EXILE ON MAIN STREET - FILM SEASON

1 July-19 August 2006

Exile on Main Street, a season of features and short films, accompanies the National Gallery (London, UK)exhibition Rebels and Martyrs: The Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century (26 June-3 September 2006). The films look at characters and directors who stood outside of the ‘system’ and have protagonists who feature as rebels or martyrs – from Bresson’s Mouchette (1967) to Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938). The season brings together a wide variety of European directors, who, like the artists in Rebels and Martyrs, sought to express their personal vision without compromise. Through their work they pioneered technologies and artistic strategies that influenced mainstream fictional cinema.

The directors featured in Exile on Main Street. selfconsciously worked towards a new cinematic language which enabled them to deal poetically with pressing problems of their times. They created ‘new waves’ and ‘young cinemas’ that were formally experimental and thematically challenging. This was notably in conflict with a production system which did not want to relinquish control to the director.

Some of the directors made a move away from both traditional and dramatic cinematic conventions and used non-professional actors or documentary effects. They were committed to shaking up and invigorating film culture through realistic representations of the contemporary working classes. This can be seen in the work of Rossellini, Truffaut, Bresson and Richardson. These directors took to the streets to film, aided by the technical developments of lightweight cameras. The location filming in Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) was rarely seen in German films at that time. Within this film Murnau created some of the most vivid images in German expressionist cinema.

The shorts programme explores a similar drive for creative freedom. Coal Face (1935) is representative of a unique decade of British film-making when social idealism led to documentarists making artistic strides to realise their vision. Here Alberto Cavalcanti collaborates with W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten to bring a powerful portrait of the coal industry. Ridley Scott is known for striking visual imagery and this is evident from his very first steps in film-making. In Boy and Bicycle (1965) Scott captures that heady teenage mix of innocence, frustration and rebellion as we follow his younger brother Tony playing truant for the day.

Tim Burton’s early short Vincent (1982) about a young boy who fantasises that he is Vincent Price, is one of four animated films in the season. Each uses a very different style and technique: from Burton’s puppet-boy to Caroline Leaf’s elegant sand animation in The Metamorphosis of Mr Samsa (1977; and from Jonathan Hodgson’s mix of word and simply drawn image to interpret Charles Bukowski’s The Man with the Beautiful Eyes (1999) – a rebel poet’s homage to the outsider – to Andrei Khrjanovsky’s densely drawn animation Glass Harmonica (1968), in which the artist is pitched against an uncompromising, profit-fixated state – a film that was banned in Russia until after perestroika. To end the season, Peter Capaldi turns the myth of the artist as poor, suffering loner on its head in the light-hearted Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1993).