BFI Southbank Programme Notes

National Gallery

Frederick Wiseman on ‘National Gallery’ Why did you settle on the National Gallery as the subject for this film? The first reason is that it’s one of the great museums of the world. Second is tha...

January 25, 2026 | Frederick Wiseman

David Lynch - The Art Life

Famously tight-lipped when it comes to discussing his work, offering little more than peculiar observations – ‘Keep your eye on the donut’ – David Lynch’s disarming ‘Jimmy Stewart from Mars’ person...

January 14, 2026 | David Lynch
The Dreamer

Twin Peaks – original US pilot episode

+ intro by Lisa Kerrigan, Senior Curator of Television, BFI National Archive A contemporary review There’s been a rush to proclaim the apocalypse in everything that has been written so far about T...

January 12, 2026 | David Lynch
The Dreamer

Ex Libris - The New York Public Library

‘Libraries are not about books,’ explains architect Francine Houben, ‘libraries are about people.’ Frederick Wiseman could hardly have written a more perfect summation of his invigorating new film,...

January 11, 2026 | Frederick Wiseman

Out 1

Jacques Rivette’s 12-hour-plus Out 1 languished for years as one of European cinema’s great unseen films, although it has gradually emerged into the daylight over the past decade or so. Out 1 is pe...

January 10, 2026 | Ensemble
The Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague

La Danse - Le Ballet de l’Opera de Paris

Performance has been a concern of legendary documentarist Frederick Wiseman ever since his 1967 debut Titicut Follies, titled after the revue put on by prisoners and guards at the mental asylum exp...

January 10, 2026 | Frederick Wiseman

Moon

The screening on Wednesday 21 January will be introduced by Melanie Bell, Feminist Film Historian and Principal Investigator for the Film Costumes in Action project SPOILER WARNING The following n...

January 9, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

INLAND EMPIRE

Whether or not such a thing as ‘pure cinema’ exists is an argument that will never cease – can movies attain essential ‘movieness’ by way of pure visual effect, associative or imagistic, without de...

January 8, 2026 | David Lynch
The Dreamer

Les Cousins

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The story told in Chabrol’s Les Cousins, his second film, is wonderfully simple, or, if you prefer, simply beautiful. It begins like...

January 8, 2026 | Ensemble
The Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague

Slacker

Richard Linklater on breaking through and ‘Slacker’ In your early learning about cinema, was your focus on watching films or amassing technical expertise? All of the above. I just read a Godard q...

January 5, 2026 | Ensemble
The Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague

Paris nous appartient

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. The innocuous title of Paris nous appartient suggests we are in for a New Wave fourteenth of July. In fact it uncovers a secret cham...

January 4, 2026 | Ensemble
The Filmmakers from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague

Gate of Hell

A leading entry in the vanguard of Japanese cinema at the time of its belated discovery in the west in the early 1950s, Gate of Hell was the first Japanese film to nab the top prize at Cannes and t...

January 4, 2026 | Big Screen Classics

Villain

Meet Vic Dakin, your everyday London businessman and murderous, sadistic gang leader: the sort of diamond geezer who would shake your hand prior to nailing your head to a passing milk float. Vic lo...

December 23, 2025 | Muse of Fire
Richard Burton

Exorcist II - The Heretic

Boorman’s follow-up to the Friedkin-Blatty hit was plagued by production problems and savaged by critics, but it has more going for it than its reputation suggests. Not least of which is Burton’s c...

December 19, 2025 | Muse of Fire
Richard Burton

True Lies

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Watching James Cameron’s films, I sometimes experience what I imagine the Lumières’ original audiences must have felt: a mixture of ...

December 17, 2025 | James Cameron

Nineteen Eighty-four

Burton was not first choice for the role of inscrutable Inner Party official O’Brien in Radford’s as-yet-unmatched adaptation of the totemic dystopian novel. Yet his casting opposite Hurt’s Winston...

December 15, 2025 | Muse of Fire
Richard Burton

Silent Sherlock - Three Classic Cases

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series, which was so popular it ran for 45 episodes, was sanctioned by Arthur Conan Doyle, who thoroughly approved of Eille Norwood as Holmes. This programme featu...

December 14, 2025 | Silent Cinema

The Cloud-Capped Star

The Cloud-Capped Star iconically represents the angst of the Partition and affective impacts of the resultant refugee crisis on women. In this film, Ritwik Ghatak politicised melodrama to embody th...

December 14, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

The Silences of the Palace

In its new year issue Time magazine listed the ten best movies of 1994. Predictably, Pulp Fiction was at number one. Less predictably, eight of the other nine were made outside the United States, t...

December 13, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Four Nights of a Dreamer

Robert Bresson on ‘Four Nights of a Dreamer’ You first turned to Dostoevsky for A Gentle Creature and returned to him for White Nights , which you called Four Nights of a Dreamer . Why? It was pa...

December 13, 2025 | UK Premiere of 4K Restoration

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