FS74
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
FS74
The glory days of the Film Society – of London, but, being the first, it didn’t bother to specify – were in the late 1920s. The coming of the Depression, Nazism, Stalinism, ‘talkies’, etc., at the turn of the decade, portended nothing less than a ‘Fall from Grace’, as Annette Michelson put it in her seminal essay ‘Film and the Radical Aspiration’. The avant-garde was done for. Or was it?
FS74 is a reconstruction of the Film Society’s 74th performance (hence the name), which took place at the Tivoli theatre, on the Strand, on 25 November 1934. Its packed programme of British premieres included:
- Night on the Bare Mountain, Claire Parker and Andrei Alexeieff’s experiment in pinscreen animation.
- Lotte Reiniger’s Das Rollende Rad, the history of the wheel depicted in moving silhouettes (made for the German Ministry of Transport)
- The Cathode Ray Oscillograph, a ‘demonstration of the use of the Cathode Ray for precise measurement in the interests of advanced radio research’
- Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite, the inspiration for François Truffaut and Lindsay Anderson and many others; banned from public performance in Britain for another three decades.
All this and more will be introduced by organizers Tashi Petter and Henry K. Miller, and projected almost entirely from celluloid prints.
Contact name:
Matthew Anthony Barrington
Contact phone:
02076316115