**MONDAY, MARCH 16**
A TRICK OF THE LIGHT, WIM WENDERS: COMMERCIAL WORK AND MUSIC VIDEOS, AND WAR IN PEACE, Wim Wenders
MoMA
A TRICK OF THE LIGHT
WIM WENDERS: COMMERCIAL WORK AND MUSIC VIDEOS
WAR IN PEACE
INVISIBLE CRIMES
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A HATFUL OF RAIN, Fred Zinnemann
BAM
A young Korean War veteran’s morphine addiction tears him and his family to pieces in this starkly realistic depiction of drug abuse directed by Fred Zinnemann (High Noon, From Here to Eternity). Bernard Herrmann’s edgy score and the gritty location shooting in and around New York City’s housing projects ramp up the intensity of this groundbreaking drama.
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SALLY OF THE SAWDUST, D.W. Griffith
Film Forum
(1925) Sideshow “Professor” Eustace McGargle and ward Carole Dempster (Griffith’s real-life lover/protégée) leave the carny to pursue respectability, but it’s hard to quit swindling those suckers. Based on Fields’ stage hit Poppy, with stage legend Alfred Lunt in rare film role; remade in 1936.
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TOKYO-GA, Wim Wenders
MoMA
1985. West Germany/USA. With Chishu Ryu, Yuharu Atsuta, Werner Herzog, Chris Marker. Inspired by the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, Wenders journeyed to Tokyo to make this richly tangential essay film. “I was curious as to whether I still could track down something from this time, whether there was still anything left of this work,” Wenders explains in a voiceover. “Images perhaps, or even people…. Or whether so much would have changed in Tokyo in the twenty years since Ozu’s death that nothing would be left to find.” He does find captivating images, of a crowded yet lonely pachinko parlor, of a teenage rockabilly group performing for passersby in a park, of skilled artisans crafting uncannily realistic plastic models of sushi for restaurant displays. He also pays visits to Ozu’s leading man, Chishu Ryu, and Ozu’s cinematographer, Yûharu Atsuta, whose account of their decades-long collaboration is extraordinarily moving. New digital restoration. In Japanese, English; English subtitles. 92 min.
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PINA, Wim Wenders
MoMA
2011. Germany. Directed by Wim Wenders. With Pina Bausch, Malou Airaudo, Regina Advento, Ruth Amarante, Pablo Aran Gimeno. A German choreographer who revolutionized tanztheater (“dance theater”) with her brash, raw, and often absurdist stagings of human emotion and gesture, Pina Bausch died in 2009 shortly before she and Wenders were to collaborate on a film. All but ready to give up on the project, Wenders was instead persuaded by members of her Wuppertal Dance Theater to refashion the film into a tribute of dazzling variety and valence, interweaving archival footage of Bausch with live performances of some of her most legendary and intimate dance pieces that he shot in 3-D. Frustrated by traditional cinema’s failure to capture the kinetic intricacy of dance—”I felt cameras were at a loss in front of a dance stage,” he observed, rendering the volumetric language of the body too “graphic,” too “abstract,” and not “corporeal” enough—Wenders used 3-D to astonishing effect, capturing the full range of Bausch’s elaborate somatic vocabulary while also venturing beyond the proscenium arch to film members of Bausch’s ensemble dancing on the banks of a river, in a factory, and with transit commuters in the company’s home town of Wuppertal. In many languages, including German, Russian, French, Portuguese, Korean, Slovene; English subtitles. 103 min.
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**TUESDAY, MARCH 17**
THE THREE FACES OF EVE, Nunnally Johnson
BAM
Joanne Woodward gives a tour-de-force Oscar-winning performance as a woman with multiple personalities in this daring portrayal of mental illness. Acclaimed cinematographer Stanley Cortez (The Night of the Hunter, The Magnificent Ambersons) alters his lighting technique and shooting style to reflect the character’s different psychological states.
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TO TELL THE TRUTH: A HISTORY OF DOCUMENTARY FILM (1928-1946), David Van Taylor and Cal Skaggs
IFC Center
Documentaries offer a unique encounter between art and actuality. Yet the genre is perpetually misunderstood: its artistry neglected, its truthfulness suspected, its real-world impact overlooked. Veteran doc makers Cal Skaggs and David Van Taylor have spent nearly a decade interviewing documentary pioneers for a multi-part history of the field. In this 2-hour section, we see the invention of the social documentary in reaction to the Great Depression and the bending of the form toward propaganda during World War II.
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ALICE IN THE CITIES, Wim Wenders
MoMA
1974. USA/West Germany. Directed by Wim Wenders. Screenplay by Wim Wenders, Veith von Fürstenberg. With Rüdiger Vogler, Yella Rottländer, Lisa Kreuzer. A signal achievement of Das Neue Kino (New German Cinema), Alice in the Cities was the first in Wenders’s so-called “road movie trilogy,” together with Wrong Move (1975) and Kings of the Road (1976); and as a touching portrait of longing and loss, the film also anticipates Paris, Texas, which he made a decade later. Philip Winter, an aspiring journalist, is assigned to write a story about the American landscape for a German newspaper. Much to the chagrin of his editor, he has only a box of Polaroids to show for his travels. While held over in a New York airport he befriends a woman, likewise stranded, who suddenly entrusts him with her young daughter: the petulant, eponymous Alice. When it becomes clear that the mother won’t be joining them in Amsterdam as planned, the pair wend their way across various German cities in search of a grandmother whom Alice only vaguely remembers. The rapport they develop is charming and keenly observed, but the film also speaks profoundly to themes that have prevailed throughout Wenders’s career: the Americanization of Europe and, conversely, the peculiar blend of fascination and alienation felt by a European in the United States. “When you drive through America,” Philip observes, “something happens to you. The images you see change you.” New digital restoration. In German; English subtitles. 112 min.
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KICKING AND SCREAMING, Noah Baumbach
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Post-graduation angst is what drives this smart romantic comedy, Noah Baumbach’s directorial debut. Four young men try to chart their futures with varying degrees of uneasiness while their formidable girlfriends move ahead with considerably more confidence. Baumbach’s vision of the tremendous anxiety associated with newly established adulthood is embodied by a top-notch cast, including the likes of Josh Hamilton, Elliott Gould, Parker Posey, Chris Eigeman, and Eric Stoltz (several of whom would go on to become Baumbach regulars). As they move in small concentric circles, Baumbach allows us to get to know and be amused by his affable characters, ultimately yielding a strong sense of kinship with them. An NYFF33 selection.
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THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, Noah Baumbach
Film Society of Lincoln Center
In his Oscar-nominated third feature, director Noah Baumbach scores a triumph with an autobiographical coming-of-age story about a teenager whose writer parents are divorcing. The father (Jeff Daniels) and mother (Laura Linney) duke it out in half-civilized, half-savage fashion, while their two sons (Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline) adapt in different ways, shifting allegiances between parents. The film is squirmy-funny and nakedly honest about the rationalizations and compensatory snobbisms of artistic failure as well as the conflicted desires of adolescents for sex and status. In detailing bohemian-bourgeois life in brownstone Brooklyn, Baumbach is spot-on. Everyone proceeds from good intentions and acts rather badly, in spite or because of their manifest intelligence. Fulfilling the best traditions of the American independent film, this quirky, wisely written feature explores the gulf between sexes, generations, art and commerce, Brooklyn and Manhattan. An NYFF43 selection.
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**WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18**
THE TARNISHED ANGELS, Douglas Sirk
BAM
Visionary subversive Douglas Sirk transforms the Faulkner novel Pylon—about a band of stunt fliers wallowing in sin and sleaze in Depression-era New Orleans—into a transcendent melodrama. The luridly expressionist ’Scope cinematography yields one visual knockout after another—including a memorably sordid Mardi Gras bacchanal. “It should be seen in a theater or not at all” (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader).
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GREY GARDENS, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer and Susan Froemke
Film Forum
(1976) Mrs. Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edie, aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, live in a world of their own behind the brambles that surround their decaying 28- room East Hampton mansion known as “Grey Gardens,” where raccoons and cats prowl about and handymen drop by to cadge odd jobs. Mrs. Beale, aka “Big Edie,” was a born aristocrat, sister of “Black Jack” Bouvier, Jackie O’s father. “Little Edie” was a model and aspiring actress of striking beauty who put her New York career on hold to care for her aging mother — and never went back. Together they descended into a strange life of recrimination and companionship. Little Edie — a still-attractive woman at 56 – parades about coquettishly in fishnet stockings, bathing suit and improvised turban, feeds the raccoons in the attic, and breaks out into impromptu song-and-dance routines, never losing hope that her Big Chance and Big Romance are still just around the corner. While semi-invalid Big Edie, a trained soprano in bohemian days, trills romantic songs of yesteryear in a slightly wobbly, but still rich voice, as she cooks corn on the cob perched up in bed. The women bicker like characters out of Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill — with a nod to Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? In the wake of eviction threat headlines, Albert and David Maysles (Salesman, Gimme Shelter) brought their Direct Cinema approach to Grey Gardens for a five-week shoot, with the resulting 50 hours of footage edited by co-filmmakers Hovde, Meyer and Froemke into a cinéma verité epic. Approx. 95 min. DCP restoration
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**THURSDAY, MARCH 19**
THE TALES OF HOFFMAN, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Film Forum
(1951) As Moira Shearer (the prima ballerina of The Red Shoes) pirouettes through the Dragonfly pas de deux, a scheming Robert Helpmann intercepts a backstage billet-doux, as Robert Rounseville’s Hoffmann recounts for his cronies in a smoky next-door tavern the tales of his three lost loves: Shearer again as the mechanical protégée of Diaghilev legend Leonide Massine; Ludmilla Tchérina as a Venetian courtesan; and Ann Ayars’ Greek-islanded soprano who mustn’t sing. Casting dancers (except for Rounseville and Ayars) who embody the choreography of Frederick Ashton against the delirious designs of Hein Heckroth — color-coded gold, red, and blue respectively for each of the episodes — with a menacing Helpmann Hoffmann’s nemesis throughout, Powell and Pressburger’s adaptation of comic operetta roi Jacques Offenbach’s sole opera realized Powell’s dream of a complete “composed film,” what he had achieved in the climax of Black Narcissus, the whole of the mise en scène edited to a pre-recorded score, in this case conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham (see Unfaithfully Yours, April 15), who had originally suggested the work, glimpsed in a telling cameo at the finale, with a wry visual gag as the topper. A favorite film of both Powell and Pressburger booster Martin Scorsese and, more surprisingly, horror icon George Romero, who first saw it at age eleven: “It just took me into another world in terms of its innovative cinematic technique. It really got me going.” This new restoration, supervised by Thelma Schoonmaker Powell, wife of the director and Scorsese’s longtime film editor, is the most complete version ever seen in this country. Approx. 133 min. DCP.
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THE HAUNTING, Robert Wise
BAM
Robert Wise directed this atmospheric chiller—called the scariest movie of all time by Martin Scorsese—about a group of people staying at a Gothic mansion purportedly haunted by a poltergeist. Drawing on his experience working under legendary producer Val Lewton, Wise employs shadowy lighting, distorting lenses, and disorienting camera angles to create an unsettling mood of sustained dread.
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BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB, Wim Wenders
MoMA
1999. Germany/USA. Directed by Wim Wenders. Legendary in Cuba, the musicians of Buena Vista Social Club—Ibrahim Ferrer, Compay Segundo, Rubén González, and Elíades Ochoa—achieved universal adoration and success after Ry Cooder brought them together to record an album of traditional Cuban son and perform live in Amsterdam and at Carnegie Hall. Rarely has a film about music captivated millions of people worldwide; 15 years later, with the recent thawing of relations between Cuba and the United States, this film could not be more timely. New digital restoration. In Spanish, English; English subtitles. 105 min.
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**FRIDAY, MARCH 20**
FLAHERTY NYC: PROGRAM 5: REBELS OF THE NEON GOD
Anthology Film Archives
DUSTY STACKS OF MOM, Jodie Mack
BUFFALO JUGGALOS, Scott Cummings
THE BLAZING WORLD, Jessica Bardsley
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I’LL BE SEEING YOU, William Dieterle
MoMA
1944. USA. Directed by William Dieterle. Screenplay by Charles Martin, Marion Parsonnet. With Ginger Rogers, Joseph Cotten, Shirley Temple, Spring Byington. Rogers and Cotten are two lost souls who meet on a train: she’s a convict on an eight-day Christmas furlough; he’s a severely traumatized war veteran on a therapeutic 10-day leave from a military hospital. As the two fall in love, they hesitate to reveal the violent secrets that lie in their pasts—his as a victim, hers as a perpetrator. A teenage Shirley Temple, as Rogers’s spoiled niece, threatens to upset the apple cart. William Dieterle directs with his customary attention to lighting and dramatic space. 83 min.
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