Cinema Rediscovered Tour: THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION (1985)

We're bringing film festival Cinema Redisocvered to Liverpool!

Derek Jarman’s The Angelic Conversation is one of the most beautiful and mysterious works of queer cinema from the 1980s. A drifitng, dreamlike journey through the landscape of desire that was originally shot on Super-8 and blown up to 35mm. Here, the image transforms into something more resembling a mythical moving painting, lost in time.

Structured around 14 connonical sonnets by Shakespeare that're recited by the fantastic Judi Dench, The Angelic Conversation asks how queer lives inhabit history, literature, and myth.

An entrancing, experimental score by Coil marries together with Jarman’s images and Dench’s voice and conjours a cinematic spell making this a truly singular piece of moving-image work in British Cinema, at a time when Thatcher was trying to make it harder to be visibly queer.

Before our main feature, we shall be playing Sanctus (1990) which is one of Barbara Hammer’s key works from her mature period, created from a collection of early 20th-century medical X-ray films originally made by the radiologist James Sibley Watson. Hammer re-edits and hand-manipulates this archival footage into a rhythmic, luminous study of the human body. What was once scientific documentation becomes something sensorial and spiritual: bones, organs, and joints appear in motion, transformed into glowing, almost devotional images.

Hammer — a pioneering lesbian filmmaker and major figure of queer experimental cinema — uses the X-ray as a way to reclaim visibility. The film reframes the interior of the body not as a site of pathology or surveillance, but as a place of vitality, movement, and transcendence.

We're really excited to have Dr Sammy Holden aka ObscureFilm introduce Derek Jarman and his iconic work.

Please join us for our final screening on the year!

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This event is presented as part of , produced by Watershed in Bristol, and is supported by Film Hub North and the BFI Film Audience Network (BFI FAN) with National Lottery funding.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Quarry, 45 Hardman Street, Liverpool, United Kingdom

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