Orpheus

Chosen by artist Cornelia Parker for Misspent Youth, two films that play with reality in very different ways.

Chosen by artist Cornelia Parker for Misspent Youth, two films that play with reality in very different ways. Our main feature is Jean Cocteau’s reJean working of the Orpheus myth, with human candelabras, leather-clad bikers as messengers of Death and post-war France as the Underworld. As an appetiser, John Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum, in which the director seems to be choregraphing a Dalston street corner. Parker: “made when he was barely out of film school, it’s a quiet masterpiece. It is his voiceover imbuing each frame with a subtext, that keeps me hooked; his unwitting real life subjects become part of a drama that unfolds in real time.”