Film Societies return

Nothing heralds the end of summer like the return of your local film society, reports Dan Slevin.

After several years of disrupted scheduling, New Zealand’s film societies are back next week with 2023 programmes that are sure to be a feast for movie lovers of all stripes. Because the film selection is performed centrally – through the New Zealand Federation of Film Societies, which is part of the New Zealand International Film Festival – every society in Aotearoa has access to the same collection of outstanding classic and modern titles. In this preview, I’ll be concentrating on the Auckland and Wellington selections but there is enough crossover that most of my highlights will also be appearing on screens closer to you.

If you have read Quentin Tarantino’s book, Cinema Speculation, you’ll know he spends quite a bit of time on Taxi Driver and the influence on it of John Ford’s The Searchers. (And if you’ve seen Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans you will have delighted in seeing David Lynch’s late cameo as Ford himself.) Both of those classic films – both in the Sight & Sound Top 50 for those following that project – feature in Wellington, no Searchers in Auckland though.

That’s likely because the Auckland season is a bit shorter. Wellington gets 35 screenings instead of 32 and runs until 4 December – is that longest Wellington Film Society programme ever?

Other classics playing in both centres include Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn in John Huston’s The African Queen and Sweet Smell of Success – Alexander Mackendrick’s iconic portrait of New York showbiz intrigue in the 1950s, starring Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster.

Wellington also gets Charles Laughton’s only feature film as director, The Night of the Hunter, in which Robert Mitchum as a travelling preacher terrorises single mom Shelley Winters and her two young kids. I saw this at the Embassy one film festival a few years ago back, in the days when films were screened on 35mm. It was amazing then and will be amazing again.

As always, the programme isn’t just a collection of beloved Hollywood classics, there is some theming going on. From our neck of the woods, there are small collections of early Aotearoa NZ features – Sleeping Dogs and Smash Palace – and three rarely seen on the big screen examples from Australia’s film industry – My Brilliant Career, The Big Steal and Celia. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice there’s a cross section of early Sir Sam Neill films coinciding with the publication of his autobiography on 21 March.

I have a reviewing colleague who doesn’t believe that documentaries are cinema but luckily for us he’s alone in that assessment. Wellington (5) and Auckland (4) have some excellent recent examples including the harrowing Romanian investigation into a nightclub tragedy Collective and B Movie: Lust and Sound in West Berlin, using never-before-seen archive footage to recreate the artistic and cultural tumult that was Berlin in the '70s and '80s.

I love Japan – and Japanese cinema of all kinds – so the chance to see Tokyo Drifter (1966) and Pigs & Battleships (1962) on the big screen is pure catnip to me.

But there are recent films, too. Léa Seydoux as a TV journalist in Bruno Dumont’s provocatively named France; one of the most dizzying contemporary noirs, Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake was one of my favourites at the 2019 international film festival and I’m delighted to have a chance to see it again; programmed in the highly Covid-compromised 2021 festival, therefore overlooked by many, was Polish film Never Gonna Snow Again, about a mysterious masseur bewitching “a prosperous but dysfunctional” upper-middle class gated community.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of this year’s programme, but I can tell you that if you’ve ever been considering an Auckland or Wellington film society membership, your Monday nights will never be the same again.

The programmes for all of New Zealand’s film societies can be found at the New Zealand Federation of Film Societies website.