The Moving Image Source Calendar is a selective international guide to retrospectives, screenings, festivals, and exhibitions.
Descriptions are drawn from the calendars of the presenting venues.
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The Time Machine
September 25-October 15, 2008 at
BFI Southbank
, London
Without time and movement, film is little more than a string of near-identical still photographs. But once they are put in motion, those same images viewed in rapid succession become a document of time's passing, of change, of life itself; no wonder Godard claimed that film was truth 24 times a second. It has even been said that to film someone is to record the inexorable approach of death.
Another inextricable link: film itself is notoriously vulnerable to the ravages of time. Celluloid tears, chemicals are volatile, images fade. But while film ages, if properly cared for, it has a near-magical ability to confer immortality on people, places and moments of time. Hence the lasting appeal of old "actuality" footage. Film enables us to travel back into a past we ourselves may not even have been alive to experience; in this regard, it's a kind of time machine.
This two-month season comprises films which in one way or another are primarily concerned with time in terms of form and/or content. It includes films set in the past or the present or the future, and films set in more than one of those temporal territories. It includes films about time-travel, and films about different kinds of time. It includes films about memory, change and history. It includes films about time as a philosophical construct, and films about death. It includes films about time as a narrative device or which use time as a cinematic plaything. And it includes films about film itself as a document and a vessel of time. This season is itself a time machine.
Featured Works:
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941); The Picture of Dorian Gray (Albert Lewin, 1945); A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946); Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964); Fata Morgana (Werner Herzog, 1971); Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1984); The Quince Tree Sun (Victor Erice, 1992); Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993); The Hudsucker Proxy (Ethan and Joel Coen, 1994); Ulysse's Gaze (Theo Angelopoulos, 1995); Decasia (Bill Morrison, 2003, pictured); Five (Abbas Kiarostami , 2003); A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2003); The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005)
Program Information
The Time Machine