• SEASON 6
    Ritual

    Rituals create meaning; they raise us from the drab monotony of routine – ritual’s less interesting sibling – and build community, intimacy, narrative. We find ritual everywhere in cinema, not only on screen where myths and legends are retold and refreshed, but also off it, in the muted dialogue between maker and viewer. 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.

  • The Sacrifice

    Andrei Tarkovsky | 1986

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    The Sacrifice

    Andrei Tarkovsky | 1986

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    Andrei Tarkovsky’s hallucinatory late-style masterpiece The Sacrifice is permeated by the same prophetic inertia that haunts its creation; the director was undergoing chemotherapy while labouring over the final edit. After news of nuclear war arrives on his birthday, critic Alexander promises in prayer to sacrifice all he loves lest global catastrophe be avoided. But this metaphysical bargain provides neither relief nor atonement, only the ecstatic upheaval of a religious vision.

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    Matthew Janney is managing editor at TANK. Guy is assistant editor at TANK. Here, they discuss their immediate post-viewing impressions as the credits roll on The Sacrifice.  

  • 45 Years

    Andrew Haigh | 2015

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    45 Years

    Andrew Haigh | 2015

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    Andrew Haigh’s claustrophobic psycho-drama is a study in how even our most secure commitments are haunted by our unlived lives. Kate and Geoff, a comfortable and childless couple, are planning their 45th wedding anniversary when Geoff receives an explosive letter. In surgical scenes of sparse, suspicious dialogue, Haigh explores how the letter forcefully inserts Geoff’s past into the couple’s shared present, throwing their steady marriage into disarray as secrets held out of compassion become cause for hostility.

     

     

  • Leviathan

    Andrey Zvyagintsev | 2014

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    Leviathan

    Andrey Zvyagintsev | 2014

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    Leviathan offers a bracing take on a familiar tale: the struggle of a solitary figure against an unjust system. In a remote Russian village, part-time mechanic Kolya ignites a labyrinthine game of corruption and intimidation when he recruits a lawyer friend from Moscow to contest the forced purchase of his property. Epic, bleak and cut through with inimitable wit, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film is at once a precise critique of contemporary Russia and an otherworldly parable.

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    Matthew Janney is managing editor at TANK. Carmen Gray is a freelance journalist, film critic, and programmer from New Zealand who now lives in Berlin. Publications she has written for include The New York Times, The Guardian, The Observer, Art Review, Sight & Sound and The Calvert Journal, often focusing on the art and culture of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. Here, they discuss their immediate post-viewing impressions as the credits roll on Leviathan.

  • Weekend

    Jean-Luc Godard | 1967

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    Weekend

    Jean-Luc Godard | 1967

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    A time capsule of 1960s revolutionary fervour, Jean-Luc Godard’s black-comedy follows a bourgeois couple who drive out into the countryside with murderous intent. They are willing to kill to secure their inheritance from an ailing relative, but before, they must contend with hippie cannibals, cinema’s longest traffic jam and the apparent collapse of Western civilisation. In Godard’s scorched-earth, all-surface road film, both the polite norms of consumer society and romantic revolutionary ideals are reduced to wreckage.

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    Mike Figgis is an award-winning director born in Carlisle and raised in Nairobi. Before becoming one of the most inventive directors in contemporary British cinema, Figgis studied music and played alongside Bryan Ferry in the band, Gas Board. Integrating his musical craft with filmmaking, Figgis first experimented with one-stage productions combining music and theatre before achieving his cinematic debut with Stormy Monday in 1988. A prolific film and documentary maker, his most notable works include Internal Affairs (1990), the Oscar-nominated Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and Time Code (2000).Tamsin Topolski is a British actress, director, singer and photographer who most recently starred in the US miniseries The Rook (2019). She has appeared in numerous shows for TV, theatre and radio as well as three films – and has also found time to sing backing vocals for Laura Marling. In 2019, Topolski was profiled in TANK, where you can read more about her life and work. Here, they discuss their immediate post-viewing impressions as the credits roll on Weekend.

  • 71 Fragments of a chronology of chance

    Michael Haneke | 1994

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    71 Fragments of a chronology of chance

    Michael Haneke | 1994

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    With an eerie distance that mirrors the numbing effects of the newsreel segments scattered throughout, Michael Haneke’s asynchronous study of our frayed social fabric skips between the lives of a dozen or so characters, unified by a tragic mass-shooting at a Viennese bank. In lesser hands, the film’s structural ambition and heady themes of isolation and desensitisation might collapse into gimmick, but this often-overlooked early work is exemplary of the hypnotic tension celebrated in Haneke’s later, more conventional films.

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    Guy Mackinnon-Little is assistant editor at TANK. Martha Skye Murphy is a musician and singer-songwriter. Her most recent single Found Out was released in June. Here, they discuss their post-viewing impressions as the credits roll on 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance.

  • Le Bonheur

    Agnès Varda | 1965

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    Le Bonheur

    Agnès Varda | 1965

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    What secrets lie behind smiling family photographs and projections of domestic bliss? In Le Bonheur, Varda turns her attention to one French family, whose picture-perfect life is derailed when husband Francois falls in love with a postal worker. Set against hyper-stylised vignettes of rural France – and accompanied by a dramatic Mozart score – Le Bonheuris a biting satire on our clichéd conceptions of happiness and in the words of Varda herself, “a beautiful summer fruit with a worm inside”. 

  • The Seasons in Quincy

    Bartek Dziadosz, Christopher Roth, Colin MacCabe, Tilda Swinton | 2016

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    The Seasons in Quincy

    Bartek Dziadosz, Christopher Roth, Colin MacCabe, Tilda Swinton | 2016

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    Four films in one, The Seasons in Quincy combines to create a layered biography of British writer John Berger’s life and work. Visiting Berger at his home in the French Alps – directors Bartek Dziadosz, Christopher Roth, Colin MacCabe and Tilda Swinton move meditatively through Berger’s ideas around time, family, art and agriculture. It is a film dedicated to the art of witnessing, echoing what is perhaps Berger’s greatest gift to humankind.

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    Christabel Stewart is arts editor at TANK. Josh Appignanesi is a filmmaker whose work includes the acclaimed feature documentary The New Man, with Devorah Baum, award-winning comedy The Infidel and the playful thriller Female Human Animal co-devised with the novelist Chloe Aridjis. Here, he shares a cautious hagiography of John Berger himself, as the credits roll on The Seasons of Quincy.  

  • Police, Adjective

    Corneliu Porumboiu | 2009

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    Police, Adjective

    Corneliu Porumboiu | 2009

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    Police, Adjective is award-winning Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu’s deadpan comedy about a police detective tasked with tailing a pot-smoking student. Questioning the moral implications of his task, the detective plunges into a crisis of conscience – much to the frustration of his overly bureaucratic, draconian superiors – and begins to question not only the ethics of law enforcement but deeper, artistic questions about genre and narrative.

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    Matthew Janney is managing editor at TANK. Paula Erizanu is a writer and journalist and culture editor at The Calvert Journal. Here, they discuss their immediate post-viewing impressions as the credits roll on Police, Adjective.

  • Leningrad Cowboys Go America

    Aki Kaurismäki | 78

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    Leningrad Cowboys Go America

    Aki Kaurismäki | 78

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    Before Borat, there were the Leningrad Cowboys. As prospects of stardom dry up at home, Siberian polka band Leningrad Cowboys set their hopes on America, because in “hamburger nation… they’ll buy anything”. With their accordions, fiddles, fur coats – and the frozen corpse of their bassist – in tow, the spikey-haired, pointy-shoe-wearing musicians tour the dive bars and juke joints of America’s deep south, in this farcical, eccentric pseudo-biopic from Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki.

     

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    Guy Mackinnon-Little is assistant editor at TANK. Louis Rogers works at MACK Books and is a regular contributor to TANK. Here, they discuss their immediate post-viewing impressions as the credits roll on Leningrad Cowboys Go America.  

  • Exotica

    Atom Egoyan | 1994

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    Exotica

    Atom Egoyan | 1994

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    In the murky blue light of a Toronto strip club, Francis Brown, a regular grieving the loss of his daughter, buys the company of dancer Christina. Far from a series of transactional erotic exchanges, their ritual meetings express a shared intimacy based more on loss and grief than superficial thrills. As the pair’s fates intermingle with those of the club’s owner and DJ, the film’s complex geometry is revealed in a thrilling sequence of events that shows Egoyan at the height of his dramatic powers.

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    Stephanie Sy-Quia is a writer and critic whose poetry collection Amnion is forthcoming with Granta. Mimi Xu is a music director and sound designer who also DJs under the name of Misty Rabbit and publishes the French electronic music magazine Trax. Here, they discuss their immediate post-viewing impressions as the credits roll on Exotica.  

SEASON 11
Forbidden Colour

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.

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 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.