TEST Programme Notes TEST

BFI Southbank

Golden Eighties

Shopping precincts are as good an indication as any of our moral condition. Just as the Passage Choiseul, where in the early years of the century Céline’s anti-hero watched his parents sinking deep...

February 3, 2025 | CHANTAL AKERMAN
ADVENTURES IN PERCEPTION

Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000

+ intro by Alfonso Cuáron Intelligent without being cerebral, political without being dogmatic, cloaking its epic view of history in a wealth of burlesque domestic details, Jonah is perhaps the mo...

January 26, 2025 | ALFONSO CUÁRON ON ALAIN TANNER

In the White City

Alain Tanner is an endangered species: a European filmmaker fiercely resistant to the seductions of the Euro co-production in an age when that seems the only alternative to transatlantic funding. T...

January 26, 2025 | ALFONSO CUÁRON ON ALAIN TANNER

The Salamander

A salamander, Alain Tanner tells us during his film, is an attractive but venomous lizard which can go through fire and emerge unscathed. By fire Tanner doesn’t mean passion or catastrophe; rather ...

January 25, 2025 | ALFONSO CUÁRON ON ALAIN TANNER

Gösta Berling’s Saga

+ intro by writer Paul Joyce Some stories lend themselves well to a three-hour running time and the episodic saga is perfect for it. The word saga might imply stodginess but in fact the time speed...

January 19, 2025 | SILENT CINEMA

Sneakers

The many tributes published following Sidney Poitier’s death on 6 January 2022 tended to focus, naturally enough, on the actor/director’s status as a pioneering figure in 20th century American cine...

January 18, 2025 | SIDNEY POITIER
HIS OWN PERSON

Rebel without a Cause

‘It’s a great coming-of-age melodrama with an incredible cast.’ – Luke Hemmings, BFI Member ‘Whatever’s inside making me what I am, it’s like film. Film only works in the dark. Tear it all open an...

January 18, 2025 | MEMBER PICKS

Stir Crazy

On a crisp March morning, some 90 newcomers went into the maximum-security block of the Arizona State Penitentiary. Leading the party the way were Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. They were in the j...

January 17, 2025 | SIDNEY POITIER
HIS OWN PERSON

Ludwig

Shown at the sweeping, epic length Visconti initially intended, and not without some vague parallels to his own life, this stately biopic focuses on the life of wildly eccentric, closeted gay royal...

January 12, 2025 | LUCHINO VISCONTI
DECADENCE AND DECAY

Death in Venice

In this classic depiction of queer desire and mortality, adapted from the novel by Thomas Mann, Visconti captures the aesthetic pleasures and exquisite longing of an ageing intellectual following t...

January 11, 2025 | LUCHINO VISCONTI
DECADENCE AND DECAY

Experimenta Mixtape S02E02 Curated by Holly Antrum

Drawing on extensive, sustained research carried out at the BFI National Archive, artist Holly Antrum presents a wide-ranging, unpredictable mix of film and videos, as if selected by the fictional ...

April 24, 2023 | EXPERIMENTA