Celebrating 52 years of GFT with Big Screen Classics

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Celebrating 52 years of GFT with Big Screen Classics

Our Head of Programme, Paul Gallagher, tells the story behind our Big Screen Classics season.

We’re heading into May, a big month for cinema on the world stage as it’s the occasion of the annual Cannes Film Festival. Exciting as that is, we have an annual occurrence closer to home that we think is even more important: GFT’s birthday. This year our beloved home of film turns 52, and while that’s not an official big one, it’s all the excuse we need to put on a special programme of films (and comes in particularly handy when it’s a quiet time of year for big indie cinema new releases).

Last year we loved rolling out the new 70mm print of North by Northwest, and it prompted us to ask our friends at classic film distributor Park Circus if they had any more new 70mm we could showcase this year. They came back with something pretty special: the new 70mm restoration of John Ford’s iconic Western, The Searchers. These screenings at the start of May at GFT will only be the second time this print has been shown in the UK, following three screenings at the Prince Charles Cinema in London last year, so it feels like a worthy exclusive to begin our birthday.

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Taking the lead from the grand vision of The Searchers, our birthday season this year follows the theme of Big Screen Classics; films that can legitimately be called ‘visual feasts’. To that end we’ll be filling our Sunday afternoons with several of the biggest, most lush cinematic experiences we could get our hands on: Dr Zhivago, one of David Lean’s most iconic epics; The English Patient, which in many ways was director Anthony Minghella’s tribute to Lean, screening on 35mm, no less; Sergio Leone’s masterful Spaghetti Western Once Upon a Time in the West; and The Godfather, a film that unbelievably gets better with every viewing. This last one also overlaps with a mini-season of films we’re screening to mark the passing of beloved screen legend Diane Keaton, who died last October. Alongside her turn as Kay in Coppola’s landmark masterpiece, we’ll be showing Keaton’s defining role in one of the greatest romantic comedies of all time, Annie Hall, and acknowledging her mastery of mainstream entertainment with The First Wives Club.

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Returning to birthday plans, while Sunday afternoons are where you will find the traditional epics, Saturday evenings are about films with a more visceral approach to popping your eyes (and ears) — Mad Max: Fury Road, Interstellar on 70mm, the 4K restoration of Tarsem Singh’s uniquely dazzling ode to storytelling, The Fall, and a back-to-back Steven Spielberg day taking in two of his essential science fiction works, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and A.I. Artificial Intelligence. And if your tastes run to something more esoteric, we’ll also be showcasing GFT 1 screenings of Resurrection, a new otherworldly cinematic experience from Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan, alongside his 2018 showstopper Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Lastly, because David Lynch remains our CineMaster of CineMasters, we’ll be offering another chance to catch his magnum opus, Mulholland Drive, on our biggest screen.

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And as if this wasn’t enough, we’ll also have a whole swathe of new releases, including Steven Soderbergh’s brilliant The Christophers, with Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel on top form; a trio of 80s favourites getting 40th anniversary reissues (Stand By Me, Top Gun and Highlander); a pair of very different cult classics back on the big screen (Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Wake in Fright); and a handful of returning hits from earlier this year, including Oscar winner One Battle After Another. Who needs sunshine?

Tickets for all of this and more are on sale now from our Box Office and glasgowfilm.org. Click here for showtimes for our Big Screen Classics season.