***MONDAY, OCTOBER 20***
MR. AND MRS. SMITH GO TO WASHINGTON, Frank Capra
Film Forum
Naïve scout leader James Stewart, with tart-tongued reporter Jean Arthur in tow, finds Washington ain’t all monuments, while Senator Claude Rains and Boss Edward Arnold provide the requisite dishonor to the American way of life. The D.C. premiere occasioned massive congressional backlash.
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CRAZY BOHEMIA, FIVE DAYS WITH ADRIÁN IAIES, Rafael Filippeli
Anthology Film Archives
Rafael Filippelli, through his work at the Universidad del cine in Buenos Aires, is responsible for teaching a whole new generation of filmmakers how to find alternative methods of producing and thinking about films. He taught us – between whiskies and late-night film debates – that limitations of any kind can be a positive factor in filmmaking. CRAZY BOHEMIA is Filippelli’s most recent work: the fourth installment of a series of portraits of Argentinean artists and intellectuals that he has been developing for decades now. Demonstrating his love of conversation, the film spends five days with composer and pianist Adrián Iaies, and reveals Iaies’s explorations into the relationship between tango and jazz.
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STATE OF THE UNION, Frank Capra
Film Forum
Behind-the-scenes Republican operators Adolphe Menjou and a pre-nice Angela Lansbury decide airplane magnate Spencer Tracy is their boy; the catch: he’s got to get back with estranged wife Katharine Hepburn. Capra’s adaptation of the Lindsay-Crouse stage smash reversed his Mr. Smithdebacle: Truman loved it.
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THE WAY OF THE STRONG, Frank Capra
Film Forum
Ugly gangster “Handsome” Williams falls in love with a blind violinist. Capra consciously experimenting with drama, revitalizing genre clichés.
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AN EVENING WITH BILL MORRISON
MoMA
For this Modern Mondays discussion, Bill Morrison focuses on his use of archival and found footage, tracing the ideas that surfaced in some of his earliest titles (Footprints [1992], The Film of Her[1996]) and continue in his most recent work (Light Is Calling[2004], All Vows [2013], Beyond Zero: 1914–1918 [2014]). The range and diversity of his manipulation of found footage reveals his profound use of film as a metaphor for reflections on the historical and existential nature of time. Program approx. 90 min.
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EVERYTHING TOGETHER, Federico León
Anthology Film Archives
Theater director Federico León was already internationally acclaimed for his works in the off-off theater circuit of Buenos Aires when he made TODO JUNTOS, his first feature film. A chamber piece for two actors based on the inner dialectic of restraint and confrontation of a couple’s darkest secret, it remains a lonesome cowboy within Argentine cinema. And yet, it inaugurates a dialogue that would be axiomatic for future films to come: a new bond between theater and film. A new theater helped to shape the identity of a new cinema, not only providing new actors, with a different approach to acting, but also new production methods, a new writing scheme, and new structures.
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***TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21***
MURIEL, Alain Resnais
FIAF
Historical trauma is synonymous with personal intrigue in the coastal town of Boulogne when Helene is visited by a past lover, Alphonse, and her stepson Bernard is haunted by the memory of a girl named Muriel, whom he encountered while doing military service in Algeria.
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DURAS SHORTS PROGRAM, Marguerite Duras
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
En rachâchant
Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, France, 1982, 16mm, 7m
French with English Subtitles
Adapted from Marguerite Duras’s 1971 text Ah! Ernesto by Straub and Huillet, this rigorous and comic story concerns a young boy (Olivier Straub) who vows to discontinue his education “because at school they teach me things I don’t know!” Duras would later adapt Ah! Ernesto herself with 1985’s Les Enfants.
L’Homme atlantique
Marguerite Duras, France, 1981, 35mm, 42m
French with English subtitles
In this avant-garde short, Duras uses outtakes from Agatha et les lectures illimitées, removing Agatha and leaving only the voice and likeness of her brother (Yann Andréa). Duras scholar Leslie Hill contends that for the first time in her work, “the gap between image and sound is now aligned with the fissure of sexual difference itself.”
Nuit noire, Calcutta
Marin Karmitz, France, 1964, digital projection, 24m
French with English subtitles
Duras scripted this sketch of Jean (Maurice Garrel), a writer struggling to complete a Calcutta-based novel while battling alcoholism and creative impotence. Most of the text is spoken off-screen, evoking dislocation that’s echoed visually in the world beyond Jean’s window—could the woman outside be the character he’s unable to capture in words?
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EXTRAORDINARY STORIES, Mariano Llinás
Anthology Film Archives
The turning point in Argentine Cinema of the last decade, Mariano Llinás’s film proposes a revolution not only in how a film can be constructed but also in how it can be produced. Boldly embracing his love of the epic, Llinás inaugurates here a narrative of excess, a style much abandoned in a Latin American cinema a bit too enamored of peddling descriptive passages, poverty pictures, and slim storylines to foreigners. With an extremely limited budget, avoiding every film bureaucracy but fueled by a passion for cinema, these four and a half hours filled with love, hate, action, violence, death, and emotion are suffused with the impure joy of cinema.
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PLATINUM BLONDE, Frank Capra
Film Forum
Smart-talking newspaperman Robert Williams breaks the heart of reporter chum Loretta Young when he weds socialite Jean Harlow – a class-crossing that gets him tagged “Cinderella Man,” in Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin’s Deeds prototype.
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VIDEO: 1996-2012, Bill Morrison
MoMA
Morrison’s video work has explored everything from his cat Gene’s ruminative wanderings to the last days of Al Capone inside the Eastern State Penitentiary. For Outerborough—commissioned by MoMA on the occasion of the 2004 reopening of the newly expanded Museum—Morrisson applied a mathematical formula to his editing, blurring the path of an 1899 train as it crosses the Brooklyn Bridge.
Moda
1996. USA.
Directed by Bill Morrison. Music by Jim Farmer. 7 min.
City Walk
1999. USA.
Directed by Bill Morrison. Music by Michael Gordon. 6 min.
Outerborough
2005 Sound version. USA.
Directed by Bill Morrison. Music by Todd Reynolds. 8 min.
East River
2006. USA.
Directed by Bill Morrison. Music by Michael Gordon. 7 min.
Porch
2006. USA.
Directed by Bill Morrison. Music by Julia Wolfe. 9 min.
Every Stop on the F Train
2008. USA.
Directed by Bill Morrison. Music by Michael Gordon. 5 min.
Release
2010. USA.
Directed by Bill Morrison. Sound Design by Vijay Iyer. 13 min.
A Trip to the Beach
2012. USA.
Directed by Bill Morrison. Music by William Basinki. 12 min.
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THE MIRACLE WOMAN, Frank Capra
Film Forum
Embittered minister’s daughter Barbara Stanwyck becomes a give-‘em-what-they-want evangelist, until blind man David Manners makes her see the light. Highlights: Stany preaching inside a cage of lions and a climactic conflagration.
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MODERATO CANTABILE, Peter Brook
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
“Moderate and songlike”—a musical tempo, but also an apt descriptor of this moody, deliberate drama co-scripted by Duras from her novel. Jeanne Moreau won Best Actress at Cannes for her haunting portrayal of a wife and mother whose husband is the chief employer of their steel town near Bordeaux. Her life consists of little more than shuttling their son to piano lessons, until one day, mid-sonata, she hears a scream. Before long she’s conducting a murder investigation with one of her husband’s workers (Jean-Paul Belmondo), unleashing her own morbid impulses and perhaps a private death wish. Theater giant Peter Brook’s restrained direction casts rare moments of intensity in relief, and Armand Thirard’s crisp cinematography conveys the desolation of life in a windswept town where “summer never comes.”
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AGATHA ET LES LECTURES ILLIMITÉES, Marguerite Duras
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Hiroshima Mon Amour at the shore. A brother and sister (Yann Andréa and Bulle Ogier) meet at a seaside hotel to confront the nature of their relationship and try to achieve closure with the past. Their love for each other and its manifestations emerge in voiceover, with Duras herself articulating the sister’s thoughts. Eschewing traditional approaches to storytelling, Duras keeps the siblings off-screen or obscured for much of the film and never allows them to share the frame. Her camera prowls the deserted hotel lobby and sometimes catches itself in the mirror, analogizing the film’s reflective themes.
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***WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22***
LES ENFANTS, Marguerite Duras
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Seven-year-old Ernesto (played by adult Axel Bogousslavsky) leaves school because he doesn’t wish to learn, believing knowledge serves no purpose in a bankrupt world. His parents (Daniel Gélin and Tatiana Moukhine) try to make sense of their son’s cynical and inscrutable convictions. Winner of three prizes at the Berlin International Film Festival, Duras’s final film as director may have taken inspiration from her own unhappy years in a Saigon boarding school. Her penchant for uninhabited spaces is evident in her shots of the schoolyard—the empty playground pairs with Bogousslavsky’s casting to make a comment on vanishing childhood and untimely disillusionment.
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THE TRUCK, Marguerite Duras
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Initially conceived as the story of an older woman hitching a ride with a trucker, bemoaning the demise of the revolution and the impoverished state of society (“the world has gone to rack and ruin”), Le Camion (“The Truck”) is the film that ensued when Duras couldn’t find a suitable actress for the lead. Instead, she and Gérard Depardieu sit at a table and read from the script, discussing the film that might have been, with periodic cutaways to a truck driving along the highway at night. Celebrated by figures as disparate as Pauline Kael and John Waters, Le Camion was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes and hailed by Jonathan Rosenbaum as “one of Marguerite Duras’s most radically minimalist features . . . [also] one of her best, as well as one of her most accessible.”
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IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT, Frank Capra
Film Forum
During breaks from a New York-bound Greyhound bus ride, only the “walls of Jericho” separate scoop-hungry newshound Clark Gable from runaway heiress Claudette Colbert. Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Robert Riskin’s Screenplay.
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ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES, Michael Curtiz
MoMA
It’s the Lower East Side as only Warner Bros. could imagine it, starring a group of kids who grow up to be James Cagney (big-hearted gangster), Pat O’Brien (big-hearted priest), and Ann Sheridan—the tomboy who becomes the parish social worker. Sheridan was just climbing out of B pictures at this point, and while her male costars dominate the film, director Curtiz highlights the down-to-earth sexiness that would soon make her a star.
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FOREIGNER, Inés Oliveira Cezar
Anthology Film Archives
Adapting Euripides’s Greek tragedy IPHIGENIA IN AULIS, Inés Oliveira Cezar uses the Argentine desert to deconstruct the density of her literary source and create her own deep reflection on parent/child relationships. A young woman must be sacrificed by her father in order to end the drought season. Are we to witness the tragic destiny of Iphigenia and Agamemnon? Old foreign myths clash against the abstraction of a landscape that has configured the identity of the Argentine nation. Adopting an observational approach, EXTRANJERA depicts bodies that enclose within themselves a centuries-old story, one that here unfolds in a new light. Silence and stillness compose the precise pulse of this tale of Beckettian inspiration that redefines the notion of film adaptation.
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YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU, Frank Capra
Film Forum
Jean Arthur’s screwy family – Lionel Barrymore, Ann Miller, et al. – straighten out suitor James Stewart’s crusty plutocrat dad Edwards Arnold, in Capra’s Oscar-winning (Best Picture and Director) comedy classic, adapted from Kaufman & Hart’s Pulitzer-Prized stage sensation.
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THE PLAYERS VS ÁNGELES CAÍDOS – INTRO BY MATÍAS PIÑEIRO, Alberto Fischerman
Anthology Film Archives
Fischerman was a key figure in a group of cutting-edge filmmakers named “The group of five.” As a successful advertising director, he was, ironically, able to produce the most radical films thanks to that context, taking advantage of the studios and equipment when they were not being used to sell soap. Associated with the Instituto Di Tella, the center-point of Porteño avant-garde culture at that time, the film stands as a vital document of pop culture, modernism, performance, and rupturist filmmaking. As in a football match, two sides battle over victory: the Players and the Fallen Angels. The confrontation takes many forms until darkness remains as the only way of resisting.
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***THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23***
HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, Alain Resnais
Film Forum
“You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.” “I saw everything. Everything.” Entangled, unmoving limbs covered in ash, the bodies of two lovers: French actress Emmanuelle Riva (2012 Oscar nominee for Amour), in Japan to make a “peace” film about Hiroshima, finds in the course of her brief affair with Japanese architect Eiji Okada (Woman in the Dunes, The Ugly American) compulsively returning to her traumatic post-war experiences, her love for a German soldier and her own shaming.
Asked to do an anti-nuclear documentary In the wake of his powerful Holocaust doc Night and Fog, Resnais opted instead for a feature exploring mutual guilts and the power of memory via multitudes of sometimes tiny timeshifts intercut with the present day lovers’ marathon conversation – all by first-time scripter but already-distinguished novelist Marguerite Duras, whose screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. This year marks Duras’ centennial.
A pillar of the French New Wave, Hiroshima was awarded the International Critics’ prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. Due to its harrowing anti-nuclear stance, it was kept out of the main competition to avoid offending the U.S.
A worldwide sensation when first released, and widely considered one of the most beautiful and influential movies ever made, Hiroshima Mon Amour has long been unavailable for exhibition in the United States due to rights issues.
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PINK PANTHA 50TH ANNIVERSARY, Blake Edwards
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
A decade after the first two installments of the Pink Panther series, Peter Sellers and Blake Edwards team up again, scaling new heights of comic mayhem and mangled English dialogue at the hands of the incompetent Inspector Clouseau. When the Pink Panther diamond is stolen once again, Clouseau is dispatched by his long-suffering boss Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) to Nice and then Switzerland to investigate the prime suspect, suave super thief Sir Charles Litton (Christopher Plummer)—who, now happily married and retired from his life of crime, sets out to clear his name by tracking down the real thief. Classic slapstick setpieces abound as Sellers pulls out all the stops in this lavish jet-setting comedy knockout.
Followed by:
The Pink Panther Strikes Again
Blake Edwards, UK, 1976, 35mm, 103m
Peter Sellers’s comic genius is on full display yet again in the fifth installment of the Pink Panther series, but the great Herbert Lom is not far behind, with his twitching, psychotic Dreyfus, now transformed into a James Bond–style supervillain, taking a central role. Driven insane by the bungling detective and confined to a padded cell at the end of The Return of the Pink Panther, Dreyfus escapes, recruits an army of crooks, and creates an international criminal network dedicated to the extermination of his nemesis. Meanwhile, Clouseau assists Scotland Yard on the case of a kidnapped scientist, who has fallen into the clutches of Dreyfus, for whom he is forced to build a Doomsday Machine to threaten the world unless Clouseau is eliminated. The supporting cast includes the great British comic actors Colin Blakely and Leonard Rossiter, Burt Kwouk as Clouseau’s manservant Kato—plus an uncredited Omar Sharif as an Egyptian assassin!
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JUAN MOREIRA, Leonardo Favio
Anthology Film Archives
Leonardo Favio is the most popular filmmaker in Argentina. However, he’s never enjoyed the international recognition he deserves. Juan Moreira is the bandit of La Pampa, turned bad by the corrupt political system in which he came of age. Based on the book by 19th-century author Eduardo Gutierrez, the film is spectacularly stylized, influenced by the Western but actually closer to the Italian take on that genre. It’s most striking for its characters’ manner of speech – often almost unintelligible, their speech has a near-abstract quality that’s attributable to the influence of the literary genre of la Gauchesca. It is the voice of the Other and it is a beautiful one.
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CELLIST MAYA BEISER PERFORMS LIVE WITH ALL VOWS, JUST ANCIENT LOOPS, AND LIGHT IS CALLING, Bill Morrison
MoMA
“All Vows” is an English translation of “Kol Nidre,” a Yom Kippur incantation that nullifies any future vows made without intention. The film uses archival film scenes to show a dissolving historic document that represents an unknowable future. 10 min.
New York Premiere
Just Ancient Loops
2012. USA. Directed by Bill Morrison. Music by Michael Harrison. High-resolution scans of archival nitrate film scenes are combined with newly created CGI renderings of the planets to depict different views of the heavens. 26 min.
Light Is Calling
2004. USA. Directed by Bill Morrison. Music composed by Michael Gordon. Two minor characters from The Bells, a 1926 crime film by James Young, become the central focus of Light Is Calling as they forge an impossible relationship from a chance encounter. 7 min.
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The post 26 Films to See This Week: Alain Resnais, Frank Capra, Marguerite Duras appeared first on BlackBook.