Catalyst Club special at Horatio’s Bar on Brighton Pier in collaboration with Cinecity 2023. Three guest speakers connecting film, place and this year’s focus: the films of Powell and Pressburger.

Linsay McCulloch on Detour
What Detour, a 1945 low-budget film noir, lacks in star power and glamour, it makes up for in sheer fatalistic bleakness. Al Roberts is a sweaty unemployed musician hitch- hiking from New York to LA to join his girlfriend but like everyone else in film noir, he’s on the road to nowhere. A random encounter with the most terrifying femme fatale in history upends his plans but is this a detour or what fate had planned for him all along?
Director Edgar G Ulmer takes all the familiar film noir elements and twists them grotesquely to make Detour an unforgettable watch.
Linsay McCulloch is a Brighton-based film podcaster and writer and if a film was made before 1950, she’ll probably love it.

Mark Keeble on Black Narcissus
Mark Keeble, a curious cinephile with a lifelong obsession with Powell and Pressburger explores one of their enduring masterpieces. Black Narcissus is a melodramatic tour de force that audaciously conjured up its exotic settings from a UK Pinewood Studio set and Leonardslee Gardens in West Sussex. Michael Powell called it “the most erotic film I ever made”. Well, to eroticism, can we add jealousy, sensuality, repressed desire and crazed madness. The setting? A remote Himalayan nunnery. This Archers masterpiece has to be seen to be believed and, as Mark argues, is one of the absolute pinnacles of British Cinema.

Stella Starr on Jeff Keen
Jeff Keen was an experimental artist whose work spans from the 1960s to his death in 2012. Daughter and archivist Stella Starr explores Keen’s use of Sussex locations and how they’re almost another character in the films and photos – a genius loci/spirit of place!