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  • © 2023 TANKtv
  • 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.

  • Summer with Monika

    Ingmar Bergman | 1953

    EXIT

    Summer with Monika

    Ingmar Bergman | 1953

    WATCH NOW TRAILER AFTERTHOUGHTS

    Beginning with the romance between a grocery store worker, Monika (Harriet Andersson) and shy delivery boy, Harry (Lars Ekborg), Summer with Monika’s title describes the months the couple spend powerboating around a sunny Swedish archipelago before the walls of domestic life close in. Bergman’s rich and contemplative film traces the maturation of youth to adulthood, as summer turns to winter, and infatuation transfigures into something altogether more complex.

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    Maddie Mortimer’s debut novel Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies won this year’s Desmond Elliott Prize and was, last week, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Saskia Dixie is an independent filmmaker whose work has been screened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, ALEX Berlin, Germany and the Barbican Centre, London, amongst others. Here, they discussed their post-viewing impressions of Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika as the credits roll.

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  • Naked

    Mike Leigh | 1993

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    Naked

    Mike Leigh | 1993

    WATCH NOW TRAILER AFTERTHOUGHTS

    Mike Leigh’s nighttime odyssey follows Johnny, a nihilistic and malicious drifter, as he collides with the dispossessed souls of London’s underbelly. With a razor-sharp script and a blistering performance from David Thewlis, Naked is a rage-filled masterwork of British cinema, which, as Derek Malcolm wrote, "tries to articulate what is wrong with the society that Mrs Thatcher claims does not exist".

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    Megan Nolan is an Irish author based in London. Her first book, Acts of Desperation, was published in 2021. Critic, editor and director of Resonance FM, K Biswas’ work has been published widely. Here, they discuss their post-viewing impressions as the credits roll on Mike Leigh’s Naked.

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  • Early Summer

    Yasujirō Ozu | 1951

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    Early Summer

    Yasujirō Ozu | 1951

    WATCH NOW TRAILER AFTERTHOUGHTS

    Rising from a fractious post-war Japan, Early Summer transfigures the country’s defeat and western occupation into one of Yasujiro Ozu’s most intricate familial studies. After Noriko (Setsuko Hara) chooses to marry a childhood friend against the recommendation of her family, the bonds between she and them are torn apart. Black-and-white film renders the textures of water and light in as much painstaking detail as Ozu’s depiction of the slow fracture of a family. 

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    Writer and critic Leo Robson has recently launched his own substack, Taproot. Writer and editor Joanna Biggs’s next book, A Life of One’s Own, was published by Hachette in spring 2023. Here, they discuss their immediate post-viewing impressions as the credits roll on Yasujirō Ozu’s Early Summer. 

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  • A Woman Under the Influence

    John Cassavetes | 1974

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    A Woman Under the Influence

    John Cassavetes | 1974

    WATCH NOW TRAILER AFTERTHOUGHTS

    The spaghetti turns cold as the coupledom of Mabel and Nick collapses under the pressure of 20th-century domesticity. Inspired by his wife the actor Gena Rowland’s desire to write about contemporary womanhood, John Cassavetes’ film records Mabel's shuttling between the twin institutions of the family and the asylum in this frank portrait of love and where it fails. 

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    Wendy Erskine lives in Belfast. Sweet Home, her first collection of stories, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. Her second short story collection, Dance Move, was published in 2022 and has been described by the Irish Times as containing “the whole human comedy” of “life, drama, tragedy, conflict and wit”. Susannah Dickey grew up in Derry and now lives in London. She is the author of four poetry pamphlets and her short fiction has been published in the Dublin Review and the White Review. She is the author of Tennis Lessons (2020) and Common Decency (2022), both published by Doubleday UK.

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  • Rashomon

    Akira Kurosawa | 1950

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    Rashomon

    Akira Kurosawa | 1950

    WATCH NOW TRAILER AFTERTHOUGHTS

    When a murdered samurai is found in the forest, four people – his wife, a woodcutter, a bandit and the samurai himself – give four wildly differing accounts of the circumstances surrounding his death. Groundbreaking cinematography charges the film with narrative power that diffuses through dappled sunlight: Akira Kurosawa’s visual and psychological masterpiece destabilises the very concept of truthfulness, becoming a monument to the impossibility of objective experience.

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    Josh Cohen is Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. Rye Dag Holmboe is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Researcher at University of the Arts London. His writings have appeared in journals such as October, Angelaki, Third Text, and Art History, as well as magazines including The White Review, Art Licks, and Apollo. Here, they discuss their post-viewing impressions as the credits roll on Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon.

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  • Riddles of the Sphinx

    Laura Mulvey | 1977

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    Riddles of the Sphinx

    Laura Mulvey | 1977

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    The camera pans throughout the various domestic environments inhabited by Louise – including Malcolm LeGrice’s kitchen and Stephen Dwoskin’s bedroom – interrupted by Laura Mulvey reading the story of Oedipus encountering the Sphinx. Perhaps more than the subject matter, co-directors Mulvey and Peter Wollen are applying lessons from Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema” to the domestic: “Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectre the illusions of looking in on a private world.”

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    Georgie Carr is a staff writer for Another Gaze and her writing has appeared in Gloam Journal, The Quietus and Ceasefire Magazine. Lamorna Ash's first book, Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town, was published in 2020 and she has written for publications including The Guardian, The TLS and New Left Review. Here, they discuss their post-viewing impressions as the credits roll on Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx.

  • Fitzcarraldo

    Werner Herzog | 1982

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    Fitzcarraldo

    Werner Herzog | 1982

    WATCH NOW TRAILER AFTERTHOUGHTS

    Werner Herzog’s modern epic follows its titular protagonist’s attempt to expand his rubber-harvesting empire in deep Peru. A “conquistador of the useless” (as Herzog labelled his own directorial project), Fitzcarraldo drags a 320-ton steamer over a mountain in a feat of absurdity that dances along the line between dream and insanity – as did much of the film’s production, which boasts a Wikipedia subcategory headline of “deaths, injuries and accusations of exploitation”.

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    Writer and lecturer Rebecca Tamás is the author of the poetry collection WITCH and the essay collection Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman. She is a lecturer in creative writing at York St John University. Writer Rebecca May Johnson has published essays, reviews and nonfiction with Granta, Times Literary Supplement and Vittles, among others. Her debut non-fiction book Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen was published by Pushkin Press in 2022. Here, they discuss their immediate post-viewing impressions as the credits roll on Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. 

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  • The Belly of an Architect

    Peter Greenaway | 1987

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    The Belly of an Architect

    Peter Greenaway | 1987

    WATCH NOW TRAILER AFTERTHOUGHTS

    At the centre of Peter Greenway’s The Belly of an Architect is Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy), an American cuckold in Rome. As the ageing architect arrives in the capital with his wife, Louisa (Chloe Webb), he is unsettled by intestinal maladies and adultery. As visually obsessive as Kracklite, the film is a celebration of Roman architecture and the vision – artistic or Bacchic – of the men who built it.

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    Matteo Pericoli is a Milan-born architect, illustrator, writer and teacher. He is the author of several books — including Manhattan Unfurled, The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York, Windows on the World: 50 Writers, 50 Views, and more recently The Great Living Museum of Imagination: A Guide to the Exploration of Literary Architecture. His drawings have appeared in various newspapers and magazines including the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Observer. David Annand has worked as an editor at Conde Nast Traveller and GQ and has written for the FT, TLS, the New Statesman and Time Out. Peterdown is his first book. Here, they discuss their post-viewing impressions as the credits roll on Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect.

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  • Violent Cop

    Takeshi Kitano | 1989

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    Violent Cop

    Takeshi Kitano | 1989

    WATCH NOW TRAILER AFTERTHOUGHTS

    In the 1980s, Takeshi Kitano turned from presenting the wildly popular Takeshi’s Castle to creating crime dramas. Violent Cop is the first in a trilogy of Yakuza crime films, in which brutality and erratic humour nestle together to illustrate the increasingly absurd aesthetic landscape of a new turbocapitalist society. 

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    Satona Suzuki is a lecturer in Japanese and Modern Japanese History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and is a member of the Centre for Translation Studies and the Japan Research Centre. Fabio Gygi is a senior lecturer in anthropology at SOAS and chair of the Japan Research Centre. Here, they discuss their post-viewing impressions of Violent Cop as the credits roll.

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  • Beauty and the Beast

    Jean Cocteau | 1946

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    Beauty and the Beast

    Jean Cocteau | 1946

    WATCH NOW TRAILER AFTERTHOUGHTS

    Jean Cocteau’s reinvention of the fairy tale represents a post-war return to fantasy and the impressionable realm of childhood. In the aftermath of her father’s floral theft, Belle steps from a world filled with light into the Beast’s lair. A lush orchestral score and intelligently-designed special effects produce a hyper-expressiveness that render this fairytale more vivid than reality – how unsettling that might be depends on the viewer...

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    Caroline Issa is fashion director at TANK. Ali Golsorkhi is video editor. Here, they discuss their post-viewing impressions of Jean Cocteau’s The Beauty and the Beast as the credits roll.

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  • Caravaggio

    Derek Jarman | 1986

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    Caravaggio

    Derek Jarman | 1986

    WATCH NOW TRAILER AFTERTHOUGHTS

    The artist, dying of lead poisoning in exile with only his companion Jerusaleme by his side, recalls his youth in the city. Cavorting with the drunks and sex workers of 16th century Rome street life lend a precious beauty and a dark energy to his developing work, and Jarman’s use of chiaroscuro in the film itself makes this paen to artistry as expressive and textured as its namesake’s paintings.

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    Barry Pierce is a writer whose work has appeared in i-D, the Times, the Irish Times, Dazed Magazine and others Eliza Clark’s first novel Boy Parts was released by Influx Press in July 2020, and her second Penance was released by Faber in 2023. She hosts the podcast You Just Don’t Get It, Do You? with her partner, in which they discuss film and television which squanders its potential. Here, they discuss their post-viewing impressions as the credits roll on Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio.

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  • Distant Voices, Still Lives

    Terence Davies | 1988

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    Distant Voices, Still Lives

    Terence Davies | 1988

    WATCH NOW TRAILER AFTERTHOUGHTS

    Terence Davies’ debut feature is an intimate portrait of a working-class family in 1940s and 1950s Liverpool. Davies, himself the youngest of ten children born into a Catholic household, uses various family gatherings as a backdrop for the tipping of the 20th century into its explosive second half. Yet the film’s focus is on the drama and mundanity of everyday human experience, which Davies portrays with a tender grace.

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    Nathalie Olah is an editor and journalist and the author of Steal as Much as You Can (Repeater Books, 2019). Rachael Allen is a poet and editor whose first poetry collection Kingdomland was published by Faber & Faber in 2019. Here, they discuss their post-viewing impressions as the credits roll on Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives.

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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 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.