Visions Season 1 Episodes

Episode 1

Cinema, Cinemas/Q & A with Paul Schrader/A Film Comment by Angela Carter

55 mins

Episode 2

Ivor Montagu 'An Impish Figure'/Cinemas The Other End of the Market

55 mins

Episode 3

Episode #1.3

Episode 4

British Special Effects/E.T. & Tron Marketing Fantasies/'Gandhi' An Assessment

Episode 5

Episode #1.5

Episode 6

Makers of Dreams/Snow Business

49 mins

Visions tackles two widely different cinematic intentions, as Chris Auty talks to the new owners of the commerce-orientated Cannon Classic, while Simon Field interviews experimental film director Michael Snow.

Episode 7

Episode #1.7

Episode 8

Episode #1.8

Episode 9

Episode #1.9

Episode 10

Parsifal/FESPACO '83

Episode 11

Episode #1.11

Episode 12

Tootsie/British Cinema: Crisis? What Crisis?

48 mins

Episode 13

Episode #1.13

Episode 14

Le Bunker: Cannes 1983/The Case of 'Ascendancy'

52 mins

Episode 15

Film as a Way of Life: Hong Kong Cinema

52 mins

Tony Rayns presents a look at the new generation of Hong Kong film makers and the pressures they face from censorship, traditional Cantonese filmmaking and the need to be commercially successful.

Episode 16

Special: The Wizard of Babylon

Episode 17

Cinema in China

57 mins

History of filmmaking in China from its beginnings in the 1920s to 1982, featuring Shanghai cinema of 1930s; the progressive filmmakers; the organisation of filmmaking under the post-war communist government; the impact of the Cultural Revolution; the work of Xie Jin.

Episode 18

Episode #1.18

Episode 19

Film in the Philippines

39 mins

The last of Tony Rayns' reports from the Far East investigates a politically contentious cinema. In President Marcos's Philippines, filmmakers like Lino Brocka are in the front line of political agitation from freedom of speech and expression. The popularity of their films (dealing as directly as possible with social issues) is the only thing that saves them from the fate of lesser figures. Their filmmaking owes little to the dominant tradition of the Philippines' filmmaking, as historian Hammy Sotto makes clear. Gerardo De Leon is their real precursor and the programme begins with a clip from his banned The Moises Padilla Story - about the murder of an opposition leader in the Fifties. Shot in a semi-clandestine fashion, this programme documents an entertainment cinema that is also a cinema of political contestation.