mekas in attendance. Imagine… a humble local film club invited and had Mekas, the godfather of American experimental cinema and our hero, talking after a screening of his films, in a bar on Brick Lane. It gave me a great deal of confidence that a lot can be achieved independently and outside the usual institutions. This again was Mekas’ teaching.
Anthology has always been an organisation to look up to for us at Close-Up, and the only place I constantly refer to when asked which cinema I admire the most in the world. And each time I re-watch Lost Lost Lost, Walden, or Reminiscences, tears always accompany my joy.
Today there were only tears.
Damien Sanville
See More

Showing Tonight, 25 January 8.15pm: Stolen Death
"A thriller set in turn-of-the-century Helsinki, Stolen Death uses elements of German expressionism to tell the story of Finnish resistance fighters smuggling arms to overthrow the Tsarist occupiers of Finland. Tapiovaara stresses the divided loyalties of the Finnish bourgeoisie, torn between preserving their privileged economic position and taking a risky stand for an independent Finland. Stolen Death can be viewed as a thinl...y disguised protest against the rise of the fascist movement in Finland in the 1930s. Tapiovaara's allegorical indictment of class inequality and the suppression of free speech and political expression, coupled with his death at 28 fighting the Russians in the Winter War of 1939-1940, earned him almost a mythic status in Finland." – BAMPFA
With thanks to Ehsan Khoshbakht, Antti Alanen, The Finnish Institute London and KAVI for making this programme possible.
bit.ly/2U528a3
See More

“If there's something you don't like, don't keep to the rules-break them.” – Vera Chytilová
"Former philosophy student, fashion model, and script-girl, Vera Chytilová became one of Europe's most innovative filmmakers in the 1960s. The Czech director's formally rigorous aesthetic of organized chaos and visual symbolism successfully merged the traditions of narrative cinema with the complex experimentation of the avant-garde. Variously compared by critics to Fellini, the psyche...delic Jodorowsky, and New York underground filmmaker Ken Jacobs, she gained fame with the surrealist feminist classic Daisies and the unclassifiable allegory Fruit of Paradise. Labeled “cynical” by the Czechoslovak government, she was forbidden to work for years until finally re-emerging in the late 1970s. Nothing is as it “should be” in a Chytilová film, but then, nothing is as it should be in the world she observes and comments on. Her work, as film historian Yvette Biro wrote, “denies conventional rules. It is a rigorously calculated frenzy...a macabre play, and if it succeeds in surprising the spectator constantly, it is not due to the irrational intrigue, but to its peculiar development from the grotesque into an existential desperateness.”” – Jason Sanders
This programme anticipates Virginie Sélavy's upcoming Close-Up Film Course: Surrealism & Cinema from Buñuel to Lynch and features a selection of films from across the Czech iconoclast's career.
Full programme: bit.ly/VeraChytilova
*
Tickets: £10 / £8 conc. / £6 Close-Up members Box Office: 02037847970 Close-Up Cinema, 97 Sclater Street, London E1 6HR
See More

Showing Tonight, 24 January 8.15pm: People In the Summer Night + Alvar Aalto
Valentin Vaala's beautiful adaptation of a novel by F.E. Sillanpää paired with Eino Ruutsalo's portrait of Alvar Aalto.
"F. E. Sillanpää, Finland's Nobel laureate, was an imagist who relied more on descriptive word painting than on narrative to shape his pantheistic vision of man. The peasants of his melancholy meditation on Finnish summers are carried along by the cycle of the seasons, from birth ...to death, from love to loss. By celebrating the Nordic rituals of the summer solstice they offset winter's descent into darkness and remain in harmony with nature. Valentin Vaala's languorously paced images are among the most sensuous in Finnish cinema, and capture Sillanpää's atmosphere of resistance and resignation, the douceur de la vie of old age. As the sun lingers well into the night, farmers till the soil, lovers meet in the fields, a baby is born, a man dies mysteriously, and we are left to speculate about their destinies." – BAMPFA
With thanks to Ehsan Khoshbakht, Antti Alanen, The Finnish Institute London and KAVI for making this programme possible.
bit.ly/2U9Ix8Z
See More

Luis Buñuel's final film explodes with eroticism, bringing full circle the director’s lifelong preoccupation with the darker side of desire. Buñuel regular Fernando Rey plays Mathieu, an urbane widower, tortured by his lust for the elusive Conchita. With subversive flare, Buñuel uses two different actresses in the lead – Carole Bouquet, a sophisticated French beauty, and Ángela Molina, a Spanish coquette. Drawn from Pierre Louÿs’s 1898 novel, La Femme et le Pantin, That Obsc...ure Object of Desire is a dizzying game of sexual politics punctuated by a terror that harkens back to Buñuel’s brilliant surrealistic beginnings.
*
Part of our season on Luis Buñuel: bit.ly/CU_LuisBunuel
This programme anticipates our upcoming: Close-Up Film Course: Surrealism & Cinema from Buñuel to Lynch
Tickets: £10 / £8 conc. / £6 Close-Up members Box Office: 02037847970 Close-Up Cinema, 97 Sclater Street, London E1 6HR
See More

The opening sequence of Luis Buñuel’s first film contains one of the most indelible images, and most primal “cuts”, in film history – the chillingly tranquil slicing of an eyeball with a razor blade. From there, Buñuel and collaborator Salvador Dalí use a Surrealist version of narrative to thread together sequences involving a heterosexual couple, a disembodied hand and a rotting carcass inside a piano.
Realizing his goal of enraging fascists, Catholics, the bourgeoisie, and ...his general audience in this follow-up to Un Chien Andalou, Buñuel proved too radical this time for even Salvador Dalí, who quickly distanced himself from this explosive cinematic revolution. Slyly beginning as an innocuous documentary on scorpions, this surreal masterpiece evolves into a love story in which the lovers are routinely blocked from realizing their love by the complexes of society and their own psyches. Even more miraculous that it was one of the earliest sound films – and incidentally, the first to use interior dialogue – L’Age d’Or is a decadent, jarring Freudian dreamscape that has maintained its horror, eroticism and taboo – provoking on planes both conscious and subconscious. *
Part of our season on Luis Buñuel: bit.ly/CU_LuisBunuel
This programme anticipates our upcoming: Close-Up Film Course: Surrealism & Cinema from Buñuel to Lynch
Tickets: £10 / £8 conc. / £6 Close-Up members Box Office: 02037847970 Close-Up Cinema, 97 Sclater Street, London E1 6HR
See More

""I’m sick of symmetry," states Monsieur Foucauld as he repositions his preserved spider above the mantel. Achieving total Buñuelian liberation from the despotic narrative form, this elegant labyrinth of contradictory, dream-like scenarios – each of which breaks-off and follows a different character – maintains a curious unity of its own. Never explicit or predictable in its sly comedy, Buñuel presents a deadpan inversion of normalcy that plays upon the tension between parado...x, ambiguity and taboo: police searching for a missing girl that is not missing, modern guests seated at toilets around a table, a military roadblock due to a fox sighting. Upsetting and opening up expectation, the film resembles a conversation with a child; it is a playfully relentless reconsideration of our accepted existences where conclusion would suggest not liberty, but death." – Harvard Film Archive
*
Part of our season on Luis Buñuel: bit.ly/CU_LuisBunuel
This programme anticipates our upcoming: Close-Up Film Course: Surrealism & Cinema from Buñuel to Lynch
Tickets: £10 / £8 conc. / £6 Close-Up members Box Office: 02037847970 Close-Up Cinema, 97 Sclater Street, London E1 6HR
See More

Set in the 1930s French countryside, the first of several films Luis Buñuel co-wrote with Jean-Claude Carrière (who also plays a cleric in the film) is sardonically laced with absurd perversions of classism and fascism. The chambermaid of the title is the enigmatic Parisian Célestine who is besieged as soon as she steps off of the train by the frustrated desires and eccentric obsessions of the Montreils, a rural bourgeois clan at war with each other, the neighbors, and “forei...gners” at large. When one of them commits a sordid crime, the avenging Célestine takes an unpredictable, mystifying path. Everywhere she goes, she cannot escape one of Buñuel’s famous fetish objects, the boot – titillating, incriminating, and ultimately pointing the way to a greater, darker march on the horizon.
*
Part of our season on Luis Buñuel: bit.ly/CU_LuisBunuel
This programme anticipates our upcoming: Close-Up Film Course: Surrealism & Cinema from Buñuel to Lynch
Tickets: £10 / £8 conc. / £6 Close-Up members Box Office: 02037847970 Close-Up Cinema, 97 Sclater Street, London E1 6HR
See More

Emerging at the dawn of his nouveau "French period," Buñuel’s extraordinary apparition embraces the theatrical ritual of his favorite social stage, the dinner party, to famously imprison a group of well-heeled guests without explanation at a sumptuous meal in a luminous Mexico City mansion. Trapped within their own nonsensical social structure "out of politeness," the guests realize they cannot escape their own soiree as ridiculous party banter, veiled insults and invented sc...andals give way to outrageous carnal depravity and animal ugliness. Luis Buñuel elevates and abstracts political critique beyond simple satire – floating symbols like the recurrent sheep, the dream emblem par excellence. In the end the very fabric of time and space immobilizes Buñuel’s guests in discontinuity, repetition, and a confusion of reality and fantasy that draws a clear parallel to the film’s very own audience. Providing inspiration for Godard’s Weekend, The Exterminating Angel is a hysterical revolt against oppressive civilization and its willing victims.
*
Part of our season on Luis Buñuel: bit.ly/CU_LuisBunuel
This programme anticipates our upcoming: Close-Up Film Course: Surrealism & Cinema from Buñuel to Lynch
Tickets: £10 / £8 conc. / £6 Close-Up members Box Office: 02037847970 Close-Up Cinema, 97 Sclater Street, London E1 6HR
See More

Luis Buñuel's final film explodes with eroticism, bringing full circle the director’s lifelong preoccupation with the darker side of desire. Buñuel regular Fernando Rey plays Mathieu, an urbane widower, tortured by his lust for the elusive Conchita. With subversive flare, Buñuel uses two different actresses in the lead – Carole Bouquet, a sophisticated French beauty, and Ángela Molina, a Spanish coquette. Drawn from Pierre Louÿs’s 1898 novel, La Femme et le Pantin, That Obsc...ure Object of Desire is a dizzying game of sexual politics punctuated by a terror that harkens back to Buñuel’s brilliant surrealistic beginnings.
*
Part of our season on Luis Buñuel: bit.ly/CU_LuisBunuel
This programme anticipates our upcoming: Close-Up Film Course: Surrealism & Cinema from Buñuel to Lynch
Tickets: £10 / £8 conc. / £6 Close-Up members Box Office: 02037847970 Close-Up Cinema, 97 Sclater Street, London E1 6HR
See More

""I’m sick of symmetry," states Monsieur Foucauld as he repositions his preserved spider above the mantel. Achieving total Buñuelian liberation from the despotic narrative form, this elegant labyrinth of contradictory, dream-like scenarios – each of which breaks-off and follows a different character – maintains a curious unity of its own. Never explicit or predictable in its sly comedy, Buñuel presents a deadpan inversion of normalcy that plays upon the tension between parado...x, ambiguity and taboo: police searching for a missing girl that is not missing, modern guests seated at toilets around a table, a military roadblock due to a fox sighting. Upsetting and opening up expectation, the film resembles a conversation with a child; it is a playfully relentless reconsideration of our accepted existences where conclusion would suggest not liberty, but death." – Harvard Film Archive
*
Part of our season on Luis Buñuel: bit.ly/CU_LuisBunuel
This programme anticipates our upcoming: Close-Up Film Course: Surrealism & Cinema from Buñuel to Lynch
Tickets: £10 / £8 conc. / £6 Close-Up members Box Office: 02037847970 Close-Up Cinema, 97 Sclater Street, London E1 6HR
See More

" Luis Buñuel’s most successful film, which won the 1972 Oscar for Best Foreign Film, once again places a group of bourgeois friends in dinner party purgatory. Continually interrupted from eating by strange events, the diners are perennially unsatisfied, yet driven to play out their polite social rituals nevertheless. Meanwhile, the elegant costumes, good manners, and meaningless small talk hides drug trafficking, affairs, political intrigue and vengeful murder. Absurd remind...ers of their hypocrisy and doom constantly resurface via apparitions, premonitions, dreams, and dreams within dreams, yet they never seem to “wake up.” No standard cinematic fare, the seamlessly surreal satire features a charming ensemble cast playing social actors who are doomed to play their parts ad infinitum." – Harvard Film Archive
*
Part of our season on Luis Buñuel: bit.ly/CU_LuisBunuel
This programme anticipates our upcoming: Close-Up Film Course: Surrealism & Cinema from Buñuel to Lynch
Tickets: £10 / £8 conc. / £6 Close-Up members Box Office: 02037847970 Close-Up Cinema, 97 Sclater Street, London E1 6HR
See More

"Though the most popular of Luis Buñuel’s films from his late French period, Belle de Jour may also be one of the most radical. The film is perhaps as duplicitous as its lovely protagonist Séverine. Appearing to lead a respectable existence with a successful, handsome husband, she behaves icily chaste with patient Pierre in the bedroom while secretly indulging in fetishistic daydreams. Caught between the gaze of saintly Pierre and that of lecherous men like his friend Husson,... she begins to lead another life at a nearby brothel. Her sexual and emotional needs may be deeper, stranger and more complex than either man could ever allow in their rigidly circumscribed narratives. Or are they? Belle de Jour is a pristine psycho-cinematic puzzle – imparting to the viewers as much or as little profundity as they are willing to entertain." – Harvard Film Archive
*
Part of our season on Luis Buñuel: bit.ly/CU_LuisBunuel
This programme anticipates our upcoming: Close-Up Film Course: Surrealism & Cinema from Buñuel to Lynch
Tickets: £10 / £8 conc. / £6 Close-Up members Box Office: 02037847970 Close-Up Cinema, 97 Sclater Street, London E1 6HR
See More

"After the death of her mother, the beautiful and impressionable Tristana is taken under the wing of Don Lope. An aging Don Juan with an outdated, hypocritical code of honor, he defiles Tristana’s body and her spirit – alternately treating her as his child or his lover, a lady or a servant. The selfish manipulations backfire in subversively subtle Buñuelian fashion – unnaturally transforming the young swan into a fickle monster of Don Lope’s own making. Mistreated and misshap...en in one way or another, all characters in the film suffer under misuse of aristocratic power, as they play out Luis Buñuel’s psychoanalysis of loathing and desire within the narrow, disorienting streets and faded palette of 1920’s Toledo – aging prematurely under corrupt conditions." – Harvard Film Archive
*
Part of our season on Luis Buñuel: bit.ly/CU_LuisBunuel
This programme anticipates our upcoming: Close-Up Film Course: Surrealism & Cinema from Buñuel to Lynch
Tickets: £10 / £8 conc. / £6 Close-Up members Box Office: 02037847970 Close-Up Cinema, 97 Sclater Street, London E1 6HR
See More