“We aim to give our discerning audience films from classic world cinema, films that will not be seen repeatedly on the television screens or on the big commercial chains. This year we have gone for an international flavour,” says Nigel Thorpe, part of the successful team behind GalleryFilm.

The monthly showings at Dulwich Picture Gallery are more akin to a great film club – but without membership fees. There are drinks and snacks served for up to 45 minutes before the screening, which gives ample time for mingling. Before the film starts there is an introduction given by one of the film team giving an insight and background to the film and there are also notes to take home.

This is the second season for the new film team and so far it has been close to sell-outs for all their films. Last season ended with TinTin, aimed at the younger audience and it was a full and very happy house. “We aim to have one family film per season and this year it’s the Disney favourite Aristocats, shown on Sunday 3 March at 3.45. Children will be encouraged to turn up in cat costumes and best costume will get a prize. The film team will all turn up dressed as cats and join in the singing of the unforgettable ‘Everyone wants to be a cat’. It promises to be quite a session,” says Nigel Thorpe.

But for the more serious film goers there are a string of exciting films. After the TV film about Hitchcock and the film soon to be released about his marriage, here is a chance to see one of his earliest Hollywood classics from 1944, the black thriller Shadow of a Doubt. It stars Joseph Cotton and Teresa Wright. It has all the hallmarks of Hitchcock at his best; suspense and excitement. This is the first film of the season and it is showing on Monday 21 January.

Next up is another thrilling movie with an undertone of horror. On Monday 18 February GalleryFilm will show the lauded The Orphanage from 2007, directed by the Spanish master Juan Antonio Cayo, at present garnering critical praise for his current film The Impossible. The Orphanage has received seven Goya awards in its native Spain and is a most beautifully told ghost story with a gripping narrative. “We chose this Spanish film to coincide with the Murillo exhibition at the Gallery and before the screening Number 22 from Half Moon Lane, Dulwich will serve complimentary tapas and drinks to get us in the right mood.”

Trishna

“The reason why we selected Le Havre, which is shown on Monday 11 March, is just because it is such a good film and it disappeared all too quickly last year from general release.”    It is directed by the prize-winning Finnish director Ali Kaurismaki and is a big-hearted comedy set in the Normandy port. It is about a young Congolese teenager fleeing from the authorities and who is helped by a shoe-shine man. It gives an insight into the plight of refugees but it is told with a dry sense of humour.

Monday 8 April sees the showing of Trishna, an Anglo-Indian film directed by Michael Winterbottom. It stars Frieda Pinto from Slumdog Millionaire and is based on Tess of the D’Urbevilles transplanted from Dorset to Jaipur and Mumbai.  In the newly industrialised India love is worth little when opposed by money and power. The film got rave reviews at its premiere last year. “And Ganapati, the Indian restaurant in Peckham, will serve Indian drinks and snacks before the film. We have been very lucky in attracting very enthusiastic sponsors from local restaurants like Ganapati, Romeo & Jones, Mimosa and Number 22.”

Le Havre

So successful is the team that they are now looking for film-interested volunteers. “We need people willing to help out on the film nights, once a month, as well as helping us to select films and write film notes. It’s a great team, well I would say that,” says Nigel Thorpe with a laugh, “as we are six girls and me.” Anyone interested can contact Nigel at nigeljthorne@gmail.com

Tickets for the films including drinks and snacks are only £9, and if you are a Friend of Dulwich Picture Gallery it is only £7. Now try to beat that for price for an evening in good company and with the best that cinema can offer.

GalleryFilm - For further information please visit www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk .

Tickets can be obtained by telephone 020 8299 8750 Mon to Fri 10am-4pm or via the website or from Friends Desk in the Gallery

Tintin might be the world’s favourite young reporter but in actuality he has now reached the respectable age of 83 years.

He was born 10 January 1929 and his “father”, the Belgian artist Georges Remi, better known under his pen-name Hergé, did not think he would be around for long. How wrong he was. Tintin has become one of the most popular comic series of the 20th century and his adventures have been translated into fifty different languages and sold more than 200 million copies.

The young reporter always accompanied by his faithful fox terrier Snowy is a character known to children all over the world and the love he engenders does not wither with age, it seems that grown-ups are equally fond of the young boy with his spiky quiff. Maybe it is because he somehow represents innocence but combined with an enquiring mind and a talent for solving mysteries.

There is no violence in his adventures but Hergé worked hard on making proper plots with strong storylines and they covered everything from political thrillers to science fiction. What really made the stories were the touches of almost slapstick humour. His characters all brought something to sustain the storylines. Who can forget Captain Haddock and the mad Professor Calculus?

These are the ingredients that have attracted so many other artists to turn Tintin’s adventures into plays and films and even videogames and musicals. The latest is Steven Spielberg who has turned The Secret of the Unicorn into a magnificent film. It had its premiere last year to great acclaim by both critics and an appreciative audience of Tintin fans. In this film Spielberg has managed to conjure up a visual feast that explores the boundaries of computer animation. With the help of Daniel Craig, Jamie Bell and Simon Pegg, Spielberg has relied on the cream of English acting. It is this film that is being shown at Dulwich Picture Gallery on Sunday 2nd December, a treat for the whole family.

What would Hergé have thought of the never-ending popularity of Tintin? The Secret of the Unicorn was first published in English in 1942 during the height of the Second World War. Hergé had been directly affected by the war himself. Before the war he worked on a Belgian newspaper but it was closed down when the Germans occupied Belgium. In spite of his fame he decided to stay on during the Nazi occupation and went on to work as an illustrator at Le Soir, a major daily, where he was later made responsible for the Children’s Section. This gave him an opportunity to give a bigger platform for his boy reporter Tintin. Yet, during the war Tintin was turned into an explorer rather than an intrepid investigative journalist – as not to attract the attention of the Nazis.

Hergé died in 1983 at the age of of 76 and thanks to Tintin he died a very rich man;  today, The Hergé Foundation owns the rights to his works. Royalties and awards still roll in and his ardent followers write tomes on  Tintinology where Tintin and his adventures are analysed from both literary and political angles.

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
(2011) Cert PG/107 mins
Sunday 2 December
3.45 at Dulwich Picture Gallery, Linbury Room
£5

Booking details:
Online: www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk
Phone: 020 8299 8750 Mon-Fri 10.am – 4pm
Tickets also available from Friends Desk at the Gallery

GalleryFilm has been going for some seven years and has become a meeting point for people who are interested in films but not in the popcorn chomping and fizzy drink slurping which tend to take place at most cinemas nowadays.

Bright Star (2005) showing on 15 October

At Dulwich Picture Gallery there are glasses of wine and exciting bites from local restaurants or delicatessens. And all that is included in the ticket price.

“It’s not just about the film; it’s also a social occasion before the film starts. It is, relaxed and informal,” says Nigel Thorpe, who is one of the eight who make up the GalleryFilm team. “We like to think we are offering a club atmosphere but without a membership.” The audience also gets something that the cinemas do not offer. Each film is preceded by a well-researched introduction and there is also a fact sheet to take home for further reading.

When asked how the team selects the movies Nigel Thorpe says there are no special criteria, “but we are looking for classical films from all over the world and specifically those that are not constantly shown on the television. They must also resonate with our core audience, who are both curious and broadminded.” The eight team members are meeting this week and will then have a discussion on what to offer during 2013. “We all have our specific ideas but it’s a question of presenting a mix that is well balanced.”

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011)

They also have been very successful in encouraging local restaurants and caterers to sponsor the pre-film snacks. “Yes, we like to be able to offer our audience food that connects with the film, “says Nigel Thorpe and mentions tapas for Spanish films.

Each season also features a film for children. On 2nd December they will show The Adventures of TinTin: The Secret of the Unicorn.  This is a visual feast that combines computer animation with acting of the highest calibre. Daniel Craig plays the villainous Rackham and Jamie Bell gives voice to TinTin, Herge’s famous boy detective. This is a film that will appeal to all ages.

The Artist (2011)

To set the season off, GalleryFilm presents the lauded film The Artist, which was voted best film in Cannes 2011 and secured a total of five Oscars last year. It is a charming homage to Hollywood of the silent era and without any dialogue it manages to capture the tragedy, romance and comedy thanks to the wonderful acting of Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo – and watch out for the wonderful performance by the now famous dog. It is shown on 10th September.

Next month, on 15th October another fairly new film is shown. Bright Star won plaudits after its first showing in 2005. The film is directed by Jane Campion and stars Ben Wishaw and Abbie Cornish.  It is a portrait of the young poet John Keats who in 1818 falls in love with Fanny Brawne. Their young love is opposed by her family and leads eventually to heartbreak. Many consider this Jane Campion’s finest film – a feast for the eyes and emotions.

The Beat that my Heart Skipped (2005)

Less well known is November’s offering, which is shown on 12th November. The Beat that My Heart skipped was premiered in 2005 and won two BAFTA-awards. The film is directed by Jacques Audiard and stars Romain Duris, who gives dazzling performance of a young man torn between a life of crime and music. It is a gripping noir thriller and a film that electrified critics and audiences alike.

In the lead-up to Christmas it is time for a classic comedy,that has stood the test of more than fifty years. The Apartment was directed by Billy Wilder and stars the brilliant Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. It garnered five Oscars, including one for Best Picture. Jack Lemmon finds promotion by lending his apartment to his philandering boss’s extra-marital dalliances – and then finds that his boss has an affair with the girl of his dreams. He has to make a decision – lose his job or the girl. It has some of the most sparkling dialogue in movie history. Put 10th December in your diary now for some pre-Christmas entertainment.

GalleryFilm offers the best way of enjoying a good film, in the company of likeminded and in a convivial atmosphere.

GalleryFilm: Screenings and more…

Each sociable evening includes complimentary glass of wine and snacks, an introduction to the film and film notes.

Bar opens at 7pm
Screenings at 7.45
Tickets £9, £7 Friends
Linbury Room, Dulwich Picture Gallery

You can buy tickets at friends Desk in the Gallery; you can also book online at www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk. 

Free wine and food provided by Blue Mountain Cafe
Free raffle prize donated by Herne Hill Books
Introduction and film notes
DVD sales, bring and buy

1993 Cert 15 98 mins
Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Cast: Benoit Regent, Helene Vincent, Juliette Binoche

‘Three Colours Blue is the first of a profoundly moving trilogy exploring the present meaning of the French Revolution’s liberty, equality and fraternity.

In Blue Juliette Binoche is the wife of a prominent European composer, who goes into a mourning which denies everything about her old life, when a car crash kills both her husband and her child. Her attempts to avoid the traps of going backwards or forwards in her life – which include the discovery of her husband’s mistress, and the discovery by others of an uncompleted and bombastic Concerto For Europe which only she can finish are in the end, abortive. But the film suggests that she has still found a new kind of freedom, even that born of emptiness and despair. What brings her back is first and foremost the music, from which she can never wholly escape. The Concerto For Europe has to be finished, despite all her fear and solitude.

Binoche’s performance is deeper and stronger than anything else she has given us.’
Derek Malcom, The Guardian

‘A year before Kieslowski made this film, the Maastricht treaty had brought the European community into being and the European ideal was a fashionable topic for the political classes in continental Europe, if not the Britain of John Major.

In Blue, the composer had been working on a huge orchestral work to celebrate European union: it is a rather bombastic-sounding piece of music which the audience is nonetheless expected to take seriously. Yet this European anthem appears at disquieting moments. Great, deafening shards of music will crash into scenes with Julie, like traumatic flashbacks, re-awakening Julie to what she is, what she has done. A great chord will announce what looks like the end of a scene, we fade to black, fade back in – and Julie is still there, still talking, still dealing with her memories. That great chorus of supposed unity is juxtaposed with a drama of dislocation and alienation.

The Three Colours trilogy is an operatic triptych, a dramatic cine-poem of intense strangeness, indulgent and confident, set somewhere which looks like the real world, but isn’t.

With the Eurozone and the European ideal in such crisis, now is an interesting moment to watch the Three Colours again.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

French with subtitles
GalleryFilm plans to screen Three Colours White and Three Colours Red in the future.

Free wine and food provided by Blue Mountain Cafe
Free raffle prize donated by Herne Hill Books
Introduction and film notes
DVD sales, bring and buy
Monday 16 January
7 for 7.45pm
Tickets £9/£7 Friends – online WeGotTickets   or 020 8299 8750 (weekdays only)
Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, SE21

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Part of South East London Film Club Network

Info on future GalleryFilm screenings

Poisonous snakes, filthy water, a diet of whisky and a leading lady throwing up between takes . . . in this interview  by Steve Rose  for the Guardian, Anjelica Huston reveals how her father filmed his classic, The African Queen, which can be seen at Dulwich Picture Gallery on 10 October and is introduced by Steve Rose.

Anjelica Huston  is recalling her father’s reputation for putting his actors through hell on shoots. “Basically,” she says, “the one thing you had to do was take it well. My father, John Huston admired anyone who actually survived it all. Usually, it was a test to see if you had: a) any bravery; or b) a sense of humour. Somehow, if you came out with either of those intact, you graduated.”

Anjelica knows all about her father’s approach, having acted in four of his films, but on this occasion she’s talking about The African Queen, one of John Huston’s  best loved and most enduring films, which was made in 1951, the year Anjelica was born.

The film’s status as a classic has now been cemented by a full restoration, involving a frame-by-frame clean-up of the original negatives, premiered at Cannes this year.

The making of The African Queen is the stuff of legend: everyone had to “take it well” on this one.

In 1951, Hollywood directors rarely strayed beyond the studio lot, but Huston had already made The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in Mexico, and insisted on shooting The African Queen in Africa – in what was then the Belgian Congo and Uganda.

What a surreal congregation it must have been: Humphrey Bogart, Huston’s drinking buddy and regular leading man; Bogart’s young wife Lauren Bacall, who decided to come along for the ride; Katharine Hepburn, unpopular at the box office and at a crucial stage in her career; and a crew of British technicians, including cinematographer Jack Cardiff and future Bond director Guy Hamilton. Then there was Huston himself: man of action, war veteran and incurable adventurer.

The African Queen is one of those movies that shouldn’t work, but does. Set in German east Africa, it’s the unlikely story of a starched English missionary (Hepburn) and an unsanitary, gin-swilling boat captain (Bogart), who embark on a self-imposed downriver mission to do their bit in the first world war. If you were pitching it today, you might describe it as Apocalypse Now without the apocalypse, meets Speed without the speed.
There are rapids, Germans, breakdowns and hungry leeches to negotiate, but it’s less an action thriller than an eccentric opposites-attract romance, fuelled by the unexpected chemistry between its middle-aged leads. “There’s a kind of wink behind the movie,” says Anjelica. “You feel a kind of complicity – knowing he had these poor actors trapped in the Belgian Congo. I think it adds to the enjoyment.”

Angela Allen, one of the few surviving members of the crew, agrees. “It was not an easy shoot,” says Allen, who was a 22-year-old continuity checker on the film (she went on to make 13 more movies with Huston). “It certainly wasn’t a luxury safari like people go on today. We lived in a camp hacked out of the jungle. You had to leap into bed at night before the mosquitoes could get you, and shake your boots in the morning to make sure there were no centipedes. You washed with red water from the river, and you had a bucket with a string for a shower.”

Filming on the river was tricky. The African Queen was too small to shoot in, given the size of the Technicolor cameras, so mock-ups were made of each end of the boat and placed on rafts. The crew would follow behind in more rafts, forming a bizarre flotilla. Bringing up the rear was the sole concession to luxury: Hepburn’s private lavatory tent, as stipulated in her contract. “Nobody else was allowed to use it,” says Allen.

Hepburn, much like her character, looked on Bogart and Huston’s alcoholic regimen with disdain. She made a point of drinking only water, which ironically made her sick. Bogart and Huston, on the other hand, were fine. “All I ate was baked beans, canned asparagus and Scotch whisky” Bogart later recalled. “Whenever a fly bit Huston or me, it dropped dead.”

The restored print highlights just how green and gaunt Hepburn looked. During some scenes, a bucket was kept off-camera for her to throw up into between takes.

“It was very tough for Katie Hepburn,” says Allen. “She had very definite ideas about everything and everybody. One day we were shooting a complicated shot and John said, ‘Print it,’ and she said, ‘You weren’t even watching!’ John said, ‘But I was listening.’ ‘But you weren’t watching,’ she insisted and demanded they do it again. To turn the whole flotilla around and come back down the river took hours. John did shoot another take, but we used the original anyway.”

There are tales of dysentery, diarrhoea and other tropical ailments, not to mention soldier ants, hippos, black mambas and crocodiles. But adversity drew everyone together. Bogart helped pull the African Queen out of the river when it sank one night, while Bacall mucked in with the catering. She and Hepburn became lifelong friends, and Hepburn ultimately came to admire Huston. Their relationship even became flirtatious, judging by the memoir she wrote later, entitled The Making of the African Queen, or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind.

When not chronicling her bowel troubles, the book recalls Huston coming to her hut and massaging her when she was sick. It’s Bogart she falls for in the film, but The African Queen could not be a more accurate reflection of Hepburn’s thawing attitude to Huston. With his knowledge of art and literature, his rugged masculinity, and his famously mellifluous voice, the director eventually won her over. “John had such charisma and charm,” says Allen. “He could make the ugliest woman in the room feel beautiful. He never got mad, never lost his cool, and the boys would do anything for him. Crews adored him. It was tough, but there were never horrendous rows because John actually steered a very calm ship.”

This admiration was mutual, says Anjelica. “I remember, towards the end of his life, we were all having dinner and Dad started to talk about The African Queen. He said, ‘Katie was the best female friend I’ve ever had in my life.’ And Lauren Bacall, this little voice at the end of table, piped up, ‘Well what about me, John?’ And he said, ‘Oh honey, you were married to Bogey.’”

Huston had a brutish, chauvinistic side, though. This was recorded by Peter Viertel, a young writer on the shoot who turned his experiences into the novel White Hunter, Black Heart, in which Huston (or rather “John Wilson”) is portrayed as a self-indulgent drunk who’s more interested in shooting an elephant than a movie. “I always take exception to people who take it too literally,” says Anjelica of the book. “I think, for the purposes of novelisation, you have to pump up the volume a bit.” Although she admits the gun room in their family home in Ireland had a few stuffed heads, she insists that Huston never shot an elephant.

Still, the story has prevailed. Clint Eastwood turned White Hunter, Black Heart into a movie, in which he both channelled Huston’s alpha-male swagger and critiqued it. “He did quite a good job on my dad,” says Anjelica, who doesn’t remember her father being particularly hands-on. “He was generally away or out of sight. It was a bit of a disjointed family scenario: my father resided in the big house, my mother, brother and I – and our nanny – were in the little house next to it. He always brought a lot of lovely exotic presents back, but, yes, he was largely absent.”

John later bonded with Anjelica the only way he knew how: through film. She made her acting debut in 1968 in A Walk With Love and Death, his cumbersome 14th-century romance. “I don’t think it’s his best movie and it certainly isn’t mine,” she laughs. “He was tough on me. I had trouble with my lines. It was awful. But he was always hard on actors if he didn’t get what he wanted. I just took it personally.”

‘He directed in an oxygen mask’
Things had improved by the time of Prizzi’s Honour in 1985, for which Anjelica received a best supporting actor Oscar. Huston’s last film, 1987′s The Dead, seemed like a final effort to settle family differences: it was adapted by his son Tony from James Joyce’s short story; it starred Anjelica; and it dealt with the regrets of an Irish family. By this stage, Huston was giving way to emphysema, and often had to direct wearing an oxygen mask. “I think Pauline Kael said about that film, it was easier for him to direct than breathe,” says Anjelica. “Because I was so sad to see him so sick, I was depressed, too. But he was amazing, completely in charge. It went as smooth as glass.”

Thanks to The Guardian for allowing us to reproduce this article.

The African Queen is showing at Dulwich Picture Gallery on 10 October

Directed by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn, Robert Morley

Introduced by Guardian film critic Steve Rose who will also be hosting a Q&A

In Africa during WW1, a gin-swilling riverboat owner/captain is persuaded by a strait-laced missionary to use his boat to attack an enemy warship. And so begins one of the all-time great screen partnerships between the grumpy, boorish Charlie Allnut (Bogart) and snooty sister Rose Sayer (Hepburn), who somehow find romance along the way

Includes:

• Free wine and food provided by Romeo Jones, Dulwich Village
• Free Raffle prize: Humphrey Bogart by D. Thompson donated by Herne Hill Books
  
• Film notes
• DVD sales (please bring along your unwanted DVDs)

Bar opens at 7pm
Screenings at 7.45pm
Linbury Room, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, SE21 7AD
£8, £6 Friends/students online from WeGotTickets
or by phone (restricted hours) 020 8299 8750

More info
Dulwich Picture Gallery Gallery Road, SE21
Follow us on Facebook

Alex taking tickets

GalleryFilm, the film club of Dulwich Picture Gallery has won an award for innovation at the British Federation of Film Society’s ‘Film Society of the Year Awards’

The Jim Dempster Award for Innovation is described as a ‘new award to celebrate the group that shows thinking ‘outside the box’. This might be demonstrated through special projects, an inspiring programme or a completely new way of challenging the film society or community cinema model. The criteria for this award is deliberately brief, to allow the most far-reaching of entries. Think ‘different’!

We were one of 3 winners of this award.

Audience at 'An Island' free film

Who are we?  GalleryFilm was set up 6 years ago by volunteers who love film, Dulwich Picture Gallery and our local community. In these 6 years we have created an immensely popular film club (we sell out at pretty much every screening now, capacity 100), attracting a very diverse range of people, supported by local businesses which provide free food and drink at every film. We have created not just a film club, but a community of people who come to meet and socialise, having an interest in film and perhaps food and drink in common, but in other ways are very different.

Our programming has included World cinema – Polish, French, Spanish, Italian, Indian – Hollywood classic, black and white, British Classic, Contemporary, music (free), Children’s, family sing-a-long.
See photos taken at many of the films.

We take into account the temporary exhibitions at DPG.
Examples:   This year we put on an Italian Film Festival linking to the exhibition ‘Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters’. The curator Nick Cullinan of the exhibition from Tate Modern introduced one of the films.

Every January we have a Polish film – DPG has Polish roots and there is a Polish community nearby. This is supported by a local Polish deli, Piast in Crystal Palace.
We put on Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven during the exhibition ‘The Wyeth Family’ as this was greatly influenced by Andrew Wyeth. The American Cultural Attaché came to introduce that one.

Sometimes we have a joke. DPG had a reproduction of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa up for a while. So we put on Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa. The curator gave a short talk about the painting, in front of the painting. There was surprise and some consternation among some of the audience when they discovered the subject matter of the film. They had obviously not read the publicity material.

Why did we win?

Community vision

Romeo Jones' free food at drink at a screening

Supporting and being supported by local businesses
• Local businesses are really happy to provide free food and drink before each film in return for our publicity. They publicise our films and sometimes they suggest films and we have all become good friends.

Supporting and being supported by the local community

Grease Sing-a-Long

Every August bank holiday we have an outdoor family sing-a-long. See video made by a volunteer of Mamma Mia in 2009. This year we sold 650 tickets for Grease Sing-a-Long.
• We offer free pitches to local businesses – locally made popcorn, baguettes, ice cream, coffee, cakes, books etc.
• A local dance school, Gleek School, gave a short performance before the film – 50’s style singing and dancing.

• Push studiosled singing and dancing before the film.

Push studios leads singing and dancing before Hairspray

Supporting and being supported by other film clubs
• We have linked up with 12 other SE London film clubs, have set up a communal website South East London Film Clubs Network, to publicise each other, so raising awareness of independent film in SE London in general.
• We meet regularly and exchange fliers, so promoting each other at our screenings.
• We are planning a joint film festival later this year.

free food and drink from Barcelona Tapas bar and Restaurant

GalleryFilm has created its own supportive diverse community
We have set up a Facebook group which now has more than 400 members. We ask for members’ suggestions and put up photos taken at most of the evenings encouraging people to tag themselves and ‘like’. Quote from Facebook: Ingrid, you and Paul and friends deserve our congratulations for improving the social scene in Dulwich, it is lovely to have a little garden party with drinks and food before the excellent films.

Technology

Online ticketing
Dulwich Picture Gallery does not have the facility to sell events tickets online so GalleryFilm set up a third party ticketing system WeGotTickets as an addition to the DPG phone line and buying in person at Friends’ desk options.

The use of social networking for marketing. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and of course Dulwich OnView!

And along the way we donate on average £9,000 a year to DPG.

BFFS award Bella, Ingrid, Paul

Dulwich Picture Gallery appreciation:
Gallery Film is a wonderful series that helps attract in new, younger audiences, local businesses and the Dulwich community to participate with the Gallery in innovative ways – and the Gallery is grateful for all your hard work.
With all best wishes from Dulwich,
Kathleen

Kathleen Bice
Development Officer, Membership & Patrons
Dulwich Picture Gallery

jolly barmen Nigel & Matthew

Anna dishes out soup

So thanks to our lovely team, Paul, Bella, Matthew, Katy, Annie, Anna and Nigel.

Films until Christmas

Buy tickets online

Join our Facebook group

On a big screen in the Dulwich Picture Gallery gardens
on Bank Holiday Monday 29 August

Celebrate the end of the summer holidays in style!

THE FILM

(1978) Cert PG/110 minutes Starring John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John – you knew that didn’t you?

THE FOOD
There will be loads of food and drink stalls, so you don’t need to make a picnic.

Romeo Jones – hot dogs, sodas etc.

Patrick and Amanda support GalleryFilm

Viet Van’s  Vietnamese baguettes

Dave's Vietnamese baguettes

Peter Popple’s Popcorn

Louise's Peter Popples Popcorn

Julie Madly Deeply ‘Grease’ themed cakes

Jules' themed cakes

Scoop.ed Ice cream

The Little Coffee Van – says it all

Paul and Tammy's Little Coffee Van

GalleryFilm Friends bar

And even a Book Stall – Rye books

Alastair's Rye Book stall on North Cross Road

THE ENTERTAINMENT

Dulwich based Glee Club, Harmony High are busy preparing for their appearance at Sing-a-long Grease!  The group of 20 local teenagers will be performing some the best loved songs from the hit tv show Glee, together with their own all-singing, all-dancing arrangements!  We are hoping to get you in the mood to raise your voices when the film shows!

Harmony High

Kevin and his colleagues from Push Studios will get everyone on their feet leading singing and dancing from Grease.

Push studios leads the dancing at Hairspray 2010

THE DRESSING UP

That’s up to you – prizes for best adults and children’s 50’s gear.

GalleryFilm Grease 2007

GalleryFilm Hairspray 2010

FREE BALLOONS for the kids

Balloons for the big kids too

PROGRAMME

6.30pm gates open
7pm Fancy dress judging
7.15pm Harmony High
7.30pm learn Grease dances with Kevin and Push Studios
8pm film starts

Get a flavour of the evening - video of similar event in 2009

online or 020 8299 8750 or at the Friends’ Desk in Dulwich Picture Gallery     £6

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Facebook event

How to get there

Director Victor Erice / Spain 1973 / 97 minutes / Cert PG

Monday 9 May at Dulwich Picture Gallery
Free Spanish tapas and sparkling wine kindly donated by Barcelona Tapas

Derek Malcolm wrote for the Guardian …

I once showed a dozen or so classic non-American films to students at the Royal College of Art. To my surprise, despite the fact that the list included the work of such world-renowned directors as Luis Bunuel, Satyajit Ray and Kenji Mizoguchi, the film they fell in love with was Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive. They rightly thought it close to magic. It is one of the most beautiful and arresting films ever made in Spain, or anywhere in the past 25 years or so.

Set in the Castillian countryside around 1940, when Franco had won the civil war but was still hunting down republican sympathisers, and made in 1973 when it was necessary for Spanish film-makers to cloak their political messages in allegory, it has an eight-year-old girl called Ana, superbly played by Ana Torrent, as its central character.

She watches James Whale’s Frankenstein at the local cinema and can’t understand why Frankenstein kills the little girl he meets and seems to cherish by the lakeside. Her elder sister, Isabel (Isabel Telleria), explains that nobody actually dies in movies. But she adds that the monster is really a spirit who can take on human form and can be summoned up by closing your eyes and calling out: “I’m Ana”. She has seen him in a deserted outhouse near the village.

Ana is determined to invoke the spirit. Going across the deserted fields to the outhouse, she finds a republican fugitive and brings him clothes and food. For her, he is Frankenstein and even though he is shot by the civil guard, she is certain spirits don’t die and dreams that she meets him, like the little girl in Whale’s film. Brought back home by her distracted parents and put to bed, she goes to her bedroom window and whispers: “I’m Ana, I’m Ana.”

The film can be construed in many ways but is, above all, an almost perfect summation of childhood imaginings. It is also about the pall Franco’s long shadow left over Spain. Ana’s father, played with understated power by Fernando Fernan Gomez, has evidently been traumatised by the civil war and is a shadowy figure writing a treatise on beekeeping while his wife writes letters to a would-be lover, exiled in France. They are a family “locked up in themselves”, unable to avoid the terrible emotional consequences of the civil war and the absolute triumph of dictatorship.

The film is thus cloaked in quiet and sadness, through which its children move almost as if in a dreamworld of their own. It is brilliantly shot by the great Luis Cuadrado in atmospherically muted colours: the series of dissolves with which he denotes the passing of time outside the makeshift cinema where the children see Frankenstein provides one stunning sequence, but there are many.

Few know that Cuadrado was going blind at the time, which makes his work all the more remarkable. There is also a memorable score from Luis de Pablo, which sums up everything while underlining nothing.

It is virtually impossible to get the sight and sound of the film out of one’s mind after watching it.

Explanation of Spirit by film scholar Linnda Ehrlich

• Free food and wine donated by Barcelona Tapas, Lordship Lane
• Free raffle prize – ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley donated by Herne Hill Books
• Introduction and film notes

GalleryFilm at Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, SE21 7AD.
7.15pm bar opens, 7.45pm screening

Tickets: £8, Friends of DPG £6
Online or ring 020 8299 8750

More info
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GalleryFilm are screening this deliciously black Ealing comedy with Alec Guinness taking eight major roles and the limelight from everyone else.

Monday 18 April at 7.15pm for 7.45pm

- Free wine and food donated by Romeo Jones
- Raffle prize DVD The Ladykillers

A clip from the film is in the DOV video collection – bottom of home page.
Deprived of his inheritance by the D’Ascoyne family, Louis Mazzini (played with cool and masterly understatement by Dennis Price) plots to regain his title and avenge his wronged mother. Standing between him and his inheritance are eight of the D’Ascoynes, all of whom are played with relish by Alec Guinness in a variety of guises. Coolly and beautifully cynical in its detached view of Edwardian society and manners, this is one of Ealing’s finest. Funny, articulate and really quite amoral.

Director: John Hamer
Cast: Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Valerie Hobson and Dennis Price

106 mins, 1949 (black & white)   Cert U

We have unashamedly copied an excellent article by Peter Bradshaw, the film critic of the Guardian, who in Nov 2009 compared the film with the novel on which it is based.

Thank you Peter Bradshaw.

Kind Hearts and Coronets: from ‘anti-Semitic’ novel to classic film

Kind Hearts and Coronets is the elegant black comedy about a suburban draper’s assistant, Louis Mazzini, played by Dennis Price, who by a quirk of fate is distantly in line to a dukedom and sets out to murder every single nobleman and noblewoman ahead of him in the succession so that he can get his hands on the ermine. All the members of this complacent family are famously played by Alec Guinness in various guises, and this multi-performance is superbly detailed and differentiated: not a pantomime dressing-up turn, but an inspired tour de force, as if eight different excellent actors from the same family had somehow been brought to the screen.

It is based on a very interesting book: a 1907 novel called Israel Rank, by the Edwardian actor-manager and author Roy Horniman – a work which since 1949 has attained a kind of cult fascination by virtue of being, until very recently, obscure and almost impossible to find.

The Daily Telegraph journalist Simon Heffer, with enormous energy and resourcefulness, tracked down a copy, wrote about the book’s importance, and it is Mr Heffer who has the distinction of having single-handedly retrieved this novel from oblivion. It is witty, tremendously written and a real page-turner, and is now republished as a print-on-demand item from Faber Finds, with an introductory essay online by Heffer.

However, the weird samizdat aura still surrounds the novel by virtue of the strange copy-editing slips that speckle almost every single page of this new edition.

There is a very specific reason why Israel Rank has been shrouded in reticence and unspoken embarrassment. In the movie, Dennis Price’s social-climbing serial killer was supposed to be half-Italian: in the book he is a Jew, whose first name speaks for itself and whose second name hints punningly at social hierarchy but also, unquestionably, at a bad smell.

The adaptation’s change – which of course arguably offends Italians – could be read as a tacit admission that one of our greatest films is taken from a dubious source, and that there is something questionable about the idea of a Jew (actually his father is a Jew, his mother a Christian) insinuating himself into the intimate friendship of the English nobility, and then murdering them, his cunningly concealed ambition feeding parasitically off the dead bodies of these aristocrats. The most deliriously inspired homicide – which is not used in the movie – is Israel’s murder of a baby boy by wiping the infant’s face with a handkerchief impregnated with the spores of scarlet fever. That comes really very close to the ancient blood libel.

So is Israel Rank the most obviously antisemitic novel of modern times? Simon Heffer argues forcefully that it in fact satirises anti-semitism, daringly conjuring up the anti-semite’s most paranoid fantasies, though in doing so “skirts dangerous territory, and possibly even wades into it”. This I think is true, and I think Horniman is also, specifically, satirising English attitudes to the career of Benjamin Disraeli: his wicked antihero at one stage relaxes with a copy of Disraeli’s novel Vivian Gray. In its dreary suburban setting, it is also a premonition of the work of Patrick Hamilton.

No lover of the film will want to remain in ignorance of this book; reading it, while imagining Dennis Price’s musical voice in your head, is like having access to a delicious deleted scene. But it also has the unfortunate effect of smudging what I can only describe as the film’s innocence, if a film about an unrepentant serial killer can be described in this way. The original is, arguably, chancy and provocative in a way that the film isn’t. Offensiveness has a certain worrying potency.

Set against this is the fact that the changes made by Hamer and dramatist John Dighton immeasurably improve the book. The murders onscreen have a cantering gaiety and narrative momentum which Horniman lacks. The book has an unwieldy third love-interest for the protagonist, a woman whose abject love for him creates the plot twist which saves Rank from the gallows. But Hamer and Dighton stick to just two women in Louis’s life – Sibella and Edith – creating a simpler dilemma which is far more satisfying. Finally, Hamer and Dighton come up with a completely original final act, devising an irony by which Louis is arrested for the one murder he never commits: this is a masterpiece of suspense, much better than Israel Rank’s final anticlimactic and implausible sloppiness.

Most importantly, removing the “Jewish” part of the book makes it a universal story. Kind Hearts and Coronets is a brilliant satirical parable for career ambition: anyone who has ever yearned enviously for a certain job or position – and tormented himself with those people ahead of them in the pecking order – will recognise and perhaps secretly admire Louis for his criminal daring. Israel Rank was a minor classic for its time; Kind Hearts and Coronets is a still major classic right now.

FREE  wine and food donated by Romeo Jones
FREE raffle prize – DVD The Ladykillers

Monday 18 April in the Linbury Room, Dulwich Picture Gallery
7.15pm bar opens, 7.45pm introduction and screening
Tickets £8, £6 Friends.  Call 020 8299 8750 or email friendsticketing@dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk
More info
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South East London Film Club Network.

AND – did you know, GalleryFilm has now joined up with 14 SE London independent community film clubs and we have put together a single website with all the films we are showing.

If you feel like going to a movie, visit this website first and see if there is an independent film club in your area showing something that you fancy.  If not, go to the chains.  Its like shopping locally rather than at a supermarket!

Hidden cameras and hidden guilt at Dulwich Picture Gallery on 21 March 11.

Director: Michael Haneke, starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil

Hidden (2005) is Michael Haneke’s masterpiece: a compelling politico-psychological essay about the denial and guilt mixed into the foundations of western prosperity, composed and filmed with remarkable technique. It is one of the great films of this decade.
The performances by Auteuil and Binoche as Georges and Anne are superb. – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian.

A smart marriage of the thriller genre with a compendium of strong ideas about guilt, racism, recent French history and cinema itself, Michael Haneke’s (The White Ribbon 2009) eighth feature is an unsettling, self-reflective masterpiece. It opens with a lingering, static shot of a bourgeois Parisian home. We watch as a woman leaves through the front door. Strangers stroll along the street. A car passes. Birdsong permeates the soundtrack. So far, so very normal; but what are we looking at – and why?

The question is rudely answered when rows of static appear and the image blurs and then begins to fast-forward. It’s an illusion: we are, in fact, watching a video that’s been sent anonymously to the owners of this house, Georges and Anne Laurent, a wealthy, middle-class couple who are ostensibly paragons of the Parisian intelligentsia. Georges is a French version of Melvyn Bragg and hosts a literary discussion show on TV; Anne works for a high-brow publisher. Once this visual trickery is revealed, we watch as the pair agonise over this sinister intrusion into their ordered lives. Who’s been filming their house? And why?

For the Laurents, it’s the start of a horrific upset that mirrors the disturbing breakdown of familial comfort that characterised Haneke’s ‘Funny Games’, ‘Time of the Wolf’ and ‘Benny’s Video’. This time, we’re immediately upset by and suspicious of Haneke’s opening video-volley. Can we trust him, we wonder, as the film continues? Are we always watching the main narrative, or further video recordings? Is there even a clear difference between the two? The introduction of these recordings – which crop up several times – makes this a multi-layered affair. Perception is all. Interpretations are plenty.

Some tapes arrive with childish drawings that hint at violence. The tapes and the flashbacks, we are led to believe, are linked and Georges becomes convinced that the videos are connected to an Algerian, Majid. He locates and confronts Majid and his son (allowing, in one scene, for a particularly jolting and unexpected coup de cinéma).

All the while, Haneke crafts the fabric and routine of Georges and Anne’s lives with cold precision, only to upset their habits violently at regular intervals: witness a sudden knock at the door during a civilised dinner with friends, or a whisper in the ear from Georges’ producer at the end of his chat show. The effect is to plant unease and suspicion at every turn. Auteuil and Binoche support this sense of implosion with superb performances.

But who is sending these tapes? What do they mean, for Georges and us? The entire film could be read as an expression of Georges’ guilt and hidden turmoil relating to his own past. The tapes are expressions of Georges’ psychological state as his darkest memories are finally unearthed in middle-age. If anyone can be accused of sending the tapes, it’s Georges, at least metaphorically. To interpret ‘Hidden’ any more literally is to miss the point. This is largely a character study – the study of a repressed man and the chaos caused when the valve is finally opened.

Yet, at the same time, Haneke presents this parable within the framework of a thriller. As such, he asks us to accept his film on both a literal and a metaphorical level. The logic of the genre – the desire to ask ‘who did it?’ – is a trap. It makes us complicit in Georges’ wild accusations that the Algerian might be responsible for this terror. We are forced to share his accusation, one that that hints strongly at France’s continuing, uneasy relationship with its immigrant population. It’s here that Haneke’s film leaves the personal behind and becomes a reflection on an entire society – a society famed from the outside for its commitment to progression and ideas. Georges and Anne are, on the face of it, enlightened, educated liberals. Yet Georges and Anne look elsewhere for a scapegoat for their own, very personal problems.
Georges and Anne are us.
Time Out

Cert 15
117 minutes

FREE  wine and food donated by Blackbird Bakery
FREE raffle prize – French wine

Monday 21 March 2011

7.15pm bar opens, 7.74pm screening

Tickets £8, £6 Friends.  Call 020 8299 8750 or email friendsticketing@dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

More info

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Efterklang by Rasmus Weng Karlsen

So I’ve been asked to write a blog about Efterklang, why I like them, and ultimately why you should come and see their film with Vincent Moon at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

I would like to say that I had my finger on the pulse back in 2000 when Efterklang was formed, or in 2004 when they released their first album Tripper – while they were still for the selected few who knew that something great was happening on the Danish underground Indie rock scene.

But, no, instead, my relationship with Efterklang is a story of going to concert in 2007, when Efterklangs momentum was starting to really pick up with their second album Parades, and being completely blown away by this, to me, new band.

What blew me away in particular, was the bands use of vocals, and I remember saying to the friend who had invited me along to the concert, that it in many ways felt like a Sigur Ros concert. The two bands are very different, but the way they both work to create a massive ’sound picture’ for the audience is very similar, at least to me as an average concert goer. Their song Mirador, from Parades is a great example of this, as is Modern Drift, from their latest album Magic Chairs.

I’ve have since seen Efterklang a few times at various Danish festivals, including Roskilde, and they seem to only be getting better.
As for Vincent Moon, all I know is that he made the film A Skin A Night together with and about one of my other favourite bands The National, which is a really beautifull film about the band and their music.
For this, and many more reasons, I’m really looking forward to seeing the outcome of Efterklang’s work with Vincent Moon in An Island at Dulwich Picture Gallery on Monday, March 7th.

As a side note, you get a good sign of the band’s and the film’s popularity when you look through the places where the film is being screened. From the looks of it, people will be watching it all over the world, from the Danish fishing town Esbjerg, to Montreal in Canada and Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.

Peter Baeck, a native of Denmark

More info To get on the waiting list, email efterklang.dulwich@gmail.com

In August 2010, French filmmaker Vincent Moon and Efterklang‘s 8 piece live band met up on an island off the Danish coast.

The objective was to shoot a film. A film with the same length as an album, and a film full of performances, experiments and collaborations. Over an intense period of 4 days Efterklang collaborated with more than 200 local musicians, kids and their own parents, creating new performances and interpretations of songs from their album Magic Chairs.

The band then invited fans and organisations to host free screenings of “An Island” around the world during February and March 2011.  Thousands took this up all over Australia, NZ, the US, East and West Europe, even Kuala Lumpur, Rio and Guadalajara.   Dulwich Picture Gallery is one such place.

GalleryFilm is screening ‘An Island’ on Monday 7 March at 8pm.  There is a pay bar and food from 7.30pm.

AND – JUST ARRANGED – 2 bands will be playing after the film:
The Last Dinosaur and Emily and the Woods.

Tickets are free but very limited, if you want to come along e-mail: efterklang.dulwich@gmail.com
To gain entry you will need to have the printout of the email responding to your request.  There will be a guest list.

More teasers at bottom of home page in DOV’s video collection.

A Sunday afternoon treat for the kids…GalleryFilm are showing the classic gangster movie for kids by Alan Parker, Bugsy Malone (1976).

• Sunday 6 March at 3.45pm in the Linbury Room (after ‘Artplay’ the drop-in family workshop at Dulwich Picture Gallery)
• Free juice and popcorn donated by Peter Popples Popcorn
• Prize for the best costume

“Small boys who talk like Al Capone. Girls in flapper dresses. Machine guns that fire whipped cream. That’s the bizarre genius that is director Alan Parker’s Bugsy Malone, the 1976 musical with a unique take on prohibition-era Chicago. As if you don’t know, Scott Baio stars as Bugsy, a wise-guy who gets tangled up in a local gang rivalry, while a 14-year-old Jodie Foster is Tallulah, singer at the local speakeasy. Ridiculous? Of course, that’s why we love it.

What’s more, if you’re under 30 you probably remember all the songs from that school production you were in. The story, here, is little more than a peg on which Parker hung his tongue-in-cheek vision, and centres around a power struggle between Fat Sam (John Cassisi) and Dandy Dan (Martin Lev) for control of a grocery racket. Bugsy finds himself drawn in when Dan threatens to take over town via liberal use of splurge guns; really, though, he’d rather be wooing newly arrived club singer Blousey (Florrie Dugger).

“GLORIOUSLY WEIRD”

Sure, some of the performances are distinctly Year Nine drama class, but the whole idea is so gloriously weird it doesn’t matter. The great set piece songs (and splurges) at Fat Sam’s Grand Slam speakeasy, and Scott Baio’s utterly winning turn as Bugsy, ensure this movie is guaranteed to inspire those warm, Sunday afternoon, family-around-the-television kind of feelings. And there’s proof that there is some justice in Hollywood; Jodie Foster, the only actor here to achieve full-blown mega-stardom, acts her small co-stars off the screen.” Review by David Mattin for BBC Movies.

• Sunday 6 March at 3.45pm in the Linbury Room (after ‘Artplay’ the drop-in family workshop at Dulwich Picture Gallery)
• Free juice and popcorn donated by Peter Popples Popcorn
• Prize for the best costume

Tickets £4 Call 020 8299 8750 or email friendsticketing@dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

Join our GalleryFilm Facebook group

‘beautifully made…tender, funny and almost unbearably moving’

GalleryFilm is screening this charming film, which is almost a love story, one week after Valentine’s Night. Directed by John Carney, starring Glen Hansard and Marketa irglova. And the music is superb; Hansard’s song, Falling Slowly, was an Academy Award Winner in 2007.

Cert 15, 87 minutes
* Monday  21 March 7.15 for 7.45pm in the Linbury Room, Dulwich Picture Gallery
* Drinks and snacks provided by GalleryFilm, included in the ticket price
* Free raffle prize – the award winning CD soundtrack to ‘Once’

In the film review by Cosmo Landesman for The Sunday Times, published in October 2007, he wrote:
“Written and directed by John Carney, Once is a unique film: a low-budget, low-fi modern musical that is scruffy, soulful and full of beautiful tunes about battered hearts and bruised hopes. It’s the Hollywood musical of old, but unplugged and stripped of lavish sets and big numbers. Instead, it offers a minimal narrative and a lush lyricism that leaves a lump in your throat.

I can’t remember seeing a musical shot in the bumpy and grainy style of cinéma vérité before, but Carney manages to keep it real without losing the romanticism. His characters don’t suddenly burst into song or dance; they take to their instruments and sing as though music were their first language. Most of these haunting compositions (written mainly by Glen Hansard, of the Irish band the Frames) are performed on an old broken-down guitar by a lonely busker known, according to the credits, as the Guy (Hansard again).

He meets the Girl (Marketa Irglova) on a street in Dublin. I usually hate films with characters who have existential names like this. But Carney and his two leads are so good at establishing the inner lives of their characters that you don’t notice that we never hear their real names.

Once is the story of what happens when the right person comes into your life at the wrong time. It treats its audience as adults and not, as many modern musicals do, as children who need to be wrapped in the comfort blanket of familiar pop hits or the clichés of romantic love. The guy is on the rebound from a relationship that ended badly in London; the girl is a Czech immigrant with a small daughter and a husband in the background. He works with his dad repairing vacuum cleaners; she gets a job as a cleaner.

Both are adrift from the thing they love most: music.

They meet one evening when he’s out busking. She approaches, listens and when he’s finished asks: “Who’d you write that for?” She asks questions like a curious child. At first he’s irritated, but slowly they discover their common love of music (she’s a talented pianist/ singer) and their love for each other. He sets out to make a demo of his songs to take to London, but, thank heaven, the film spares us the will-he/won’t-he-make-it drama. What really holds our attention is: will they or won’t they get it together?

The film is beautifully understated, and often funny without trying hard to make you laugh, as in the moment when you see the pair walking together down a street, her broken vacuum cleaner trailing by her side as if it were a dog being taken for a walk. Other scenes are moving and unforgettable, as when they go into a music shop and start to sing a duet together. I could have done with a few more of the Girl’s compositions, so we could learn more about her feelings, but it’s refreshing to hear a musical done in a contemporary singer-songwriter style and not the usual generic pop format. Carney has wisely used the songs to tell the emotional side of the story, so the interaction between the couple has that kind of Brief Encounter restraint that tugs at your heart.

The two leads are unlikely types for a romantic musical. Carney had originally chosen the more conventionally handsome Cillian Murphy for the Guy, which would have been a mistake. Hansard is not handsome, or handsome-but-“interesting”, or even ugly-sexy. He’s just a tall ginger bloke with a beard who looks like an ageing cherub with a midlife crisis. In other words, he’s perfect for the part. You get the sense of his terrible loneliness, as well as his hopeless love for this young woman. Irglova, making her screen debut, is not your typical beauty either, but she captures your heart by the power of her charm. Together they make one of the screen’s most appealing couples.”
Director: John Carney
Starring: Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova
Running time:  87 minutes
Certificate: 15

• Monday  21 March 7.15 for 7.45pm in the Linbury Room, Dulwich Picture Gallery
• Drinks and snacks provided by GalleryFilm; included in the ticket price
• Free raffle prize – the award winning CD soundtrack to ‘Once’

Tickets £8, £6 for Friends. Telephone boookings on 0208 299 8750 or the Friends’ desk in Dulwich Picture Gallery. More info at GalleryFilm.

Follow GalleryFilm on Facebook.

Katyn Massacre Memorial: Photo by Smolensk Memoryal

When President Kaczynski of Poland was killed in a plan crash at Smolensk in April last year, he had been on his way to a ceremony to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the murder of over 20,000 Polish army officers by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in 1940.

This terrible event haunts Polish history. It is a story of deceit, duplicity and cold, relentless brutality.

Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, following the German attack on Poland. Unfortunately, we were unable to do anything to help the Poles. Nor did we know, any more than the Polish government,
that the non-aggression pact signed in August between Germany and the Soviet Union contained a secret protocol under which the two parties in effect agreed to divide Poland between them.

Soviet forces entered Poland on 17 September, taking a large number of prisoners. These were taken to camps and prisons in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Politburo subsequently decided that all those regarded as enemies of the state should be killed. In April 1940 those from the Kozelsk camp were taken to the Katyn forest near Smolensk and, one by one, with their hands bound behind their backs, shot in the back of the head. They were buried in rows in mass graves. Similar executions took place of those at the Ostashkov and Starobelsk camps and other places too. In all it is thought that 21,768 officers were murdered at about the same time.

These men included regular army officers and many officers from the reserve, called up for the war. They were from the cream of Polish society. The Polish Government in Exile, in London, had tried to keep track of the fate of Polish soldiers who were taken prisoner by either Germans or Russians. It was noticed that letters from the officers in the three camps in Russia had stopped in April 1940. But enquiries of the Soviet government as to what had happened were brushed aside.

These terrible murders were not revealed until 1943, when German forces, by then at war with the Soviet Union, discovered the mass graves in Katyn forest. They immediately accused the Soviet Union of responsibility. Stalin was quick to accuse the Germans in turn. This was at the height of the war, when Soviet forces were retreating, before the turning point of Stalingrad. The Polish Government in Exile, in no doubt as to who was responsible, broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The British and US governments, deeply conscious that it was the Soviet Army that was doing the fighting against the Germans, avoided taking a position on the issue and Churchill tried to encourage the Poles to take a softer line, to no avail. When Soviet forces expelled the Germans from Polish territory and the fate of Poland was securely in Soviet hands there was little that could be done to help solve this question.

The Katyn massacre as it became known, remained a controversy throughout the Cold War. The Polish Communist governments, installed by the Soviet Union after the war, maintained the Soviet fiction of German responsibility. The Western countries, including Britain, sat on the fence, taking the line that in the absence of conclusive proof it would be wrong to attribute blame. It was the arrival of Gorbachev in 1985 that changed things and permitted, for the first time, an examination of what were called ‘blank spots’ in Polish-Soviet history. In 1987, with Soviet cooperation in resolving the issue looking brighter, the British government admitted that ‘there was indeed substantial circumstantial evidence pointing to Soviet responsibility for the killings’.

2010. Vladimir Putin leaves a wreath at the memorial to the Polish troops massacred at Katyn in 1940.

Finally, in 1990, Gorbachev admitted that the Soviet Union had indeed been the murderer. Even so, the Russians have never come fully clean. An investigation by the Russian Prosecutor’s Office confirmed the deaths of 1,803 Polish citizens but refused to classify this as a war crime or act of genocide. The investigation was closed on the grounds that the perpetrators of the massacre were already dead. But, in a final gesture of reconciliation, if that was possible, President Putin invited the Polish President to commemorate the event’s 50th anniversary in April last year. And so the Katyn story brought its final tragedy.

For the families of those murdered, indeed for all free thinking Poles, the crime was an outrage which has to be brought to light and Soviet responsibility confirmed.

It is this search for truth and justice, as well as the horror of the murders, that runs through Wajda’s marvelous film, Katyn. It spares no detail. Go and see it at GalleryFilm on 17 January at Dulwich Picture Gallery. It is a fitting tribute to those who died.

NIGEL THORPE is former British diplomat who served in British Embassy in Warsaw for 7 years. He was later head of the Central European Department in the Foreign Office and was Ambassador to Hungary for 5 years.

Nigel will be introducing the film at 7.45pm

More info about the evening.
More info about the film.

Tickets £8, £6 Friends, includes free Polish food and drink kindly donated by Piast, Polish Delicatessen, Crystal Palace.
Ring 020 8299 8750 or turn up at the door.

Paying homage to the Polish origins of Dulwich Picture Gallery, GalleryFilm are screening Katyn, directed by Poland’s greatest living filmmaker, Andrzej Wajda, on Monday 17th January. Wajda crafts a gripping tale of official cover-up surrounding the murder by the Russians of Poland’s military and intellectual elite at Katyn in 1940.

* Monday 17th January 7.15 for 7.45pm in the Linbury Room, Dulwich Picture Gallery

* Free drinks and food donated by Piast Polish Delicatessen, Crystal Palace

* Free raffle prize – ‘Enigma’ by Robert Harris, donated by Herne Hill Books

In the movie review by Dave Colhoun of Time Out London, Colhoun comments:

Polish veteran Andrzej Wajda tackles an event close to his – and his country’s – heart in ‘Katyn’, a poignant drama that traces the lasting effects of a national tragedy, the memory of which started to warp almost as soon as it happened.

Wajda’s father was among more than 20,000 Polish officers murdered by Soviet troops in 1940, many of them buried in the Katyn forest. In this fictional take on that tragedy, Wajda places special focus on the influence of malevolent politics on the impossibility of any resolution for the victims’ families. As we learn, sometimes through excellent use of archive footage, when the soldiers’ bodies were first discovered in 1943, the Soviets blamed the Nazis; then, when Poland fell under the USSR’s influence after 1945, any attempt to blame the Soviets was so strictly outlawed that, as we see, any mention even on a gravestone of the correct date of the massacre was brutally punished.

Wajda reflects this fog of truth in the story of Anna, the wife of a Polish officer who knows her husband is a Soviet POW, but who, even after a list of the dead is released in 1943, does not know whether or not he died at Katyn. Although Wajda introduces several other women, young and old, each closely affected by Katyn, it’s the story of Anna and her husband which offers a backbone to the film, along with intermittent, reverent and serene scenes of the POWs, whose grim fate Wajda reserves for the film’s final chapter. But some other characters, although instructive, feel like misplaced footnotes.

The principal success of Wajda’s stately, widescreen and exquisitely shot film lies in its sober attempt to mirror the fragmented truth of a genocide. For half a century, the perception of  Katyn was clouded by ideology: it was a distortion whose ripples were felt at the most intimate of levels. Wajda is excellent at portraying the lingering corruption of this top-down rewriting of history. On the downside, he tries to reflect so many experiences in his time-hopping story that he clouds our view at times.

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Cast: Andrzej Chyra, Artur Zmijewski, Danuta Stenka, Maja Ostaszewska

Certificate: 15                                                                 Running time: 120 minutes

* Monday 17th January 7.15 for 7.45pm in the Linbury Room, Dulwich Picture Gallery

* Free drinks and food donated by Piast Polish Delicatessen, Crystal Palace

* Free raffle prize – ‘Enigma’ by Robert Harris, donated by Herne Hill Books

Tickets £8, £6 for Friends. Telephone boookings on 0208 299 8750 or the Friends’ desk in Dulwich Picture Gallery. More info at GalleryFilm.

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GalleryFilm has screened the first 2 films of The Apu Trilogy by Satyajit Ray to a sell out audience.  We were incredibly lucky to persuade Andrew Robinson, Ray’s friend, biographer and world authority on his films, to introduce and give a Q&A both films.

Now DOV readers are being offered a 30% discount on Andrew’s new book, The Apu Trilogy, Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic.

Print out, fill in and send off the form below to claim it.  A great Christmas present for film lovers.

By Ian Dejardin, Director of Dulwich Picture Gallery.

I notice that GalleryFilm are showing the 1974 film of Swallows and Amazons. I have always loved Arthur Ransome’s series of books – to excess, probably. I still read them from time to time; in many ways his stories have the force of genuine childhood memory for me.

They certainly influenced my life: just this year my summer holiday was spent in a tent at a campsite on Exmoor, whose greatest claim to fame (apart from appearing in the modern camper’s bible, Cool Camping) was that it allowed real camp-fires. Anyone who witnessed my careful construction of twigs and logs within a careful circle of stones would have known that here was a full-blown Ransome-ite. I loved it – particularly since, unlike the Swallows, I could enjoy a wee dram of whisky by the fire.

The books even taught me to sail. And they taught me to love the Lake District – to such an extent that I moved there in my early twenties.

I had already started up a small craft business, designing and making knitwear. I figured that I had the cottage industry – why not try for the cottage? And if a cottage, then it had to be in the Lakes. I ended up living firstly with a view from my kitchen down the length of Ullswater, and later moved over to Hawkshead Hill between Windermere and Coniston. And – despite having inherited from my father a basic fear of water ( I can swim, unlike Dad, but that’s about it), I obviously had to have a boat.

On Ullswater I rashly acquired a sleek little number being pensioned off from the local sailing school. It terrified the life out of me; I like boats to be slow, sure and utterly safe. This one veered alarmingly at the slightest puff of wind – and that’s another thing: I like sailing breezes to be mild, gentle and unfailingly from one direction only. The boat had to go.

But now I come to the point of this story. I suddenly read, in the Cumberland News, of an old clinker-built sailing boat for sale. This was Amazon – the boat that had been used first in a 1960s television adaptation of the book, and then again in the 1974 film. She cost £500. On practically the same day, I heard from my Grandfather – he was giving all his grandchildren an early Christmas present…of £500.

Reader, I bought her. To be honest, I didn’t sail her very often (see note about sailing breezes above: nobody told me that wind just doesn’t work like that) but when I did, I always had the great pleasure of seeing much more modern sailing boats seriously swerving as the child, or indeed adult, caught sight of the name on the transom. I think half of the Lake District is inhabited by Arthur Ransome fans in search of the ‘real’ Swallows and Amazons.

When I moved to London, I eventually had to sell her – and I don’t know where she is now. But it gave me so much pleasure to own that boat – even though, of course, there was absolutely no direct link with Ransome – Amazon was just an old converted rowing-boat with an old white sail that had been created to play the part. But, my she was beautiful. For a few years I lived the dream as twenty-something Amazon pirate.

So – go watch the film, and admire my old boat. The film was rather lovely, if I remember correctly. Casting of the children was absolutely spot on – nearly forty years from its release I can still vividly remember the faces of the film’s John, Susan, Titty (particularly wonderful – I wonder what happened to her?), Roger, Nancy and Peggy. Virginia McKenna was also perfect as Mrs Walker.

Of course, some of the magic of the book was inevitably lost – the sense of real time passing, in the need to keep the narrative going in film terms. And – its one serious failing – it had, correct me if I’m wrong, one of the most irritating films scores I’ve ever heard. Pa-pa-pa pum pum, pa-pa-pa pum pum it went, endlessly, radiating exactly the kind of jolly hockeysticks ‘made-for-children’ cuteness that the original books so completely lacked.

Sunday 5 December at 3.45pm at Dulwich Picture Gallery

2-3.30pm Come to ArtPlay before -  the drop-in family workshop in the Sackler Centre, and make an afternoon of it.

3.30-3.45 pm     Free juice and popcorn thanks to Peter Popple’s Popcorn

3.45 pm screening

5.15 pm   Free raffle – Prize is the book of ‘Swallows and Amazons’ by Arthur Ransome kindly donated by Tales on Moon Lane, the childrens bookshop in Herne Hill.

Tickets £4  020 8299 8750 or email friendsticketing@dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

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Rollicking family fun set in the inter wars years is provided by 1974′s SWALLOWS AND AMAZONS (certificate U), as national treasure Virginia MacKenna (Born Free) takes her two boys and two girls off to the Lake District for their summer holiday.

• Sunday 5 December at 3.45pm in the Linbury Room (after ‘Artplay’ the drop-in family workshop at Dulwich Picture Gallery)
• Free juice and popcorn donated by Peter Popples Popcorn
• Free raffle prize – book of ‘Swallows and Amazons’ donated by Tales on Moon Lane bookshop, Herne Hill

Today’s youngsters will be astonished at how much of their grandparents’ youthful activities were conducted outdoors in this primitive, X-Box-free, period of human evolution. For the four kids are rapidly caught up in a daily round of adventures involving sailing, camping, fishing, exploration and, ultimately, piracy. Sailing their dinghy Swallow, the Walker foursome encounter another two girls, the Blackett children, with their own dinghy, the Amazon. Rivalry and fun ensues.

Swallows & Amazons is based on the first of Arthur Ransome’s series of children’s adventure stories, published in 1930 and set during the long, hot summer of 1929.

British children’s literature in the pre-60s 20th century was dominated by outdoor adventure. This is often taken to reflect Britain’s then Imperial status, when the Empire was at its height. Robert Baden-Powell had set up the The Boy Scouts back in 1908, and The Girl Guides followed in 1910. So children were encouraged  to use holidays and leisure time for healthy outdoor pursuits.

Meanwhile the powerful influence in adult popular culture of both detectives and the military provided a template for children’s literature to involve its young subjects in equivalent adventures. Similar themes dominated in the USA, with the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew pursuing their respective investigations. These outdoor and adventure themes continued in Britain through and beyond World War 2, notably via Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books. Not to mention the Secret Seven, the Adventure series, etc., etc.,.

So plenty of nostalgia for all the older generations as well as fun for today’s more home-bound children.

So was journalist and writer Ransome himself a cheerleader for Empire, like Baden-Powell? Far from it.

Ransome spent time in Russia studying and writing about folk tales. During which period the Russian Revolution broke out. Ransome attracted suspicion within Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service for his evident sympathy for the Bolsheviks and his vocal opposition to British intervention in the Revolution.

As the counter-revolutionary war raged, Ransome crossed the front lines as a courier carrying secret, verbal messages between Estonia and the Bolsheviks which helped the parties reach a peace agreement. Ransome began a relationship with a Russian woman, who later became his second wife. Evgenia’s c.v. included as spell as Trotsky’s private secretary. And KGB files suggest she was later involved in smuggling diamonds to help fund the Comintern. Not surprising that British Intelligence kept an eye on Ransome until the 1930s.

But adventures of a different sort had occupied Ransome back home before his Russian period. His work Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study prompted Wilde’s former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, to launch a libel suit against Ransome back in 1913. Ransome won the case, which brought him much notoriety.

All in all we can say that Ransome’s own life contained at least as much adventure than did the 12 books of the Swallows and Amazons series.

Indeed it has been suggested that the film version of Swallows and Amazons lacks a plot in the conventional sense. Rather of a series of episodes of young people enjoying each others’ company. If we can say that does not formally constitute a plot, we might then add that the film leans towards the non-narrative. Or towards the style of much post-war Italian cinema with its series of impressionistic vignettes.

For Swallows and Amazons works best in what it evokes, visually and emotionally. Nostalgia, for those alive at the time it was set. And for the generations brought up later with Enid Blyton. The joy of childhood friendship for all generations. And the pleasures that are learning via adventure and the adventure of learning.

This emotional evocation interplays with the visual, as reflected in the following Users’ Comments from imdb.

“The photography is unquestionably very alluring; capturing enough of the visual beauty of a golden English summer of times past.”

“A classic childhood adventure – film does look absolutely beautiful, with lovely views of the Lake District.”

“it is a delightful, wholesome and reasonably accurate rendition of Arthur Ransome’s wonderful book. It is nearly impossible these days to find any movies where the children are kind to one another, the parents are loving and the adventures are free of violence.”

If you are a parent wondering whether to bring your child to the screening…

“It’s interesting to read some of the reviewers wondering if the film could appeal to today’s children in the age of Shrek and the Incredibles. Well, my two daughters just watched it this afternoon (too young to have read the books) and they were both glued to it and the oldest enthusiastically grabbed the books when I pulled them down from the shelf.”

Swallows and Amazons is truly a window onto another time. An era when health and safety concerns were less pressing.

” . . . I found it hard to believe a mother would just let her four children sleep on some island for nights on end; at one point the youngest of the girls, aged no more than nine, was left alone and the mother, when finally checking up on the children, didn’t seem that bothered.”

All in all Swallows and Amazons provides a gentle and satisfying experience for all age groups (running time 92 minutes)

(written by David Grey, for other film reviews by David visit his blog)

Sunday 5 December at 3.45pm at Dulwich Picture Gallery

• 2-3.30pm Come to ArtPlay before – the drop-in family workshop in the Sackler Centre, and make an afternoon of it.

• 3.30-3.45 pm Free juice and popcorn thanks to Peter Popple’s Popcorn
  

• 3.45 pm screening

• 5.15 pm Free raffle – Prize is the book of ‘Swallows and Amazons’ by Arthur Ransome kindly donated by Tales on Moon Lane, the childrens bookshop in Herne Hill.

Tickets £4 020 8299 8750 or email friendsticketing@dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

Join our GalleryFilm Facebook group

It’s that time of year when IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946, certificate U, 130 mins) comes round again for its traditional Christmas slot.

But now offering a timely exploration of the differences between good and bad bankers writes David Grey. And indeed to explore the relationship of individuals to group, community, and society. Is there “no such thing as society”, as Margaret Thatcher declared, “only individuals and their families”? Was Gordon Gekko correct that “greed is good” for all of us?  Or do we have reciprocal obligations to one another and for our own actions?

* Monday 6 December 7.15 for 7.45pm in the Linbury Room, Dulwich Picture Gallery

* Free mulled wine and festive snacks provided by GalleryFilm

* Free Raffle prize – bottle of wine donated by Majestic Wine, West Dulwich

A relative flop when it came out in 1946, It’s a Wonderful Life has become regarded as one of the best ever US films. The American Film Institute placed it at Number One in its chart of the “most inspirational” American films of all time.

It’s a Wonderful Life spent a few decades not getting a great amount of attention. Director Capra never saw it as a Christmas movie. But because of its Yuletide setting it became an annual fixture of seasonal TV schedules in the 1970s. Leading to increased popularity and new recognition as both an entertaining favourite and an officially worthy classic.  Hence its annual place in the TV schedules is now mirrored in the programming of film societies, art house cinemas, and bastions of the worthy like the BFI.

If you’ve already seen it countless times, no need for a plot resume – just enjoy it again. If you’ve not seen it, just go and do so and thus join the rest of humanity. Just know that selfless to a fault Good Banker George Bailey (James Stewart) has spent his whole life doing good. And yet a crisis in the banking system leads him to the edge, literally, of suicide. And a chance to re-evaluate his life and his contribution to his community. After that, it’s all about the festive heart warming.

It’s a Wonderful Life  has serious issues beneath its feel-good plot. Rooted in its economic and political provenance. It originated in a short story which Philip Van Doren Stern began drafting in the 1930s. During which the socially disastrous effects of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression were being felt acutely in The Land of the Free Market.

34 million people in families with no wage-earner. Industrial production down by 45%. Homebuilding by 80%.  One million families kicked off their farms.  Two million homeless people wandering the country.  A period which generated Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath of 1939, made by John Ford into a movie in 1940.  Another film which reflects on the nature of society and social obligations.

The Great Depression of the 30s was not America’s first such experience. The so-called “Long Depression” kicked off in the US with the “Panic of 1873″  and lasted in various part of the globe into the 1890s. As millions were laid off, the 1870s saw a massive wave of industrial strikes across America. Smaller, briefer depressions occurred again in 1918 and 1920.

During these periods something happened in representations of banks and bankers in American popular culture. They became the bad guys.

As far back as the 1870s the white supremacist murderer and bank robber Jesse James began to be represented in novels and songs as a Robin Hood style outlaw, robbing the rich and helping the poor. Representations which continued into Hollywood movies of the 1930s and early 1940s. As late as the 1940s, leftist folk singer Woody Guthrie was recording traditional Jesse songs with words changed to portray him as equivalent first to a union activist and then as a Christ figure.

Throughout the 1930s a series of real life, high profile bank robbers became similarly portrayed as outlaw heroes. John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie (Parker) and Clyde (Barrow) were all without exception narcissistic psychopaths happy to kill anyone who stood in the way of their machine gun toting pursuit of Gordon Gekko’s later materialistic ethos.

It was the banks who kicked people off their farms and out of their houses. And it was the Police who assisted the banks in those tasks, in between breaking the heads of striking industrial workers. So it is less than surprising that popular culture came to lionise those who took from the banks and made fools of the Police with their daring get-aways.

Life and art imitated each other in considerable working class community support for these Depression-era outlaws, enabling them to elude capture for so long. Like James before them, and Christ before him, the hoodlums of the 30s tended to meet bloody ends via denunciation by a member of their own circle followed by the lethal extra-judicial force of the State.

In both versions of The Grapes of Wrath economic depression is portrayed as something incomprehensible to its victims. An impersonal force of nature. Sometimes vaguely involving the actions of a handful of brutal farm owners, bankers and police officers.

By contrast, the 30s gangsters were represented in a spirit of triumphal personal victory over the Establishment bad guys. Albeit short lived victories prompting gory ends.

Whereas in Grapes of Wrath we see a family struggling to find any source of hope in an almost overwhelmingly depressing situation. Economic depression luring its victims into a psychologically depressed state of powerlessness. The surviving remnants of the Joad family manage to keep hope alive, but this is far from the celebration of violent individual resistance present in the bank robber films.

And so, on to IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE.  Written towards the end of the Great Depression and produced as a film just as the state interventionist policies of The New Deal were kicking in.

Reflecting the bad times of the 1930s It’s a Wonderful Life continues the popular cultural tradition of the Bad Banker in the character of Mr Potter, who takes the Gekko greed principle even unto the stage of straightforward criminal theft.

Nobody totes a machine gun or goes on the rampage. No bankers or Police are harmed in the plot of this film. It’s a Wonderful Life organises itself around selfless to a fault Good Banker George Bailey’s own confrontation with psychological depression. Thereafter it’s a long, long way from the gloomy search for hope in Grapes of Wrath. Rapidly we are on the feel good up and up.

How do we get there?

The antithesis between good George Bailey and bad Mr Potter reflects that simple division of humanity, typical of US evangelism’s contribution to popular culture, into fundamentally good people and fundamentally bad people.

In this ontological and individualist division out have gone the huge social and economic forces of Grapes of Wrath, as well as the interpersonal, psychological and moral uncertainties of the recent Swedish film, INVOLUNTARY.

Grapes and this new Swedish film represent, if you like, the two ends of a continuum of analysis about social responsibility in hard times. Huge, impersonal and incomprehensible forces at the macro end.  With the morally complex, but daily, routine, individual dilemmas faced by the characters in INVOLUNTARY at the other, micro end of the scale.

By contrast, the struggle of good versus evil is pared down in It’s a Wonderful Life to a depiction on film of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Some of us are destined for Heaven and some for Hell, and who is who is revealed by what happens in our lives.

As directed by Divine Intervention – here in the form of an Angel. In contrast to the alpha male violence of the 30s gangsters, or the arrival of State-funded public services of the New Deal.

Thus the spiritual takes the place of social forces or individual violence in IAWL. In 1946 Frank Capra told an interviewer that he made It’s a Wonderful Life “to combat a modern trend towards atheism”.

Now in 2010 economic depression is back at the top of all our agendas, How are we going to get out of it? Working together? Or by competing with each other? With machine guns? Or via state intervention?  Or thanks to angels?

In the UK in 2008 and 2009 bankers had once again become the Bad Guys, objects of popular rage and violence as the greedy and selfish architects of our collective distress. As we near the end of 2010 it seems as though rage against bankers has been almost forgotten.

New targets of blame and hate are being found. The greedy unemployed. The mercenary sick and disabled. Feckless recipients of Housing Benefit. Profligate occupants of social housing. And, perhaps above all, the selfish, gluttonous and outrageously affluent midwives, care assistants and dustmen of the Public Sector.

Which way will we go?

THE GRAPES OF WRATH seems to suggest we have to survive. To cling to one another and hang on in there until the fiscal stimulus of the New Deal and then wartime spending comes around.

INVOLUNTARY seems to tell us there IS such a thing as society, and it consists in how every one of us treats every other one of us in our every action, every day.

Perhaps echoed in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. For George Bailey’s personal salvation lies simply in the fact that he IS a good person. As reflected in his life-long record of good deeds towards others. And generating the respect and love of his community.

It’s a Wonderful Life turns on a crucial decision whether or not to jump into a river. On the night of 16th November 2010 in London a homeless black man dived into the freezing waters of the Thames. He leapt to to save from drowning a young woman who had apparently thrown herself into the river.  The man himself wound up in hospital being treated for hypothermia. When he first emerged from the icy water, Adan Abobaker discovered that during his rescue mission thieves had stolen his jumper, coat, wooly hat and gloves, discarded in his unhesitating haste to assist another human being.

(Written by David Grey, find more film reviews at David’s blog http://davidrecommends.blogspot.com/ )

Director: Frank Capra                                              Starring James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore

Certificate: U                                                               Running time: 130 minutes

* Monday 6 December 7.15 for 7.45pm in the Linbury Room, Dulwich Picture Gallery

* Free mulled wine and festive snacks provided by GalleryFilm

* Free Raffle prize – bottle of wine donated by Majestic Wine, West Dulwich

Tickets £8, £6 for Friends. Telephone boookings on 0208 299 8750 or the Friends’ desk in Dulwich Picture Gallery. More info at GalleryFilm.

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