BFI Summer Holiday departs from ordinary leisure
BFI Summer Holiday passengers should pack Sophia Loren, The Count of Monte Cristo and enough French cinema to exceed the cabin allowance. August at BFI Player offers a getaway for anyone who finds a beach insufficiently subtitled.
The programme uses a loose summer getaway theme. It includes Last Swim, Audrey, Sophia Loren films and a selection of cult and archive cinema. This makes the usual question what shall we watch feel like an oral examination in modern culture.
Most streaming services offer comedy, drama or action. BFI Player offers a chance to confront your relationship with leisure while a postal worker in a French film looks out of a window with professional intensity.
The deckchair learns film history
“Your journey begins in glamour and changes at Paris Gare de Lyon for moral unease,” said Fenella Aspect Ratio, Curator of Platform Ennui. “A replacement bus serves the archive cinema lounge.”
The Sophia Loren focus offers real screen history and star power. The rest of the collection moves through different places, decades and styles. It is a generous programme, provided you accept that the only souvenir may be a new fear of saying a film was quite good.
One subscriber tried to watch casually while ironing. Within minutes, the iron had developed a position on Italian cinema and refused to flatten any shirt lacking emotional ambiguity.
The programme lets viewers follow an adventure one night and a more uncertain journey the next. This is what holiday choice should mean, not merely deciding whether to move from the sofa to the other sofa.
The return journey contains analysis
After a week of BFI Summer Holiday viewing, the average household can no longer call rain miserable. It must be described as an atmosphere that interrogates its own interiority.
The deckchair has returned home rested, cultured and unable to describe anything as light entertainment without first discussing the politics of looking.
Read the real story: The BFI Player’s August line up.
