January 2017 at BFI Southbank

BFI Southbank kicks off the New Year with a jam-packed programme guaranteed to fend off the January blues. As previously announced, January will see the start of a two month season dedicated to the titan of American cinema Martin Scorsese, coinciding with the release of the highly-anticipated Silence (2016) which is released on Sunday 1 January, as well as the BFI UK-wide re-release of his gangster masterpiece GoodFellas (1990) on Friday 20 January. Also running concurrently will be the two month Martin Scorsese Curates season; this season will comprise 20 films which have been restored by Scorsese’s non-profit organisation The Film Foundation and have all been personally chosen by Scorsese to screen at BFI Southbank. There will be a season dedicated to the television work of one of the UK’s finest actors Alison Steadman. The season will feature some of her best loved work such as Abigail’s Party (BBC 1977) and Nuts in May (BBC 1976), and will offer an opportunity to hear from Steadman in a special In Conversation event on Thursday 5 January. The TV programme in January will also include a preview of the final episode of the new series of Sherlock which returns to BBC One this Christmas. The preview on Thursday 12 January will be followed by a panel discussion with cast and crew to be confirmed in due course.

The events programme in January includes previews of hotly anticipated new releases which have been gathering awards-buzz at film festivals throughout 2016 including: Barry Jenkins’ exquisite Moonlight (2016) based on the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue; Jeff Nichols’ Loving (2016) which received a well-deserved standing ovation at Cannes in May; Damien Chazelle’s musical follow-up to Whiplash La La Land (2016); and Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea (2016), which boasts incredible performances from Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams and will also screen on extended run from Friday 13 January. Another highlight of the events programme will be a BFI Screen Epiphany event with award-winning author and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go, The Remains of the Day), during which he will introduce a film that inspired him – George Cukor’s charming Holiday (1938) starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.

MARTIN SCORSESE
Running from 1 January – 28 February 2017, BFI Southbank’s Martin Scorsese season will place Scorsese’s films back on the big screen where they deserve to be seen, offering younger audiences the chance to experience many of his films in the cinema for the first time, while allowing others to become reacquainted with his towering body of work. The season coincides with the highly anticipated release of Silence (2016), the Award-Winning filmmaker’s historical epic based on the novel by Shûsaku Endô, in cinemas from Sunday 1 January, and the BFI’s re-release of his gangster masterpiece GoodFellas (1990), back in cinemas from Friday 20 January. The first week of the season will culminate in spectacular fashion on Friday 6 January with a special event, presented by BFI and Southbank Centre, in association with Sony Pictures and Park Circus; TAXI DRIVER IN CONCERT will be the original Bernard Herrmann score performed live with the film by the BBC Concert Orchestra. This event, which is part of Southbank Centre’s Film Scores Live Series anticipates Park Circus’ re-release of Taxi Driver (1976), which will be back in cinemas from Friday 20 February in a 4K restoration.

The season will be themed to help audiences easily explore the rich and diverse programme, with three themes on offer in January: ITALIAN-AMERICAN, A LIFE IN MOVIES and AMERICA, AMERICA. For over 50 years, Martin Scorsese has established himself as the most cinematically eloquent and influential American director of his generation. His profoundly personal oeuvre draws on memories of growing up in Little Italy as well as his own passions and interests; even in his earliest films, Scorsese, a devout cinephile since childhood, has paid tribute to movies he loves. For those wishing to delve deeper into the season there will also be special contextualising talks Ian Christie on Scorsese as Cinema Historian and Philosophical Screens: The Violent and Paranoid World of Scorsese’s GoodFellas, and a ten week evening course exploring Martin Scorsese’s Films and Influences.

ITALIAN-AMERICAN
Scorsese’s exhilarating first feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (1967) concerns a young Italian-American played by Harvey Keitel whose feelings for a ‘nice girl’ he meets clash with the misogynist machismo unthinkingly espoused by his friends. A vivid portrait of life on the Lower East Side, the film was a striking debut, and marked a brave new voice in American cinema. Revisiting and refining the themes of his debut, Mean Streets (1973) is a bracing mix of music, movie references and breathless energy which marked a major step in the director’s development. While Scorsese made many superb films in the 70s, for many, the penetrating portrait of masculine violence and vulnerability Raging Bull (1980), revealed a new maturity and emotional depth. One of the highlights of the programme in January will be the BFI re-release of Scorsese’s classic gangster movie GoodFellas (1990), back in cinemas across the UK from Friday 20 January in a glorious 4K restoration. Performed, shot and edited with terrific expertise, fluency and panache, GoodFellas offers a teeming panorama of the Italian-American underworld, an extended ‘family’ riven by secrets and lies, rivalries and betrayals.

A LIFE IN MOVIES
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) is a bittersweet tale of a recently widowed woman setting out for Monterey with her teenage son, in the hope of reviving her singing career, deftly balancing road-movie tropes with those of the ‘women’s picture’. Scorsese pays tribute to Robert Rossen’s The Hustler with The Color of Money (1986), by casting Paul Newman once again as former pool shark Fast Eddie Felson, while his remake of J Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear (1991) heightens both the sadistic monstrosity of De Niro’s Max Cady and the various failings of his intended victims. Made for the BFI’s Century of Cinema series of documentaries, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies (1995) is a survey of American filmmaking from the silent era to the end of the 60s (just before Scorsese’s own career took flight). It is an exhaustive but always engrossing account of how the movies affected Scorsese both as a cinephile and as a director. The same is true of My Voyage to Italy (2001) in which Scorsese adopts a highly personal approach in looking at the greats of Italian cinema, such as Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti and Fellini, recalling how he first saw their movies in the 40s and 50s.

Based on the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, The Departed (2006) is a star-studded, Oscar®-winning tale of loyalty and betrayal in Boston, while Shutter Island (2010) is an adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel, which repeatedly alludes to noir, horror and suspense movies in order to create a sense of emotional and mental instability, insecurity and unreality. A Letter to Elia (2010) was directed in tandem with long-term colleague and friend Kent Jones; the film pays tribute to an important, if sometimes controversial, figure who profoundly influenced Scorsese’s own attitude to filmmaking, Elia Kazan. This will play alongside The Key to Reserva (2007) a brief homage to the ‘master of suspense’ Alfred Hitchcock. Completing this section of the programme is Hugo (3D) (2011), Scorsese’s first ‘family film’ which is both a lively adventure and an affectionate tribute to the imaginative power of cinema. Set in 30s Paris, it concerns the fateful encounter of an orphaned clockmaker’s son, who lives secretly in the Gare Montparnasse, with a toyshop owner, who just happens to be a certain Georges Méliès.

AMERICA, AMERICA
Kicking off the America, America section of the programme is Boxcar Bertha (1972), a depression-era B-movie which centres on a farm-girl-turned-labour organiser who joins forces with a union leader against corrupt railroad proprietors. Scorsese zoned in on an unhealthy obsession with celebrity and the potential pitfalls of mistaking television (or film) for real life in his brilliantly prescient masterpiece The King of Comedy (1982). This is a darkly witty tale of a nerdish New Yorker, played by Robert De Niro, who is so desperate to get a break on TV as a stand-up comedian that he starts stalking a chat-show host. For Casino (1995) Scorsese worked once again with Nicholas Pileggi, writer of GoodFellas, to create an epic, glossily stylised look at the Mafia’s involvement in Las Vegas in the 70s and 80s. Public Speaking (2010) is a documentary portrait of long blocked essayist and public speaker Fran Lebowitz who, in interview with Scorsese himself, offers her often provocative thoughts on such topics as sexism, racism and elitism. Completing this section of the programme is The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) the corrosive black comedy about the rise and fall of corrupt stockbroker Jordan Belfort, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Alongside the season, events and re-releases, there will also be a BFI Player collection focusing on Scorsese’s documentary work and the great works of cinema that inspired him, DVD releases of WHO’S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR and ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE, and dedicated articles in Sight & Sound, the BFI’s international film magazine.


MARTIN SCORSESE CURATES
Running alongside BFI Southbank’s Martin Scorsese season from 1 January – 28 February 2017 will be Martin Scorsese Curates, a wide-ranging selection of films which have been restored by his non-profit organisation The Film Foundation, and have been personally chosen by Martin Scorsese to screen at BFI Southbank. The programmes underlines The Film Foundation’s mission to restore and preserve films – from all genres – presenting them on the big screen where they belong.

In expressing his admiration for the great filmmakers of yesteryear, Martin Scorsese isn’t alone; he is joined on the board of The Film Foundation by 12 of his fellow directors, each uniquely dedicated to film preservation. As the founder and chair of the Foundation, Scorsese’s commitment to preserving the cinematic past is unparalleled; since 1990 he has worked with rights-holders, sponsors and archives to restore, preserve and make available over 750 films – an extraordinary achievement augmented since 2007 by the World Cinema Project, which focuses on the diversity of global cinema culture.

Films screening in January include Elia Kazan’s epic saga America, America (1963) which was inspired by Kazan’s own family history, the expansive western The Big Country (William Wyler, 1958) starring Gregory Peck as the scion of a shipping dynasty who faces the prospect of marrying into a cattle baron’s household and Drums Along the Mohawk (John Ford, 1939) an adventure story, which, like John Ford’s later signature US Cavalry films, depicts a community bonding in testing circumstances. Long championed by Scorsese, Force of Evil (1948) has been acknowledged by the director as a vivid influence on both Mean Streets and Raging Bull; writer-director Abraham Polonsky turns B-picture crime fare into drama of Shakespearean scale and poetry. Max Ophüls’ exquisite moving camera has gathered many admirers among today’s filmmakers notably Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson. In Caught (1949) Ophüls works his magic in a contemporary setting, as struggling Leonora (Barbara Bel Geddes, future star of Dallas) looks to better herself, only to end up in the clutches of a neurotic millionaire, a role which was allegedly modelled on Howard Hughes.

According to Scorsese, watching Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (Albert Lewin, 1951) is ‘like entering a strange and wonderful dream’; this tall tale of a mysterious siren and an immortal sea captain brought together by destiny boasts lustrous star power in Gardner and Mason and is saturated in Technicolor courtesy of cameraman Jack Cardiff. Cardiff also leant his unique talents to one of Scorsese’s favourite films – Powell and Pressburger’s sublime The Red Shoes (1948). Scorsese himself played a key part in reawakening interest in the Powell and Pressburger partnership, so it’s entirely fitting The Film Foundation should present this vivid restoration of one of their greatest achievements in this season. Another of Scorsese’s favourites is The River (Jean Renoir, 1951), based on the memoir of English author Rumer Goddenir about his colonial childhood in what is now Bangladesh.

The first of Joseph Losey’s five American pictures before he fell foul of the McCarthyite blacklist, The Boy with Green Hair (1948) is an idealistic post-WWII parable that’s among the oddest products of the Hollywood studio era, while The Night of Counting the Years (Chadi Abdel Salam, 1969) is a remarkable Egyptian film set in 1881, which explores the exploitation of national heritage. Another World Cinema Project restoration is Manila in the Claws of Light (1975), a welcome reminder of the late, great Filipino filmmaker and activist Lino Brocka. January’s line-up is completed by a compilation of silent films which have been restored with funding from The Film Foundation. Scorsese’s affection for early cinema illuminated his family fantasy Hugo, and this astute programme – TFF-Funded Restored Silent Films – ranges from the Lumières’ very first moving images to work by DW Griffith, Georges Méliès and Charlie Chaplin.

THE TV WORKS OF ALISON STEADMAN
· THU 5 JAN, 20:30 – SPECIAL EVENT: Alison Steadman in Conversation

During January BFI Southbank will host a season dedicated to exploring the wonderful television career of one of the UK’s finest actors Alison Steadman. A highlight of the season will be an opportunity to hear from Steadman in Alison Steadman in Conversation on Thursday 5 January, during which she will discuss her remarkable career from Abigail’s Party and Life is Sweet to Fat Friends and Gavin and Stacey. Steadman is unique among her peers in having helped create many of the iconic characters that she’s played. Working with directors such as Mike Leigh and Les Blair, who favour allowing their films to develop organically through improvisation, she conjured Beverly in Abigail’s Party (BBC 1977), Candice in Nuts in May (BBC 1976) and the deliciously appalling Jackie in News Hounds (BBC 1990), all of which will screen during the season.

Also screening will be Richard Eyre’s spare and intimate Pasmore (BBC 1980), Girl (BBC 1974), the story of a young army recruit and her secret relationship with her army superior which features one of the first lesbian kisses on UK TV, and the moving and painfully honest Virtuoso (BBC 1989), based on the life of brilliant pianist John Ogdon and his descent into mental illness. Steadman’s immense range and versatility have meant that a number of key writers and directors have created characters with her specifically in mind, aware that she’s equally at home in the high comedy of Gavin and Stacey as she is in the quiet poignancy of Life Is Sweet (Mike Leigh, 1990). Above all, through her ability to connect with audiences she’s acquired a very special place in the nation’s affections.

EVENTS, PREVIEWS AND REGULAR STRANDS
· WED 11 JAN, 20:30 – PREVIEW: La La Land ­(Damian Chazelle, 2016)
· THU 12 JAN, 18:15 – TV PREVIEW: Sherlock Series 4, Episode 3 (BBC 2017) / Onstage: panel TBC
· TUE 17 JAN, 18:20 – BFI FLARE PREVIEW: Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016)
· THU 26 JAN, 20:30 – PREVIEW: Loving (Jeff Nichols, 2016)
· TUE 17 JAN, 20:30 – MEMBER EXCLUSIVE: Kazuo Ishiguro introduces Holiday (George Cukor, 1938) / Onstage: Novelist and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro
· SUN 29 JAN, 14:15 – MEMBER EXCLUSIVE: Louise Jameson introduces Paddington (Paul King, 2014) / Onstage: Actress and writer Louise Jameson
· SAT 7 JAN, 17:55 – LIVE FROM THE NEW YORK METROPOLITAN OPERA: Nabucco
· MON 23 JAN, 18:30 – SPECIAL EVENT: Mark Kermode Live in 3D at the BFI
· SAT 28 JAN, 14:00 – AFRICAN ODYSSEYS: Blacks Britannica (David Koff, 1978) + discussion with Colin Prescod, Chair of the Institute of Race Relations, Kunle Olulode, Director of Voice4Change and more guests TBA
· TUE 10 JAN, 18:10 – WOMAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA: Suffragette (Sarah Gavron, 2015) + Q&A with director Sarah Gavron and casting director Fiona Wier
· VARIOUS DATES – BFI FLARE: High Art (Lisa Cholodenko, 1998), Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980)
· VARIOUS DATES – BFI CULT: The Gate (Tibor Takács, 1987), The Monster Squad (Fred Dekker, 1987)
· TUE 24 JAN, 20:30 – EXPERIMENTA: Bruce Conner Evening – eight classic works, all screening from 16mm prints held by the BFI National Archive
· SUN 22 JAN, 12:00 – FUNDAY PREVIEW: Sing (Garth Jennings, 2016) + a free Funday Workshop in the BFI Foyer before the screening
· SAT 21 JAN, 20:30 – FILM FIGHT: Each month we pick a category and line up two opponents for the audience to choose from. In January, pick the best New Year’s Eve party scene; the cosy family get-together in Woody Allen’s Radio Days (1987) or the romantic reunion in Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally (1989)

NEW RELEASES
· OPENS SUN 1 JAN: Silence (Martin Scorsese, 2016) – part of the Martin Scorsese season
· OPENS SUN 1 JAN: The Eagle Huntress (Otto Bell, 2016)
· OPENS FRI 13 JAN: Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016) – previewed on Tuesday 10 January

RE-RELEASES
· OPENS FRI 20 JAN: GoodFellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990) – part of the Martin Scorsese season

BIG SCREEN CLASSICS: THE TIMELESS FILMS WE URGE YOU TO SEE
Until mid-March our regular Big Screen Classics series will feature films which are all notable for their production design or art direction. Sets, Threads and Sellotape: Design in the Movies will feature films which vary in design, from conspicuously flamboyant and exaggerated to subtle and low key. One of these films in the series will be screened on a daily basis for the special price of £8:
· The Lodger (Alfred Hitchcock, 1926)
· Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (FW Murnau, 1927)
· Pandora’s Box Die Büchse der Pandora (GW Pabst, 1928)
· Piccadilly (EA Dupont, 1929)
· L’Age d’or and Un Chien andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1930 & 1929)
· Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935)
· Carnival in Flanders La Kermesse héroïque (Jacques Feyder, 1935)
· Jezebel (William Wyler, 1938)
· Le Quai des brumes (Marcel Carné, 1938)
· Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)
· The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)
· To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944)