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  • SEASON 11
    Forbidden Colour

    Once, the transmission of feeling in colour film was dependent on the fizzing, fickle interaction of chemicals. Different palettes created by chromatic processes in the lab offered different palettes, and consequently, different envisionings of the world. In a digital age, colour is no less an important weapon in the filmmaker’s arsenal, and dependent still – though differently – on the auspices of technology. These kaleidoscopic films by visionaries Bergman, Bidgood, Bakari, Greenaway, Herzog, Pasolini, Ozu, Jarman and Rosso represent the most enchanting, troubling and shocking uses of colour in cinematic history, and demonstrate that colour is at once a tool and a vibrant character in the technological conjuring of cinema’s most lurid dreams.

  • Equinox Flower

    Yasujirō Ozu | 1958

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    Equinox Flower

    Yasujirō Ozu | 1958

    WATCH NOW TRAILER THE MEMO AFTERTHOUGHTS

    A charming exploration of courtship and unspoken desire in bourgeois Japan, Yasujirō Ozu’s first colour film Equinox Flower is also his return to comedy after two decades of serious dramas. Telling the tale of Hirayama, a wealthy and respected Tokyo businessman who stubbornly refuses to accept his daughter’s choice of husband, Ozu paints in miniature a country’s changing cultural tides. An intimate family story with a certain melancholy woven through even the cheeriest scenes, Equinox Flower stands alongside Ozu’s finest work. 

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    Helen O'Horan is a linguist and translator of the Japanese language. Polly Barton is a translator and writer, also specialising in Japanese. Together, they share their post-viewing impressions of Yasujirō Ozu's Equinox Flower.

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    EQUINOX FLOWER

    From neon Tokyo street signs to the bright statement reds of mid-century interiors, Yasujiro Ozu’s 1958 Equinox Flower – his first film in colour – marks an important turning point in the master director’s career. The titular flower, also known as Lycoris radiata, is described in Chinese and Japanese translations of the Lotus Sutra as a plant that grows in hell, guiding the dead into the next reincarnation. It is an appropriate metaphor for the role played by tradition amidst Japan’s rapid modernisation, here represented in Ozu’s “pillow shots” of trains coming and going in quick succession. Throughout the film, Ozu gestures towards a Taoist notion of progress and transformation: that is, the death of one lifestyle allows for the blooming of another. 

    The plot centres around an old-fashioned father, Hirayama (Shin Saburi), and his daughter, Satsuko (Ineko Arima), as she becomes engaged to marry. When Satsuko disobeys her family’s wishes for an arranged marriage and instead espouses the man of her own choosing, Hirayama struggles to reorient himself amid his rapidly changing life. He eventually comes around to his daughter’s decision, yet not without having lost something fundamental to his identity as a man, father, and husband.

    Released five years before Ozu's death from throat cancer at the age of sixty, the film is both a sombre acknowledgement of time’s crushing weight and a celebration of the Now, with its explosion of technicolour elements and scenes of youthful ardour. Even as Hirayama gazes wistfully out towards the camera, mourning the loss of his paternal authority, young girls stroll by in vibrantly hued cardigans, and brilliant scenes of Tokyo in full bloom blaze across the screen. A new era has arrived: Satsuko, only two years shy of the freewheeling sixties, embodies a modern woman in charge of her own destiny (and of her body, too). 

    Saburi is particularly poignant as Hirayama, with wide-set, strong features, moving with the slow grace of an animal awakening from sleep. Dressed in the same grey suit for the majority of the film, he clashes with the polychromatic world around him, and as the gap between him and his surroundings widens, so does our sympathy for his plight. He has been left behind in every sense of the phrase, and to watch him accept this defeat is both tragic and, by the film’s close, heartwarming. A classic tale of generational differences, the film masterfully uses hue to portray the contrast between its central characters, and further, between them and a rapidly changing world. 

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  • Pink Narcissus

    James Bidgood | 1971

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    Pink Narcissus

    James Bidgood | 1971

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    A male sex worker navigates his fantasies of bikers, matadors and harem leaders in this hallucinogenic classic of queer cinema. Pink Narcissus was filmed over seven years by James Bidgood, who built the film’s elaborate sets in his small Hell’s Kitchen apartment, and who released the film anonymously after a squabble with his financier. Gloriously lavish, Pink Narcissus was a revolution in DIY filmmaking and a poignant document of the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS window in gay culture.

  • Mark of the Hand

    Imruh Bakari | 1987

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    Mark of the Hand

    Imruh Bakari | 1987

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    A sensitive portrait of luminary Guyanese artist Aubrey Williams, Mark of the Hand sees Williams returning to his birthplace of Georgetown after a decades-long sojourn in the UK. Meeting once again with the Warao Indians who heavily influenced Williams’ abstract expressionist canvases, he muses on a career spent in search of truth. The result is a lilting study on otherness, technology and the Warao concept of timehri, the titular “mark of the hand”, that stamps the masterpieces of art.

  • An Actor's Revenge

    Kon Ichikawa | 1963

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    An Actor's Revenge

    Kon Ichikawa | 1963

    WATCH NOW TRAILER

    A remake of the 1935 film of the same name, An Actor’s Revenge is an extraordinary fusion of kabuki theatre and pop art. Kazuo Hasegawa, in his 300th role, is double cast as a local thief and an actor whose parents were driven to suicide by a trio of thugs, and who now seeks revenge. The idioms of kabuki theatre – melodrama, androgyny, elaborate makeup and wigs – are interrogated in Kon Ichikawa’s darkly amusing thriller, whose nagging queer subtext and unconventional Brechtian staging allow for deeper considerations of the precarity of the acting profession.

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  • Gallivant

    Andrew Kotting | 1996

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    Gallivant

    Andrew Kotting | 1996

    WATCH NOW THE MEMO AFTERTHOUGHTS

    In Gallivant, director Andrew Kotting takes three generations of his family, including his 85-year-old grandmother and his disabled daughter Eden on a madcap, psychogeographic romp across Britain’s coastlines. Interweaving Super 8 documentary footage, polyphonic narration, and techniques from early cinema, the film's formal daring is balanced by its warm heart and utter lack of pretension. A road movie like no other, Gallivant is an ebullient celebration of the mundane and a fascinating enquiry into the bizarre land we call home.

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    Andrew Kotting is an artist and filmmaker, and the director of Gallivant. John Rogers is a writer and filmmaker, whose work encompasses psychogeography and flânerie. Together, they discuss their post-viewing impressions of Gallivant.

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    GALLIVANT

    In Andrew Kotting’s Gallivant, it can be difficult to communicate. The film follows Kotting’s daughter Eden and his grandmother Gladys as they travel clockwise around the British coast, a project Kotting embarked upon with the intention of bringing Gladys and Eden closer together and on camera before it was “too late”. Then-seven-year-old Eden was born with Joubert syndrome, a rare genetic disorder. She communicates in British Sign Language, and as a result, communication in Gallivant is predominantly visual instead of aural. 

    Set against unremarkable views of the British seaside, the film is an organic collaboration between a director who takes the backseat and a highly opinionated “Big Granny” who takes the reigns. With a flair for taking up space in front of the camera, Gladys produces a litany of cautionary tales over the course of the trip. Eden, in a refusal to concede to the obstruction of their language barrier, is squeaking with vivacity in her every statement.

    Aside from genetics, Eden and Gladys are connected by their mutually limited life expectancies. In Gallivant, there is a yearning quality produced by the threat of impending mortality. Service stations and chilly cliffs become the stuff of daydreams. Iain Sinclair writes that “the problem with the British road movie is that there is nowhere to go”; Gladys and Eden circumvent this problem by creating a shared fantastical landscape populated by lollipop ladies, monks, and virgins.

    As Kotting and co. complete their loop, the film comes to find itself falling somewhere between documentary, psychogeographic study, and home movie. Adventures are had, and unspoken truths are faced. Gallivant is a touching ode to the ragged perimeters of Britain, as well as to Kotting’s idiosyncratic family.

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  • Fata Morgana

    Werner Herzog | 1971

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    Fata Morgana

    Werner Herzog | 1971

    WATCH NOW TRAILER THE MEMO

    A mesmerising journey through the Sahel and Sahara deserts, Werner Herzog’s Fata Morgana is the video essay as pure cinema, a floating odyssey into the sublime. In his first departure from fictional storytelling, the film establishes motifs that would go on to define Herzog’s career: lizards, blazing fires and the profoundly destructive impact of humans on their environments. With brisk narration from Lotte Eisener and a soundtrack including Leonard Cohen, the alien landscapes of Fata Morgana elucidate the fundamental strangeness of life on Earth.

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    If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Before philosopher George Berkeley posed such a question, he might’ve benefited from an audience with director Werner Herzog. In his 1971 film, Fata Morgana, Herzog’s own personal ethos - and perhaps Berkeley’s long-lost answer - is held up to the light: ‘there is landscape even without deeper meaning’. 

    Shot over 13 months in the late sixties across the Sahara and Sahel deserts, Herzog and cinematographer Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein faced appalling conditions when filming. These included the imprisonment of Schmidt-Reitwein in Cameroon, due to a likeness between his name and a German mercenary’s who’d been sentenced to death in absentia the year prior, as well as the violent capture and beating of Herzog that led to him contract a rare parasitic disease. The film was loosely intended to take the form of a video postcard made by an inhabitant of the fictional planet Uxmal, hoping to relay the experience of a visit to a post-apocalyptic Earth to his kind back home. And by ‘loosely’, perhaps a more accurate term would be ‘not at all’ - there was in fact no real sequence or storyline established before filming. Which certainly translates, but not necessarily to the film’s detriment.

    Fata Morgana’s namesake is the only other real clue Herzog provides us with. Translating to ‘mirage’, the film’s approach to image and illusion was integral to its conception. With shots filmed from the top of a Volkswagen and roads quite literally paved by the two filmmakers themselves, smoothing the sand ahead of them every few metres, the result is a lot less homespun than perhaps anticipated. Gallery-worthy images of desolate lands, animal carcasses and aircraft skeletons all flesh out Fata Morgana’s main source of context. Any drama a viewer might derive from the film - like the opening sequence, consisting of marginally varied shots of planes landing, some thirty times over - rests entirely on the sensibility of the individual. 

    So does a tree make a sound? For Herzog, the answer seems to be yes. As it deprives us of any grounding in traditional narrative, Fata Morgana works to attack perception as a means of validating existence. Despite a dejected opening, made all the more opaque with its overlayed recording of an ancient Mayan creation story read by writer Lotte H. Eisner, the film begins to take on a more animated spirit in its second part. Patterns and life cycles emerge - under an oppressive sun, a scientist holds up a lizard and explains the difficulties it faces catching its prey, and then proceeds to tell us of the difficulties he faced himself catching the lizard. Playfully equating reptile with man, and God with Sun - the source of both light and destruction in Fata Morgana - Herzog is mocking us all. 

    In its third and final part, ‘The Golden Age’, we witness lively scenes: lime-slakers at work, an earnest, living-room-based musical duo, sand-duning tourists. And despite a certain bleak attempt from Herzog to cast light on the twisted absurdity of humankind, there remains something so endearing about it all; that wondrous human ability to populate the most barren of landscapes with absolute nonsense. Amidst animal corpses and mechanical detritus, it’s in the little moments (like the slightly outlandish soundtrack choice of Leonard Cohen) that Herzog occasionally lets slip his partiality for our planet. Perhaps this is his ‘ecstatic truth’.

    Upon reflection, the obscure connection that formed between the film and a European, art-house, psychedelic niche (in spite of an otherwise hostile reception at the Venice Film Festival) begins to make sense. A conventional film critic’s tendency to attempt the deciphering of raw, unprocessed material is exactly the tendency an inhabitant of Planet Uxmal might find so perplexing. Fata Morgana’s opacity becomes its strength, and with a subplot so eccentric and practically impossible for a viewer to discern without the gift of prior knowledge, all we can really do is soak it up. Be it as inhabitants of the Anta Nebula galaxy, or simply as ourselves, tiny specs in the lime-slaking ludicracy of it all. 

  • Dreams that Money Can Buy

    Hans Richter | 1947

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    Dreams that Money Can Buy

    Hans Richter | 1947

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    Dancing mannequins, wire circus figures, a retelling of the myth of Narcissus with sentient furniture: Dreams that Money Can Buy is a Dadaist delight. An anthology film in seven parts, each directed by a different avant-garde visionary including Man Ray, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst and Alexander Calder, the film stars Jack Bittner as a literal average Joe who has gained the ability to sell dreams. A veritable who’s who of the post-war art landscape, Dreams that Money Can Buy is an exhilarating exploration into the richness of our subconscious landscapes.

  • Babylon

    Franco Rosso | 1980

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    Babylon

    Franco Rosso | 1980

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    The jewel in the crown of British reggae cinema, Franco Rosso’s Babylon is an explosive delight, a winning merger of kitchen-sink thriller and cinema verite chic. Following Blue, a Londoner of Jamaican parentage, through his encounters with dub culture, racism and violence in pre-Brixton riots South London, Babylon’s urgeny vision led it to be banned from the New York Film Festival for being “too controversial, and likely to incite racial tension”. The power of Rosso’s film is in its verisimilitude, its radical honesty about the pleasures and pains of the immigrant experience in a country that, as a character insists, has “always been a fucking tip!”

  • Cries and Whispers

    Ingmar Bergman | 1972

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    Cries and Whispers

    Ingmar Bergman | 1972

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    A piercing investigation into the psychology of the nuclear family, Cries and Whispers is Ingmar Bergman at his most essential. Harriet Andersson gives a bravura performance as Agnes, a woman whose slow death threatens to unravel the dense web of secrets held in place by her callous sisters. Even without any onscreen violence, Cries and Whispers overflows with blood, both that of its shockingly lurid crimson backdrops and that of the family ties that imprison as much as they support.

  • The Falls

    Peter Greenaway | 1980

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    The Falls

    Peter Greenaway | 1980

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    Defiantly odd, Peter Greenaway’s first film is a grab-bag of interpretative richness, pitched somewhere between Monty Python and Maya Deren. A catalogue of the 92 survivors of a Violent Unknown Event of which the details are never explained, the film’s structuralist frippery and shimmeringly changeable colour schemes create a beguiling map of emotional landscapes. A document of nuclear anxiety, a parody of British public information films and a wry critique of identity itself, The Falls is an endlessly reflexive and fascinating film and an appropriately iconoclastic debut to one of cinema’s true innovators.

  • The Garden

    Derek Jarman | 1990

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    The Garden

    Derek Jarman | 1990

    WATCH NOW TRAILER

    Completed as he was dying of AIDS, Derek Jarman’s The Garden is its own strange beast, cinema on frontiers both personal and physical. Shot in the shingle desert of Dungeness, The Garden moves through a series of surreal tableaux – Tilda Swinton as the Virgin Mary pursued by paparazzi, a wine glass orchestra – forever in search of the titular fallen utopia. A riposte to Thatcherite greed, The Garden searches for spiritual salvation in a world where both the body natural and politic has betrayed itself.

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  • Medea

    Pier Paolo Pasolini | 1969

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    Medea

    Pier Paolo Pasolini | 1969

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    Starring opera legend Maria Callas in her only film role, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea is a deeply mysterious, minimalist portrayal of Euripedes’ 2454-year-old play. Moving the narrative focus away from Medea’s infanticide towards the loss of her homeland Colchis, Pasolini mounts a savage allegory of Western imperialism, elevated by tasteful uses of traditional Persian, Tibetan and Balkan music. A sun-bleached vision of hubris from one of the century’s foremost visual stylists, Medea is above all a love letter to its lead actress, who delivers a performance of preternatural grace.

SEASON 10
Lives of the Saints

There can be no sainthood without struggle, and for Ingmar Bergman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Robert Bresson, Margaret Tait, Carl Th. Dreyer, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Christopher Newby, Liv Ullman, Toshio Matsumoto, Timothy Neat, Jamil Dehlavi and Edward Bennett, the divine vision is in the details.

SEASON 9
Conception

TANK’s ninth season, featuring films by John Cassavetes, Jean Cocteau, Terence Davies, Peter Greenaway, Werner Herzog, Derek Jarman, Takeshi Kitano, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Mike Leigh, Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen and Yasujiro Ozu, show that between the idea and the story there is a universe of possibility.

SEASON 8
Escape

With films by Kryzsztof Kieślowski, Deniz Gamze Egüven, Andrei Tarkovsky, François Ozon, Cristian Mungiu, Hal Hartley, Atom Egoyan, Jean Vigo, Michael Haneke and Louis Malle – offering stories that cross borders, identities and contexts – this season looks at escape anew, not as resignation from our environment, but as re-engagement with it.

SEASON 7
Back to Earth

TANK presents ten films selected by the curators at Serpentine Galleries, as part of their multi-year project Back to Earth. Showing films by Agnès Varda, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Gianfranco Rosi, Charlie Chaplin, Luc Jacquet, Bela Tarr, Thomas Vinterberg, Lars von Trier and Babak Jalali.

SEASON 6
Ritual

This season, we present 10 films spanning six decades by directors who train their lens on this ancient human practice, who, in doing so, capture the often unsaid behaviours and gestures that make us us. Showing films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrew Haigh, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, Agnès Varda, Corneliu Porumboiu, Aki Kaurismäki and Atom Egoyan.

SEASON 5
Metamorphosis

We are pleased to be showing you 10 films spanning seven decades from the greatest names in cinema, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Wim Wenders, Paolo Sorrentino, Agnès Varda, Béla Tarr, Paweł Pawlikowski, Gabriel Axel, Robert Bresson, Olivier Assayas and Atom Egoyan.

SEASON 4
On Versimilitude

This season, we are pleased to be showing 12 films spanning seven decades from the greatest names in cinema, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Michael Haneke, Paolo Sorrentino, Agnès Varda, Louis Malle, Roy Andersson, Andrea Arnold, Hal Hartley, Denis Villeneuve, Peter Strickland, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Mia Hansen-Løve. Through rich storytelling and technical nuance, these directors bring to light cinema's raw power to move and to persuade, and perhaps, to flicker more truthfully than life itself.

SEASON 3
Sculpting in Time

We look at films spanning five decades that approach time in profound ways, featuring Abbas Kiarostami, Paolo Sorrentino, Agnès Varda, Yorgos Lanthimos, Roy Andersson and more. From the hyper-real to the arcane, each provides its own portal into what Tarkovsky described as the “inner, moral qualities essentially inherent in time itself”.

SEASON 2
Growing Pains

Filmmakers return to childhood because while it is universal, it is rarely identical. Whether delving deep into the turbulent experience of our earliest years or tracing their reverberations into adolescence and adulthood, these twelve films journey back to where it all begins.

SEASON 1
Beyond Varda

With director Agnès Varda’s death in 2019, the film world lost a leading (and too-often overlooked) member of the Nouvelle Vague, a cinematic innovator and a pioneering voice. This season of TANKtv marks that legacy with 10 films by female directors for whom Varda laid a cinematic foundation.