3 – 17 December 2007: Repertory Cinema

Monday 3rd December 9pm
THEOREM (Teorema)
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
1968 | Italy | 94 mins
Venue: Café 1001 | Ticket Price: £3 / £2 members

A handsome, enigmatic stranger arrives at a bourgeois household in Milan and successively seduces the son, the mother, the daughter and the father, as well as the maid. Then, as abruptly and mysteriously as he arrived, he departs. Unable to endure the void left in their lives after his departure, the father hands over his factory to the workers, the son abandons his vocation as a painter, the mother abandons herself to random sexual encounters, and the daughter sinks into catatonia. The maid, however, becomes a saint.

Close-Up reconstructs the true story of a cinephile's attempt to become a filmmaker he admires. Hossein Sabzian introduces himself as celebrated Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and, under the pretext of working on a film project, enters the private life of a well-to-do Teheran family and eventually faces fraud charges. The film blends documentary and drama by featuring the actual people involved and has a final scene that is described by Geoff Andrew as "one of the sharpest, funniest deconstructions of film form ever shot"

Monday 10th December 9pm
THRONE OF BLOOD (Kumonosu Jo)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1957 | Japan | 105 mins
Venue: Café 1001 | Ticket Price: £3/£2 members

Kurosawa's transposition of Shakespeare's Macbeth to sixteenth-century Japan is immensely successful in capturing the spirit of the original. A truly remarkable film combining beauty and terror to produce a mood of haunting power, Throne Of Blood also shows Kurosawa's familiar mastery of atmosphere, action, and the savagery of war. "…possibly the finest Shakespearean adaptation ever committed to the screen." The Guardian

Monday 17th December 9pm
THE SILENCE (Tystnaden)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
1963 | Sweden | 94 mins
Venue: Café 1001 | Ticket Price: £3/£2 members

United since childhood in apparent incest, two sisters struggle and part as the younger seeks her freedom in a heterosexual affair. Bergman's sombre view of modern man's condition – wherein human relations are grotesquely egocentric and perversely sexual – is a truly shattering vision of despair. The third film in Bergman's religious trilogy, The Silence was awarded 'Best Film of the Year' by the Swedish Academy in 1963.