Sunday: Always Crashing in the Same Car

Lindsay Anderson, 1968 • Drawing closely from Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite and earlier American counterparts like Rebel Without A Cause, Lindsay Anderson’s masterpiece stars Malcolm McDowell and Richard Warwick as horny, disaffected, emotionally suppressed boarding school students. Moving between black and white and color with little distinction between what is real and what is imagined, If... creates a bridge between Kitchen Sink dramas like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and the post-wave British cinema of filmmakers like Nicholas Roeg with a sense of grace that places it far above anything it could be compared to. 35mm

Ken Loach, 1969 • David Bradley plays Billy Casper, a fifteen year old bullied at school and virtually abandoned by his family with nothing but a dead end life working the Yorkshire coal mines (where, at the time, one could find the lowest paid workers in a developed country) to look forward to. Primarily occupied with petty thievery and daydreaming, he befriends a falcon named Kes, who offers the film's only element of hope and kindness. A look at one of the most miserable and terrifying points in England's history, Kes is widely regarded as one of the best British films of all time. 35mm

Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970 • Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s second English language feature after being exiled from Poland because of anti-Stalinist views associated with his 1967 masterpiece Hands Up!, this British/West German production stars Jane Asher as the read headed femme fatale who drives adolescent John Moulder Brown to the brink of insanity. Compared by Andrew Sarris to the best work of Godard and Roman Polanski, and ends up a bizarre combination of the two. Deep End is a sweet hearted film pent up in a cold hearted world, both frustrating and extremely moving. Featuring music by Can and Cat Stevens. 35mm

Michael Powell, 1969 • Hoping to recapture his lost artistic passion, an exhausted but successful New York artist returns home to northern Australia. There the artist, played by a grizzled James Mason (Lolita, Island in the Sun), retreats to a less than deserted island and meets the lovely Cora. As nymph and muse, Cora (Helen Mirren) opens the artist’s eyes to her vitality against the beautiful backdrop of the Great Barrier Reef while delicately illustrating her own journey of discovery. Shamelessly depicting the possibilities of self determined empowerment we can be reminded that our shared images of art and life can and do change. 35mm

Bill Douglas, 1972 & 1973 • Funded by the British Film Institute and based on a script Douglas wrote at London International Film School, The Bill Douglas Trilogy is the closest representation of the crippling poverty of lower class England in the late 60s and early 70s on film. The first two installments, My Childhood and My Ain’ Folk were made within a year of one another and star Stephen Archibald plagued with personal and material impoverishment. Things turn around for the better when an older friend introduces him to books and the promise of a more fulfilling future. 35mm

John Schlesinger, 1971 • Britain is on the verge of financial ruin, there’s famine in Africa and Southeast Asia, technology’s gone haywire, and Alex (Glenda Jackson) simply can’t be bothered. What does trouble her? Her young artist lover (Murray Head) is sleeping with a man (Peter Finch). Well, that’s not really it. See she’s known all along that she’s sharing him. What’s changed? Sharing is getting harder. Sometimes, she learns over the course of a tumultuous weekend, nothing is better than anything. This totally flawless film was nominated for four Oscars: Best Actor (Finch), Best Actrress (Jackson), Best Screenplay, and Best Director. 35mm

Joseph Losey, 1968 • This film will replace our previously scheduled screening of The Go-Between due to scheduling conflicts. 35mm

Bill Douglas, 1978 • The last installment of the Bill Douglas Trilogy follows Stephen Archibald from welfare institution in Edinburgh to National Service in Egypt, but remains as violently unsentimental and bleak as My Childhood & My Ain’ Folk. The film was delayed five years until Archibald was the right age to play the part, and it would be the most expensive of these three films to make, totalling a minuscule $33,000. As the three films unfold they become harder and harder to step away from, moving slowly and with the most extreme attention to detail that is both harrowing and beautiful. 35mm

Nicolas Roeg, 1976 • In this twisted take on the American sci-fi novel, David Bowie plays an alien in exile who lands in New Mexico and becomes a millionaire by peddling inventions like Polaroid film, but is destroyed by capitalism, sex, and the US government. Beautifully photographed in Scope, The Man Who Fell to Earth balances surface textures of pop culture and lust with a yearning for something more profound - the perpetual post-war-American struggle through a European lens. Long out of circulation in its original release cut, this screening will be in a new 35mm print from Rialto. 35mm