2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream

11–26 March 2017

London |
11 March 2017

Opening Night

Location: Curzon Soho
Date & Time: 11 March 2017 - 20:30
Directed By:John Cassavetes
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
20:30, 11 March, Curzon Soho
Introduced by Kim Coleman
Tickets here

Cassavetes’ Opening Night is one of cinema’s finest portrayals of ageing, while also being a superb exploration of acting. It has recently enjoyed renewed interest following the 2014 release of Alejandro Iñárritu’s Birdman, with which it has notable parallels.
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Resurrecting and re-Editing the Cinema Diva

Location: The Horse Hospital
Date & Time: 11 March 2017 - 18:30
Directed By:Joseph Cornell, Michelle Handelman, Jane and Louise Wilson
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
18:30, 11 March, The Horse Hospital
Introduced by the festival’s co-curator Tom Gunning
Tickets here

Underground filmmaker Jack Smith once described film stars as ‘flaming creatures’. Being enveloped by light, female stars especially owe much of their aura to the costuming and artifice that go into constructing their image. This programme brings together female stars from cinema’s past – re-imagined, and even re-assembled – from a later perspective that abstracts them from a narrative context, and allows us to see them precisely as incandescent images of desire clothed in costumes of fantasy and role play.
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12 March 2017

Space is the Place

Location: Rio Cinema
Date & Time: 12 March 2017 - 15:00
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
15:00, 12 March, Rio Cinema
Introduced by Roger K. Burton
Tickets here

Space is the Place is a rare, unmissable trash culture, science fiction classic. Starring the Afrofuturism jazz star Sun Ra, this loosely based biopic offers the uninitiated a tantalising glimpse into his fantastical world.
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Lola Montes

Location: Genesis Cinema
Date & Time: 12 March 2017 - 18:00
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
18:00, 12 March, Genesis Cinema
Introduced by Cathy Haynes with Tony Paley
Tickets here

The final film by director Max Ophüls presents the real-life story of the scandalous nineteenth-century courtesan Lola Montes as it might have been presented by circus showman P.T. Barnum. In breath-taking cinemascope and eye-popping colour, spectacle competes with moments of tenderness and loss as Montes’s life is replayed as an acrobatic fashion show version of Remembrance of Things Past.
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13 March 2017

Tony Takitani

Location: The Hoxton, Holborn
Date & Time: 13 March 2017 - 18:30
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
18:30, 13 March, The Hoxton, Holborn
Introduced by Alessandra Vaccari
Tickets here

Set against the background of postwar and modern-day Japan, the plot follows the life of Tony Takitani and Eiko, the young woman he marries. Eiko’s obsession with designer clothes and accessories is so powerful that it ends up consuming her and even threatens to undo her.
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14 March 2017

Black Girl

Location: The Hoxton, Holborn
Date & Time: 14 March 2017 - 18:30
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
18:30, 14 March, The Hoxton, Holborn
Introduced by Karen Alexander
Tickets here

Racism, colonial oppression and injustice were recurring themes for Senegalese author Ousmane Sembène, who in the 1960s turned from literature to the cinema in order for his social message to reach a broader audience. Mbissine Thérèse Diop plays Diouna, a black nanny to a French family.
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Ikarie XB-1

Location: Prince Charles Cinema
Date & Time: 14 March 2017 - 20:45
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
20:45, 14 March, Prince Charles Cinema
Introduced by the festival co-curator Marketa Uhlirova
Tickets here

Ikarie XB-1 is an ambitious science fiction space opera, possibly best known for prefiguring many visual and thematic motifs of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This ‘Space Marienbad’, as one critic called it, perfectly epitomises an era defined by a raging space race and cultural competition between the East and the West.
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15 March 2017

Things to Come

Location: Prince Charles Cinema
Date & Time: 15 March 2017 - 20:45
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
20:45, 15 March, Prince Charles Cinema
Introduced by Sir Christopher Frayling
Tickets here

Although the streamline moderne style, which has come to define Things to Come in popular imagination, appears only in its final part set in 2036, it makes a profound visual impact. The ‘age of mechanical perfection’ (in H.G. Wells’ words) is overwhelmingly white in both architecture and clothing, cutting a serene image of a world cleansed of manual labour, disease and suffering.
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After Reel Time

Location: Central Saint Martins
Date & Time: 15 March 2017 - 18:30
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
18:30, 15 March, Central Saint Martins
Film talk by Alistair O’Neill and Inga Fraser

This talk explores the significance of Annabel Nicolson’s seminal 1973 performance Reel Time, which drew an explicit connection between the technologies of film and clothing, conjoining a film projector and a sewing machine through a loop of celluloid.
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16 March 2017

Last Year in Marienbad

Location: Picturehouse Central
Date & Time: 16 March 2017 - 21:00
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
21:00, 16 March, Picturehouse Central
With a post-screening discussion between Caroline Evans and Alexander Fury, plus a surprise guest
Tickets here

This masterpiece of 1960s art cinema sets its mediation on time, memory and longing within the most fashionable of locations – the Marienbad spa and its endless corridors and manicured gardens (the film was in fact shot in and around the Bavarian palaces of Nymphenburg, Schleissheim and Amalienburg). Perhaps no film has so profoundly challenged the viewer with a truly ambiguous approach to time, where truth mingles with lie, and chronology blurs with fantasy.
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Don't Look Now

Location: Picturehouse Central
Date & Time: 16 March 2017 - 18:30
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
18:30, 16 March, Picturehouse Central
+ Childhood Storage
Tickets here

A red hooded coat – that fairy tale trope of Little Red Riding Hood – gains an ominous significance in Nicolas Roeg’s masterful thriller. Based on a novella by Daphne du Maurier, the film tells of a married couple coming to terms with their daughter’s accidental death by drowning.
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17 March 2017

Cléo from 5 to 7

Location: The Hoxton, Holborn
Date & Time: 17 March 2017 - 20:45
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
20:45, 17 March, The Hoxton, Holborn
Introduced by Rosemary Wallin
Tickets here

This masterpiece of the French New Wave cinema by director Agnès Varda presents a slice of life, ninety minutes in the day of a young clothes-conscious recording star. The film respects the unity of time unfolding and the everyday, but this passage of time also marks the drama of a young woman facing the outcome of a critical medical test, during which she meets someone who might change her life.
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In the Mood for Love

Location: Curzon Soho
Date & Time: 17 March 2017 - 18:00
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
18:00, 17 March, Curzon Soho
Introduced by Ian Haydn Smith
Tickets here

Wong Kar-Wai’s meditation on the way layers of separation create a mood for love in the close confines of 1960s Hong Kong derives an erotic atmosphere from the restrictions on romance. Two characters, married to other people who they discover are having an affair, actually avoid initiating their own affair in spite of mutual attraction.
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18 March 2017

Dressing History

Location: The Horse Hospital
Date & Time: 18 March 2017 - 18:30
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
18:30, 18 March, The Horse Hospital
A film talk by Silvia Vacirca.
Tickets here

Although period dramas these days are typically criticised if ‘historically inaccurate’, costuming the past in cinema amounts to much more than merely capturing historical dress and styles in exacting detail. In showing the look of the past, films inevitably display our own relationship with it. This talk will closely examine some of cinema’s most extravagant examples of costume drama.
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Vertigo

Location: Curzon Soho
Date & Time: 18 March 2017 - 15:00
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
15:00, 18 March, Curzon Soho
Introduced by Phoebe English
Tickets here

Vertigo ranked highest in the latest Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll of film scholars and critics. Although a critical and box office flop when released, through the years, Hitchcock’s complex erotic thriller about the death of love and its possible return has gained an enthralled audience.
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19 March 2017

Solaris

Location: Curzon Bloomsbury
Date & Time: 19 March 2017 - 20:00
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
20:00, 19 March, Curzon Bloomsbury
With an introduction and readings from Nelli Fomina: Costumes for the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky (2015) by Anastasija Nikitina
Tickets here

In contrast to the technotopian sci-fi productions of the 1950s and 60s, Tarkovsky’s Solaris offered to early-1970s audiences a completely fresh take on a future world of inter-stellar travel. Within the genre, the film is uncharacteristically sombre and understated in its preference for familiar, ‘human’ imagery of nature and 16th century Flemish painting over the exotically new.
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Beyond the Rocks

Location: Rio Cinema
Date & Time: 19 March 2017 - 13:00
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
13:00, 19 March, Rio Cinema
Introduced by Adrian Garvey, with live musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne
Tickets here

Sam Wood’s recently rediscovered film captures two of the biggest stars of the silent screen, Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, in what remains the only film where the pair appear together. Cast as would-be lovers in a gloriously doomed romantic affair, she plays a habitual clotheshorse, showcasing numerous glamorous gowns, while he cuts a picture of elegance in a wardrobe designed by his then lover Natacha Rambova.
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20 March 2017

The Colour of Pomegranates

Location: Curzon Bloomsbury
Date & Time: 20 March 2017 - 18:30
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
18:30, 20 March, Curzon Bloomsbury
Introduced by Alice Rawsthorn
Tickets here

A recent 4K digital restoration by Cineteca di Bologna and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project. One of the most daringly experimental films ever made (and produced in pre-Glasnost USSR, where it was quickly banned), Parajanov’s tribute to the Armenian poet Sayat Nova rethinks the very nature of cinematic space.
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Om Shanti Om

Location: Genesis Cinema
Date & Time: 20 March 2017 - 20:30
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
20:30, 20 March, Genesis Cinema
Tickets here

Farah Khan, one of the few mainstream female directors in contemporary Bollywood, is not the only Khan associated with Om Shanti Om. Megastar Shah Rukh Khan plays (ironically) an unknown film extra Om, in love with Shanti, a larger-than-life 1970s film star. The film’s title is a tongue-in-cheek pun that reprises a religious incantation and film song “Om Shanti Om” from Subhash Ghai's 1980 thriller Karz. It tells a story of revenge and reincarnation, in which Om and Shanti must find each other by decoding clues left behind by their​ onscreen doubles.
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21 March 2017

Princess Raccoon

Location: Curzon Soho
Date & Time: 21 March 2017 - 21:00
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
21:00, 21 March, Curzon Soho
Introduced by Jane Tynan
Tickets here

Seijun Suzuki made a name for himself in the 1960s with his fast-moving gangster films, which increasingly became exercises in delirious action and colourful mise en scène. In this, his last film, he presents an unhinged fantasy in which elaborate costumes mark different levels of reality.
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Aelita

Location: Genesis Cinema
Date & Time: 21 March 2017 - 20:30
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
20:30, 21 March, Genesis Cinema
With a live musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne, featuring a theremin (a musical instrument invented in Russia during the 1920s) plus a post-screening discussion with Ian Christie and Djurdja Bartlett
Tickets here

Aelita remains one of the most ambitious endeavours of Soviet Russia’s silent cinema, and a bold showcase of its avant-garde design. The film is perhaps best known for its wild cubo-futurist aesthetic flaunted in its otherworld sequences on Mars.
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22 March 2017

My Fancy High Heels

Location: Genesis Cinema
Date & Time: 22 March 2017 - 20:30
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
20:30, 22 March, Genesis Cinema
Featuring a post-screening panel discussion with Orsola de Castro, Kate Hills and Alice Wilby, chaired by Bel Jacobs
Tickets here

My Fancy High Heels is an experimental documentary that traces fashion to its materials, and through the production chain, revealing the troubling process that haunts the latest trends. While not pointing her finger at obvious villains, director Chao-ti Ho reveals very visible victims.
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24 March 2017

Tales of Manhattan

Location: Genesis Cinema
Date & Time: 24 March 2017 - 20:30
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
20:30, 24 March, Genesis Cinema
Introduced by Timothy Long
Tickets here

Directed by French filmmaker Julien Duvivier during his WWII exile in Hollywood, Tales of Manhattan presents a series of individual stories with different characters and situations. In this neglected film, the link is a dress suit that seems to carry bad luck.
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25 March 2017

Barbarella

Location: Barbican Centre
Date & Time: 25 March 2017 - 14:00
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
14:00, 25 March, Barbican Centre
Introduced by Christopher Laverty
Tickets here

Barbarella testifies to a time in which a profound fascination with technological possibilities of the future had permeated mass culture. Based on Jean-Claude Forest’s racy comic serial, Vadim’s film details the adventures of a beautiful, kinky ‘cosmic queen’ in the distant future of the year 40,000.
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Holy Motors

Location: Barbican Centre
Date & Time: 25 March 2017 - 16:00
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
16:00, 25 March, Barbican Centre
Tickets here

Carax’s fantastically bizarre drama follows its protagonist, Mr Oscar, through a single busy workday in Paris. As he is ferried around by his chauffeur from one ‘appointment’ to another, he undergoes a series of radical transformations, his white stretch limousine becoming a dressing room where new costumes and make-up are applied.
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26 March 2017

The Inferno Unseen

Location: Barbican Centre
Date & Time: 26 March 2017 - 16:30
Programme: 2017 | Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream
16:30, 26 March, Barbican Centre
World premiere with live music by Rollo Smallcombe
Tickets here

In partnership with Lobster Films and MUBI, we are proud to present a newly mastered cut of rushes created in 1964 in preparation for Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film The Inferno, which was never finished. Together with his cinematographers Andréas Winding and Armand Thirard, Clouzot staged seemingly endless kinetic and optical experiments focusing primarily on actress Romy Schneider performing simple, seductive actions in carefully composed mises-en-scène. Departing from Serge Bromberg’s critically acclaimed documentary about the making of Clouzot’s film (2009), The Inferno Unseen focuses solely on Clouzot’s intoxicating visions, allowing them to build up their own momentum as they unfurl in all their glory.
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