Movie Church: The Parallax View
Cultplex50 Red Bank
Sun 20 Sept · 13:00
About this event
Part of Cinema Rediscovered on Tour: a Watershed project in association with Wiper & True and collaboration with principal sponsors Park Circus and StudioCanal. With support from BFI Audience Projects Fund awarding National Lottery funding. The films in this season, far from the liberal consensus often associated with Hollywood of the period, are darkly difficult in terms of subject matter and provocative in their politically contradictory nature. Bleak, unsettling but endlessly rewarding, these films are testament to a period when some in the Hollywood mainstream went very rogue. They provide a fascinating snapshot of America which resonates today. Curated by CULTPLEX, Ellen Smith (freelance film programmer and Projectionist at HOME) and Andy Willis (Professor of Film Studies at the University of Salford and Senior Visiting Curator at HOME). Alan J. Pakula’s ominous vision of America – captured in the wake of the assassination of the Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King and just before the scandal of Watergate is about to break. Conspiracy and creeping paranoia seeps through every frame of Alan J Pakula’s The Parallax View - even the architecture and the soundtrack communicate dissonance and unease. Made two years before Pakula’s definitive Watergate film All the President’s Men , Warren Beatty plays a reporter who becomes caught up in the fall out from seeing a Presidential candidate assassination - a shockingly dramatic opening sequence. Unlike the fearlessly heroic journalists Woodward and Bernstein, as played by Redford and Hoffman, Beatty’s reporter is drawn deeper into the corporate and political conspiracy enveloping him. It leads to an ending that does not result in exposure, but rather echoes Chinatown ’s devastating conclusion. Cinematographer Gordon Willis’ coolly stylized compositions give visual expression to a mood of the pervasive sense of dread and mistrust that defined the 1970s. All of our screenings are 18+ unless otherwise stated, and the film start time is as advertised above. Content Warnings: violence, political assassinations, and intense psychological manipulation. Check out the HOME programme for Rogue Hollywood here. Runtime: 102 minutes Director: Alan J. Pakula Country: USA Year: 1974 Film
Follow the thread
A different kind of night
Not the same tradition as the lineage above — a genuinely different thread to pull, if you want one.