THE IMMORTAL STORY

THE IMMORTAL STORY unfolds in 19th century Macao where the wealthy, powerful merchant Charles Clay has reached the end of his life’s brutally financial frontiers. Clay becomes obsessed by an old erotic seafaring legend—of a wealthy trader who hired a sailor to conceive a child with his much younger wife—and resolves to recreate it. His dutiful accountant gathers the desperate “actors” who are to spend one impassioned night together: a young, virile sailor and Jeanne Moreau’s lovely, victimized Virginie playing the estranged wife who has yet to produce an heir. This jewel-like film, dreamily shot by Willy Kurant and suffused with the music of Erik Satie, is a brooding, evocative distillation of Welles’s artistic interests. Originally planned as part of an anthology based on stories from Isak Dinesin’s 'Anecdotes of Destiny', the production was terminated after the first episode. Yet Welles’ first excursion in color remains one of his more modest, tender experiments about truth, artifice, authenticity and the artist’s quandary of stories told but not lived and those lived but never told.

The feature will be preceded by a screening of THE GIRL CHEWING GUM (1976).

In 1976, while still a student at the Royal College of Art, John Smith filmed an ordinary street corner in East London: passersby, traffic, birds crossing the sky, people lining up for the cinema.  Only later did he add an authoritative voice-over that seems to orchestrate every movement on screen — his own voice of god retroactively claiming command over everything we see. A brilliant reflection on filmmaking, authorship and control, chance and intention, and the moment when description slips into instruction. As Ed Halter describes it in the Village Voice, “Smith takes the piss out of mainstream auteurist ego, but provides proof of the underground ethos: Even with meagre mechanical means, the artist can command the universe.”