May ’68 (2018)

To mark the 50th anniversary of the events of May ’68, CINECITY curated a season of British Cinema classics shot in 1968 and paired them with a film from another era that shares its radical spirit. As the double bill was once a staple of cinema-going, it felt appropriate to bring back this tradition for this special season of Sunday screenings. By placing a film from ’68 alongside a film from another era, we could also start to explore how films influence or inspire and are in turn influenced by other titles. The complementary films spanned over 80 years of film history.

Screenings

BLOOD OF A POET (1932) + PERFORMANCE (1970)
Sunday 6 May / Duke of York’s

Dir. Jean Cocteau. France. 55 mins.
Surreal and dreamlike, Jean Cocteau’s first film, Blood of a Poet, begins with an artist in his studio startled to find a mouth he has painted beginning to move. A personal, poetic, symbolic fantasy and a key influence on Donald Cammell.

Dir. Nicolas Roeg & Donald Cammell. UK. 105 mins.
In Performance, a gangster hides out in the bohemian home of a reclusive rock star. The sex, drugs and violence caused panic at Warner Bros, who re-edited the film before its eventual release in 1970.

ZÉRO DE CONDUITE (1933) + IF… (1968)
Sunday 13 May / Duke of York’s

Dir. Jean Vigo. France. 41 mins.
Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite is a beautiful, anarchic and highly influential film about childhood rebellion in a repressive boarding school. Based on the director’s own experiences, it was banned by the French authorities until 1945.

Dir. Lindsay Anderson. UK. 111 mins.
Shot during the social unrest of 1968, Malcolm McDowell is magnificent as anti-hero Mick Travis, who takes his public schoolboy rebellion to its limit.

WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968) + A FIELD IN ENGLAND (2013)
Sunday 20 May / Duke’s at Komedia

Dir. Michal Reeves. UK. 86 mins.
Vincent Price stars as a corrupt inquisitor who travels across an idyllic East Anglian landscape, extracting confessions of witchcraft in a brutal reign of terror.

Dir. Ben Wheatley. UK. 90 mins.
This nightmarish black comedy, set like Witchfinder General during the English Civil War, follows a group of deserters drugged and tricked by an alchemist into looking for nearby buried treasure.