Watched on Thursday May 9, 2024.

Watched on Thursday May 9, 2024.

Watched on Thursday May 9, 2024.

Watched on Thursday May 9, 2024.

Watched on Thursday May 9, 2024.

Watched on Thursday May 9, 2024.

Watched on Thursday May 9, 2024.

Watched on Thursday May 9, 2024.

Watched on Thursday May 9, 2024.

Watched on Thursday May 9, 2024.

In partnership with Noods Radio, this sold-out May Day special screening of The Blood on Satan's Claw at Watershed is accompanied with Maya Deren's short Witch's Cradle, rescored live by Tara Clerkin Trio!

This acts as a precursor for Watershed's May Sunday season Curses, Cults & Covens: The Birth of British Horror, running weekly from the 5th to 26th of May.

• Le Samouraï
• Gilda
• Lone Star
• The Annihilation of Fish
• The Weak and the Wicked
• No Trees in the Street
• My Childhood
• My Ain Folk
• My Way Home
• Bill Douglas: My Best Friend

1-5 screened as part of 1971: The Year Hollywood Went Independent, a strand reassessing the "independent" Hollywood films of 1971, 50 years on.

6-14 screened as part of Restored and Rediscovered, showcasing some of the latest restorations and rediscoveries on the big screen.

1. The Last Picture Show
2. Klute
3. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
4. Two-Lane Blacktop
5. Five Easy Pieces
6. In the Mood for Love

   In partnership with Janus Films, ICA and the BFI.

7. Jazz on a Summer's Day

   The film has been beautifully and extensively restored in 4K from the best surviving vault elements by IndieCollect.

   Presented in partnership with Bristol International Jazz & Blues Festival.

8. Beau Travail

   Presented in patnership with the French Institute.

9. Blue Collar
10. The Beast Must Die

    Presented by Bristol Black Horror Club, an online platform exploring all things Horror through a Black Diasporic lens.

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Described by Gordon as ‘a story about looking’, the film offers a nuanced reflection on the nature of the cinematic gaze through challenging and inverting the conventions of noir – reversing the traditional gender roles of the stalker and the stalked, the watcher and the watched.

From Antonioni’s countercultural masterpiece on the act of seeing and image-making Blow-Up (1966), to the later De Palma neo-noir it inspired – Blow Out (1981), this season revisits pillars of the surveillance and thriller canon, in which voyeurism itself becomes the focus of perhaps the most naturally voyeuristic of the arts – cinema.

Tickets available here.

• Rear Window

  Screening on 6 Aug 2023, 2pm www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/12126/rear-window

• Blow-Up

  Screening on 13 Aug, 2pm www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/12127/blowup

• Klute

  Screening on 20 Aug, 2pm www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/12128/klute

• Blow Out

  Screening on 27 Aug, 2pm www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/12129/blow-out

This strand of restorations explores the impact of this oppositional ethos and lo-fi aesthetic on a new generation of American filmmakers in the following decades, with a selection of films which explored controversial subjects, countered mainstream representations and offered other, more radical ways of seeing gender, sexuality and race on screen.

This strand is curated by Steph Read (Watershed).

This strand is screening at the 2023 edition of Cinema Rediscovered.

• Variety

  A new 2K restoration from the original camera negative overseen by director Bette Gordon courtesy of Other Parties and Kino Lorber.

• Kamikaze Hearts

  A 2K restoration from the original 16mm A/B camera negatives. Restored by Kino Lorber in collaboration with the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

  Presented in partnership with Queer Vision.

• Salvation!

  A new Digital Restoration courtesy of KinoLorber.

• Drylongso

  Restored in 4K by the Criterion Collection, Janus Films, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences®, supervised by director Cauleen Smith.

In this period, between the demise of classic Hollywood and the rise of the modern franchise, we glimpse an independent style of filmmaking being made and distributed within the increasingly corporate studio system: a parallel ‘dream-factory’ universe as it were, rich in visual and thematic ambiguity, complexity and nuance.

1971 marked independent Hollywood’s zenith with films like Two Lane Blacktop directed by Monte Hellman (who sadly passed away earlier this year) produced by Universal Studios, Alan J. Pakula’s Klute, Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs Miller by Warner Brothers, Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show and Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces by Columbia all released that year. These films rewrote the traditional genre rule book or indeed threw the rule book away and took the audience on an existential journey where the only ending possible was the film to burn in the projector gate. All of them though were shaped by and, in different ways, reflected on the social and political turmoil engulfing the United States at the end of the 60s and the beginning of a new decade.

Whilst the period has popularly been defined as The New Hollywood it has also been defined by its male directors. However, women were central to this creative moment whether in front of the camera: Jane Fonda (Klute), Julie Christie (McCabe and Mrs Miller) and Cloris Leachman (who won a Supporting Actress Oscar® for The Last Picture Show and passed away earlier this year); or behind the camera: Polly Platt (The Last Picture Show) and scriptwriter Carole Eastman (Five Easy Pieces).

'1971: The Year Hollywood Went Independent' provides an opportunity to reassess these films 50 later, see them back on the big screen with a range of guest speakers and reflect on and recognise the contribution made by women.

Presented by Cinema Rediscovered and Park Circus, 1971: The Year Hollywood Went Independent tours to venues across the UK as part of Cinema Rediscovered on Tour (Aug - Oct), a Watershed project with support from BFI awarding funds from The National Lottery and MUBI.

This strand screened at the 2021 edition of Cinema Rediscovered.

• Two-Lane Blacktop
• McCabe & Mrs. Miller
• Five Easy Pieces
• Klute
• The Last Picture Show

If you want to see women centre-stage and expressing their own desires, or criminals so charming you’ll pray they get away with the loot, step this way…

We’re showing brand new remasters of five classic Pre-Codes, from the sparkling Jewel Robbery (1932) starring Kay Francis and William Powell in a tale of Viennese gentlemen thieves wreathed in marijuana smoke, to James Cagney and Joan Blondell in the classic crime caper Blonde Crazy (1931). Norma Shearer throws herself at bad-boy Clark Gable in A Free Soul (1931), while in Red-Headed Woman (1932) and Baby Face (1933), Jean Harlow and Barbara Stanwyck learn how to get ahead, one notch on their bedpost at a time.

Words by season co-curators Pamela Hutchinson and Christina Newland. With thanks to Park Circus and Warner Bros.

This strand screened at the 2022 edition of Cinema Rediscovered.

About the curators:

Christina Newland is the lead film critic at the i paper and a journalist on film, pop culture, and boxing at Criterion,Sight & Sound, BBC, MUBI, Empire, and others. She runs an award-winning newsletter, Sisters Under the Mink, on the depiction of women in crime film and TV. Her first book, an anthology entitled She Found it at the Movies: Women Writers on Sex, Desire and Cinema, was published by Red Press in 2020. She tweets at @christinalefou.

Pamela Hutchinson is a freelance writer, critic, film historian and curator. She writes for Sight & Sound,Criterion,Indicator, the Guardian, Empire and regularly appears on BBC radio. She is also the editor of Sight and Sound’s Weekly Film Bulletin, an email newsletter. Her publications include the BFI Film Classic on Pandora's Box and 30-Second Cinema (Ivy Press), as well as essays in several edited collections. In 2021 she delivered the Philip French Memorial Lecture at Cinema Rediscovered. Her site: SilentLondon.co.uk is devoted to silent cinema.

• Blonde Crazy
• A Free Soul
• Jewel Robbery
• Red-Headed Woman
• Baby Face

A Hollywood movie is the quintessential form of American cinema: entertainment with a side order of escapism where good triumphs over evil. However, like the country itself, this style of film was forged through various external influences.

Explore some of the European influences which shaped Hollywood, from directors such as F.W. Murnau (German) and Michael Curtiz (Hungarian) and actresses Marlene Dietrich (German) and Greta Garbo (Swedish) who were courted by the American studios because of their success in 1920s Europe, through to those forced into exile to escape the rise of fascism in the 1930s like directors Billy Wilder (Austrian) and Fritz Lang (German).

All made an indelible mark in this most American of popular forms and created some of Hollywood’s most distinctive and enduring films which reflected a more complex world than the popular myth of Hollywood would have us believe. The strand ends with the 4K restoration of High Noon on its 70th anniversary.

Presented by Watershed Cinema Curator, Mark Cosgrove in collaboration with archive activists Invisible Women and Park Circus as part of Cinema Rediscovered on Tour, a Watershed project with support from BFI awarding funds from The National Lottery and MUBI.

This strand screened at the 2022 edition of Cinema Rediscovered.

• Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
• Shanghai Express

  4K restoration courtesy of Park Circus.

• Queen Christina

  35mm print courtesy of the BFI. Presented in partnership with Queer Vision.

• Fury

  Presented in collaboration with Film Noir UK.

• Double Indemnity

  Presented in collaboration with Film Noir UK.

• Casablanca
• The Killers
• High Noon

  4K restoration courtesy of Park Circus.

The 2017 edition of Cinema Rediscovered kicks off with a special anniversary screening of Network - introduced by award-winning journalist and broadcaster Samira Ahmed - as part of a season of films which look at how the media and journalism have been portrayed in Hollywood.

Including Orson Welles’ tale of power and corruption, and cinematic tour de force Citizen Kane (Sat 29 July, 20:20); Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (Fri 28 July, 18:00), with its no-holds-barred exposé exposé of the American media and public’s appetite for sensation; Gus Van Sant’s darkly hilarious satire To Die For (Fri 28 July, 15:30) starring Nicole Kidman as Suzanne Stone who’ll stop at nothing for a career on TV; Alexander MacKendrick’s caustic noir Sweet Smell of Success (Sat 29 July, 17:50) about the influence of the columnist; and the grandfather of Hollywood newspaper movies, Lewis Milestone’s The Front Page (Sat 29 July, 14:30), in a UK premiere of a new restoration by the Academy Film Archive and the Film Foundation from a print discovered in producer Howard Hughes’ personal collection.

This strand screened at the 2017 edition of Cinema Rediscovered.

• Citizen Kane

  Presented in a 35mm print with thanks to the British Film Institute.

• Sweet Smell of Success
• The Front Page

  Restored in 2016 by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation. Elements for this restoration provided by The Howard Hughes Corporation and by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, College of Fine Arts' Department of Film and its Howard Hughes Collection at the Academy Film Archive.

• Ace in the Hole
• To Die For
• Network

The films were all introduced by practitioners actively working to challenge these barriers, including Black Cinema Project, Annouchka De Andrade, Ajabu Ajabu, Martin Mhando, Global Women’s Film Heritage, Twelve30 Collective, Dr. Jessica Gordon-Burroughs and curator Lorena Pino — highlighting considerations and conversations around: moral approaches to institutional practice, legitimisation of informal film cultures, deconstructing film ownership, lifecycles of archival work, and the rights of audience.

Women's Stories from the Global South (& To Whom They Belong) is part of an ongoing interrogation by Ajabu Ajabu and Black Cinema Project that explores the multitudinous ways in which exhibition of classical cinema from the Global South has become a privileged experience. This work urges film practitioners to critique the global power imbalance of film cultures with an aim of encouraging not only return of archival cinema to the people, but open and inclusive reinterpretation of works according to their ever-evolving cultural significance.

Black Cinema Project is an evolving space set up by Mosa Mpetha and Samra Mayanja to bring people together with care, to meaningfully watch and discuss Black films and the landscape they are situated within.

Ajabu Ajabu is a collective of audio-visual practitioners based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania working on the preservation, production, and presentation of audio-visual art. Their work is centred around curatorial interrogations related to deconstructing bias across film cultures, platforming underrepresented narratives and modes of storytelling, and promoting amateur and experimental practice.

This strand screened at the 2022 edition of Cinema Rediscovered.

• Araya
• One Way or Another
• Sambizanga
• Maangamizi: The Ancient One
• A Door to the Sky

1-5 screened as part of Women’s Stories from the Global South (& To Whom They Belong): five recently digitised or restored works from the Global South, written by and about women.

6-10 screened as part of Pre-code Hollywood: Rules are Made to be Broken: brand new remastered versions of classic Pre-Codes.

11-18 screened as part of When Europe Made Hollywood: From Sunrise to High Noon, an exploration of how European filmmakers shaped American popular film.

19-22 screened as part of bell hooks: Reel to Real, an exploration of the work of feminist theorist and activist, bell hooks.

23-25 screened as part of Black Paris: Josephine and Beyond, exploring the appeal of Paris to Black Americans and the cultural scene that developed there.

1. Araya
2. One Way or Another
3. Sambizanga
4. Maangamizi: The Ancient One
5. A Door to the Sky
6. Baby Face
7. Red-Headed Woman
8. Jewel Robbery
9. A Free Soul
10. Blonde Crazy

...plus 35 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Screening at cinemas including 20th Century Flicks, Clevedon’s Curzon Cinema & Arts, Watershed, and new this year, Bristol Aquarium, which holds the former IMAX cinema, plus pop-ups in the crypt of St John on the Wall and The Galleries Car Park. The festival will launch a UK wide tour of highlights (Aug – Oct 2023).

See this year's full programme and get tickets here.

2-5 screening as part of Down & Dirty: American D.I.Y. Restored, a selection of films exploring controversial subjects, countering mainstream representations and offering other, more radical ways of seeing gender, sexuality and race on screen.

6-12 screening as part of Look Who’s Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist.This strand invites audiences to re-think the contribution of Hollywood’s blacklistees to American cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s.

1. The Virgin Suicides

   A 4K restoration approved by director Sofia Coppola and supervised by cinematographer Ed Lachman courtesy of StudioCanal.

2. Variety

   A new 2K restoration from the original camera negative overseen by director Bette Gordon courtesy of Other Parties and Kino Lorber.

3. Kamikaze Hearts

   A 2K restoration from the original 16mm A/B camera negatives. Restored by Kino Lorber in collaboration with the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

   Presented in partnership with Queer Vision.

4. Drylongso

   Restored in 4K by the Criterion Collection, Janus Films, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences®, supervised by director Cauleen Smith.

5. Salvation!

   A new Digital Restoration courtesy of KinoLorber.

6. Uptight

   With thanks to Park Circus and Paramount.

7. Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here

   With thanks to Park Circus.

8. Shampoo

   A 4K restoration courtesy of Park Circus and Sony.

9. Claudine

   A 4K restoration courtesy of Park Circus and Disney.

10. M*A*S*H

    With thanks to Park Circus and Disney.

...plus 34 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1-2 screening as part of Celebrating Orton, a look back at the work of queer British playwright Joe Orton, 50 years after his murder.

3-4 screening in collaboration with feminist horror film collective, The Final Girls.

5-10 screening as part of Manipulating The Message, a season exploring the world of broadcasting, advertising and the manipulation of the media and the audience.

11-12 screening as part of India on Film, a selection of special events putting the spotlight on Indian filmmaking and archive films about India.

13-15 screened in collaboration with Come The Revolution, a collective of curators, programmers and creatives from Bristol and Birmingham committed to exploring and challenging black life, experience and cultural expression through cinema.

16-17 screened highlights from Cinema Rediscovered inspiration, Il Cinema Ritrovato.

18-20 screened as part of Girls Like Us, a strand looking at emergent women writers, producers, and stars in World War II Britain and their astonishing propaganda movies that merged stark reality with fiction and fantasy, many with a female bias.

21 presented in partnership with Cary Comes Home Festival.

22-26 New restorations, previews and premieres.

• Entertaining Mr. Sloane

  Brand new restoration, with thanks to STUDIOCANAL. Screening as part of Celebrating Orton, a look back at the work of queer British playwright Joe Orton, 50 years after his murder.

• Prick Up Your Ears

  30th Anniversary Screening, with thanks to Park Circus. Screening as part of Celebrating Orton, a look back at the work of queer British playwright Joe Orton, 50 years after his murder.

• The Entity

  Presented by The Final Girls, a film collective exploring the intersections of horror film and feminism

• Outer Space

  Presented by The Final Girls, a film collective exploring the intersections of horror film and feminism

• Citizen Kane

  Presented in a 35mm print with thanks to the British Film Institute.

• Sweet Smell of Success

  With thanks to Park Circus.

• The Front Page

  Restored in 2016 by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation. Elements for this restoration provided by The Howard Hughes Corporation and by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, College of Fine Arts' Department of Film and its Howard Hughes Collection at the Academy Film Archive.

• Ace in the Hole
• To Die For

  With thanks to Park Circus.

• Network

  With thanks to Park Circus.

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

In fact, the 1960s saw the return to the mainstream of a number of film professionals who had been blacklisted in the anti-communist drive within the Hollywood film industry in the late 1940s and 1950s. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, when America was experiencing social and political upheaval - the fight for civil rights and the anti-war movements - these filmmakers once persecuted for their progressive politics were now more in tune with the times. As a result, they found fresh collaborators in the new American cinema of the period.

This strand invites audiences to re-think the contribution of Hollywood’s blacklistees to American cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s. Far from being a spent creative force as they are often represented, these films show that formerly blacklisted directors, actors and screenwriters made a vital contribution to the re-invigorating of cinema in one of American film’s most creative eras.

This strand has been curated by Professor of Film Studies at the University of Salford and Senior Visiting Curator at HOME in Manchester Andy Willis.

• Uptight

  With thanks to Park Circus and Paramount.

• Midnight Cowboy
• Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here

  With thanks to Park Circus.

• M*A*S*H

  With thanks to Park Circus and Disney.

• Serpico

  This is a new 4K restoration with thanks to Park Circus and Paramount.

  Paramount scanned and cleaned the original camera negative at L’Immagine Ritrovata, Bologna and restored color at Colortime LLC. in Los Angeles, using a 1983 Vintage Release print as a color reference. It also has newly created 5.1 and restored original mono sound.

• Claudine

  A 4K restoration courtesy of Park Circus and Disney.

• Shampoo

  A 4K restoration courtesy of Park Circus and Sony.

Whether it was a moralising tale designed to caution or a comment on injustice hoping to incite change, each of the films served up in this buffet of fear, oppression, desperation and desire hopes to activate its viewers into action.

From the heady days of the Czechoslovak New Wave through Thatcherism, authoritarianism, dystopic futures and right down to the bare bones of our own bodies, Gluttony, Decadence and Resistance showcases brilliant, bold and bittersweet filmmaking from Vera Chytilová, Ester Krumbachová, Peter Greenaway, Marco Ferreri, Richard Fleischer and Rachel Maclean.

• The Murder of Mr. Devil
• Fruit of Paradise
• Soylent Green
• La Grande Bouffe
• The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

  35mm print courtesy of Contemporary Films.

• Society
• Make Me Up

1-7 screened as part of Gluttony, Decadence and Resistance, exploring indulgence as a metaphor for social and political change through brilliant, bold and bittersweet filmmaking.

8-13 screened as part of The Balance of Things: the Cinematic Imagination of Nic Roeg, a celebration of Nic Roeg's cinematically explosive body of work.

14-16 screened in celebration of Bristol's status as UNESCO City of Film.

17-25 screened as part of Restored and Rediscovered, previewing and profiling some of the latest new restorations of classic films before they are re-released in cinemas.

1. Soylent Green
2. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

   35mm print courtesy of Contemporary Films.

3. The Murder of Mr. Devil
4. La Grande Bouffe
5. Society
6. Fruit of Paradise
7. Make Me Up
8. Walkabout
9. Bad Timing
10. Performance

    Presented on 35mm.

...plus 29 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1-3 screened as part of Restored and Rediscovered, profiling and previewing some of the latest new restorations of classic films before they are re-released in cinemas, alongside shining new light on lost films which have recently been rediscovered and presented at our partner festival Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna.

4-7 screened as part of Bazin 100, a look at influential French film critic André Bazin's impact and influence on film, readdressing his simple yet fundamental question: “What is cinema?”

8-12 screening as part of a celebration of Bristol's new status as a UNESCO city of film.

13-14 screened as part of Slocombe at Ealing, celebrating the work of cinematographer Douglas Slocombe with a pair of his films from his time at Ealing Studios.

15-22 screened as part of Women on the Periphery, looking at women’s stories, told by and about them; about love, life and the determinism to be true to themselves.

23-24 screened as part of Workers Unite! Inspired by the 50th anniversary of the events of May ‘68, this strand presents two rarely screened depictions of working class life and history.

1. Maurice
2. The Apartment

   With thanks to Park Circus. Restored in 4K from the 35mm Original Picture Negative and 35mm Duplicate Picture Negative. Audio restored from the 35mm Original Optical Soundtrack Negative. 4K scans completed at Deluxe EFILM, Hollywood. Digital image restoration by L’Immagine Ritrovata, Bologna. Color grading, picture conforming, additional image restoration, DCP creation by Roundabout Entertainment, Santa Monica. Colorist Sheri Eisenberg. Restoration supervised by Grover Crisp.

3. The Big Lebowski
4. The Eyes of Orson Welles
5. You Were Never Really Here
6. The Crime of Monsieur Lange

   Restored in 4K by Cineteca di Bologna, under the supervision of Studiocanal, with the support of the CNC.

7. The Phantom Carriage

   Presented by South West Silents in partnership with the Swedish Institute.

8. The Terminal Man

   Hodges’ very own, personal, 35mm print of his later ‘Director’s Cut.’

9. Black Panther

   Outdoor screening presented by Watershed and supported by IMDb.

10. Get Carter

    Archive 35mm Print Courtesy of the BFI.

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1-6 screening as part of Sculpting Time– an Andrei Tarkovsky retrospective from Curzon Artificial Eye.

7-12 screening as part of Celebrating Slocombe – a retrospective of adventurous cinematographer Douglas Slocombe.

13-20 screening as part of a strand curated by Il Cinema Ritrovato, with 15-20 screening as part of In Search of Colour – a historic programme of short films curated by II Cinema Ritrovato festival and restored by L'Immagine Ritrovata labs. This collection showcases Kinemacolor and the Pochoir colour technique, which employed elaborate stencils to add precise colour detail to two-tone Kinemacolor prints.

21-23 presented by Autograph ABP as part of the Black Atlantic Cinema Club, a season of rarely seen contemporary films and archive classics inviting you to explore rich and different possibilities through which to view the African Diaspora experience of transatlantic culture. With thanks to writer/curator Karen Alexander.

1. Andrei Rublev
2. Solaris
3. Mirror
4. Stalker
5. Nostalgia
6. The Sacrifice
7. It Always Rains on Sunday
8. The Smallest Show on Earth
9. The Servant
10. The Titfield Thunderbolt

...plus 24 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

With over 50 events and screenings, including 15 brand-new 4K film restorations showing alongside contemporary classics, film-on-film rarities and curiosities from around the globe, Cinema Rediscovered 2024 is shaping up to be our most thrilling yet.

The full line-up for the 8th edition of the festival will be revealed in June but here’s a sneak peek of what’s in store… 

Our two opening night films are maverick director Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967), a masterpiece of cool embodied by Alain Delon in a career-defining performance, and Charles Vidor's sultry film noir Gilda (1946), which propelled Rita Hayworth to eternal film stardom.

Charles Burnett’s long-lost feature The Annihilation of Fish (1999) will be shown in celebration of the film’s 25th anniversary and the 80th birthday of the visionary director.

John Sayles’ Oscar-nominated Lone Star (1996) starring a young Matthew McConaughey alongside Chris Cooper, Elizabeth Peña and Kris Kristofferson represented a highwater mark for American Indie filmmaking. Set on the Tex-Mex border, it brilliantly fuses the Western genre with contemporary thriller to explore issues which speak powerfully to the current political climate.

Marking what would have been Scottish-born filmmaker Bill Douglas’ 90th year, the festival partners up with The Bill Douglas Museum to present his achingly beautiful trilogy (My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973), and My Way Home (1978)) alongside a new documentary Bill Douglas: My Best Friend (2024) which gives fresh insights into this most mercurial filmmaker and passionate collector of film memorabilia.

Other British titles include two 4K restorations of films by the Bristol-born, Oscar® and BAFTA nominated director J. Lee Thompson (1914 – 2002), both featuring strong performances from two recently lost British female leads, Glynis Johns and Sylvia Syms; The Weak and the Wicked (1954) and No Trees in The Street (1959).

Add in special guest introductions, projection tour walks, happy hour gatherings and a hugely popular film quiz alongside the stacked full line-up, and rest assured there will be plenty to explore this July.

Get your Cinema Rediscovered Early Bird Festival Pass now!

From Cinema Rediscovered 2023 Film Critics’ Workshop, The Sapphic Gaze wlw by Amy Jensen is a video essay commission in response to the 7th edition of the festival.

Watch here on YouTube

Amy Jensen is a recent Film & TV graduate from the West Midlands. She developed a strong interest in video essays during her studies at the University of Reading and is now currently working at a vintage art deco cinema in The Cotswolds. Amy aspires to pursue a career in film production in the future.
 
“After attending the festival and reflecting on the theme of 'Other Ways of Seeing,' I found myself captivated by the concept of 'gazes' in cinema, particularly after watching
the exclusive interview with Laura Mulvey. Exploring the portrayal of sapphic relationships on screen has been a truly enlightening experience, and I hope this serves as a valuable introduction to LGBTQ+ cinema for some, inspiring them to discover lesser-known
queer films that deserve far more recognition.” Amy Jensen

From Cinema Rediscovered 2023 Film Critics’ Workshop, The Lonely Underground by Cameron Mumford is a video essay commission in response to the 7th edition of the festival.

Watch here on Vimeo

Cameron Mumford recently completed their MLitt in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. They have a particular interest in queerness and the horror genre, having written their MLitt dissertation on queerness in modern horror and how that subverts and plays with many of Robin Wood’s ideas about the horror genre and its relationship to those that society represses. They also adapted many of the dissertation’s central ideas into a video essay, putting Séance and Bit into conversation.

"With this video essay I wanted to juxtapose footage from Variety, Kamikaze Hearts, and Midnight Cowboy against more romanticised depictions of American Cities (New York, San Fransisco, Seattle) from the same period. Through this juxtaposition, I wanted to emphasise how, through aesthetics and sound, these more grounded films present a very lonely and isolated version of these cities, and encourage "another way of seeing"." Cameron Mumford
 
Watch: https://vimeo.com/875133762?share=copy

From Cinema Rediscovered 2023 Film Critics’ Workshop, Challenging the Canon by Niall Glynn is a video essay commission in response to the 7th edition of the festival.

Challenging the Canon by Niall Glynn

Watch here on YouTube

Niall Glynn is a digital film restoration artist working in Cardiff. He is a student of film in Ireland and the UK and has worked in various positions in film production, post-production and within film analysis and criticism.

"After finally seeing Jeanne Dielman at Cinema Rediscovered I was blown away, so there was no other choice for me as far as subject matter went. As a film restoration worker and a student of the history of the medium I wanted to explore how a film's reputation changes over time, especially for a winner as comparatively esoteric as Dielman. I hope for those who haven't seen the film in question that this video essay will inspire them to give it a try, hopefully adding some context that may help viewers to understand the intention of the director." Niall Glynn

From Cinema Rediscovered 2023 Film Critics’ Workshop, It takes time to build castles by Steph Francis-Shanahan is a video essay commission in response to the 7th edition of the festival.

Steph Francis-Shanahan is a writer, filmmaker and musician from London. Her practice focuses on the presence of catharsis within the acts of making and thinking. She is interested in the intersection between visual, audio and language as a vessel to explore emotion. She is a self-publisher and creates a wide range of her own artist books and zines which are sold within independent bookshops and book fairs in the U.K. She completed an MA from Central Saint Martins in 2020 and is a current member of the School of The Damned. Her interests also encompass working class representation within the arts and how the myriad of this culture has been depicted on screen. The intersections of the arts and how to build links between different works are of great importance to her and she finds a lot of enjoyment in bringing new audiences to pieces they may feel are not for them.

“‘It takes time to build castles’ is a collage film, which uses a selection of the Cinema Rediscovered 2023 programme to investigate and evoke the emotional experience of being trapped in domestic spaces. This can be from familial oppression seen in The Virgin Suicides, (1999), abusive romantic relationships in Millenium Mambo (2001), or the effects and monotony of seeking financial stability in Drylongso (1998), Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Jeanne Dielman (1975). The film aims to replicate the malaise and relentlessness of this sensation and the longing for home to be where the heart really is. The collage style speeds up and slows down footage as time becomes dizzying and the score uses clips from the films and original music I have made whilst watching the edits. The piece ends with a photograph from my own past to remember it is possible to take time and build castles.” Steph Francis-Shanahan
 
Watch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-6uL6PWpms

From Cinema Rediscovered 2023 Film Critics’ Workshop, half reflection: Windows and Mirrors on Film by Jacob Rose is a video essay commission in response to the 7th edition of the festival.

Jacob Rose is a current Film and English student at the University of Bristol. Jacob began understanding art through theatrical performance, before moving to other fields. In 2018, he made a fairly bad song about an Artificial Intelligence who enjoyed eating religious icons of the world. Since then, they’ve been producing better projects, working with the BFI Film Academy, The Company Ltd., and other creatives to create short films, archive-based narratives, documentaries, and video essays. Strung between fiction and non-fiction, truth and performance, he has chosen not to specialise within the worlds of film (at least not until it is brought upon him by outside forces).
 
“Life has to break through art, windows have to reflect. It's a car crash that we don't intend, that can hurt us, but that we must hit anyway. When watching my video, even if you take away nothing else, I hope you see your silhouette in your screen, at least once.” Jacob Rose
 
Watch:

https://youtu.be/rLE_Sy8pVgQ

From Cinema Rediscovered 2023 Film Critics’ Workshop, Listening to Variety by Theo Rollason is a video essay commission in response to the 7th edition of the festival.

Listening To Variety by Theo Rollason. <a href=" vimeo.com/875640865 ">Watch here on Vimeo.

Theo Rollason is a freelance film critic based in London. They are particularly interested in writing about capitalism, gender and queerness, found footage, sci-fi, and the materiality of film. They recently completed an MA in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths. When they're not writing, Theo works as an archivist for the estate of Paula Rego, where their current project involves preserving and digitising the artist’s film and photo archives. 
 
"My initial interest in Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983) was the involvement of the experimental writer Kathy Acker. Watching the film at Cinema Rediscovered, I was fascinated by the ways in which Gordon, rather than merely drawing on her talents as a writer, imports Acker’s confrontational performance style into Variety’s narrative itself, through the three erotic monologues that punctuate the film. My video essay examines the role spoken language plays in Variety’s subversion of traditionally male spaces, looking to the origins of these monologues in Acker’s writing broadly and Gordon’s 1981 short Anybody’s Woman specifically." Theo Rollason 

From Cinema Rediscovered 2023 Film Critics’ Workshop, “there are other ways of seeing (on GOD... i brought you in and i'll take you back out bbz)” by cecile emeke is a video essay commission in response to the 7th edition of the festival.

Watch here on Vimeo.

“'there are other ways of seeing' uses experimental film collage to explore the 2023 touring programme of cinema rediscovered as a cinematic visual field in the mathematical sense, that is a particular set of elements, or as Laura Mulvey would call it, a heterotopia, or perhaps as Arike Oke has suggested, as a topographical map, in order to reverse search them for the 'unsolvable polynomial equation' that birthed them in the first place. That is to say, the map is not looked at as an aide to our exploration, but the map itself, in its very form, is examined to allow it to reveal to us, not necessarily the destination or possible new pathways, but why we left home and all we know, and stepped into the unknown, in the first place.” Cecile Emeke 

Cecile Emeke is a director, writer and artist from London, with a body of work that spans broadcast television, independent film and visual arts. Cecile’s work often explores time, cosmology and cultural production, through the prism of the Black diasporic experience, within liminal and intimate spaces. Cecile has directed and written for broadcasters such as HBO, BBC and Sky, as well as receiving film and moving image commissions from Tate Modern and ICA amongst others and is particularly well known for her globally acclaimed documentary series ’Strolling’, which recorded conversations with people across the Black diaspora, as well as ‘Ackee & Saltfish’, a comedy short film turned web-series about the everyday happenings of two friends. 

Website / Instagram / Twitter 

From Cinema Rediscovered 2023 Film Critics’ Workshop, Bushman (Reassembled) by Kwame Phillips is a video essay commission in response to the 7th edition of the festival.

Watch here on Vimeo

“My video essay is on Bushman (1971), leaning into its experimentation in the liminal space between documentary and cinéma verité. This was done by remixing, recutting and reassembling its dialogue and footage to create a piece that accentuates the film’s discussion of othering and belonging. With the film still being resonant more than 50 years after its release, I tried to channel the poetic and ironic character of the film to speak to today’s ‘strangers in strange lands'” Kwame Phillips 

Kwame Phillips is Senior Lecturer in Media Practices at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, specialising in sensory media production, visual anthropology and audio culture. Phillips’ work uses multimodal and experimental methodologies, often grounded in remix and repurposing, to focus on resilience, race, and social justice. He is author of the chapter “Dub, ecstasy and collective memory in Lovers Rock” (and the accompanying visual mixtape Lovers Rock Dub) in ReFocus: The Films of Steve McQueen (Edinburgh University Press 2023). He is also co-creator (with Dr. Debra Vidali) of the multi-sensorial sound art work, “Kabusha Radio Remix: Your Questions Answered by Pioneering Zambian Talk Show Host David Yumba (1923-1990).”

He is part of the Visual Scholarship Initiative.

Website / Visual Scholarship Initiative / Instagram

We are very excited to share this interview with film theorist and filmmaker Laura Mulvey! This conversation was recorded for our 7th edition of Cinema Rediscovered: Other Ways of Seeing, and first screened at the festivals opening event in July 2023.

Cinema Rediscovered's festival theme was Inspired by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, seizing the top spot in Sight and Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time poll this year.

Following this thread, the curatorial team visited professor Laura Mulvey to look at the current context of film culture to ask the question “How do films become relevant in an era of social media ubiquity and streaming?”

In the interview, Mulvey discusses impact of Dielman topping the poll has had, what the history of her coming to this wider recognition tells us about the process of construction of cultural value of older films.

Laura Mulvey is a professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. This interview was hosted by Watershed’s Curatorial team Mark Cosgrove & Steph Read, filmed by Adam Laity in June 2023.

Film critic and curator Fedor Tot examines the censorship link between the Soviet dramas of Ukrainian filmmaker Kira Muratova and films produced by the Hollywood blacklistees, playing at venues across the UK & Ireland as part of the Cinema Rediscovered touring strand – Look Who's Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist. This piece was originally published in the Cinema Rediscovered 2023 Tour 'pamphlet/book/thing', edited by Tara Judah.

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Almost no establishing shots. Scenes that begin in the middle of a conversation, or sometimes after they’ve finished. A character toying with something irrelevant to the narrative action. Past and present tenses mushed into the ether. Lines repeated, jump-cutting, as if rehearsing for a final take that never arrives. A complete reluctance to adhere to standard shot/reverse-shot film grammar. 

Kira Muratova’s first two films – Brief Encounters (1967) and The Long Farewell (1971) – remain landmarks of Soviet cinema. They take simple, arguably even ‘small’ stories and extrapolate from them details that reveal a whole world of thought in the Soviet era. Brief Encounters is about two women, Valentina (played by Muratova herself) and Nadya (Nina Ruslanova), both in love with Maksim (Vladimir Vysotskiy), a geologist with a penchant for singing and roving around (a strong shout for the most free-spirited geologist ever depicted onscreen). The Long Farewell tells of Yevgeniya (Zinaida Sharko), mother to teenager Sasha (Oleg Vladimirsky), drifting further apart as he grows up. Love triangles, parent-child relationships, and coming-of-agers. Basic building blocks of dramatic cinema turned inside out by Muratova’s radical aesthetic choices. 

Both films showcase a stubbornly individualistic voice, one who grasped the brief liberalisation of Soviet censorship in the Khrushchev Thaw with both hands and produced work that kicked and scratched at the conservative social mores that dominated the USSR at the time: Nadya, Valentina, and Yevgeniya are all solo-fliers. Under a different gaze, and from a slightly different angle, they would become flattened archetypes; Valentina, a city bureaucrat tasked with managing the construction of social housing could easily become a power-tripping apparatchik scold (not that she isn’t capable of being that); the beautiful maid Nadya who entangles herself with Valentina’s husband would ordinarily become an object of desire; Yevgeniya is an overbearing, occasionally immature and viciously smart mother, but the stock character wouldn’t develop beyond the word ‘overbearing’. For what it’s worth, Maksim never emerges beyond a roving romantic figure, with Muratova's Valentina even admitting he is little more than a phantasmagorical object of desire in a scene together. 

But even though it’s her female protagonists that are the centre of attention, Muratova was notably resistant to being labelled a ‘feminist’ director, particularly when her contact with the West grew after the fall of the Soviet Union. At a seminar in feminist theory, she reportedly wanted to compliment the students by saying “You know, I think that, if I hadn’t found my métier in art, I too might have become a feminist.” [1] Her cinema exists beyond the simple, representational confines of identity politics rooted in Western thought; born in what is now Moldova to a Russian father and a Romanian-Jewish mother, she eventually settled in Odesa in Ukraine, continuing to make films in the Russian language (even in an independent Ukraine), a defiantly multi-cultural, multi-faceted filmmaker to the core, resisting simplistic box-ticking. 

Even though her work is focused on women’s stories, it refrains from reductive readings of gender politics in the Soviet Union. Her films aren’t interested in life as a woman in the USSR, but rather the puppet strings of ideology that exist beyond that representational fact. These puppet strings fall out from her free-structured editing and seemingly chaotic style; these may be ‘simple’ stories on the surface, but her resistance to cookie-cutter film language illuminates the power structures that are her targets - the network of patriarchal, hierarchical, top-down dynamics that underpinned the Soviet system. 

Nadya’s desires in Brief Encounters become refracted through scenes in which her place in time seems immaterial, placing her simultaneously both in the present and in her past, powered by the desire to leave the village, arriving in the city, and the desire to return back to the village (shifts to modernity and return to tradition defined by the state’s ideological drives). Valentina is introduced wondering whether or not to wash the dishes, before sitting down to write a dreary work speech, domesticity and her dull, stressful work life animated by the all-too-brief visits from Maksim (who seems to enjoy his work even as he does very little of it). Lust and boredom form the crux of Valentina’s emotional life, both crafted by the wider ideological forces at play: the boredom generated by the context of a Soviet society motivated by building mass infrastructure projects, the lust by the freedom Maksim seems to enjoy, having carved out a niche within the system where he can play by his own rules. And Yevgeniya is frustrated partly by the growing chasm between her and her son, but also by the dawning realisation she can’t control him like one does an infant, the top-down goals of the state unworkable in human form, where they lead to arguments, rifts and disdain. 

That constant push-pull between the thunderous force of ideology and the resistance of the protagonists, however small, is precisely what makes Muratova’s work so thrilling. 

That, perhaps, is also what made her work such a concern in the eyes of the authorities, her work criticised for being “mannered” and “bourgeois”, according to Jane Taubman in her biography of Muratova. You can’t really tell the story of Muratova’s work without telling the story of censorship, her most famous film The Asthenic Syndrome (1989) earning itself the honour of being the only film banned during Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika era. Muratova’s work, still underseen in the UK and the wider Western world, is often introduced with the caveat that she found it difficult to get films made and then they were often censored on release. 

But her films still got made. Though it took her time to make them (she was much more productive in independent Ukraine, though still struggled with financing), when her films were completed, they had seemingly almost no compromises or concessions to contemporary taste. 

In the wake of historical fact, audiences – including critics and programmers – have a tired relationship with censorship. But real censorship is far more pernicious and slow going. The question really is not whether a work is censored or not, but how that censorship affects the work itself: does it happen in pre-production or filming itself, as an act of self-censorship, or in the editing room via a “helpful note” from funding bodies or a friendly production head. Does it happen before a film even reaches pre-production, a litany of rejections from commissioners sighing “not for us at this time”? Or does the artist wander unfettered through the entire process, only feeling resistance once their work threatens to meet an audience? 

The Hollywood Ten - blacklisted by major film studios for their perceived Communist sympathies, alongside many colleagues later also suspected of the same - remain perhaps the most famous case of direct censorship in the US. The work that the blacklistees completed after the censorship was lifted from the ‘60s onwards partially helped form the New Hollywood era, with Waldo Salt contributing to the screenplay for Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Serpico (1973), whilst Ring Lardner Jr. wrote the screenplay for M*A*S*H (1970). But in spite of their anarchy and rawness, these films often seem to refrain from considering ideological power struggles. The draftees of M*A*S*H, for example, are there simply because they’re told to be, their relationship to military command abstract and invisible except for their extreme hatred of it. Even Serpico, a film which confronts head-on the corruption within the NYPD still, essentially, takes its hero protagonist, played by Al Pacino, at face value, the lone ‘good cop’ in a sea of swirling shit. That the film revolves around Serpico’s inability to affect meaningful change within the police chimes with a Watergate-era paranoia, but the context of the police force’s corruption seems absent: they’re corrupt because they are and because they can. 

These films have been easily accessible to viewers since their release, continually playing on TV, often in circulation on DVD, Blu-ray, usually available to stream somewhere. As brilliant as they are, I often wonder if their central messaging makes it easier for audiences to be receptive: they are ‘downer’ films, but they don’t push against the central ideologies that animate the USA. Uptight (1968), by another returning blacklistee Jules Dassin, does. It transplants John Ford’s 1935 film The Informer from the Irish War of Independence to a majority Black Cleveland, Michigan, in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. It centres on Tank (Julian Mayfield), an alcoholic would-be revolutionary who is unable to join his crew on a heist, eventually caving and selling out his friend for a cash reward. The guilt wrecks him, but Dassin and co-writers Mayfield and actress Ruby Dee (who also plays Tank’s estranged lover, Laurie) are as interested in the wider contours of Black revolutionary politics as they are in Tank’s personal narrative arc. 

Though much was shot on location in Cleveland, the look of the film is often expressionistic and stylised, the city closing in on Tank as we delve deeper into his psyche. As we head towards the conclusion, Tank travels away from the populated urban centre to a largely vacant industrial landscape, emptying out his head as his connections to friends and colleagues are severed. Dassin’s scene construction and blocking may be classical in form, but he utilises it to radical ends, drawing out the power dynamics between Black radicals and activists, white allies, traitors, and onlookers. It reckons fully with the moral implications of Tank’s choices and that of the Black revolutionaries that surround him, alongside the violent, racialised ideological politics that surround their actions. 

That a film willing to take Black revolutionary politics seriously and coherently was funded by major studio Paramount, ensconced as they are within a racist and capitalist structure, comes as a surprise, though less surprising were attempts by the FBI to encourage informers amongst those working on the set, nor is it surprising that Paramount threatened to take the film out of Dassin’s hands during editing, for which he fled to Paris to finish the film. Contemporary reviews from the time by Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert [2] describe enthusiastic audience reactions, particularly from Black audiences, but Paramount barely marketed the film, according to J. Hoberman [3], and ended up double-billing it alongside Otto Preminger’s acid-inflected Skidoo (1968). In contrast, Midnight Cowboy and M*A*S*H were greeted with commercial and critical success: multiple Oscars for the former, a long-running, hugely popular TV show for the latter. Both films retain their place in the ‘canon’ of New Hollywood by ease of access to cinephiles. By dint of its release history, Uptight didn’t have the same opportunity afforded the others to climb into the ‘canon’, and its critical reclamation is still ongoing. Is this forgetting an act of censorship in and of itself? A way for market forces to pressure a film out of existence? It’s a far subtler and nastier form of censorship: it co-opts its creators into the market system before dumping it into the sidelines. Does art without an audience exist? 

Film’s status as an industrial artform, one which requires a collaborative infrastructure to exist, opens it up to far greater methods of control and collaboration than say, novels or paintings, which are often a predominantly solo affair. Picking through this control - be it in the production of a film, the finished artwork itself, or in the distribution models which allow it access to an audience - reveals a compromised relationship with power and authority. Commercial/state control and artistic choice are forever at odds with each other, but in the final artwork it’s often tricky to delineate the exact lines of pressure or give-and-take. This makes it all the more energising when radical art is produced, forcing us to consider the means by which it is made, as Uptight, Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell do. 

[1] Žigelytė, Lina, Kira Muratova’s Queer Bloc: Situations, Generations, Nations,
Another Gaze, 12 March, 2022 www.anothergaze.com/kira-muratovas-queer-bloc-situations-generations-nations/ 

[2] Ebert, Roger, Up Tight, RogerEbert.com, 19 February 1969 www.rogerebert.com/reviews/up- tight-1969/ 

[3] Hoberman, J., Uptight, TabletMag, 22 February 2021, www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts- letters/articles/hoberman-uptight-jules-dassin 

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Look out for screenings at a cinema near you as part of Cinema Rediscovered on Tour.

Image: The Long Farewell, Janus Films

Writer Ian Wang dives deep into the thematic links of Variety, Kamikaze Hearts and Salvation! from the Cinema Rediscovered Down & Dirty: American D.I.Y. Restored strand, currently touring to venues across the UK. This piece was originally published in the Cinema Rediscovered 2023 Tour 'pamphlet/book/thing', edited by Tara Judah. Illustration by Amber Phillips.

Discomfort and desire by Ian Wang 

In Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983), seeing isn’t necessarily believing. In the first few images we see – set in a swimming pool – our vision is broken into fragments, distorted by the rippling water, shot in such extreme close-up that the bodies beneath the surface become garbled and unrecognisable. In the next scene, we see the characters Nan (Nan Goldin) and Christine (Sandy McLeod) getting dressed in a changing room; the right half of the frame almost entirely occupied by a mirror. We can see Christine’s image, crisp and unobstructed, yet when she begins to walk towards the camera, she disappears, and instead we see her enter from stage left, her back to the audience. Christine was off-screen the whole time; what we have been seeing is her reflection, not the “real” thing. 

We see much of the rest of the film the same way, through mirrors, frames, windows, screens – not least of all the window to the box office booth where Christine sells tickets to a pornographic movie theatre in Times Square. This booth is the film’s visual nexus. Most obviously, it is how customers see Christine. “They think that I'm some sort of attraction,” she says. We think we know this story: she is blonde, conventionally attractive, the subject of several unwanted advances, an archetype of all-American submissive femininity. But Bette Gordon flips this script. The next line Christine says is: “But mostly, I think they're sort of embarrassed that I'm there.” Unlike the idealised, fetishised image of the female body in porn, Christine has the power to look back. 

To say Variety is a film about seeing is redundant when almost every film relies upon the scopophilic powerplay between the looker and the looked-at, between audience and object. But where most directors take seeing for granted, seeking to render that imbalance of power invisible even as they take satisfaction from it, Gordon confronts it. No scene in Variety unfolds without the gaze of her camera, and by extension her audience, being questioned. 

*** 

Pornography, for all its promises of male domination and sexual fantasy, should represent the natural climax of the power of seeing, the final possession of the (female) image by the (male) spectator. Yet such extreme – perhaps anxious – expressions of control seem to betray their own impotence. In Linda Williams’ seminal study of pornography, Hard Core, she described pornography’s pursuit of the “frenzy of the visible”: that is, evidence of female pleasure so wildly out-of-control that it cannot be feigned, thereby assuaging male anxieties around the fake orgasm. But this pursuit is impossible. Not only is another person’s sexual pleasure unknowable to oneself, but a pornographic actress’s pleasure is literally performed, in the sense that she is a professional being paid to act out a scene she likely had no part in constructing. 

In Juliet Bashore’s Kamikaze Hearts (1986), Sharon Mitchell, a then real-life pornographic actress playing a fictionalised version of herself, says that she is always playing a character when having sex on screen. “I really am an actress,” she declares. “I can’t have sex as Sharon Mitchell. I have to have sex as Carmen, or fucking Tallulah, or somebody else.” But performance permeates all aspects of Mitchell’s life. “I’m off-screen right now,” she says, “and I’m a character.” Another speaker describes her as a “perfect fantasy”, a one-night stand without the morning after. As we see more of Mitchell’s story, however, a cavalcade of hedonism and menace through California’s porn underground, it seems less that “Sharon Mitchell” is a performance so much as it is a reflection of an industry built on invention and trickery. When faced with seedy producers who lie about what they’re offering or try to charm you into doing more than you’re comfortable with, why not make your own dissembling persona and have a little fun instead? 

*** 

Bashore and Gordon made their films amidst the feminist sex wars of the 1980s, which saw fierce debate about how to respond to the spread of pornography and its frequently misogynistic, violent content. Anti-porn feminists called for legislation to treat porn as a violation of women’s civil rights; anti-censorship feminists countered that such ordinances might have an adverse impact on queer people, sex workers, and other marginalised groups. Porn is sexist, these feminists argued, but its sexism is not a unique aberrance so much as an extension of a patriarchal system which pervades all parts of popular culture – including cinema. 

These films serve as a stark demonstration of this thesis. In an interview with Another Gaze, Gordon stated, “My film takes the leap of equating traditional mainstream cinema with pornography. Both employ the voyeuristic mode to exploit women as object of male fantasy and desire.” As Linda Williams points out, Gordon’s chosen genre, the thriller, with its emphasis on somatic response – sweaty palms, a quickened pulse – relies on a similar toolkit of tension and release to pornography. Bashore’s film, similarly, draws unsettling parallels between pornography and documentary, both media which promise an objective reality which belies the cultural and authorial forces which shape them, both media which have a tendency to exploit vulnerable subjects. When Bashore submitted the film to festivals, she found it was often shoehorned into the documentary section, despite her being explicit that it was a narrative film. Audiences and film professionals alike, it seems, struggle to recognise the possibility that sex on screen might be less than real. 

*** 

Pornography’s unnerving resemblance to other forms of media – Linda Williams argues that the porn feature’s sexual “numbers” are closest in form to the movie musical – even extends to its seeming polar opposite. In Beth B’s Salvation! (1987), the televangelist Reverend Randall delivers searing monologues about the moral decline of America. But when the camera switches off, he watches slides of pornographic images projected onto his living room wall. When a young woman arrives at his house after her car breaks down, he accuses her of trying to draw him into sin, before violently assaulting her. 

Salvation! was released around the same time that Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, two of America’s most famous televangelists, were embroiled in sexual misconduct scandals that tarnished (but didn’t end) their careers. What Beth B’s film understands is that what seems like the utmost contradiction in character is no contradiction at all. Televangelism – with its emphasis on spectacular crescendos of passion, ecstatic union with the sublime, and dominant, paternalistic male figures – is its own kind of pornography. Its claim to morality is little more than a claim to power over others. Like tabloid journalists, televangelists can’t help but betray a latent, lurid fascination with the very spectres of sin and sex they claim to oppose. Pornographers and televangelists are both technicians of lust: the former feed it, the latter suppress it, but in each case it is the same muscle of desire and power contracting and relaxing in turn. 

*** 

Later on in Variety, Christine becomes increasingly fascinated with Louie (Richard Davidson), a wealthy customer of the porn theatre. She follows him to a restaurant, to the Fulton Fish Market, to the Flamingo Motel, even on a train all the way to Asbury Park, New Jersey. If Variety is, as Gordon has suggested, a reversal of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), then Louie might be said to be its femme fatale. Christine’s obsession leads her to discover a furtive relationship between Louie’s business and the mafia operation which has been intimidating fish sellers at the market. The film ends when Christine calls Louie, telling him what she has discovered and arranging a clandestine meeting. 

If you’ve seen Variety, you might be wondering – why Louie? For a figure of mystery, he isn’t very mysterious at all. His organised crime operation is conspicuous enough that it is already under investigation by Christine’s boyfriend, a journalist. He doesn’t have much in the way of charisma – he introduces himself to Christine by buying her a Coke from a vending machine. He may be rich, but he still stoops to go to a cheap Times Square porn theatre where, by Christine’s own admission, “Most of the guys that come in are lonely, down-and-out types.” He’s certainly no Kim Novak. 

So why all the fuss? One answer might be that the man isn’t so important at all. What matters is Christine. It is she who pursues him, she who enters into masculine spaces – the fish market, the porn theatre’s projection room – without regard, she who alienates her milksop boyfriend with deadpan recitations of pornographic scenarios. Adjacent to the voyeuristic technology of pornography, but not beholden to it, Christine adopts an oppositional, confrontational existence. Variety is not a reversal of Vertigo so much as a breakdown of the very framework upon which that film was built. As Gordon said, “My character is not being made over by a man: she remakes herself.” 

*** 

The final shot of Variety is of an empty street, the location of Christine and Louie’s meeting. Yet the shot cuts before we see either of them appear: tension but no release. This ambiguous ending caused controversy at Cannes, where Gordon recounted a French journalist complained to her: “There’s nothing to see.” Yet this withholding of the satisfying climax that film audiences have come to expect is perhaps the ultimate expression of Gordon’s critique of the cinematic apparatus of desire, in mainstream film and pornography alike. 

This sense of destabilising incompleteness is perhaps the closest formal similarity between these three films. Salvation!, which maintains a scuzzy, satirical tone throughout, ends abruptly with a faux-Christian hair metal music video fronted by Exene Cervenka of the punk band X. There is no satisfying conclusion to the morass of hypocrisy and abuse within the world of televangelism, it seems to suggest: only farce. The topsy-turvy indulgence of Kamikaze Hearts, likewise, fizzles out into discomfort and unease. Bashore told Screen Slate that she wanted, “[F]or straight men to go see this film with the expectation that they were going to see the cum shot and then instead get delivered this other kind of thing that they weren't prepared for.” Fittingly, then, in the film’s downbeat final scene, its wayward protagonists drink, smoke, and lament being stuck in the business. “What’s the fucking matter with human beings?” one of them says. 

The brilliance of these three films is not simply that they leave you wanting more, but that they leave you questioning why you want more in the first place – to better resemble hegemonic, mainstream film form? To comfort instead of disrupt? If porn is an extension of the visual language of Hollywood, then our desire for a satisfying ending might not be so different to the straight man’s desire for a cum shot. In refusing this desire, these filmmakers perform one last subversive trick, challenging cinema (and its audiences) to go beyond easy answers and simple solutions, and instead to reinvent itself entirely. 

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Look out for screenings at a cinema near you as part of Cinema Rediscovered on Tour.

Guest writer Harriet Taylor from SWITCH offers a fresh take on Juliet Bashore's quasi-documentary Kamikaze Hearts, screening at Cinema Rediscovered 2023 on Thu 27 July and Sun 30 July.

"You never really know what’s real."

There are few films that are as raw, transgressive, and viscerally shocking as Juliet Bashore’s 1986 queer docufiction, Kamikaze Hearts – screening as a part of Cinema Rediscovered 2023 in a recently restored version. Nearly forty years after its initial release, it still packs an almighty wallop.

For audiences new to the film, it’s easy to be swept up in its surface level and classification as a documentary – a no-holds-barred examination of the adult entertainment industry in its 'golden age' and the experiences of its performers. But in truth, Kamikaze Hearts is significantly more layered than meets the eye.

Due to constraints while filming and flighty participants who didn’t wish to be incriminated by the United States’ stringent laws on pornography, Bashore got creative. While the actors and situations in Kamikaze Hearts are real, the set for the porn film-within-a-film is artificial.

This, in part, compounds the voyeuristic qualities of both pornography and documentary filmmaking. Some of the crew – those hired for work on what they believe is a legitimate porn production – have no idea as to its falsity. Bashore is astutely aware of the power this grants her while filming too – an environment where she can manipulate the elements to a certain extent, leading to some volatile onscreen exchanges. The film in some ways prophesies a shallow world of 'reality programming', algorithmic content, and a cultural landscape of self-absorption where the whole, unequivocal truth is near impossible to discern.

The uncertainty around “what it is” likewise speaks to its queer aspects. Ubiquitously pigeonholed as a 'lesbian movie' for decades, Kamikaze Hearts dares not to define itself nor the sexual identities of its stars, Sharon Mitchell and Tigr Mennett, in such explicit terms. Bashore was aware of fluctuating levels of polysexuality and attraction that exist in such communities, and at a time when a properly defined queer vocabulary was still basically non-existent, a certain rebelliousness against potentially inaccurate labels being put on her film feels astonishingly inclusive. Still, some aspects of the film show their age, such as a casual usage of the word “transsexual". This is wholly unsurprising for the time period, especially in the contexts of adult performers, but such terminology grates from a modern perspective.

Ultimately, Kamikaze Hearts is an experience that few filmgoers have had the means to engage with properly. Its initial limited release meant the film was not properly accessible for some time. This, too, was compounded by its niche subject matter. Till very recently, bootleg discs and torrent sites were possibly the film’s only distribution routes, and a small but devoted community of cinephiles the only thing keeping interest in the film alive. It is therefore very exciting, and fitting, that Kamikaze Hearts will get not one, but two screenings at the festival for ‘Other Ways of Seeing.’

Andy Willis (Professor of Film Studies at the University of Salford and Senior Visiting Curator at HOME in Manchester), curator of the Look Who's Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist strand at this year's Cinema Rediscovered festival, dives into the thinking behind the strand and the political context of this era of Hollywood filmmaking.

Much has been written about the renaissance in Hollywood cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s, an era which saw films tackling tougher subjects and challenging older, conservative views. The fact that this has often been portrayed as a moment when new voices, particularly those of a younger generation of creatives, got their chance in the mainstream has meant that the contribution of a previous group of Hollywood practitioners – those blacklisted in the 1940s and 1950s – has been overlooked. The Look Who’s Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist strand at this year’s Cinema Rediscovered offers audiences the opportunity to revisit the involvement of some of those blacklistees to the new Hollywood cinema of the late 60s and 70s through a series of screenings of well-known and not so familiar titles.   

The Hollywood blacklist was an attempt to counter a perceived communist influence in Tinsel Town's output. It began in the years after the end of World War II when some of the USA’s former allies, particularly the Soviet Union, now became enemies. As early as 1946 the film industry trade paper The Hollywood Reporter began to publish articles that suggested communist sympathisers were working in Hollywood and, crucially, that something should be done about it. 

Following these accusations, in 1947 The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began to investigate the supposed presence of communists in Hollywood. Whilst some figures on the political right, such as Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan, were happy to testify and denounce those they saw as communist supporters, nineteen of those called to testify before HUAC were labelled as hostile. Eleven of those appeared before the committee and refused to co-operate fully, with ten charged with contempt of congress, whilst the other – dramatist Bertolt Brecht – spoke to the committee and then promptly left America for Europe. Those who remained subsequently became known as ‘The Hollywood 10’.  

In November 1947 a number of major studio heads, including Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn and Albert Warner, released what became known as the ‘Waldorf Statement’. This denounced the Hollywood 10 and stated that they would not knowingly hire a communist at their studios. This led to the instigation of a blacklist which had a real and significant impact on the careers of a range of Hollywood practitioners. 

By 1950 The Hollywood 10 had been sentenced to a year in prison for contempt and the pamphlet, Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, had named another 151 actors, writers, musicians, broadcast journalists and technicians suspected of being communist sympathisers. This led to many being called before HUAC, and the blacklisting of those who refused to collaborate. Those who did co-operate offered the names of others suspected of communist sympathies. Often mere hearsay, this led to many being blacklisted due to association rather than hard evidence.

As the 1950s progressed many of those blacklisted, including writers and composers, were forced to work under pseudonyms or fronts, often for much less renumeration than they were able to demand in their Hollywood heydays. However, in the case of directors and actors, for whom this route was more difficult given their presence on set, the blacklist led to either exile or inactivity, with many not being able to work in America again until the 1960s.  

This aspect of the blacklist led to a number of quite ridiculous events. For example in 1957, The Brave One, scripted by Dalton Trumbo (one of the Hollywood 10), won the Best Screenplay Oscar for a fictitious Robert Rich. In the same year, two other blacklisted writers, Carl Forman and Michael Wilson, wrote the script for The Bridge on the River Kwai only for the author of the original novel it was based on, Pierre Boulle (who was rumoured not to speak a word of English), to be given the on-screen writing credit. To make matters more farcical, in 1958 the film was awarded the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. It would not be until 1985 that Forman and Wilson would be awarded posthumous Oscars for their The Bridge on the River Kwai script.  

1960 is widely seen as the year the blacklist began to break down, with Dalton Trumbo being given on-screen credits for his work on the screenplays of both Spartacus, which was released in the USA in October 1960, and Exodus, which was released in December. However, many of those who had endured the blacklist would not return to making films in American until much later in that decade. In fact, the 1960s would see the return to the mainstream of a number of film professionals who had been blacklisted in the late 1940s and 1950s. This is perhaps unsurprising when one considers that during the late 1960s and early 1970s America was experiencing significant social and political upheaval. Inspired by the fight for civil rights and the growing anti-war movement, as well as other campaigns for social justice, these filmmakers discovered their leftist and progressive politics had the potential to once again connect with audiences. As a result, they found fresh collaborators in the youthful and radical voices within the new American cinema of the period.     

This series of screenings invites you to re-think the contribution of the Hollywood blacklistees to American cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s. Far from being the spent creative force as they are often represented, these films show that formerly blacklisted directors (Jules Dassin (Uptight), John Berry (Claudine), Abraham Polonsky (Tell Them Willie Boy is Here)), actors (Lee Grant (Shampoo)) and screenwriters (Ring Lardner Jnr (M*A*S*H), Waldo Salt (Midnight Cowboy and Serpico)) made a vital contribution to the reinvigoration of cinema in one of Hollywood’s most creative eras.  

After its launch at Cinema Rediscovered from Thu 27 – Sun 20 July, Look Who’s Back: the Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist tours to venues across the UK with the support of BFI, awarding funds from National Lottery. 

From guest writer Sean Wilson comes this exploration of some of the soundtrack highlights & musical motifs from this year's Cinema Rediscovered programme.

It’s no secret that in the mid to late 1960s, traditional Hollywood norms were in trouble (analogous with today, perhaps?). On an aesthetic level, this was evident in the soundtrack shift from lavish non-diegetic orchestral scores to pop and rock needle drops designed to draw in a younger audience, a trend that continues to this day. The notion of pop music as a narrative device is very much on display in the seventh annual Cinema Rediscovered festival.

Amidst the bevy of 4K restorations, discussions and rediscovery of long-lost gems, a linking theme is the importance of music in sculpting our audio-visual experience. On Wednesday July 26th, the festival opens with a 4K restoration of Sofia Coppola’s cult teen drama Virgin Suicides, introduced by critic Hannah Strong. The clarity wrought by the 4K re-release throws into sharper focus the ethereal nuances of the score from French music duo AIR. In line with the ‘60s principle, the group’s currency with its target audience is used to bypass the intellect and go straight for the heart, conjured a propulsive yet haunting musical account of an eerie modern tragedy.

On July 29th, audiences will be treated to a restoration of cult favourite Hal Ashby’s 1975 drama Shampoo. Set on the day of the US Presidential election in 1968, Shampoo ‘operates as both a sharp critique of the excesses of America in the late 1960s and a commentary on the duplicity of society in the mid-1970s’. To that end, the music tracks in a who’s who of influential artists designed to reflect the movie’s historical context while also conjuring a sense of emotional immediacy. This includes The Beatles, The Beach Boys and Jimi Hendrix – emblems of the epochal era that Shampoo recreates with such fidelity and nuance.

Also not to be missed is the screening of Robert Altman’s classic 1970 Vietnam War satire M.A.S.H. (also July 29th), which imports renowned jazz artist Johnny Mandel to graft blackly comic, tempo-shifting craziness onto one of the darkest periods in modern American history.

On the same day that Shampoo and M.A.S.H. are screening, there’s also the 4K restoration of the 1974 comedy-drama Claudine to be enjoyed, showing as part of the festival strand ‘Look Who’s Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist’. The movie stars Oscar nominee Diahann Carroll as ‘a black working-class mother struggling to make ends meet’, her character ‘offering an antidote to the testosterone driven star-turns of the blaxploitation cycle’. The Claudine soundtrack enlists several of the most reputable soul and Motown artists to have ever topped the charts, including Curtis Mayfield and Gladys Knight and the Pips.

A further celebration of artists of colour comes in the expanded screening of the Oscar-winning documentary Summer of Soul (also July 29th), held in the Galleries car park in Broadmead. Questlove’s account of New York’s ‘Black Woodstock’ festival, held in 1969, gathers a dizzying and exhilarating array of authentic concert footage showcasing some of the greatest musical artists ever to walk the stage. This ranges from Stevie Wonder to Nina Simone, Mavis Staples to The Chambers Brothers. The screening is followed by a funk and soul afterparty showcasing homegrown Bristol DJs and musicians.

On July 30th, audiences will be treated to the dreamy eclecticism of the score for Lynne Ramsay’s haunting Morvern Callar, starring Samantha Morton. This intuitive account of a dangerously impulsive Scottish supermarket worker is built around a tapestry of artists ranging from The Velvet Underground to Aphex Twin and Nancy Sinatra, a suitably unpredictable mix that ably reflects the eponymous Callar’s mercurial mindset.

That said, showcases of landmark original scores are hardly thin on the ground. John Barry’s famously lilting harmonica theme for Midnight Cowboy takes pride of place during the classic movie’s screening on July 29th. Barry’s capacity for melancholic and piercing melody is put to excellent use in John Schlesinger’s provocative and controversial account of shifting moral standards, the score grafting palpable sadness onto the film’s depiction of urban alienation.

On the same day, noted jazz trumpeter and film composer Terence Blanchard, a regular collaborator with director Spike Lee, invests the underrated Samuel L. Jackson Deep South drama Eve’s Bayou with pathos and geographical specificity. Rounding things off on July 30th, British composer Oliver Coates’ elegiac and wrenching cello melody for Aftersun promises to wash over the audience like a tide, suggesting the ebb and flow of memory that drives Charlotte Wells’ remarkable feature film debut.

All in all, Cinema Rediscovered 2023 acts as a microcosm of what music can do to both support and elevate the artistry of cinema, inherent in a range of movies famous, infamous and little-seen.

Discover the full programme and book your tickets here.

Check out the brand new trailer for Cinema Rediscovered 2023, created by our friends at Silk Factory

The festival returns this year for its 7th edition, showcasing classic & cult films, new restorations and rediscoveries back on the big screen, at Watershed and other venues across Bristol between Wed 26 July - Sun 30 July, before launching a tour of highlights to venues across the UK.

It kicks off with the UK premiere of the new 4K restoration of Sofia Coppola’s hauntingly beautiful debut, The Virgin Suicides, and closes with David Schickele’s politically astute Bushman, direct from its screening at this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato. It's a packed five days in between, including screenings of Bette Gordon’s subversive Variety, Hou Hsiao-Sien’s seductive Millennium Mambo, Seijun Suzuki’s brutally absurdist Branded to Kill and stone-cold classic Serpico. 

There’s plenty of film-on-film at the festival too, with premieres of three new 35mm archive prints struck by the BFI – Morvern Collar, Wanda and Portrait of Jason – as well as a focus on 16mm for the centenary, with a screening of Meshes of the Afternoon and Michael Snow’s Wavelength.

Take a look at the full festival programme and book your tickets here!