Jessica Kiang Talkies

Aug 22, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Jessica Kiang Talkies |Jessica Kiang |Joanna Abeyie |Alain Robbe-Grillet

“Allow me to grow,” said Richard Pryor to the magazine Ebony in 1980, defending his decision to swear off using a certain racial slur in his comedy. His turning point had come the year before, during a trip to Kenya. Sitting in a Nairobi hotel, he’d had an epiphany, realising that such loaded terms, even when self-administered, and even when they’d become a cornerstone of his success, were “a trick, like genocide on the brain”.

Aug 22, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Jessica Kiang Talkies |Jessica Kiang |Joanna Abeyie |Alain Robbe-Grillet

“Nobody loses all the time,” spits Benny (Warren Oates) in Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, before going on to prove incontrovertibly that some people do. By the time Peckinpah’s magnificently fucked-up road movie premiered in August 1974, American motorists on the real-life road also knew how it felt to be on a losing streak. Since the previous October when Arab oil exports to the US had been embargoed, a chain reaction had occurred.

Jun 20, 2024 | bfi.org.uk | Jessica Kiang Talkies |Jessica Kiang |Mike Kohler |Isabel Stevens

“Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive,” wrote Joan Didion in 1977, toward the end of what had been the driest recorded three-year period in California history. But anyone who’s seen Roman Polanski’s masterpiece Chinatown, released on midsummer eve in 1974, the year that dry spell began, must have reverence for California’s water struggles.