5 – 12 October

The human mind is a fragile thing, as can be illustrated by three characters who have slipped the shackles of the mundane to drive the narrative of three very different films. From the hallucinatory madness of a Spanish conquistador too hungry for power, through the humourous antics of an artist too poor to be called eccentric we collapse into the world of an alcoholic who listens too closely to the voices in his glass. Lest you find your own grip faltering, remember to keep telling yourself… “It’s only a movie”.

Dir: Werner Herzog
West Germany 1972 93mins 35mm
Drawn from a handful of lines scrawled in a 16th century monk’s journal, Herzog constructed his hallucinatory myth of conquistadors searching for El Dorado, the elusive city of gold in the Amazon. As the jungle closes in and their separation from civilisation grows, sanity and order break down, descending into collective madness. Gorgeously shot on location in Peru, with a sublime Popul Vuh score and Klaus Kinski’s intense central performance, this is the benchmark for any depiction of man versus the jungle. A major influence on Coppola when he directed Apocalypse Now.

Preceded by documentary short Showing the World We’re Still Here (1972)
Listed in 1001 Films You Must See Before You Die

Dir: Karel Reisz
UK 1966 97mins 16mm
Morgan, a working class artist with an obsession for Gorillas and Karl Marx, has married above his social standing. Desperate to win his wife back after she asks for a divorce, Morgan wages a campaign of bizarre stunts that first get him arrested and then committed to an insane asylum. Turning its back on the gut-wrenching social realism of the British New Wave this anarchic comedy embraces the anti-establishment mood 1960s Britain and its celebration of non-conformism. Stars David Warner, Vanessa Redgrave and Bernard Bresslaw.
Print courtesy of the National Film & Sound Archive.

Winner Best Actress (Redgrave) Cannes Film Festival 1966

Dir: Stanley Kubrick
UK/US 1980 119mins 16mm
In the hope of a bit of peace and quiet, writer Jack Torrance takes a caretaking job at the isolated Overlook Hotel while it closes for the winter. He brings with him his wife and young son, whose psychic gift gives him visions of the hotel’s terrible secret history. Discarding much of the visceral horror of Stephen King’s bestselling novel, Kubrick’s pessimistic assessment of the human condition suggests that real terror lies within the family unit. Unsettling, eerie and completely hypnotic. Stars Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall and Scatman Crothers.
Print courtesy of the National Film & Sound Archive.

Listed in 1001 Films You Must See Before You Die