BFI Southbank Programme Notes

Evolution

Lucile Hadzihalilovic on ‘Evolution’ Were you always going to set the film in and out of, or beside, the sea? No. It seems strange but in the beginning it was only the hospital – a hospital in a ...

December 4, 2025 | Lucile Hadzihalilovic

Tea and Sympathy

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away plot details for Tea and Sympathy and Home from the Hill (1960). Filmmakers David Siegel and Scott McGehee on ‘Tea and Sympathy’ Neither of us believe...

December 3, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Pillion

+ intro by Diana Cipriano, BFI Flare Programmer The coupling up of a six-foot-four Swedish sex god with Harry Potter bully boy Dudley Dursley may sound like a lurid work of fan fiction but that is...

December 3, 2025 | Seniors Paid Matinee

Innocence

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. For her debut feature Lucile Hadzihalilovic has produced a film of distinctive aesthetic quality and mystery. Innocence charts a yea...

December 3, 2025 | Lucile Hadzihalilovic

Beyond Camp - The Queer Life and Afterlife of the Hollywood Melodrama

Old Hollywood ‘women’s pictures’ have been a part of queer culture for decades, with stars like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford still reigning as gay icons. Fassbinder, Almodóvar and Haynes have all ...

December 3, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Antonio das Mortes

Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes is surely one of the most astonishing films to come out of Brazil in the 1960s. A well-deserved Palme d’Or winner at Cannes in 1969, it starred Maurício do Valle ...

November 29, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Disgraced Monuments + 23rd August 2008

+ discussion with directors Laura Mulvey, Mark Lewis and Faysal Abdullah Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’ essay film Statues Also Die (1953) infamously opens with the pronouncement: ‘When people di...

November 27, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Mephisto

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. It is helpful to know the historical background of Mephisto, and then perhaps as helpful to forget it. Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto a...

November 26, 2025 | Restored

Le Vent d’est

The cinema cannot show the truth, or reveal it, because the truth is not out there in the real world, waiting to be photographed. What the cinema can do is produce meanings, and meanings can only b...

November 24, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Madonna of the Seven Moons

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Contemporary critics almost universally derided Madonna of the Seven Moons for its ridiculous plot, crude melodramatics and ‘purple ...

November 23, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

The Bridegroom, the Actress and the Pimp + The Woman’s Film

Jean-Marie Straub describes The Bridegroom, the Actress and the Pimp as ‘the most aleatory of my films, and the most political’. The element of randomness or chance in its genesis is well documente...

November 22, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

The Bad Sister

The screening on Saturday 22 November will be introduced by Laura Mulvey The Bad Sister has its origins in a 1978 novel of the same name by Emma Tennant (1937-2017), a writer preoccupied by ‘goth...

November 22, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Die My Love

Lynne Ramsay on ‘Die My Love’ Would you call the film a black comedy? I laughed quite a bit. I wanted to make it funny. Jennifer, she’s funny; she just naturally is, so I wanted it to be quite th...

November 19, 2025 | Seniors Paid Matinee

Zorns Lemma

+ intro by Laura Mulvey Hollis Frampton on ‘Zorns Lemma’ I first began using a movie camera at the end of Fall of 1962. At that time I was being systematically forced into cinema in a way by my st...

November 17, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Written on the Wind

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. Laura Mulvey on ‘Written on the Wind’ Sexual frustration is the driving force of Written on the Wind. When its director, Douglas Sir...

November 16, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

A Cottage on Dartmoor

SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. For those accustomed to the miniature pleasures of Asquith’s later work, A Cottage on Dartmoor (his last silent film, though a dial...

November 14, 2025 | Too Much
Melodrama on Film

Saint Omer

Saint Omer, a film of stark, unnerving poise and resonance, is a distillation of a true 2016 case in which a philosophy student called Fabienne Kabou was tried in the town of Saint-Omer in northern...

November 12, 2025 | Big Screen Classics

AMY! + Frida Kahlo & Tina Modotti

We are delighted to announce that Griselda Pollock (Professor Emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art, University of Leeds) will be joining Laura Mulvey for the post-screening discussion ho...

November 11, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

Ethnic Notions + Looking for Langston

Marlon Riggs: Americans have always been more and at the same time less than what we pretended. With the quickening approach of the 21st century, greater numbers of us are giving testament to this ...

November 10, 2025 | Big Screen Classics

Crystal Gazing

Laura Mulvey on ‘Crystal Gazing’ In Crystal Gazing, the question of narrative situation revolves around the four characters we took from Erich Kästner’s Fabian and reinvented for our script. The at...

November 10, 2025 | Laura Mulvey
Thinking through Film

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