Welcome to Close-Up!
Close-Up makes film culture and history accessible through its film programmes and mediatheque.
Located in the heart of Shoreditch, Close-Up is the ideal venue for all your screening needs, whether you wish to host a press screening, corporate event, presentation, conference, Christmas or birthday party. Our adjoined cafe and bar is fully licensed and offers a convivial atmosphere for drinks receptions, networking or informal post-screening discussion.
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Showing This Week
Thursday 18 April: Mirror
While Mirror, like all Tarkovsky’s films, pays homage to painting, music, and poetry, it also makes plain that the Russian director understood Mnemosyne to be the mother of the muses. Being a poet, he sought not only to retrieve the past but to reveal its essence – and in so doing to redeem an inherently flawed present.
Friday 19 April: Andrei Rublev
Originally titled The Passion According to Andrei, Tarkovsky’s second feature remains a wholly original epic, a life of the medieval icon painter encompassing the full horror of history. The culminating vision of Rublev’s Trinity only emerges from the yoke of Tartar occupation, mystic rites, excommunications, and nearly unrelieved suffering.
Saturday 20 April: Take Two: Stalker / Hard to Be a God
A Sturgatsky brothers double bill: Andrei Tarkovsky’s metaphysical journey through an enigmatic post-apocalyptic landscape paired with Aleksei German's staggeringly visceral, phantasmagoric science-fiction epic.
Sunday 21 April: Voyage in Time + One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich
Filmed as Tarkovsky conceptualized Nostalghia with famed Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra, Voyage in Time is an exterior portrait of the Russian director’s creative process and a document of his dislocation. Chris Marker’s One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich is perhaps the best film yet made by one film-maker about another. A revelatory document, loving, lucid and lyrical, on the elemental structuring of Tarkovsky’s work.
Sunday 21 April: The Sacrifice
Tarkovsky’s final film is also one of his most overtly theatrical, a chamber drama drawn in characteristically virtuoso long takes. A philosopher celebrates his birthday by planting a tree with his young son on an otherwise barren landscape. Disgusted with modernity, he finds his calling after reports of an impending nuclear war, the reality of which remains occluded in dream.
Showing Next Week
Tuesday 23 April: The White Dove
František Vláčil’s debut feature is an exemplar of the purity and poetry of his vision. A near-experimental work of great humanism and lyricism, it traces the flight of a bird that loses it way home to the Baltic coast, where a young girl waits for it, and winds up in Prague, where a young boy and a painter rescue it.
Wednesday 24 April: The Childhood of a Leader
We're thrilled to welcome Brady Corbet and Stacy Martin to present a special screening of Corbet's debut, in tribute to Scott Walker. Loosely inspired by the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Margaret MacMillan, The Childhood of a Leader is a nightmarish coming-of-age tale charting the early stirrings of despotism in a French choirboy.
Thursday 25 April: Filmarmalade: Doozy
Part creative documentary, part essay film, Richard Squires' debut uses animated antihero "Clovis" as a means to explore the 1960s voice casting of actor Paul Lynde as a series of Hanna-Barbera villains. Through the lens of one of Hollywood’s hidden queer histories, Doozy contemplates cartoon villainy and hysterical masculinity; the use of voice to signify "otherness" and the frequently uneasy relationship between character and actor.
Friday 26 April: The Liberated Film Club IV
"Because you're sick of knowing exactly what you're going to get and you're sick when you get it." We're thrilled to welcome Chloe Aridjis as our special guest for the fourth instalment of The Liberated Film Club, and an edition of 5 risograph printed posters signed by the guest will be available exclusively on the night.
Saturday 27 April: The Firemen's Ball
A milestone of the Czech New Wave, Miloš Forman’s first colour film The Firemen’s Ball is both a dazzling comedy and a provocative political satire. Presumed to be a commentary on the floundering Czech leadership, the film was "banned forever" in Czechoslovakia following the Russian invasion and prompted Forman’s move to America.
Saturday 27 April: Daisies
Věra Chytilová’s classic of surrealist cinema is the most adventurous and anarchic Czech film of the 1960s. Two young women, both named Marie, revolt against a degenerate, decayed and oppressive society, attacking symbols of wealth and bourgeois culture. A riotous, punk-poem of a film that is both hilarious and mind-warpingly innovative.
Sunday 28 April: Czech Mate: In Search of Jirí Menzel
This expansive and intimate, eminently engaging documentary was a labor of love by Mumbai-based archivist and filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, who became enamoured with Jiří Menzel’s work after seeing Closely Observed Trains. Years later, Dungarpur initiated a correspondence and eventual friendship with Menzel that resulted in this astonishingly detailed and probing documentary on Menzel’s life, career, and postwar Czechoslovak cinema. Introduced by Ehsan Khoshbakht.
Coming Soon
23 April - 15 May 2019: Close-Up on the Czechoslovak New Wave
Coinciding with the UK premiere of Shivendra Singh Dungarpur's epic documentary CzechMate: In Search of Jirí Menzel at Close-Up, we're thrilled to present a programme of masterpieces from the Czech and Slovak New Wave.
24 April - 31 May 2019: Close-Up on Scott Walker
In memory of the late great Scott Walker, Close-Up is honoured to present three films featuring of his original scores alongside a selection of cinematic masterpieces originally selected by Scott for his edition of Meltdown Festival in 2000. Introductions by special guests and a series of listening sessions will continue to be announced over the coming weeks.
1 - 29 May 2019: The Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub
Despite the importance and influence of their work, there has not been a UK retrospective of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub's films since the early 1990s. Close-Up is thrilled to be part of this three-month multi-venue programme, presenting a selection of their features and shorts, as well as the films Straub shot on his own after 2006, which reaffirm with equal strength the aesthetic and political principles that had guided their previous works.
3 May 2019: Gwendolyn
One of the founding members of Close-Up, Gwendolyn Leick, the London-based Austrian protagonist of Ruth Kaaserer’s latest film, is in her mid-sixties, barely weighs 52kg and is a three-time world champion in weightlifting. The film documents her return to training following a cancer diagnosis. We're thrilled to welcome Gwendolyn Leick and director Ruth Kaaserer for a Q&A session.
12 May 2019: Guy Sherwin and Peter Todd: Recent Work
We’re thrilled to present a hybrid programme of digital videos by Guy Sherwin and 16mm films by Peter Todd. These recent works will be shown in an indeterminate way, enabling connections to be made unique to the screening. Both filmmakers will be present throughout and will participate in a discussion following the screening.
25 May 2019: Alt/Kino: Terror Nullius
Part political satire, eco-horror and road movie, TERROR NULLIUS is a political revenge fable which offers an unwriting of Australian national mythologies. Binding together a documentary impulse with the bent plotlines of Australian film texts, Soda_Jerk’s revisionist history opens a wilful narrative space where cinema fictions and historical facts permeate each other in new ways. Preceded by two short films that explore notions of sampling and re-mixing traditional cultural narratives.
Calendar
Sat 20 Apr 4:30pm
Stalker
Stalker
Sat 20 Apr 7:40pm
Hard to be a God
Hard to be a God
Sun 21 Apr 5:00pm
Voyage in Time + One Day in the Life...
Voyage in Time + One Day in the Life...
Sun 21 Apr 7:30pm
The Sacrifice
The Sacrifice
Tue 23 Apr 8:15pm
The White Dove
The White Dove
Wed 24 Apr 8:15pm
The Childhood of a Leader
The Childhood of a Leader
Thu 25 Apr 8:15pm
Doozy
Doozy
Fri 26 Apr 8:15pm
The Liberated Film Club IV
The Liberated Film Club IV
Sat 27 Apr 6:00pm
The Firemen's Ball
The Firemen's Ball
Sat 27 Apr 8:00pm
Daisies
Daisies
Sun 28 Apr 1:00pm
CzechMate: In Search of Jirí Menzel
CzechMate: In Search of Jirí Menzel
Mon 29 Apr 8:15pm
Closely Observed Trains
Closely Observed Trains
Tue 30 Apr 8:15pm
Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
Wed 01 May 7:30pm
International Workers’ Day: Class Relations
International Workers’ Day: Class Relations
Fri 03 May 6:30pm
Gwendolyn
Gwendolyn
Fri 03 May 8:15pm
Gwendolyn
Gwendolyn
Sat 04 May 6:30pm
Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana
Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana
Sat 04 May 8:00pm
Take Two: Diamonds of the Night / Josef Kilian
Take Two: Diamonds of the Night / Josef Kilian
Sun 05 May 6:30pm
The Leopard
The Leopard
Mon 06 May 8:15pm
The Round-Up
The Round-Up
Tue 07 May 8:15pm
The Shop on the High Street
The Shop on the High Street
Fri 10 May 8:15pm
Valerie and her week of Wonders
Valerie and her week of Wonders
