Sands Films Featured Events -20th to 26th May
WISE16 features selected events from Sands Films extensive programme of films, theatre and talks. Though most of them will be free, booking is required and donations welcome. For times and bookings tickets on Eventbrite, click here
Tuesday 21 May | 8.30pm
Cinema Club | The Woman on The Beach| Jean Renoir | 1947 | 95 minutes | Free
Jean Renoir’s heavily edited The Woman on the Beach is nonetheless a fine, noirish treatment of the lingering trauma for a World War II combat veteran. Lieutenant Scott Burnett, following psychiatric treatment, has been assigned to a U.S. Coast Guard outpost. He slips into an affair of sorts—it is difficult to determine on the basis of the mutilated version that RKO released whether they are sexual lovers—with Peggy Butler, whose husband, Tod, a painter she drunkenly blinded years ago, aggressively attempts to befriend Burnett. It is difficult not to see the Butlers’ contentious marriage, which includes elements of sadistic abuse and masochistic recrimination and guilt, as a dream projection of Burnett’s war-related trauma.
Indeed,
the film itself—this is part of its noirishness—sometimes resembles a
dream through which Burnett is sleepwalking. It ends decisively:
following a fire that Tod starts to burn his paintings, thus ending his
obsession with them as well as his similar desire to hold onto Peggy,
the Butlers walk off the beach, together, in one direction and Scott
walks off, confidently, in the opposite direction. It may be impossible
for him to shake off the vile experience of war; but he is sufficiently
integrated now that we see his resolute determination to get on with the
rest of his life.
Surely Renoir’s attention was drawn to Joan Bennett by Fritz Lang’s (mediocre) remake of Renoir’s brilliant La chienne; but what a difference! For Lang, Bennett is strikingly though agreeably over-the-top; for Renoir, she is nuanced, captivating, intriguing. One suspects that Ryan’s Burnett suffers most from the slash-job. Bickford is powerful as Tod, allegedly the greatest living painter who, alas, can no longer paint because he can no longer see: what a metaphor for postwar Burnett!
Booking required. Click here tor reserve your tickets
Friday 24 May
Film screening: Peterloo | Free
Mike Leigh brings an overwhelming simplicity and severity to this historical epic, which begins with rhetoric and ends in violence. There is force, grit and, above all, a sense of purpose; a sense that the story he has to tell is important and real, and that it needs to be heard right now. The film has an uncompromising seriousness, as much like George Eliot’s novel Felix Holt as Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy, the poem inspired by Peterloo.
On 16 August 1819, at what we would now call a pro-democracy demonstration in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, an excitable band of cavalry and yeomanry – whose commander had airily absented himself for a day at the races – charged with sabres drawn into a crowd of 100,000 unarmed people, many of whom were unable to escape the enclosed space. The troops killed 18and injured hundreds more.
Booking required. Click here tor reserve your tickets
About Sands Films
An independent film production facility operating in an 18th century listed building in Rotherhithe since 1975. In addition to the studio facilities and the costume service, the venue is home to the Rotherhithe Picture Research Library; it can also be hire for private or public events
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