This May the IFI is re-releasing three of cinema’s finest works on brilliant new digitally restored prints. From the all-American psychosis of Scorcese’s Taxi Driver, the timeless romance of Bogart and Hepburn in Houston’s The African Queen, to Coppola’s stunning and harrowing Apocalypse Now.
Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro’s landmark portrait of urban alienation Taxi Driver is so abrasive and contentious that it’s hard to imagine we’ll see its like again. Disgusted by the decadence on the streets De Niro’s New York City cabbie Travis Bickle turns moral self-righteousness, sexual anxiety and deep loneliness into one of the screen’s most persuasive psychotics. Presented in a new digital restoration that was supervised by Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Chapman, the film still touches some uneasy, secret place in every viewer. “Are you talkin’ to me?”
“It isn’t about Vietnam, it is Vietnam”, Francis Ford Coppola famously said of Apocalypse Now’s hallucinatory fresco on the madness of war. The Heart of Darkness adaptation delivers countless legendary moments as Sheen’s military assassin heads downriver to terminate Brando’s errant Colonel Kurtz “with extreme prejudice”. A psychic journey into the heart of darkness it’s truly a film like no other. This new, Coppola-approved digital restoration of the 1979 release version reproduces the expressive contrast of the original print meaning Apocalypse Now has never looked better.
Digitally restored to its former Technicolor glory for this 60th anniversary reissue, The African Queen is a more amiable trip along the river. The African Queen is essentially romantic fairytale in which Beauty (Katharine Hepburn’s primly puritanical missionary lady) is awakened by the Beast (an unshaven, uncouth Humphrey Bogart). The ill-suited couple sets off in a rattletrap boat for a long, crazy cruise down a perilous African river, to end in love and a spectacular contribution to the war effort against the Germans. The well-worn story of love born out of shared peril is lent a new conviction through the camerawork of Jack Cardiff and the celebrated performances of Hepburn and Bogart.
Taxi Driver is re-released 13th-19th May
The African Queen is re-released 27th-31st May
Apocalyspe Now is re-released from 27th May
Further information and tickets can be found here: www.ifi.ie
