Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense, will be celebrated at GoMA with an extensive retrospective featuring 56 films and 17 television episodes next month. Friday night screenings of Hitchcock’s most popular titles, including Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963) and Rear Window (1954) will see the cinema’s foyer transformed into a lounge bar from 5.30pm. Tickets available through Qtix. Read more

The Savage Eye: Surrealism and Cinema

Until 2 October 2011
Free admission

The Savage Eye: Surrealism and Cinema continues its major survey of the surrealist sensibility in cinema. The program charts how developments in filmmaking have been used to represent the interior world of dreams and the subconscious via cinematic manipulation and montage. Read more

‘“A dream of dark and troubling things” is the entire synopsis offered by David Lynch for his remarkable and wildly original first feature. The film relates the story of Henry, a hapless hero cursed with an unfortunate hairline. Best seen as a dark nightmare about sexuality, parenthood, and commitment in relationships, Eraserhead astounds through its expressionist sets and photography, its startling, sinister soundtrack, and its relentlessly imaginative fluency.’ Harvard Film Archive Read more

‘The Naked Lunch explores the ‘New Flesh’ in dreamy, hallucinogenic worlds that encapsulate the irrational logic of Surrealism. A pest exterminator lives with his wife, Joan, in a world of drugs and delirium. When he accidentally shoots Joan he is unable to prevent a headlong fall into a hallucinogenic world, inhabited by a talking typewriter, cockroaches, insects, Mugwumps and a string of sexually ambiguous characters.’ Barbara Creed Read more

Videodrome is a prophetic vision of the modern world in which the real and the televisual are dangerously confused. Cancer-carrying signals, imbedded in an underground telecast called ‘Videodrome’ are inducing mind-controlling brain tumours in its viewers. When a film producer discovers the pirate broadcast, he embarks on a hallucinatory journey of right-wing conspiracies, sadomasochism and bodily transformation. Read more

‘This bizarre psychological thriller chronicles the perverse relationship that develops between identical-twin gynaecologists with very different personalities. The twins share everything, including an apartment and a fertility clinic, but a hedonistic actress enters their lives and drives a wedge between them for the first time.’ Harvard Film Archive Read more

‘In Crash [David] Cronenberg looks at the erotic appeal of car accidents — his protagonists develop a fetish over car crashes, re-enacting the road accidents of the famous (James Dean, Jane Mansfield, Albert Camus). Characters are aroused by the melding of flesh and metal as well as the leather and steel of prosthetic devices’. Barbara Creed Read more

‘Lynch’s film presents the story of an eager actress who befriends a beautiful female amnesiac and ascends the Hollywood ladder based on sheer talent. However Lynch establishes this storyline as a fantasy that masks the horror of the actress’s actual existence. Both erotic and horrifying, the film utilizes exaggerated performance and dream sequences to distinguish between reality and fantasy — a fantasy that, in many ways, reflects the film experience.’ Harvard Film Archive Read more

‘Inland Empire is overtly about the relationship between the movie and the observer, the actor and the performance, the watcher and the watched. Events transpire in multiple locations at the same time (or multiple times at the same place), observers are anywhere and everywhere at once, and realities are endlessly duplicable and repeatable. Inland Empire presents itself as a Hollywood movie (and a movie about Hollywood) in the guise of an avant-garde mega-meta art movie.' Jim Emerson Read more