At London's Barbican Centre: Jean Epstein, best known for his Gothic silent classic The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), was also responsible for the naturalistic semi-documentary Finis Terrae (1929), which will be screened at the Barbican's Cinema 1 at 3 p.m. on Sept. 17.
Shot on the coast of Brittany, Finis Terrae portrays the hardships faced by Breton fishermen and coastal kelp-harvesters. Musical accompaniment will be provided by Curt Collective. (According to the Barbican website, "Curt Collective's daring new score uses oboe, clarinet, trombone, guitars, percussion, electronics and voices, spoken and sung.")
The Latin Finis Terrae, by the way, means "the end of the world" or "where the earth ends."
Also at the Barbican: From Sept. 23-Dec. 10, the Barbican Centre will screen "the biggest season of Shostakovich's work on film ever presented" in the United Kingdom. Dmitri Shostakovich, one of the most renowned Russian composers of the twentieth century, created scores for numerous films.
Among those to be screened at the Barbican are Sergei Yutkevich and Fridrikh Ermler's 1932 political propaganda-cum-love story Vstrechnye / The Counterplan (Sept. 23); Albert Gendelshtein's 1935 post-Revolution civil war drama Lyubov i nenavist / Love and Hate (Oct. 8); and Alexander Faintsimmer's 1955 drama Ovod / The Gadfly (Dec. 10), the tale of a nineteenth-century Italian revolutionary who rebels against both church and state.