The admirers of rough Scandinavian detective
films will be pleased by the news that the 6th year of Noir Film Festival, once again held at the royal Křivoklát Castle, will bring several
dark stories from the production of Northern Europe countries in its program.
The festival, now in preparation, will open its gates to the fans of the „black
cinema” in the second half of August, namely from Thursday 23th
to Sunday 26th August.
Nordic
noir films and gloomy prison dramas
Festival visitors can look forward to real
gems: programmers Jana Bébarová and Milan Hain
added films to the NORDIC NOIR section that are unknown to the Czech viewers.
In these 1940s and 50s productions from Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland,
the viewers can see remarkable parallels with the contemporary Hollywood noirs and
discover more or less apparent influences of the iconic films of the American
cinema.
The next program section of the 6th
year is concentrated on PRISON NOIR. The section will introduce one of
the films of the distinctive film noir director Jules Dassin, whose
legacy the film festival had commemorated in the past, namely by Night and the
City (1950) and Rififi (1955). This year it will be his earlier film
Brute Force (1947), which had been a significant landmark in the
director’s career, because it was his first cooperation with an influential producer
Mark Hellinger and his new acting discovery Burt Lancaster.
Dassin’s prison drama excels with a stark social commentary and it can be
viewed as a rough allegory of the Nazi regime through the character of a
sadistic warden Munsey (played by the great Hume Cronyn).
A thrilling drama shot in the real prison
locations will be offered in Riot Cell Block 11 (1954), for which
director Don Siegel had engaged
several unprofessional actors. These two masculine titles will have their
counterpart in the dark female noir film Caged (1950), in which Eleanor
Parker excels in one of her lifetime roles awarded at the Venice Film
Festival. She plays a convict – victim, who is going through a fundamental
change of character in the unrelenting environment of a jail. Similar emotional
urgency is to be seen in the drama I Want to Live! (1958), in which Susan
Hayward had played her Oscar role.
A
tribute to the noir film stars
The acting icons of Classic Hollywood, which
will be paid a tribute to this year by naming the festival’s main projection
halls after them, will be actress and director Ida Lupino (1918–1995),
who would have been 100 years old this year, and actor Robert Ryan
(1909–1973). While you can remember Ida Lupino from Raoul Walsh’s They
Drive by Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941), in which she had appeared
alongside Humphrey Bogart, Robert Ryan is connected to a type of rude
men with decided, xenophobic opinions and violent behavior.
Hynek
Bočan celebrating his jubilee
Within the Czech “mark” the festival will
commemorate the work of Hynek Bočan, who is going to celebrate his 80th
birthday in April. The director, one of the patrons of the festival, visited
Křivoklát in 2015 and 2017, as he was introducing a screening of a
Czechoslovak-British film Třicet jedna ve stínu (Ninety Degrees in the
Shade, 1965), on which he had worked as an assistant director to Jiří
Weiss. He had significantly contributed to the Golden 60s of the
Czechoslovak cinema with works like Nikdo se nebude smát (Nobody Will
Laugh, 1965), a black comedy based on Milan Kundera’s novel, a film
adaptation of Vladimír Páral’s novel Soukromá vichřice (Private
Torment, 1967) or two films from 1968 that had been banned by the Communist
party, Čest a sláva (Honour and Glory), a historical drama from the
Thirty Years’ War, and Pasťák (The Borstal), situated in a Prague youth
detention center. You can experience the rawness and rough claustrophobic atmosphere,
which is close to the prison noir films introduced on the festival, at a
special screening.
Křivoklát
Castle Noir
This year the festival visitors are going to
enjoy the screenings in five historical halls (for example in the Gothic Royal
Hall and in the private chamber of Wenceslaus IV) and in Castle’s Upper
Courtyard, where the main evening screenings take place. By popular demand, we
negotiated the extension of these stylish screenings to another place – the
northeastern walls.
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