We have curated a ‘Reclaim The Frame : Vintage’ season for you as part of the BFI FAN Film Feels: Obsession season, on the theme of Women and Obsession. Join us for a double bill of two unique and under-screened female-made thrillers from the 80s plus creative writing workshops tapping into one’s own obsessive capacities!

The screening will be preceded by an extended introduction led by Mia Bays, Birds’ Eye View’s Director-At-Large and Oscar-winning producer and Dr Katie McBride, a Criminologist from the University of Plymouth with an interest in the social structures of society that foster and sustain social harms. Katie was previously Chief Executive of the regional equality and human rights body for the South West.

After the screenings there will be a workshop, hosted by the award winning poet and creative writing facilitator Be Manzini where the audience can explore their own objects of obsession, through words and images. This is also a great opportunity for participants to connect with other members of the RTF community.

The first film on the double bill is Dance With A Stranger (1985), a darkly haunting British noir written by Shelagh Delaney, who is perhaps best known as the writer behind A Taste Of Honey (1961). Based on the true story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain following her conviction for the murder of her lover, David Blakeley. Ellis’s murder trial in the 1950s became a national obsession which later informed the debates leading to the abolishment of the death penalty in 1965. Dance With A Stranger explores what it means to commit a ‘crime of passion’ and how class and gender can inform the criminal justice system.

In the 64 years since Blakely and Ellis died, the case has fascinated the British, perhaps because it combines sexuality and the class system, two of their greatest interests. Blakely was upper-class, polished, affected, superior. Ellis was a working-class woman who made herself up to look like Marilyn Monroe, and used the business of being a bar hostess as a way to support her young son and maintain her independence from men. Ironically, she was finally undone by her emotional dependence on Blakely, who gave and then withdrew his affection in a way that pushed her over the edge.

Cast:

Miranda Richardson, Rupert Everett, Ian Holm

102 minutes

 

REVIEWS

★★★★

“A film of astonishing performances and moody, atmospheric visuals.”
Robert Ebert

 

The second film is Smooth Talk, also from 1985, directed by Joyce Chopra. The film features a young Laura Dern in her debut lead role as Connie, a teenage girl who is pursued by an enigmatic older man. Atmospherically crafted Smooth Talk won the Grand Jury prize in the dramatic category at Sundance Film Festival. It unsettlingly contracts two types of sexual obsession – a teenager’s sexual curiosity and tendency to ‘crush’ and an older man’s fetishisation and manipulation of innocence.