‘Photography Film Night’ 2017

Photography film nights in conjunction with Access Cinema will take place on the second last Tuesday of every month at 8pm. Admission €5.00.

Bill Cunningham, New York Tuesday 21st February

Chronicles a man who is obsessively interested in only one thing,
the pictures he takes that document the way people dress. The 80-
year-old New York Times photographer has two columns in the
paper’s Style section, yet nobody knows who he is.

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Annie Leibovitz – Life through a Lens Tuesday 21st March

Dir: Barbara Leibovitz / USA, 2006,  90mins   Cert: 12 (UK) / Language: English

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEjho8I8XBY

This documentary, directed by her sister Barbara, is a fascinating portrait of a great talent, featuring footage from Leibovitz in action during the 1960s and contributions from Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hillary Clinton, Mick Jagger and George Clooney.

She has also recorded the horrors of war in Rwanda and Sarajevo and taken intimate shots her own friends and family, including Susan Sontag.

This documentary, directed by her sister, is a fascinating portrait of a great talent, featuring vintage footage of Leibovitz in action during the 1960s and contributions from Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hillary Clinton, Mick Jagger and George Clooney.

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 Everlasting Moments Tuesday 25th April

Dir: Jan Troell     Denmard, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Germany         2008           131mins   Cert: 15A

Starring: Martin Balsam, John Fielder, Lee J.Cobb, E.G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Ed Binns, Jack Warden, Henry Fonda, Joseph Sweeney, Ed Begley, George Voskovec and Robert Webber

Language: Swedish

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRUygObOP08

MUCH REVERED IN HIS NATIVE SWEDEN, WRITER-DIRECTOR JAN TROELL RETURNS TO THE INTERNATIONAL SPOTLIGHT AT THE AGE OF 77 WITH THIS BEAUTIFULLY MEASURED PORTRAIT OF AN ORDINARY WOMAN WHOSE PHOTOGRAPHS CAPTURED THE WORKERS’ LOT IN MALMÖ BEFORE AND AFTER WWI.

Based on a real-life relative of the filmmaker’s wife, it recreates a time past — and indeed time passing — with the sort of languid glow that even Terrence Malick would be proud to claim as his own. With an ever-growing brood of kids, and a husband who’s a handful when he’s sober, a nightmare when he’s drunk, Maria Heiskanen’s doughty heroine has a lot to contend with. Discovering an unused box camera won in a lottery, her first thought is to sell it, but when the proprietor of the local photographic shop finds an exposed plate within and develops it, seeing the result sparks some hidden inspiration in her. Courtesy of the shopkeeper’s kindness, she gets the camera on an extended loan and proves a natural behind the lens, capturing decisive moments which are not only a source of pleasure in themselves but provide an island of self-worth in an otherwise hardscrabble existence.

Troell, who also shot the film in 16mm for a persuasive vintage look, is in no rush to hurry events along, instead allowing seemingly episodic events — strikes, infidelity, the coming of war — to build, gradually and quite cannily, into a totally involving fresco, where the characters’ everyday struggles compel our emotional investment. In the end, we haven’t just watched these people, we feel as if we’ve lived alongside them. A future classic. — Trevor Johnston / Irish Film Institute

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 McCullin Tuesday 23rd May

Dir: David & Jacqui Morris / UK, 2012, 85 mins  CLUB / Language: English

It is perhaps a flaw in Jacqui Morris’s excellent documentary portrait of war photographer Don McCullin that it implies he effectively retired in the early 1980s, having been alienated by the Sunday Times’s new owner Rupert Murdoch and incoming editor Andrew Neil. In fact, McCullin (now 77 years old) was taking pictures of the war in Aleppo this month, for the Times. The 60s to the 80s were the high-water mark of McCullin’s career: he found brilliant and searing images in pre-wall Berlin, Cyprus, the Congo, Cambodia, Northern Ireland and Lebanon. His then editor, Harold Evans, is interviewed here extensively and says he is a “genius”. It is hard to disagree. McCullin emerges as an unsentimental, plain-speaking, thoughtful man, disgusted at the inhumanity of war – and yet candid about how he is also personally and professionally drawn to its drama. He is haunted by what he has seen, and what he made newspaper readers see. Some of the more brutal images shown here surely could never have been published at the time. His shell-shocked US soldier in Vietnam is deservedly celebrated, as is his remarkable shot of the army charge in Belfast with the woman shrinking back into the doorway. Does he glamourise war? No. But perhaps he cinematises it, instinctively finding the vivid, compellingly composed image. I wonder what would happen if, like music photographer Anton Corbijn, he decided to make a feature film.  Peter Bradshaw / The Guardian