A new film season at HOME will celebrate the act of making films, from the power struggles and self-doubt via dark secrets and chaos to artistic triumph.
The Reverse Gaze: Filmmaking on Screen will feature 13 titles from directors including Wim Wenders, Atom Egoyan, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michael Powell and Eleanor Coppola.
Jason Wood, HOME’s creative director for film and culture, said: “At a moment when cinemas have been closed for a protracted period and in an era in which streaming films has become commonplace, The Reverse Gaze is a reminder of the art and endeavour of filmmaking. It’s also a celebration of the physical screen space, a place where people come together, commune and better understand society.”
‘The Reverse Gaze: Filmmaking on Screen’ will look at the act of creating images and more generally the process of artistic endeavour, offering along the way an analysis of the film industry and the personal struggles within it.
The season will open with Wim Wenders’ corrosive statement on the art of filmmaking, The State of Things, a powerful journey into the underbelly of the American film industry introduced by Jason Wood.
Armenian-Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s Ararat, with a recorded introduction from the director, is a highly personal statement about the forced march imposed in 1915 upon the Armenian people by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, and the impact of the historical trauma which still reverberates with contemporary Armenian-Canadians living in Toronto.
David Fincher’s Oscar-nominated Mank imagines screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and his development of the screenplay for Citizen Kane, with strong performances from a cast including Gary Oldman – in the title role – alongside Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins, Arliss Howard, Tom Pelphrey, Sam Troughton and Tom Burke (as Welles).
Also in the season will be the 1960 classic exploration of voyeurism and violence Peeping Tom, and Fassbinder’s damming reflection on the process of filmmaking, Beware of a Holy Whore, introduced by Andy Willis, HOME’s senior visiting curator: film and professor of film at the University of Salford.
François Truffaut’s affectionate farce Day For Night is one of his most beloved films, with Truffaut himself appearing as the harried director of a frivolous melodrama, the shooting of which is plagued by the whims of a neurotic actor, an aging but still forceful Italian diva, and a British ingenue haunted by personal scandal.
Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse is a documentary by Eleanor Coppola, who captured her husband Francis’s 238-day shoot for Apocalypse Now, objectively capturing things spiralling out of control in pursuit of a maverick vision. The only documentary in the season, it will be introduced by Dr Kirsty Fairclough, reader in screen studies at Manchester Metropolitan University’s School of Digital Arts.
Also showing will be Dolemite Is My Name, Man With A Movie Camera, Irma Vep, One Cut of the Dead and Censor.
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