Screening of Alex Cox's directorial swan song, a frontier fable of American greed, followed by a Q&A with the director.
HOME is screening Dead Souls on Friday 6 November, with a Q&A to follow. It's the directorial swan song from Alex Cox, the punk cinema pioneer who brought us Repo Man and Sid and Nancy, and this time he's stepped in front of the camera as well as behind it.
The film is a loose adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls, though Cox has transposed it to the American West. It follows a mysterious drifter called Strindler — or is he Swindler? — as he scours the frontier for the names of dead Mexican labourers. He starts raising eyebrows when he offers to pay to add to his list, and the whole thing plays out as a fable of American greed. It's a strange, dry premise that fits Cox's particular brand of cinema.
There's a bit of a Spaghetti Western connection here, too. Gianni Garko, known for If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death, claims a co-writer credit on the script, which explains some of the dusty, wide-open energy of the thing. If you're familiar with Cox's earlier work, you'll recognise that same irreverent, slightly off-kilter approach he's been known for since the late seventies.
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The screening is followed by a Q&A with Alex Cox himself, so you'll get to hear from the man who wrote, directed and starred in it. It's a good chance to ask him about the transition from punk cinema to this frontier fable, and how a 19th-century Russian novel ended up as a story about the American West. The whole thing is at HOME on Friday 6 November.
