It's a Family Affair...
13 - 31 May
- Introduction
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- All films
The family can be a source of support, comfort and love, but it's also frequently a breeding ground for disappointment, frustration, jealousy, resentment, hatred, and all kinds of violently manipulative emotional and physical abuse, reckons Geoff Andrew.
The poet Philip Larkin may have laid the blame for the world's ills on parents, but even he recognised that mum and dad had themselves already been 'fucked up' by their folks. It's this side of family life that's the most fertile territory for drama; think back to its very beginnings and the Greek tragedians' tortured tales of Agamemnon, Oedipus, Medea et al. Happy families seldom make for very interesting cinema, especially if the family is the prime focus of attention rather than incidental to the plot. Even Meet Me in St Louis - fondly regarded by many as one of the warmest tributes to family life - chronicles an annus horribilis for the Smiths, with anxiety, anger and the prospect of disintegration looming.
Cinema thrives on conflict, obstacles to overcome, and the disclosure of mysteries; we were tempted to title this season 'Secrets and Lies' - but then there are far more (and far worse) aspects to the dystopia which our nearest and dearest can constitute than mere deceit.
So this season embraces a range of ills, some common, others mercifully less so; it also explores a variety of relationships and different notions of 'family'. (A One and a Two..., for example, concerns one kind of extended family, the Godfather trilogy quite another.) Sometimes the troubles that form the drama of the film arise within the family, sometimes from without. Sometimes the family turns out to be a source of comfort and strength to an individual member, sometimes it exacerbates or is the cause of any problems. And some of the films gathered here are affectionate, nostalgic or comic, while others are quite vitriolic in expressing their disenchantment or horror at what people may inflict on their relatives. All of them, however, speak volumes about what it's like to feel that one belongs - or not, in some cases - to a group of people linked not only by blood but by a very special, very dangerous kind of mutual and intimate knowledge.
