Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (4th Anniversary Show)

At 5.30pm

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair

This one is a genuine rarity. So rare that the distributor doesn’t actually have a digital cinema print (DCP) of the film. So I’ve made one, especially for this screening, from the best elements I could find.

Ongoing issues between band members and distributors have held The Wall back from Blu-ray and home entertainment releases; the only official copy you can get for the home is the DVD, a 2006 repackaging of the 1999 master, with no remaster since. It’s not just rare in the cinema. It’s rare in any form.

I remember seeing it when it first came out. I’d deeply misunderstood the album when I was young. For some reason I had it down as “pity me, I’m an ultra-rich rock star, isn’t my life awful”. Then, just as the film arrived, I got what it was really about.

This album spoke to an entire generation: anyone who has ever felt disconnected, isolated or misunderstood. And the film speaks it in pictures.

Alan Parker, one of my top ten favourite directors, working with Roger Waters and Gerald Scarfe (the artist/animator behind the original album’s artwork) does an extraordinary job of visualising the concept album. Together they create a surreal, kaleidoscopic mashup of autobiography, music video and drama: a paranoid nightmare about how the events of our lives, and how we react to them, make us build a metaphorical wall so we don’t get hurt any more.

I think it’s criminal that it’s so rarely seen now, and I’m deeply excited to share it with an audience who may never have seen it at all, let alone on a big screen. One of the most significant and successful albums of the 20th century, captured in dramatic form.

It’s not a concert movie. It’s an experience that can only be seen to be believed. We’re showing it with its original six-track surround sound, from the best elements available, to really make it shine.

If you think listening to The Wall on your own, headphones on, in a dark room is a powerful experience, you’ve not had an experience like watching it in a room of 150 people, all focused on the same thing. Utterly stunning, and not to be missed.

I am confident this one is going to sell out, so book early.