High Anxiety at the IFI

admin | May 26, 2011 | Comments (0)

This June the IFI will present a season of American conspiracy thrillers centered on the series of films from the 1970s that culminated in Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way. This trend in filmmaking, that came to be known as ‘Filmnoia’, was a response to a national mood of disillusionment after a decade that had seen political assassination and cover-up, social protest, the Vietnam War and Watergate.

The season kicks off with conspiracy thriller, The Manchurian Candidate. John Frankenheimer’s suspenseful film which was ahead of its time in 1962, prophetically plunging into a whirlpool of political paranoia. The season then shifts on to the early seventies with a duo of films from Alan J. Pakula; Klute a genuinely frightening film featuring an extraordinary Oscar-winning performance from Jane Fonda and The Parallax View which fed America’s hunger for political conspiracies in the wake of assassinations and brilliantly leads its hero Warren Beatty through a thrilling maze of blind alleys.

Roman Polanski’s Chinatown sees Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway subvert the Bogart-Bacall roles of old in a film that admirably shoulders the weight of modern tragedy. The bugging of a young couple poses a challenge to professional eavesdropper Gene Hackman as it appears that they may be murder targets and that they may not be the only people being bugged in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.

The season continues throughout June with more Gene Hackman in Arthur Penn’s film Night Moves; an underrated but prescient Pakula film, Rollover, that evokes the claustrophobic world of high finance on the eve of a financial crash; one of the most troubled productions in the history of cinema that included bankruptcy and a mob killing, Winter Kills; and finally Missing, Costa-Gavras’ first American film based on a true story about the search for a young American in the aftermath of Chile’s military coup.

Tickets are available from the IFI Box Office, by phone 01 679 3477, or online at www.ifi.ie