With a new season of Film Society upon us, converting newcomers to this weekly ritual is often greeted with the same question: why, when I can rent most of these movies at the video store? In a pervading digital age, where more films, past and present, are available and within reach than ever before, the need to preserve ‘live cinema’ gathers an urgency all of its own. If radioactive multiplexes, popcorn encrusted seating, grossly inflated ticket prices and insolent teens are just some of the reasons behind punters opting for the comfort of their own living rooms, let a Film Society membership restore their faith in theatres once more. Respectable, well attended, affordable, and certain to enrich any jaded moviegoer’s palette, we can’t recommend it enough.

This year, the films of Samuel Fuller and Francois Truffaut combine forces as the major retrospective element of the programme: B-picture greats Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, as well as the irrepressible adventures of Antoine Doinel rank as must-sees along side other iconoclastic works. A handful of French features unreleased in this country extend the Gallic theme, including new films by Benoît Jacquot (director of the excellent The School of Flesh), and Olivier Assayas, whose Clean won a supreme Maggie Cheung (re-teaming here with her ex-husband and Irma Vep collaborator) Best Actress at Cannes in 2004. It is certainly the most forthright and intently focused of movies about drug addiction, and a great vehicle for Cheung in what is reputedly her last ever movie role. Further a field is the Cinema Novo season, delivering five features from Brazil supported aptly by the Brazilian Embassy. These curiosities hail from the potent sixties, a decade conducive to many a creative movement. Of the quintet are two seldom-seen films by Novo giant Glauber Rocha, a radical spoken of in the same breath as Jean-Luc Godard.

Various classics, oddities and one-offs round out the season, which begins in March. First port-of-call should be the Wellington Film Society website, which is the most up-to-date and links to Auckland, Hamilton, Palmerston North, Nelson, Canterbury, Queenstown and Dunedin divisions – their programmes, apart from the major aforementioned selections, will differ in parts, and have yet to be confirmed. Further film society links are listed below.—Tim Wong

See Also:
» Samuel Fuller and Francois Truffaut: An Appreciation
» An ode to Film Society; a fatwah against DVD