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ON THIS MONTH: CINEMA<br />
Man with a Movie Camera<br />
Secret of Kells<br />
Film '18<br />
Cinema round-up<br />
The highlight of the month at Depot Cinema, as<br />
far as cineastes are concerned, has to be the screening<br />
of the 1929 documentary Man with a Movie<br />
Camera (Sun 11th, 3pm), part of the U3A’s Soviet<br />
film season.<br />
The ‘Man’ in question is Dziga Vertov, who presents<br />
a vibrant warts-and-all picture of urban life<br />
in four Soviet cities – Kiev, Khartov, Moscow and<br />
Odessa – through a series of moving snapshots of<br />
the citizens at work and play, starting at the break of<br />
dawn and ending well after the lights go out.<br />
Film critic Peter Bradshaw loves the film’s ‘spirit of<br />
pure punk rock’: Vertov experiments with any number<br />
of pioneering techniques – double exposure,<br />
fast motion, jump cuts, tracking shots et al. The<br />
editor, interestingly, was his wife Elizaveta Svilova,<br />
who must have had her work cut out curtailing all<br />
the footage to 68 rip-roaring minutes, like someone<br />
clearing up after a great party. My favourite scene?<br />
The homeless chap bursting out laughing as he<br />
wakes in the morning to find a film crew in front<br />
of him.<br />
The other film in this three-part series (which<br />
started in Feb with Battleship Potemkin) is Warren<br />
Beatty’s 1981 classic Reds (4th, 2pm), in which<br />
producer/director/scriptwriter Beatty stars as<br />
Communist journalist John Reed (author of Ten<br />
Days that Shook the World), alongside Diane Keaton,<br />
who plays his lover-then-wife Louise Bryant. It’s<br />
something of a monster, weighing in at 3 hours 15<br />
minutes: American critic Roger Ebert called it ‘a<br />
thinking man’s Dr Zhivago… from the other side.’<br />
Another season to report is Depot’s ‘Documenting<br />
Reality’ series of five classic documentaries,<br />
screened in the Depot’s studio, and preceded by a<br />
lecture by University of Sussex’s Wilma De Jong,<br />
with a more informal discussion afterwards. These<br />
started in February 22nd (with Michael Moore’s<br />
Sicko) but there are four more to come in <strong>March</strong>,<br />
starting with Sarah Polley’s raw and intimate<br />
family tale Stories We Tell (1st and subsequent<br />
Thursdays, 7pm).<br />
As ever there’s the chance to do a bit of travelling.<br />
Last month we mentioned Depot’s Japanese<br />
season; this continues with the anime samurai tale<br />
The Sword of the Stranger (3rd, 12pm); Kazura<br />
Shiraishi’s mystery drama Birds Without Names<br />
(6th, 8.30pm) and Shinji Azura’s Where I Belong<br />
(13th, 8.30pm). Nearer to home, on St Patrick’s<br />
Day (17th) there’s a rare big-screen chance to<br />
see the brilliant 2009 Irish animation Secret of<br />
Kells; further afield (and then some) the sci-screen<br />
season continues with The Martian (27th).<br />
It’s Oscars month, of course, but there’s much<br />
more besides Hollywood fare (check out lewesdepot.org<br />
for day-to-day listings of first-run and<br />
other films) including live and as-live screenings<br />
of stage performances including Bizet’s opera<br />
Carmen (6th, 6.45pm); Shakespeare’s Julius<br />
Caesar (directed by Nicholas Hytner, 22nd, 7pm);<br />
The Royal Ballet’s Bernstein Centenary (27th,<br />
7.15pm), and Handel’s Messiah, staged by Tom<br />
Morris (28th, 8pm). Hallelujah to all that.<br />
Dexter Lee<br />
41