Early Jerzy… Identification Marks (1965) and Hands Up! (1967), BFI Blu-ray out now

The main thing is to be able to give something from oneself. Sometimes, conditions are hard. One has to risk it. That’s the main thing.

 

Władysław Gomułka was First Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party and leader of Poland from 1956 to 1970. Initially popular for his reforms during what became known as the Polish "thaw", he drifted towards more authoritarian rule in the 1960s supporting religious persecution of both the Catholic Church and the Jewish religion. As the economy struggled, he picked on these internal enemies and, in ways familiar from the 1920s to now, tried to distract through culture war. Many jews left Poland and he also clamped down on freedom of expression which inevitably brought the "new wave" of Polish creators into conflict.

Jerzy Skolimowski was one of those who ran headlong into Gomułka’s range with his film, Hands Up! (Rece do gory), originally filmed in 1967 and which failed to meet the censor’s requirements. In his recent interview at the BFI he discussed how he was sent his passport by the authorities as the clearest hint of what he should do after submitting a story heavily criticising his country’s decadent elite, smart British cars for favours, and daring the make a joke of Stalin, his protagonists hoisting a poster which gave the former Soviet leader four eyes. Say it ain’t so, Joe…

Hands up!

Over a decade later, Gomułka gone and a second Polish thaw underway with the anti-communist movement Solidarity (Solidarność), (which had over nine million members by the time martial law temporarily cut short this new dawn) Skolimowski was able to return to his home and complete the film adding a free-running twenty minute portion that explains the film’s context as well as adding footage of Beirut where he was playing a part in a German production, Circle of Deceit.

I left my friends in Poland. In their small studios through their paintings, they could express themselves to a greater extent than I could in my films.

The director compares his filmmaking against the bravery of his artist friends who stayed behind and contested the regime through their art and he focuses on some of these canvases. Then we switch to London and a private viewing of Skolimowski’s paintings attended by some famous friends including Jane Asher (in Skolimowski’s Deep End), Alan Bates (in Skolimowski’s The Shout) playing the artist, and David Essex who turns to camera and makes a comment about a painting of a woman in distress, “A Victim...”, with a twinkle that may be intended by Jerzy to berate him for his decisions and authenticity.

As ever, the director lets us join the dots and this is an introduction full of brooding menace, including the harrowing, modern operatic music from Krzysztof Penderecki and droning synthesisers from Józef Skrzek that sets our collective teeth on edge as the director walks through the real and imaginary warzone. We’re back in Warsaw 1967 and the mirror cracks to reveal Skolimowski, head wrapped in bandages, reading out a diatribe about officialdom to an audience in evening wear, raising their hands and dancing along to some excellent swaggering jazz from Krzysztof Komeda, the theme of which is repeated by one of the characters. We need a soundrack album!

The focus shifts to five friends, taking part in this strange reunion, ten years after they graduated from medical school; an unhappily married couple Alfa (Joanna Szczerbic, married to the director at this time) and Romeo (Adam Hanuszkiewicz), Opel Record (Tadeusz Lomnicki) and Wartburg (Bogumil Kobiela).  Skolimowski plays Andrzej Leszczyc, aka Zastawa; they all call each other by the cars they drive as a comment on materialism but the main targets here are the values of Polish society in general and its government in particular.

The results as Michael Brooke says in his video essay in the extras, are part psycho-drama and part sixties happening, an existential happening at that with Wartburg being targeted for some betrayal and covered in plaster of Paris as the five escape in a carriage of a freight train, deciding on how to punish him and taking chunks out of each other as friends in their disappointed early thirties may do. It has much in common with Beckett and the theatre of the absurd and the Czech Tom Stoppard, who dipped into that movement, is the same age as Jerzy, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern dying in 1966.

Dialogue-driven with some flashbacks it’s an intense watch and deliberately provides more questions than answers. A pivotal memory for all is their shared experience with setting up the Stalin poster, which ends up with four eyes, all the better to see you with? Is this an allegory for their failure to be good communists or actuality? On screen, as in life it was just too much for Poland at the time.

Skolimowski was only 26 when his first film was released and had already been a poet and a moderately successful boxer before co-scripting Andrzej Wajda's Innocent Sorcerers (1960). He enrolled in the Łódź Film School and famously planned out Identification Marks as a compilation of his student projects; for a man whose work seems so instinctive, he’s clearly very well organised. As Brooke says, Jerzy’s film language appears to come out of his poetry – it’s even quoted at the start of the film – not to mention his “jazz” sensibilities. There’s a huge difference between improvisation and “jamming” and Jerzy always controls the line even as each turn feels freshly come to mind.

This was the first film of four featuring Andrzej Leszczyc, Skolimowski’s on screen cypher, and here as in the other films in which he features, he’s searching for direction whilst kicking against expectations. Any resemblance to a Belmondo-esque rebel without a cause is probably coincidental - Skolimowski later claimed not to have seen Truffaut and Godard at this point - but this was certainly a new kind of anti-hero in Polish cinema and not for nothing was the director seen as a one-man Polish new wave, evidence of parallel evolution all certainly based on the same foundations.

Jerzy Skolimowski and Elżbieta Czyżewska in the mirror

Leszczyc is more awkward than aggressive though and the film follows the student from dawn to dusk as he begins a day that will define his life for the next two years. Leszczyc has spent four years studying Ichthyology, a branch of zoology devoted to the study of fish but has now decided to join the army leaving the underwater world behind and everything else. The film starts with the strike of a match and the gloomy hallway of Leszczyc’s apartment block as he sets off through the stragglers of the previous night’s revels. The film is full of natural visual elan with the director being as unafraid of using the dark as the light, just as Miles Davis used the spaces between notes... He walks past workmen and a brazier and his shadow is thrown in huge relief against the wall, it feels expressionistic, and certainly Orson would have approved.

The day passes in a jumble, there is no strict clockwatching from Jerzy, just a sequence of scenarios that leave the audience to their own conclusions. Leszczyc is seen with his classmates and then bewildering a military selection board who expect him to be just another intellectual draft-dodger when he tells them he wants the army to give him some direction. The head of the board tries to pull rank in terms of righteous experience but he’s wasting his time, the subject of his disapproval regrets not the waste of state resource on his education, he’s only looking to impress himself.

Street shadows and morning light

This sentiment may also be an issue with Leszczyc’s partner, played by Elżbieta Czyżewska, his actual partner during the filming the only other performer next to him who would be available over the film’s long gestation In their tiny flat, the couple argue and there’s a familiarity that has definitely led to contempt, part of the reason our hero wants to escape. Czyżewska also plays Barbara, a woman he meets later in the day and who represents a romantic future that might tear him away from his military duties… there’s always another path to follow. And that’s the point, Leszczyc talks the talk but identification marks are indeed not there, as the quote at the top shows, interviewed by a television reporter on the street he gives him exactly what he wants, he’d like to pilot a spaceship or a truck and visit unknown cities to find something new… he’s not yet formed, waiting for experience to define him but before that he needs to address the here and now. This film shows the start of that process just as it moves him further away.

Composed with just 29 long shots, the film indicated the fluid cinema to come and a style still in evidence with Essential Killing and EO, long takes, minimal dialogue and a poetic visual sense, evoking a response from our pattern recognition as we hurl ourselves forward too trying to find the meaning smuggled within.

Both films are presented for the first time on UK Blu-ray and come with the usual set of quality special features:

Jerzy in London 1981... always on the move

·         Newly recorded audio commentaries on both films by critic and scholar Michał Oleszczyk (2023)

·         The Boxing Ichthyologist (2023, 32 mins): writer Michael Brooke introduces us to the early Polish films of Jerzy Skolimowski in this newly commissioned video essay.

·         Archive interview with Jerzy Skolimowski (1983, audio only, 43 mins): the director discusses his early work in an interview recorded at the BFI’s National Film Theatre

·         Stills galleries.

·         First pressing include a superb, illustrated booklet with new essays by Ewa Mazierska and David Thompson; 10 films that left their mark on Skolimowski; credits and notes on the special features.

 

You can order the set direct from the BFI and it’s the perfect introduction to the broader work and motivations of one of the most interesting film makers of the era. As Michael Brooke says, let’s hope the EO is not the last we hear from Jerzy for he’s still on the hunt for different ways of expression and still attempting to satisfactorily express his restless vision with words, pictures and actions not to mention the spaces unfilled amidst the empty silence.

Pattern recognition... 

The shock of the old… BFI Film on Film Festival, 8th – 11th June 2023

I must have been 14, fibbing about my age and sneaking with my mates into the Astra Cinema in Maghull, opened in 1930 as the Albany and where The Beatles had played back in 1962, to watch Jaws not once but twice as we hid in our seats for the second showing. Projected, as everything else at the time, on 35mm, the film was a vividly shocking experience with moments of horror I can still remember experiencing for the first time… I even dreamt about the film that night after.

Is it just age that changes our experience of cinema or is there something in the actual technology? I was taken immediately back to the Astra by the snippet shown at the launch of the BFI Film on Film Festival in the NFT 1 today, the same heat hazed expression of fear on Roy Scheider’s face as he scans the water line after the beach has been re-opened; imperfect, not crystal clear but sun-drenched, his anxiety and obscured vision is perfectly captured by the original materials: this is new light shone through chemicals originally affected by the actual light of the scene, not a perfected copy buried under microns of digital artifice. It’s not just the Gen-X and Boomers that treasure the analogue experiences but a whole new age of youngsters fascinated by the distinctiveness of technology abandoned and almost extinct. It’s like vinyl, an analogue experience with media that shows its age and is all the better for it.

We were shown a new short film made by Mark Jenkin, A Dog Called Discord (2022), which explained his fascination with film and not just the creation of narrative but also the process of development and projection, the entire mechanics. He is often handed old Super 8 and home movie footage and used one of these reels – best before 1960 – as an example of the content that can surprise; it’s a bout capturing moments and, restoring memories and feelings, a proper emotional gem that has to be seen to be understood. On celluloid of course.

Everyone in the room had their own connection to the material of film not least Robin Baker, Head Curator of the BFI National Archive who took us through an overview of the new festival’s aims and content. Whilst accepting digital strengths, there are also weaknesses, or at least differences… “A print can feel more… unpredictable. Like us it will change over time, its ‘imperfections’ helping to convey the life it has lived…” There are even films that play with the mutability of celluloid such as Charlie Shackleton’s The Afterlight (2021) which exists as only a single 35mm print which will be getting it’s 50^th spin around on 10^th June in the festival. Then there’s Morgan Fisher’s Screening Room (1968/73) 16mm’s and shot in NFT2 and, under the director’s instruction, only to be screened there and nowhere else.

The BFI is one of only 50-odd cinemas in the UK which is still set up to screen film and it’s not so much the technology as the expertise of projectionists. Then as BFI’s Head of Technical Services, Dominic Simmons, explained, it’s about the only one built specifically to screen the notoriously flammable nitrate film with a projection booth built in the early fifties with steel walls sandwiching asbestos to prevent the spread of fire. The projectors used for nitrate also have built in fire suppression with gas released to extinguish any fire, we will, almost certainly, be perfectly safe.

That said, who wouldn’t be willing to take some level of risk in order to see Rita Hayworth in 35mm in Rouben Mamoulian’s Blood and Sand (1941), Sidney Poitier in Joseph L. Mankiewicz No Way Out (1950) and Benita Hulme and Lesley Howard in Alexander Korda’s Service for Ladies (1932). These films are going to dazzle and take our breath away on 11^th June. Perhaps the greatest impact will come from Joan Crawford and the 35mm nitrate screening of Mildred Pierce (1945) on 8^th… I already have ticket anxiety having, to my knowledge never seen nitrate projected, I’m not that old! 

Joan Crawford: explosive?

On the silent front there will be the most welcome return of Miles Mander’s The First Born (1928) featuring my Grandad Bill’s favourite, Madeleine Carroll in one of this country’s finest films of the period. There will also be Stephen Horne to accompany with his music being so memorably associated with the film’s restoration screenings ten years ago. There are also two comedies directed by Manning Haynes from WW Jacobs’s wonderful short stories: Sam’s Boy (1922) and The Boatswain’s Mate (1924). Both could only have been made in this country and will have accompaniment from Neil Brand, one of the UK’s leading special effects.

Talking of such things, there’ll also be time to turn off, relax and float downstream with 3D spectacles to revisit the early fifties craze: the great outdoors with John Wayne in Hondo (1953), Grace Kelly almost within touching distance in Dial M for Murder (1954) and the blood-curdling dislocation of House of Wax (1953). See this film as it was meant to be seen along with dozens of Telekinema shorts commissioned as part of the Festival of Britain from when the Southbank complex was born.

There’s a hugely diverse offering over the festival’s four days with every possible screen in the former National Film Theatre being used to cram in every last drop of celluloid. Personally, I’ll be looking to catch Jon Pertwee in Doctor Who: Spearhead from Space, a new print of Dorothy Arsener’s Working Girls (1931) and Sight and Image: The Visual Documentary, dialogue-free films with newly commissioned live musical score. There's also the chance to tune in and turn on to Experimenta Mixtape 16mm Happening with live music by The Begotten... until the early hours on 10th June.

The First Born (1928)

For the real hardcore Gothamite, there’s a 70mm all-night treat at the BFI IMAX, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy… the teen who lied about his age to watch Jaws would have had his mind blown by this one.

Whatever the cut of your cape, you’ll find something to love in this feast of around 200,000 feet of film: 39 features, 69 shorts and 8 television works, screening from 38 16mm prints, 58 35mm prints, four 70mm prints and 16 Super 8 prints.

Checkout the full programme online now and prepare for booking which starts in the first week of May.

Experimenta Mixtape 16mm Happening with live music by The Begotten...

There's more than one way to time travel, Jon...

The music of chance... Strolling Players (1925), with Cyrus Gabrysch, Kennington Bioscope

 

Sex and silent film, it’s full of objectification and attitudes that today we frown upon and yet… here we find four men sizing up young Lya de Putti, whose heads transform into pig’s as they imagine our heroine with no clothes on. OK, those clothes do seem to disappear but I think Karl Grune was making a point, wasn’t he? To put this even further in context, Felix Salten, the writer of the film later went on to write Bambi; so, make of that what you will.

The sexist pig-heads was one of a number of striking visual set pieces that illustrate Grune’s story of a star being born, a tale as old as time indeed, as young actress meets successful player, Axel Swinborne (Eugen Klopfet), and we all know the rest… or do we, for this film ends in a way that, whilst I obviously can’t reveal, does leave the audience surprised.

We were watching the BFI’s 35mm print of Strolling Players (Komödianten or Comedians, certainly more Max Wall than Jimmy Tarbuck!) and this is, possibly, the only celluloid copy left in the World, yet another reminder of the rarities on view at the Kennington Bioscope and the vital role played by our national film archive. Why travel a thousand miles when you can see these treats in Lambeth? Blessed are the hobbyists, the collectors, the projectors, the historians and the programmers!

The story spins on coincidence – we are all after all merely players on the stage and there’s more than one reference to Shakespeare – starting with the arrival of a group of strolling players at makeshift theatre/public house in the village of Gotten. They’re performing Faust and it’s fair to say that the locals aren’t giving the cast the respect they might possibly deserve despite the presence of a looming Fritz Rasp looking almost cherubic in blonde curls and a striking leading lady (Lya De Putti), listed just as “The Sentimental”.

The director of the troupe (Viktor Schwanneke) knows this rejection well and as he’s always done and no doubt always will do, rouses his weary gang for a morale-boosting meal.

Miles away in the big city, we see Swinborne’s latest triumph and his determination to take a holiday on the completion of this run. He duly heads off on a train only, and what does this say about the safety of German trains at this point, to catch the train door handle on his waistcoat and fall out at high speed. Rescued by railwaymen, he’s taken to the inn where the players are staying and Lya volunteers to tend to him after he’s unceremoniously dumped on an upstairs bed.

The next morning the great actor is remarkably unscathed – what a lucky break as he remarks… and going down stairs to find out where he is, catches the players in rehearsal, in the very play he has just starred in, right at the moment for his cue to rush in and find his faithless lover and then shoot her dead. Maybe it’s the new lease of life or just the look on Lya’s face, he offers to join them for the evening’s performance and, unlike the previous evening’s Geothe, tonight is a huge hit and he raises everyone’s game.

His faithful dresser (Hermann Picha) comes to collect him the next day and just as he thanks the director for his generosity, he tells Lya that she could be a successful actress if she lets him guide her career. She’s persuaded and heads of to, of course, guaranteed success.

Lya de Putti, a World-class slinker!

In the cut and thrust of theatricality there’s always complications and, just as Swinborne comes to love his protégé so do others, including a handsome young prince (Owen Gorin) and no wonder given the stunning fashions on display for the Austro-Hungarian aristocrat de Puti. She has to choose between her loyalty to Swinborne and her primal attraction to the younger man… it’s a tough call and this emotional maze confounds our expectations in a denouement that dodges and dives in every effort to avoid the predictable.

Lya’s magnetic presence does much to elevate the film, she may be posh but she’s got a look that connects in a very earthy way and as she was to show in Variety and many more, she knows how to play the camera and to pull the watcher in with earnest, raw expression. She’s part Pola, neo-Nazimova - that hair! - with a hint of a more virtuous Valeska Gert - a Euro-pudding of the most adult-deco proportions. 

Cyrus Gabrysch underpinned this emotional commitment with improvisations that captured the emotional storms and romantic sweep of this tug of love. This was a fiercely committed approach that was buoyed by clusters of muscular chords and lilting lines; I haven’t seen Cyrus play for sometime but he was lost in music and completely plugged in to the action on screen. Stirred and shaken.

 

Ralph Lewis and Norma Talmadge

Going Straight (1916) with Colin Sell

As if this BFI gem wasn’t rare enough, we were also treated to another early Norma Talmadge film, following on from last time’s stunning 16mm copy of A Helpful Sisterhood (1914). As with that film, I’d already seen Going Straight (1916) but never like this 35mm versions, which whilst showing its age, which I like, was full of gorgeous texture and tints showing Norma in fabulous close up as the 21 year-old showed the growing confidence in her craft.

 

Norma featured in hundreds of short films for the Vitagraph Company from 1910 to 1915. Then, having joined Triangle Pictures, she made longer form films of which Going Straight, was one of the first. Directed by Chester M. Franklin and Sidney Franklin the picture clearly shows the guiding influence of DW Griffith who oversaw a lot of the production at Triangle. There are expert intercuts and parallel scenes, close ups reminiscent of Pig Alley and the action is tightly marshalled throughout.

Talmadge is superb, acting naturalistically and given ample close ups to demonstrate her restrained playing which has more in common with Gish and Pickford than some of the more dramatic queens of the era. She plays Grace the wife of successful businessman, John Remington, played by Ralph Lewis. The two live in wedded bliss with their young family in one of those sizable wooden properties we brick-bound Brits envy. However, despite this apparent normality, both Grace and John were once part of a group of professional criminals known as the Higgins gang. Grace finds a clipping about their trial and a flashback explains their violent past.

Eugene menaces

Higgins/Remington’s second in command was Jimmy Briggs, played by the excellent Eugene Pallette, full of violent menace, who, after doing his time spots John, who offers to help him on the straight and narrow. Unwilling to change his greasy spots, Briggs threatens to reveal Grace’s criminal past and John has little option but to join him on one last robbery. He goes to commit the crime with Briggs whilst Grace stays over at a well-healed friend’s house after a card party. As it turns out – in a coincidence not too uncommon at the time – Briggs and John are burgling the same house.

What could possibly go wrong?

It is undeniably melodramatic but Talmadge is believable and understated even in the most fraught moments. She has a number of close ups that allow her to illustrate the emotional shifts in the story and her facial transitions are quite the special effect and as viewed on this wonderful 35mm copy, stunning. She’s another whose looks appear to be almost “out of time” and could have made her successful in any period of screen acting. It’s a face you enjoy reading on many levels and has a fascination and a depth that would grow to place her in the upper echelons by the early Twenties.

Colin Sell’s fingers danced along creating a sprightly symphony to accompany the players’ hard work and as with all good accompaniment the sound and vision blurred into a deliciously satisfying whole – sorry, the new range of home-made catering at the Bioscope naturally encourages such comparisons!

Another special occasion in Kennington, introduced majestically and expertly by Michelle Facey as we have come to expect!

 

 

 

Hybrid horror… Full Circle: The Haunting of Julia (1978), BFI Flipside No. 46, Dual Format (4K Ultra HD & Blu-ray)

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Isaac Newton's third law of motion

 

Richard Loncraine is as responsible as anyone else for the widespread deployment of Newton’s Cradles in offices, having spotted the opportunity to manufacture these kinetic art toys for a UK market deprived of their intellectual ambience. In the late sixties, he was specialising in sculpture and designed a chrome model for the Carnaby Street store Gear which was clearly fab. Studying at Central St Martins, he opted for the film studies course and soon was directing at the BBC with an Alan Wicker documentary followed by work for Tomorrow’s World and he then moved onto fiction and from there to film.

 

His subsequent achievements include his first film, Slade in Flame (1975), an award-winning Richard III (1995) with Ian McKellen and Robert Downey Jnr and his Emmy Award winning work on Band of Brothers. Then we have this film, Full Circle: The Haunting of Julia which sank with little trace at the time of release and which has previously only enjoyed a short afterlife on VHS. Not everyone forgot it though and one man, writer and cinema historian Simon Fitzjohn, has campaigned for Full Circle for many years and has helped put this splendid BFI Flipside release together so that we can all see what should not have been forgotten.

 

What we have is a very interesting film, which is part horror/part psychological thriller, and which illustrates the Newtonian principle above with a story focused on the human reaction to the massive force of tragedy and dark deeds. Loncraine sees flaws but still thinks overall it’s a good end product, praising his cast and crew with the enthusiasm of experience, and confessed that both he and his star, Mia Farrow, both felt they were working on a psychodrama whilst the producers definitely wanted another horror in the vein of The Exorcist and, more specifically, Rosemary’s Baby.

 

This looks to have had an impact on the film’s enticing narrative ambivalence, horrific things do happen but they are never lingered on, the plot gathering an eerie momentum and the camera focused on Mia who excels at the catatonically unsettling, underscoring dialogue and action with an uncanny intensity that bubbles just under the surface to devastating effect. In his interview for this set, Loncraine explains how at one critical moment – as Farrow’s character attempts a tracheotomy to save her choking child – his producer decided to throw fake blood over Farrow’s hands which convinced her that she had hurt the young actress (Sophie Ward no less) – she screamed and ran away for hours. The film doesn’t need such cheap shots, all you need is shown on Mia’s face and features that reflect her mother, Maureen O’Sullivan’s delicate beauty.

 

Mia Farrow plays Julia Lofting, a young mother with a large trust fund, married to city financier Magnus (Keir Dullea) who, as the film opens, are sharing the odd snipe as they prepare for the day with their daughter Kate (Ward). Suddenly Kate starts choking on an apple and the couple fly into a panic quickly reaching the point at which cutting her throat open might be the only way to save her. It’s a very difficult scene to watch, far more horrifying than any supernatural event a graphic depiction of everyday nightmare.

 

Some months later, her daughter dead, we find Julia in hospital recovering from the event but when Magnus arrives, she leaves and, soon makes it clear that she no longer wants him or their marriage which had been failing long before the accident. She impulsively buys a large townhouse in Holland Park, number 3 Holland Park as Simon Fitzjohn informs us in one of the extras, and now worth multiple millions. All of her wealth can’t protect Julia from the guilt and the nagging horror she still feels and she begins to sense things in her new home, a radiator that won’t stay turned off, atmospheres in certain rooms and the feeling of another presence.

 

Out walking she glimpses a girl who looks like Kate only for the vision to disappear, she watches children playing in the park, and sees Kate again only to discover a dismembered pet tortoise… Is this all in Kate’s mind or is this a genuine haunting? Either way her friend Mark (Tom Conti, who was also in Slade in Flame fact fans!) won’t believe it and provides the common-sense rationality and good humour that offsets our expectations. Meanwhile Magnus is determined to bully his wife into submission, an all too real threat to her wellbeing not that she needs anything more than the looming dread of a house she is strangely committed to staying at.

 

Convinced that there’s something otherworldly about the house, Julia brings expert help in the form of Rosa Flood (the excellent Anna Wing) who hosts a séance with the help of some fellow sensitives. Mark jokes and keeps our expectations light until Mrs Flood is suddenly overcome with a malevolent spirit and has to leave in terror. Julia is convinced that the spirit is that of her daughter but revisiting Rosa, she learns it was a young boy she saw being murdered in the park by children during the war.

 

Julia begins to investigate the story and tracks down the story in the British Library and from there finds the dead boy’s mother who reveals the full horror of his death leading her to seek out the last surviving members of the group who were involved in his murder. We’ve come a long way from a story of grief and into a whole other haunting but is any of this real or has Julia just not recovered her sanity?

 

The films manages to saddle both possibilities pretty well… and we’re going to have to figure this one out for ourselves. I can well understand the fascination this continues to exert on Simon and I’m sure there will now be many more after this release.

 

There’s an uncanny score from Colin Towns which was instrumental in persuading Mia Farrow to undertake the project with the exquisite main theme conveying just the air of sad confusion that helps this film transcend any limitations of the “horror” genre. Mr Towns is well-travelled composer and musician who I once saw playing keyboards with his pal Ian Gillan in 1982, they played Child in Time which is close yet so far away from the mood he sets in this film. There’s a lot of lovely piano lines as well as synthesised moments that could only be from this era yet are always used to good effect. Not surprisingly he now has some 139 composing credits on IMDB and counting.

 

The special features as particularly fine on this release:

 

4K (2160p) UHD Blu-ray presentation in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible) or High-Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation

Audio commentary by director Richard Loncraine and film historian Simon Fitzjohn 

A Holland Park Haunting (2023, 24 mins): director Richard Loncraine reflects upon his artistic career and the making of Full Circle 

Park Life (2023, 16 mins): Simon Fitzjohn revisits the film’s London locations. 

What’s That Noise? (2023, 25 mins): soundtrack composer Colin Towns on one of his earliest film works. 

Coming Full Circle (2023, 11 mins): Tom Conti recalls his time on the film. 

The Fear of Growing Up (2023, 10 mins): Samantha Gates looks back on the production.

Joining the Circle (2023, 7 mins): producer Hugh Harlow recalls making the film

A Haunting Retrospective (2023, 25 mins): film critic Kim Newman revisits Full Circle

Images of a Haunting (2023, 13 mins): Full Circle aficionado Simon Fitzjohn talks us through his extensive collection of memorabilia. 

Rare stills and transparencies from the BFI National Archive’s collections 

First pressing only - illustrated booklet with a new Director’s Statement, an essay by film historian Simon Fitzjohn, a biography of Richard Loncraine by Dr Josephine Bottting, credits and notes on the special features

 

 

Full Circle is available on BFI 4K UHD and Blu-ray dual format, as well as iTunes and Amazon Prime from 24 April 2023, you can and should order the physical product direct from the BFI online shop.

 

It’s another lovely release from the BFI Flipside series, collect the set and be assured of happiness but not without some emotional after effects.

EO (2022), BFI Blu-ray/DVD out now.

This film is made out of emotion… it’s our song of love for nature…

Idea for a new streaming service: Jerzy Skolimowski being “interviewed” and talking about his films, his collaborators and his art, no ads, just 24/7 humility, intelligence and integrity, self-depreciating humour, pauses for thought as he translates from his English to The English aided by partner, co-producer and co-writer Ewa Piaskowska. Trust me, it’ll be compelling and, how you kids say, immersive.

This smashing new release features one such post screening interview from New York in which Jerzy, as he was at the BFI last month, in erudite and eloquent form, leaving his interviewer standing with lengthy freeform extemporisations you’d expect from a former jazz drummer, despite the urgings of Ewa to keep his answers short. He can’t help it; he has such a powerfully holistic view of his work and all of this is punctured by the honesty and charm of the former poet who once tried to steal and destroy his own books.

EO marks the apogee – so far - of his cinematic renaissance and is a stunning work for a man of any age but as the director says, this was the most democratic of creations in which he took a step back and encouraged his collaborators to do what felt the most natural and adventurous to them. But we’ll come to the donkey later…

The lonliness of the long-distance trotter

He marks the contribution of Polish composer Paweł Mykietyn whose beautiful score really opens up the simplicity and beauty of the donkey’s world, not in an anthropomorphic way but in terms of a connection to the feelings all animals must have regardless of sentience. If nothing else, this film asks us to not only unconditionally focus on the predicament of the animal but also our reactions to it and Mykietyn has us in bits.

Michał Dymek’s cinematography is frequently breath-taking, both in terms of patient equine close ups but also in covering the immense sweep of the journey from the confusion of the initial circus to EO’s journey into the lower Alps, mountains and lakes ahead as the truck carrying him snakes it’s way closer, an overhead drone shot on a straight bridge, the donkey in relief traversing a bridge in front of a dam and the waters swirling and then reversing in front of us; non-linear, time running backwards as we, or EO, attempt to make sense of the movement.

Agnieszka Glińska’s editing must also be mentioned, she’s so vital in establishing the action/reaction of the four legs and the two legs, the tone and the pacing of an apparently slow film in which so much happens and not all is resolved… that’s life and we can make our own dénouements…

EO with Sandra Drzymalska

Skolimowski talks of his first proper film, Barrier, being screened in Paris and then listed as the second-best film of the year in Cahiers du Cinéma's top 10 films of 1966. They wanted to interview him and, after he recovered from the shock of this unexpected accolade, he insisted on seeing the film that came first before. It was Robert Bresson's 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar, the beginnings of Donkey core, and which took him from his semi-professional/semi-cynical filmmaker’s poise to tears by the final stunning reel.

Almost 60 years later he chose to make his own film about a donkey partly out of compassion – the film is a reality-checker for all careless carnivores – but also for technical reasons; he wanted to use an animals’ uncomprehending yet all too real responses to drive the narrative and he wanted a new, real character to help present a non-linear narrative. As with his earlier work, Essential Killing (2010) the film is a picaresque fable only more satisfying and successful, with enough human interaction to flavour the relentless journey.

Jerzy may be dissatisfied by some of his dialogue-driven work but he chooses his human performers well especially with Isabelle Huppert in the final human segment, she is always the master of interior expression and barely has need of dialogue herself. It’s tempting to draw a link to Jane Asher in Deep End – I think the director likes the red hair aesthetically but he also admires their silent stillness. Huppert is a Countess commanding a huge estate as well as her troubled stepson, Vito (Lorenzo Zurzolo), a trainee priest, who rescues EO from a lorry load of stolen horses, confessing his meat-eating sins to his new friend.

Isabelle Huppert

The first human interactions are the key though with our hero EO performing in a circus and being loved by his trainer and rider Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska). This is the closest connection the animal has throughout the film and it is perhaps what drives him on to keep moving once he has been “rescued” from the circus by well-meaning animal rights activists who get the animals taken to a sanctuary. EO is visited by Kasandra but after she leaves, he sets off in pursuit and his adventures begin. He is only one donkey and it’s a confusing disjointed world out there.

EO himself is portrayed by six donkeys: Ettore, Hola, Marietta, Mela, Rocco, and Tako but none of them were hurt in the making of this picture. All of them look straight to camera, always in character, never flinching but always some how pleading… may we make the effort to understand them.

 

As usual with the BFI, the special features are indeed special:

Jerzy Skolimowski & Ewa Piaskowska on the making of EO (2022, 27 mins): director Jerzy Skolimowski and co-writer Ewa Piaskowska discuss the making of EO at the New York Film Festival

Skolimowski A to Ż (2023, 53 mins): an alphabetical journey through the work of Jerzy Skolimowski with writer Michael Brooke who also conducted that superb interview with the director at the BFI in March.

High Rise Donkey (1980, 56 mins): in this Children’s Film Foundation adventure, three children who live in a tower block try to save a donkey from small-time crooks.

The Clown and His Donkey (1910, 4 mins): rare silhouette animation by Charles Armstrong depicting a clown doing tricks with his donkey Charles Armstrong depicting a clown doing tricks with his donkey.

UK trailer and assorted teasers

First pressing only illustrated booklet with an essay by Ewa Mazierska, an interview with Jerzy Skolimowski & Ewa Piaskowska by David Thompson and a film review by Christina Newland for Sight and Sound, credits and notes on the special features

Ettore, Hola, Marietta, Mela, Rocco, or Tako

The BFI Southbank season, Outsiders and Exiles: The Films of Jerzy Skolimowski, a BFI Southbank season dedicated to the director, presented in partnership with the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, continues until 29^th April. A selection of films will also be available on BFI Player and EO will be available exclusively to BFI Player subscribers.

Details are on the BFI site… Jerzy Skolimowski is an unique talent who has often had to fight to get his films made but who always seems to deliver something unusual and mood altering just like his viewing of Bresson's film, you will be moved by EO… do not hesitate to purchase!

 

There’s more coming our way too with the BFI releasing two more Skolimowski features: Identification Marks: None (1965) and Hands Up! (1981) – made in 1967 and the film that got him exiled from Poland - will be presented together on a 2-disc Blu-ray on 24 April.

Both are screening at the BFI this month as is EO, see all this on the big screen!