£6.00
(£4.50 conc.)
Doors 2:00pm
Film 2:30pm
A new film and book club for avid readers and Deptford cinephiles. Every second Sunday afternoon of the month, we will meet up to watch a film adaptation of a book or a writer’s biopic. After the screening, there will be an informal chat about the book and the film, upstairs in the bar. There will be cake!
dir. Ben Wheatley
year. 2015
country. UK
run-time. 119min
rating. 15
HIGH-RISE (2015)
based on the novel
HIGH-RISE by J. G. Ballard
Deptford Cinema’s Film and Book Club starts the year with a successful collaboration between writer Amy Jump and director Ben Wheatley with their stylish adaptation of JG Ballard’s dystopian tale of social disintegration. Set in a newly built Brutalist high-rise, each strata of the block houses a different social class, with the penthouse reserved for the architect and his sneering vision of architecture as a “crucible of change.” However, the reality is that his creation is “prone to fits of mania, narcissism and power failure.” The demise of the architect’s plan is riotously shocking.
Anti-hero, Dr Laing, superbly played by Tom Hiddleston, reflects that he is “living in a future that had already taken place”. With Deptford awash with developers and controversial displacements of local residents and claims of social cleansing, Ballard’s High-Rise has an unsettling prescience.
The screening will be followed by an informal discussion about the themes of the book and film, with reference to local housing issues. Speakers - to be confirmed.
“Togetherness is beating up an empty elevator. ”
“Visiting his neighbours’ apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee pot, but the well-modulated colour schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design. In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture, and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.”
