Close Up

3 - 17 December 2007: Essential Cinema II

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Theorem
Pier Paolo Pasolini
1968 | 94 min | Colour | Digital  

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
Abbas Kiarostami
1990 | 94 min | Colour | Digital
+ The Opening Night of Close-Up
Nanni Moretti
1996 | 7 min | Colour | Digital  

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. "One of the sharpest, funniest deconstructions of film form ever shot" – Geoff Andrew 

Throne of Blood
Akira Kurosawa
1957 | 105 min | B/W | Digital  

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.  

The Silence
Ingmar Bergman
1963 | 94 min | B/W | Digital  

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.