United Kingdom

  • Peter Whitehead – Jeanetta Cochrane (1967)

    1961-1970ExperimentalPeter WhiteheadShort FilmUnited Kingdom

    Quote:
    More consciously experimental than Whitehead’s other works, this film draws on a variety of sources, including sequences of London shot while Whitehead was at the Slade School of Art, glimpses of the singer and model Nico, and footage of the psychedelic underground nightclub UFO. There is also on-screen text, a voice critiquing it, and music from Pink Floyd, at this point still fronted by Syd Barrett–Whitehead’s old painting friend from Cambridge. The track here, “Interstellar Overdrive”, was recorded by Whitehead before the band signed to EMI and is much more exciting and beat-driven than the version they would later record for the label. There is no explicit link between the content of the film and the Cochrane Theatre, which is is named after, but the theatre was used as a venue for the Spontaneous Festival of Underground Films in 1966.Read More »

  • John Badham – Isn’t It Shocking? (1973)

    1971-1980John BadhamMysteryTVUnited Kingdom

    Here’s a spoiler free review from IMDB:

    “There have been a number of excellent films about murder and mayhem occurring in small towns. “They Only Kill Their Masters, “Sherlock Holmes & The Scarlet Claw”, “Winter Kills”, and “Five Card Stud” come to mind, and this 1973 ABC movie-of-the-week has got to be one of the very best ever made.

    An increase in the death rate among the older residents of a small New England community is initially labeled as being due to natural causes. But something about it doesn’t feel right to Daniel Barnes, the local chief of police. Barnes, (excellently played by Alan Alda) refuses to believe the official findings and begins an investigation to prove there’s something rotten going on in his little town.Read More »

  • Peter Whitehead – Wholly Communion (1966)

    1961-1970Amos Vogel: Film as a Subversive ArtDocumentaryExperimentalPeter WhiteheadUnited Kingdom

    Quote:
    On 11 June 1965, the Royal Albert Hall played host to a slew of American and European beat poets for an extraordinary impromptu event – the International Poetry Incarnation – that arguably marked the birth of London’s gestating counterculture. Cast in the role of historian, as a man-on-the-scene, and massively elevating his limited resources, Whitehead constructed the extraordinary Wholly Communion from the unfolding circus. As Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Harry Fainlight, Alexander Trocchi and others took to the stage, Whitehead confidently wandered with his borrowed camera, creating a participatory and anarchic film that is as much a landmark as the event itself, and launched his career.Read More »

  • Ken Loach – Land and Freedom (1995)

    1991-2000DramaKen LoachPoliticsUnited Kingdom

    David is an unemployed communist that comes to Spain in 1937 during the civil war to enroll the republicans and defend the democracy against the fascists. He makes friends between the soldiers.Read More »

  • Henry Edwards – Juggernaut (1936)

    1931-1940Henry EdwardsMysteryUnited Kingdom

    Victor Sartorius (Karloff) is an ailing doctor working in Morocco. He teams up with Lady Yvonne Clifford (Mona Goya) in a plot to poison her husband, Sir Charles Clifford (Morton Selten), so he can collect the 20,000 pounds necessary to save his experiments and his funding. Roger Clifford (Arthur Margetson), the son of Sir Charles has also been marked for death. The only one who can stop the murder plot of Sartorius is Nurse Eve Rowe (Joan Wyndham).Read More »

  • John Akomfrah – The Last Angel of History (1996)

    1991-2000DocumentaryJohn AkomfrahSci-FiUnited Kingdom

    This cinematic essay posits science fiction (with tropes such as alien abduction, estrangement, and genetic engineering) as a metaphor for the Pan-African experience of forced displacement, cultural alienation, and otherness.

    Included are interviews with black cultural figures, from musicians DJ Spooky, Goldie, and Derek May, who discuss the importance of George Clinton to their own music, to George Clinton himself. Astronaut Dr. Bernard A. Harris Jr. describes his experiences as one of the first African-Americans in space, while Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols tells of her campaign for a greater role for African-Americans in NASA. Novelist Ismael Reed and cultural critics Greg Tate and Kodwo Eshun tease out the parallels between black life and science fiction, while Delaney and Butler discuss the motivations behind their choice of the genre to express ideas about the black experience.Read More »

  • Malcolm le Grice – Berlin Horse (1970)

    1961-1970ExperimentalMalcolm le GriceShort FilmUnited Kingdom

    Quote:
    This film (with a soundtrack by Brian Eno) is largely filmed with an exploration of the film medium in certain aspects.

    It is also concerned with making certain conceptions about time in a more illusory way than I have been inclined to explore in many other of my films. It attempts to deal with some of the paradoxes of the relationships of the “real” time which exists when the film was being shot, with the “real” time which exists when the film is being screened, and how this can be modulated by technical manipulation of the images and sequences.Read More »

  • Hugh Burnett – Warsaw Ghetto (1965)

    1961-1970Amos Vogel: Film as a Subversive ArtDocumentaryHugh BurnettUnited KingdomWar

    From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
    This secret Nazi film – unforgettable documentary of a vanquished world – was photographed just before the Ghetto’s total destruction and either never completed or not intended for public release. For once, the Nazis – albeit unintentionally – revealed the truth about an event, though it was a truth distorted by their presence; the only Jews who did not know that they were being photographed were the dead; the others, depending on degree of desperation, indifference, or nearness of death, attempted to smile or otherwise co-operate with the photographer/director (representative of unlimited power over life or death), an obscene spectacle difficult to bear. Read More »

  • Tony Palmer – Wagner (1983)

    1981-1990DramaTony PalmerTVUnited Kingdom

    Quote:
    Wagner is a giant, unwieldy beast. Eight hours devoted to the German composer, from the age of 35 to his death. Its sheer length allows the screen to play house to his politics, his person and his loves all within the frame of his music. Yet is enacts a precarious balance between the epic and the personal, between reverence and irreverence and between high art and high camp. Indeed, at its centre is not Wagner, nor Richard Burton who portrays the composer, but director Tony Palmer who grapples with the material throughout, sometimes succeeding and sometimes falling flat on his face.Read More »

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