Tell Me Lies (A Film about London)

Tell Me Lies (A Film about London)

1968. Great Britain. Directed and adapted by Peter Brook. With Mark Jones, Pauline Munro, Eric Allan, Glenda Jackson, Peggy Ashcroft, Paul Scofield, Kingsley Amis, Stokely Carmichael. The war in Vietnam inspired an international engagée Theater of Confrontation: “The images of a napalm-burnt Vietnam shocked our small group from the Royal Shakespeare Company in exactly the same way,” recalled Peter Brook—who introduces the film on October 14. “So what should we do? The answer was obvious. We had a troupe of actors at our disposal. That was enough.” Adapted from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production-in-progress US—which the Lord Chamberlain office, responsible for censoring plays in London, lambasted as “bestial, anti-American and Communist”—Peter Brook’s long-unseen semi-fictional, semi-documentary Tell Me Lies, filmed in 1967 in London, is a living chunk of the 1960s. A group of young actors play and analyze themselves—interspersed with newsreel footage, demonstrations, and antiwar skits. The supporting cast includes Glenda Jackson, Peggy Ashcroft, Paul Scofield, Kingsley Amis, and Black Power icon Stokely Carmichael. Restored by Groupama Gan Foundation for the Cinema and Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage. 118 min.