Welcome to Close-Up!
Showing This Week
Fri 24 July, 8.15pm: La Chimera
With her customarily bewitching mixture of earthiness and magical realism, Alice Rohrwacher conjures a marvellous entertainment set in a rural Italy eternally caught between the ancient and the modern. Featuring gorgeous rough-hewn textures from the great cinematographer Hélène Louvart, La Chimera is a dreamlike descent into a majestically tattered world right beneath our own.
Sat 25 July, 5.45pm: The Marriage of Maria Braun
The best known of Fassbinder's trilogy of historical films about the Federal Republic's "economic miracle" of the 1950s and one of the major productions of the New German Cinema, The Marriage of Maria Braun is equally a melodrama of the highest order.
Sat 25 July, 8pm: Sound of Falling
Cascading through time, Mascha Schilinski’s orchestrates echoes of past experience into transcendent poetic cinema. Surfacing evocative, gilded imagery from the shadows of femininity, Sound of Falling confirms the tremendous talents of its ambitious writer-director.
Sun 26 July, 3.30pm: Histoire(s) du Cinéma
Jean-Luc Godard's video series Histoire(s) du Cinéma, consists of eight episodes made over a period of ten years and is an extraordinary look at the medium through the eyes of this unique filmmaker. Hugely ambitious in scope, the series covers a wide range of topics from the birth of cinema to Italian neo-realism to Hollywood and beyond.
Mon 27 July, 4pm: Belle de Jour
Though the most popular of Buñuel’s films from his late French period, Belle de Jour may also be one of the most radical. A pristine psycho-cinematic puzzle – imparting to the viewers as much or as little profundity as they are willing to entertain.
Mon 27 July, 6pm: Mother Joan of the Angels
One of the landmarks of Polish cinema, this film is based on the documented story of the "possession" of a group of nuns that led to the burning of a priest at the stake in Loudun, France in 1634. Mother Joan of the Angels is a spare, visually rigorous, and profoundly disturbing exploration of faith, repression, fanaticism, and Eros.
Mon 27 July, 8.15pm: Close-Up
This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event – the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf – as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.
Tue 28 July, 8.15pm: La Chimera
With her customarily bewitching mixture of earthiness and magical realism, Alice Rohrwacher conjures a marvellous entertainment set in a rural Italy eternally caught between the ancient and the modern. Featuring gorgeous rough-hewn textures from the great cinematographer Hélène Louvart, La Chimera is a dreamlike descent into a majestically tattered world right beneath our own.
Wed 29 July, 8.15pm: I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone
Kuala Lumpur replaces Taipei as Tsai’s metropolis of choice, but the return to his country of birth certainly doesn’t yield any fondness or nostalgia. As ever, Tsai makes breathtaking use of space, juxtaposing the cramped and tangled interiors of apartment buildings with the cavernous gorges of multi-story construction sites.
Fri 31 July, 6pm: The Liberated Film Club: Marc Isaacs
The Liberated Film Club concludes its yearlong season marking Close-Up's anniversary with two events on July 31: the first programmed by Marc Isaacs, the latter by Mica Levi.
Fri 31 July, 8pm: The Liberated Film Club: Mica Levi
The Liberated Film Club concludes its yearlong season marking Close-Up's anniversary with two events on July 31: the first programmed by Marc Isaacs, the latter by Mica Levi.
Sun 1 August, 6.15pm: Minnie and Moskowitz
Cassavetes attempts something heroic: a romantic comedy that actually shows us the essence of real romance, rather than selling us an aspirational fantasy of Hollywood’s version of love. The story couldn’t be simpler. It’s about two mismatched, flawed, complicated, neurotic weirdos who discover each other.
Sun 1 August, 8.30pm: Zabriskie Point
A notorious financial disaster for MGM that received brutally negative reviews and momentarily set Antonioni in the FBI's crosshairs, Zabriskie Point plays with the existential depths despite its reflective surface, its horror and beauty climaxes in the film's stunning psychedelic ending – a cathartic summary of the United States with all of its conveniences and contradictions.
Sun 2 August, 4pm: The Mother and the Whore
After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and the upheavals of May 1968 came the near religiously revered magnum opus by Jean Eustache. Through daringly sustained long takes and confessional dialogue, Eustache captures a generation navigating the disillusionment of the 1970s, and in the process achieves an intimacy so deep it cuts.
Sun 2 August, 8pm: 3 Women
This dreamlike masterpiece from Robert Altman careens from the humorous to the chilling to the surreal, resulting in one of the most unusual and compelling films of the 1970s.
Calendar
Sat 25 Jul 5:45pm
The Marriage of Maria Braun
The Marriage of Maria Braun
Sat 25 Jul 8:00pm
Sound of Falling
Sound of Falling
Sun 26 Jul 3:30pm
Histoire(s) du Cinéma
Histoire(s) du Cinéma
Mon 27 Jul 4:00pm
Belle de Jour
Belle de Jour
Mon 27 Jul 6:00pm
Mother Joan of the Angels
Mother Joan of the Angels
Mon 27 Jul 8:15pm
Close-Up
Close-Up
Tue 28 Jul 8:15pm
La Chimera
La Chimera
