ozon favourites
ACMI Cinemas presents Focus on Francois Ozon, featuring the works of the masterful director and four of his personally selected favourites: Ingmar Bergman's Persona, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul (1973), Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959) and Luis Buñuel's Belle De Jour (1967).
Focus on Francois Ozon continues ACMI's tradition of involving the filmmakers themselves in the curatorial processes for their own season.
For Focus on Jim Jarmusch (2005), audiences had the chance to see four director selections (and what great choices they were!): Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai, Monte Helleman's revisionist Western The Shooting, Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à parte (Band of Outsiders), and John Cassavete's Shadows.
Earlier this year we screened George Romero's Martin, Mario Bava's Black Sunday and Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter as part of our Focus on Guillermo del Toro season. In fact these films were only three of an extensive list of favourites the director e-mailed to us from Los Angeles on the eve of the 2007 Academy Awards (you can see del Toro's entire list here).
Ozon's selection Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973) screens alongside his Water Drops on Burning Rocks. It's a gripping domestic melodrama that explores victimization and conformity in post-war Germany. It won two awards at the Cannes Film Festival and is considered to be one of Fassbinder's most powerful works. After a chance meeting on a rainy night, Ella (Brigitte Mira), a non-descript middle aged cleaner starts a relationship with Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a Moroccan, some 20 years her junior. Fassbinder's formidable camera gaze coupled with the magnificently restrained performances creates an intensely moving cinematic experience.
Douglas Sirk's classic tearjerker Imitation of Life (1959) screens alongside Ozon's own 8 Femmes. Lana Turner is a single mother desperate for fame and a life in the theatre. After a chance meeting at the seaside, Lora takes on Annie (Juanita Moore) to care for her child in return for lodgings: a union that spans a decade full of great successes and heartbreaking tragedies. Grand in scope, Imitation of Life offers dark, subversion wrapped up in a Technicolor wonderland with themes of racism, capitalism and unbridled ambition all brought to the fore.
Screening in a double bill with Ozon's Swimming Pool is Ingmar Bergman's Persona. It is a surreal examination of the symbiotic relationship between two women set in a remote summer-house. Alma (Bibi Andersson) is a young, soon-to-be-wed nurse who is employed to care for Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann), a famous actress who has fallen silent. Their relationship deepens when they spend the summer alone and before long Alma descends into a trance, wracked with Elisabeth's thoughts and fears. Considered a major artistic work by film critics and filmmakers, Bergman's classic film within a film plays like a cinematic fever dream.
Ozon's 5 x 2 will screen with brand new imported print of Luis Buñuel's Belle De Jour (1967) starring Catherine Deneuve. The sublimely beautiful Séverine (Catherine Deneuve) is married to a successful doctor, yet emotionally sealed off in matters of physical intimacy. Unmoved by her handsome young husband's solicitude, Séverine opts instead for a little afternoon subjugation in a Parisian brothel. A childhood trauma is intimated in a brief flashback, but the line between remembered events and Séverine's excursions into ever more bizarre erotic fantasy becomes increasingly blurred.
Focus on Francois Ozon screens at ACMI Cinemas Friday 5 October to Sunday 14 October 2007. Find out more here
Published Thursday, 4 October 2007
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