Cinema Rediscovered 2023

Cinema Rediscovered will also launch Together with Lorenza Mazzetti, Brighid Lowe’s documentary portrait that incorporates critic Henry K. Miller’s interviews with the Italian artist, which were conducted shortly before she died in 2020. Writing for the BFI, Miller points out that Together, which stars artists Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi as deaf-mute friends in London’s bomb-damaged East End, also features Vali Myers, the bohemian painter and dancer immortalized in Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken’s 1954 book Love on the Left Bank. Her presence in the film, suggests Miller, “connects what has been treated as an instance of kitchen sink realism—or even documentary—to the European avant-garde.”

Film historian Pamela Hutchinson will be in Bristol to take part in two post-screening conversations. On Friday, Hutchinson, filmmaker Carol Morley, and BFI National Archive curator Josephine Botting will discuss Muriel Box’s The Passionate Stranger (1957). Box was one of the few women directors working in the British studio system at the time, and earlier this year, Morley wrote a keen appreciation for the Observer in which she called The Passionate Stranger “an imaginative retort to the romance novel, which boldly experiments with form.”

On Saturday, and with the film collective Invisible Women, Hutchinson will talk about Salomé (1922), which she calls “Alla Nazimova’s queer mistresspiece.” New restorations seeing their UK premieres during the festival include Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire (1953), Kira Muratova’s Brief Encounters (1967) and The Long Farewell (1971), David Schickele’s Bushman (1971), Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (1973), György Fehér’s Twilight (1990), Wayne Wang’s Life Is Cheap . . . But Toilet Paper Is Expensive (1990), Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999), and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo (2001).

With two unique strands, Cinema Rediscovered 2023 will spotlight American cinema. Among the films screening in Look Who’s Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist are Jules Dassin’s Uptight (1968), whose crew members were coerced by the FBI to become informers; Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), starring Robert Redford and directed by Abraham Polonsky, who found himself on the blacklist in 1951; and Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973), written by formerly blacklisted screenwriter Waldo Salt. Starring Al Pacino as a real-life New York cop, Serpico is “a biopic with the structure of a picaresque and the thematic dimensions of a morality play,” writes Christian Lorentzen for Metrograph Journal. Lumet’s film is “a portrait of a world that doesn’t know it’s crumbling, and of the man who enters as the avatar of the world that will replace it, though not just yet, perhaps not even now.”

Down & Dirty: American D.I.Y. Restored is a program of four films: Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso (1998), Beth B’s Salvation! (1987), Juliet Bashore’s Kamikaze Hearts (1986), and Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983). Writing for Sight and Sound, Rachel Pronger traces how Variety “took shape as an inversion of noir, an exploration of female sexuality set in [New York City’s] seediest corners,” and “steeped in No Wave spontaneity. Gordon describes drawing inspiration from Vertigo (1958) and the idea of what might happen if instead of James Stewart stalking Kim Novak, the roles were reversed: woman as ‘Investigator,’ man as ‘Enigma.’”

For more on Cinema Rediscovered 2023, José Arroyo and Richard Layne discuss several of the highlights in the program in the latest episode of their podcast, First Impressions: Thinking Aloud About Film.