Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 112: Mon Apr 22

Images (Altman, 1972): Roxy Bar and Screen, 7.30pm

This is a real treat. A very rare screening of a lost Robert Altman film.

Here is the introduction from the FilmBar70 club: Beautiful, haunting and very, very creepy, ‘Images’ deserves a place in the pantheon of the utterly unnerving alongside such greats as ‘The Shining’, ‘The Innocents’ and ‘Don’t Look Now’. Featuring a startling, award-winning (Cannes ’72) performance by Susannah York, luminous photography by Vilmos Zsigmond and an atypically atonal score from John Williams, Altman’s long neglected work truly requires a resurgence.

York plays Cathryn, a children’s author embroiled in her latest opus. When a series of enigmatic phone calls alluding to her husband’s infidelity shakes her reverie, Cathryn finds herself beset by unwelcome spectres from her past. As the barriers between the internal and the external crumble, the solution she implements to lay her ghosts to rest may prove more lethal than she could possibly conceive…

In addition to ‘Images’, we’ll be celebrating certain eruptive performances given by actresses beyond the verge of a nervous breakdown. From Lillian Gish to Isabelle Adjani, we’ll be lauding those ladies who threw themselves immitigably into the abyss in a special pre-feature Filmbar presentation.
And that’s not all, for El Diabolik will be on hand to summon the World of the Psychotronic Soundtrack to baffle your senses and get you a whirling…

Time Out review:
Underrated film about a lonely woman cracking up and suffering disturbing hallucinations about sex and death. Unlike most of Altman's movies, which parody and reinvent genres, Images stands rather in a loose trilogy with That Cold Day in the Park and 3 Women, in its investigation of madness and its concentration upon a female character. The fragmented style of the film, in which York's mental life is portrayed as substantially as her 'real' life, might have become pretentious; but the director controls things beautifully, proffering credible biographical reasons for her inner disturbances, and borrowing shock effects from the thriller genre to underline the terrifying nature of her predicament. It's brilliantly shot by Vilmos Zsigmond (wtihout a hint of psychedelic trickery in sight), superbly acted, and lent extra menace by the sounds and music of, respectively, Stomu Yamashta and John Williams.
Geoff Andrew

Here's the great FilmBar70 trailer.

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