The Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer has only made four feature films across the past quarter century. But each one has been singular, a shock to the system, and each time you wonder how he got away with so much. Unlike more prolific directors, Glazer doesn’t bend his work to the dictates of the industry, but rather it’s the other way round: his films are audaciously conceived, radical, and purposefully unsettling. Kubrick is his avowed master, and Glazer has the same perfectionism and single-minded focus, as well as a similar gift for taking in the bigger picture. They’re anthropologists, but Glazer has a more surrealist vision, humanity often seems like an alien species in his work, prey to impulses and desires we can only attempt to contain.
This short series includes Glazer’s rarely screened debut feature, Sexy Beast (2000), with Ray Winstone squaring off against Ben Kingsley, as well has his controversial second film, Birth (2004), with Nicole Kidman. Both are showing on 35mm film. Composer Cayne McKenzie will give a Film Studies talk on composer Mica Levi, alongside a screening of their collaborations on the short films, The Fall (2019) and Strasbourg 1518 (2020), and we’re showing the first Glazer/Levi collaboration, Under the Skin (2013).
Sexy Beast
Glazer's first film is an outrageous black comedy about a retired gangster (Ray Winstone) on the Costa del Sol, fending off the unwanted advances of a scarily psychotic Ben Kingsley, who wants him back on the job and won't take no for an answer. Screening in 35mm.
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Elective Affinities: The Scores of Mica Levi
Composer Cayne McKenzie (We Are the City; Big Kill) analyses the extraordinary sonic stylings of Jonathan Glazer-collaborator Mica Levi, whose scores include Under the Skin, The Zone of Interest, and Jackie. + Rare screenings of 2 Levi/Glazer shorts.
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Under the Skin
Nine years after Birth, Glazer returned with this unique underground movie starring a deglamorized but highly sexed Scarlett Johansson, picking up and disposing with random men. It's a bleakly unforgettable movie, with a mesmeric Mica Levi score.
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The Zone of Interest
Glazer's award-winning film follows Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller), mother of five, and wife to Rudolph. They live in an idyllic villa with a the bucolic garden, literally a stone's throw from Rudolph's place of work -- he's Camp Commandant at Auschwitz.
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