***FRIDAY, JANUARY 23***
BRONSON, Nicolas Winding Refn
Nitehawk Cinema
34 years in prison, 30 in solitary – loving every minute… BRONSON was never much of a people person.
Michael Peterson was your average, everyday bloke until he wound up in the slammer for holding up a Post Office. Prison’s where Michael really began to shine, ditching his old moniker for that of his idol: Charles Bronson. The inmate made a name for himself as Bronson, beating guards to a pulp in prisons all across the country. He even started a riot. You see, to Bronson, jail was like a vacation, a kind of playground where you can beat up just about anybody, and there’s really not much they can do about it.
Based on true events, Nicolas Winding Refn’s (Drive, Only God Forgives) Bronson stars Tom Hardy as the film’s titular badass, a charming, if terrifying, serial inmate who punched and scraped and bit his way into being Her Majesty’s Most Dangerous Prisoner.
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LORD OF THE RINGS (1978), Ralph Bakshi
Nitehawk Cinema
Metal meets mithril in this Live Sound Cinema presentation of Ralph Bakshi’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS with live score by Black Lodge!
Twenty years before a certain fuzzy Kiwi claimed Middle Earth for his own, an animation genius from Brooklyn, Ralph Bakshi, was first to bring Tolkien’s fantasy epic to life. To create his Middle Earth, Bakshi used an animation technique called Rotoscoping, which combines live action and illustration. The result is something like a panel van painting sprung to life, a bizarrely fluid fantasy realm made up of impossible landscapes, saturated color and grotesque creatures. The story’s condensed and incomplete, only making about 2/3rds of the way through the books before petering to an end, but Bakshi’s work remains a marvel and was a huge influence on Peter Jackson when the time came to finish the trip to Mordor.
For this Live Sound Cinema presentation of The Lord of the Rings, we’ve invited drone-y metal outfit, and Nitehawk favorite, Black Lodge (a collective of musicians led by guitarist/composer Geoff Gersh, who re-score films then perform live to them) to accompany the film, giving the film the Valhalla twist that the fantasy epic deserves.
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CARTOONISTS – FOOT SOLDIERS OF DEMOCRACY, Stephanie Valloatto
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Acclaimed director Radu Mihaileanu (The Concert, The Source, Train of Life, Live and Become), who co-wrote and produced the film, teams up with Plantu, a cartoonist with the French daily newspaper Le Monde for the last 40 years, to tell the story of 12 cartoonists from all over the world whose theme of democracy is represented throughout their work. The documentary explores the risks they run every day—often finding themselves on the front lines—and the reactions and debates they provoke, giving us a subtle insight into the state of freedom of expression and democracy in the world today.
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MOMMY, Xavier Dolan
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Twenty-five-year-old Quebecois auteur Xavier Dolan stylishly revisits the maternal angst and teen alienation of his 2009 debut, I Killed My Mother, with his latest Montreal-set feature. In the near future, circumstances force brassy widow Diana “Die” (Anne Dorval) to remove her violently hyperactive son, Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon), from a special-care institution and to homeschool him, and it’s not long before his anarchic instability leads to a paroxysm of domestic unrest. But when their shy, stammer-afflicted neighbor Kyla (Suzanne Clément) enters the picture, an enigmatic and eruptive ménage emerges, transforming the lives of all three. The histrionic melodrama that unfolds between mother, son, and neighbor is daringly rendered in the unusual 1:1 aspect ratio by cinematographer André Turpin and is cast against an idiosyncratic backdrop of late-90s pop in Dolan’s most fully realized work to date.
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THE MERRY WIDOW, Franz Lehar
Film Society of Lincoln Center
The great Renée Fleming stars as the beguiling femme fatale who captivates all Paris in Lehár’s enchanting operetta, seen in a new staging by Broadway virtuoso director and choreographer Susan Stroman (The Producers, Oklahoma!, Contact). Stroman and her design team of Julian Crouch (Satyagraha, The Enchanted Island) and costume designer William Ivey Long (Cinderella, Grey Gardens, Hairspray) have created an art-nouveau setting that climaxes with singing and dancing grisettes at the legendary Maxim’s. Nathan Gunn co-stars as Danilo and Kelli O’Hara is Valencienne. Andrew Davis conducts.
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SALVATION ARMY, Abdellah Taia
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Like the book it’s based on—Abdellah Taïa’s own 2006 landmark novel—the Moroccan author’s directorial debut is a bracing, deeply personal account of a young gay man’s awakening that avoids both cliché and the trappings of autobiography. First seen as a 15-year-old, Abdellah (Saïd Mrini) habitually sneaks away from his family’s crowded Casablanca home to engage in sexual trysts with random men in abandoned buildings. A decade later, we find Abdellah (now played by Karim Ait M’hand) on scholarship in Geneva, involved with an older Swiss professor (Frédéric Landenberg). With a clear-eyed approach, devoid of sentimentality, this wholly surprising bildungsfilm explores what it means to be an outsider, and with the help of renowned cinematographer Agnès Godard, Taïa finds a film language all his own: at once rigorous and poetic, worthy of Bresson in its concreteness and lucidity.
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HOTEL DU NORD, Marcel Carne
Anthology Film Archives
This rarely-screened film by Marcel Carné (CHILDREN OF PARADISE), made in-between his poetic-realist classics, PORT OF SHADOWS (1938) and LE JOUR SE LÈVE (1939), takes place at the eponymous Parisian hotel which, thanks to legendary production designer Alexandre Trauner, becomes a major character in its own right. A romantic melodrama featuring Annabella and Jean-Pierre Aumont as star-crossed lovers who have formed a suicide pact, and Louis Jouvet and Arletty as the underworld figures with whom the lovers become entangled, it’s an undervalued gem.
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STARING AT SOUND: DAN FRIEL
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Staring at Sound explores the connections between music and film through a series of intimate concerts featuring live music and original video work.
With a tiny keyboard and a lap full of electronics and Christmas lights, Dan Friel makes some of the heaviest, most psychedelic junkyard pop music ever performed while seated. A former member of the legendary Parts & Labor, Friel has been performing solo since the band dissolved in 2012. His music is full of triumphant melodies, low, snarling bass frequencies, and delay pedal effects that sound like rainbow ice cream melting.
Friel will be joined by Todd Bailey, an artist who builds his own video synthesizers from scratch. Bailey’s work can be seen at his website.
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NOT JUNK YET: THE ART OF LARY 7, Danielle de Picciotto
Anthology Film Archives
“Lary 7 – founder of the Plastikville Records label and studio, student of Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, and Hollis Frampton, and a perennial figure of the New York music scene since the early 1980s – is finally seen, heard, and celebrated as never before in this film exploration of his important work. Lary 7 has collaborated with countless music icons for more than three decades: Michael Gira, Tom Verlaine, Jarboe, Foetus, Tony Conrad, Alexander Hacke, Larry Mullins, Dorit Chrysler, Jacob Kirkegaard, Ken Montgomery, Michael Evans, and Gordon Monahan. As an irrepressible film artist and photographer, Lary 7 has also hosted countless word-of-mouth, legendary multimedia events at which he employs rube-goldian projection techniques to produce other-worldly light shows and experiences.
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TAXI DRIVER, Martin Scorsese
IFC Center
“A vet who takes to nocturnal cab-driving as a distraction from chronic insomnia, Travis Bickle is a casualty of the sex war as well as Vietnam, seeking to ‘rescue’ first Presidential campaign worker Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) and then juvenile prostitute Iris (12-year-old Jodie Foster, already adept at spinning humiliation into self-reliance) from what he perceives as the cesspit of Manhattan. Scorsese offers a fair bit of support for this perspective, from the banal closed-mindedness of Bickle’s fellow drivers to the director’s own cameo as a murderously jealous passenger.
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LES VISITEURS DU SOIR, Marcel Carne
Anthology Film Archives
LES VISITEURS DU SOIR marked Carné’s third straight collaboration with both lead actress Arletty and art designer Alexandre Trauner, but it’s distinctly different than the poetic realist HÔTEL DU NORD and LE JOUR SE LÈVE: a medieval fable, LES VISITEURS centers on two mysterious strangers who are revealed to be emissaries of the devil. Sent to earth to spread suffering and despair, their mission is foiled by the redemptive power of love. Though Carné’s retreat from the contemporary settings of his previous films into the distant past (and the realm of lyrical fantasy) may be attributable to the onset of the German occupation, many critics have interpreted the film as an allegory of the Nazi incursion and of the survival of the French spirit during these years.
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THE HOUSE ACROSS THE BAY, Archie Mayo
MoMA
With her hair newly darkened, Bennett is in fine, throaty form as a wisecracking nightclub singer who marries New York gangster George Raft. Life is sweet until she decides to rat him out to the IRS, hoping to protect him from rival hoods by putting him behind bars—at which point the film shifts coasts and genres, turning into a foggy San Francisco melodrama as Bennett pines for her man in Alcatraz and dashing aviator Walter Pidgeon tries to convince her not to. Archie Mayo’s direction isn’t up to the challenge, but there are indelible moments, including Bennett in full Miranda performing a wild Latin American production number.
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THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, Orson Welles
Film Forum
“If I’d only known where it would end, I’d never have let anything start.” Footloose Irish sailor with literary aspirations Welles gets mixed up in a murder with crooked lawyer Everett Sloane and his sultry wife Rita Hayworth (still Mrs. Welles at the time of shooting), as Byzantine plot complications ensue, highlighted by the legendary Hall of Mirrors finale.
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BOOGIE NIGHTS, Paul Thomas Anderson
Museum of the Moving Image
Julianne Moore received an Oscar nomination for her performance as the seasoned porn star Amber Waves in Paul Thomas Anderson’s richly detailed saga.
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THE THIRD MAN, Carol Reed
Film Forum
Pulp novelist Joseph Cotten goes to chaotic post-war Vienna, as zithers play and atmosphere drips from the screen, to find his old buddy, Welles’ Harry Lime, is dead… or is he?
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***SATURDAY, JANUARY 24***
BLOW UP, Michelangelo Antonioni
Nitehawk Cinema
ART SEEN begins the new year with a 35mm screening of BLOW UP, Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic film about a London photographer who finds himself part of a murder mystery.
When the talented but bored and cocky fashion photographer Thomas takes pictures of a couple in a desolate park, he unwittingly embarks on a strange journey of captured infidelity and possible murder. Blow Up is set in the swinging mid-1960s London and it evokes all the mod style and sensibility style of the time period. Importantly through Antonioni’s own camera, the film examines the power and potential of the photographic medium during a period when its boundaries to depict reality were truly being tested. Although this is Antonioni’s first English language film, as with most of the director’s work, Blow Up shares in the lone figure faced with a problem of his/her own making, their journey marked amongst a vast landscape.
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THE BIG BEAT: FATS DOMINO AND THE BIRTH OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL, Joe Lauro
Film Society of Lincoln Center
From New Orleans to Blueberry Hill, the teaming of Antoine “Fats” Domino Jr. and Dave Bartholomew is a legendary partnership that changed the course of mid-century music. Meeting at a Ninth Ward dive called The Hideaway, the two became songwriting partners, and under the banner of Imperial Records (where Bartholomew served as producer, arranger, and bandleader), they sold over 60 million records between 1949-62—a time when segregation dominated the airwaves. Director/archivist Joe Lauro, who’s helmed documentaries about The Supremes and The Four Tops, uses footage unearthed in the French National Archives of a 45-minute live performance as the basis for The Big Beat, a portrait of a collaboration that charts the influence of New Orleans R&B upon the nascent genre of rock and roll, and features candid interviews with its still-vibrant subjects. Spotlighting dynamic, uncut performances (including Bartholomew on trumpet), the film is a joyful celebration of two icons who helped pop music find its thrill.
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THE BIG BEAT, Will Cowan
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Catching the youth music zeitgeist following Frank Tashlin’s groundbreaking The Girl Can’t Help It, Will Cowan’s The Big Beat doubles down on pop-star appearances, with The Diamonds and The Del Vikings appealing to the teen market, and Harry James and The Mills Brothers lending their more established talents to the mix. Best of all is Fats Domino, performing the title track and his immortal “I’m Walkin’.” The film’s plot concerns the son of a record-company executive (William Reynolds) starting his own label to promote rock ’n’ roll with the help of his devoted secretary (Andra Martin). Featuring additional music by Henry Mancini and memorable turns by Rose Marie (The Dick Van Dyke Show) and Hans Conried (the voice behind Snidely Whiplash and Disney’s Captain Hook), this exuberant jukebox time capsule more than lives up to its name.
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CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, Woody Allen
Nitehawk Cinema
Woody Allen’s classic comic thriller on life’s CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS. A 35mm presentation.
Judah Rosenthal and Cliff Stern have problems.
Judah’s a respected doctor with a great deal of dirty laundry. His mistress has grown impatient with promises to leave his wife, and threatens to go public with their affair, a revelation that would unravel the good doctor’s professional and social standing. Judah struggles with what to do; does he face the consequences of his actions, or does this desperate situation allow for a more permanent – and unspeakable – solution? Who’s to say what’s unspeakable, anyway?
Cliff’s a documentary filmmaker whose rocky marriage and dodgy finances force him to take on a puff-piece project about his blowhard brother-in-law. While filming, Cliff falls in love with a production assistant and he agonizes over his infatuation with her, while also struggling to glamorize his oafish brother-in-law.
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LET’S GO!, Michael Verhoeven
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Director Michael Verhoeven, the “nasty boy” of German cinema, artfully presents a biting commentary on postwar German society in this adaptation of the autobiographical novel by Laura Waco. Overcome with grief at her father’s funeral in 1968, Laura looks back with fresh eyes at her parents’ decision to settle in Germany after surviving the Holocaust—at their incapacity to escape the shadow of the genocide, their denial of their own Judaism, and the deeply conflicted psychology that was the legacy of their plight and others like them. The film is a beautifully wrought, subtly probing investigation of the complex notion of German-Jewish identity.
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THE NAKED CITY, Jules Dassin
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Shot entirely on location, The Naked City exposes a raw and menacing New York, from its darkest alleys to its tallest skyscrapers. Allegedly inspired by Weegee’s photographs of crime scenes and Italian neorealism, blacklisted director Jules Dassin magnificently captured the city’s street life. The film, winner of two Academy Awards for cinematography and editing, depicts a police investigation that follows the murder of a young model in her Upper West Side apartment, and features many memorable chases through the city, including a heart-stopping scene at the top of the Williamsburg Bridge.
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EXISTENZ, David Croneberg
IFC Center
“eXistenZ is a virtual reality game where players, their nervous systems linked to a techno-biological pod via a plug in the spinal column, enter hallucinatory worlds/stories fuelled by their fears, needs and desires. At the game’s launch, cultish, controversial creator Allegra (Leigh) survives an assassination attempt by an anti-games fanatic. Fleeing from a ‘fatwa’ with the game company’s trainee marketing man Ted (Law), she soon persuades him to join her in playing her invention, both to assess the damage done to her pod, and to share the vicarious pleasures to which she’s addicted. But how can they tell which of the bizarre scenarios they find themselves in is imagined or real?
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THE STORY OF A CHEAT, Sacha Guitry
Anthology Film Archives
“Widely regarded as Guitry’s masterpiece…this 1936 tour de force can be regarded as a kind of concerto for the writer-director-performer’s special brand of brittle cleverness. After a credits sequence that introduces us to the film’s cast and crew, Guitry settles into a flashback account of how the title hero learned to benefit from cheating over the course of his life. A notoriously anticinematic cineaste whose first love was theater, Guitry nevertheless had a flair for cinematic high jinks when it came to adapting his plays (or in this case a novel) to film, and most of this movie registers as a rather lively and stylishly inventive silent film, with Guitry’s character serving as offscreen lecturer.
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THE RAVEN, Henri Georges Clouzot
Anthology Film Archives
Made during the German occupation, THE RAVEN almost brought Clouzot’s career to a halt when it was misinterpreted following the war as anti-French propaganda. But au contraire: it is in fact a withering attack on the collaborationist bourgeois society of Vichy-era France. Upon the appearance of a series of anonymous letters exposing a small town’s dirty secrets, the polite veneer of society crumbles as suspicion, hatred, and paranoia rage out of control. A deeply unsettling, unsparing glimpse into the dark heart of human nature, THE RAVEN is one of Clouzot’s finest films.
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THE END OF THE AFFAIR, Neil Jordan
Museum of the Moving Image
Moore earned an Oscar nomination for her compelling performance as the woman at the center of a torrid love triangle in this adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel, luxuriously mounted with lavish attention to 1940s period detail.
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DOUCE, Claude Autant-Lara
Anthology Film Archives
“Autant-Lara was one of the principal figures of the French ‘tradition of quality’ that flourished during the Nazi occupation, and this 1943 masterpiece, which also introduced the writing team of Pierre Bost and Jean Aurenche, is the first of several great films he made. The radiant Odette Joyeux stars as the title heroine, a socialite who seeks to flee her lavish but suffocating environs with the handsome family caretaker, only to discover that the relationship is doomed.
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***SUNDAY, JANUARY 25***
THE BIRDCAGE, Mike Nichols
Film Society of Lincoln Center
This 1996 adaptation of the iconic French farce La Cage aux Folles, directed by the dearly departed Mike Nichols, is as outrageous as the 1978 French-Italian film and the original 1973 stage play, and with a Jewish twist. Robin Williams and Nathan Lane star as the flamboyant South Beach couple whose straight son brings his fiancée and her ultraconservative (and not even a little Jewish) parents to dinner. Williams and Lane transform into a happy heterosexual couple for the occasion, with Lane in drag, Gentile-izing themselves in the bargain from Goldman to Coleman (“the D is silent,” says Lane’s Albert). Mayhem and hilarity ensue. The outstanding cast also includes Gene Hackman, Dianne Wiest, and Hank Azaria.
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CRY OF THE CITY, Robert Siodmak
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Full-fledged noirist Robert Siodmak directed this gritty crime drama about two childhood best friends who take divergent paths: one becomes a cop (Victor Mature); the other, a cop killer (Richard Conte). The killer must grapple with confessing to a murder he did not commit in order to save his girlfriend from being framed for the crime. Shot mostly on location in New York City, the film features a thrilling score by Alfred Newman and is based on a masterful script by uncredited screenwriter Ben Hecht.
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FORBIDDEN FILMS, Felix Moeller
Film Society of Lincoln Center
The Nazi regime produced over 1,200 feature films, mostly political propaganda, a handful of which were crafted specifically to engender anti-Semitism among the masses. Of these hideous artifacts, 40 remain banned from public viewing to this day for their incendiary content. In Forbidden Films, director Felix Moeller brings us into the vaulted, explosive-resistant compound where the reels are kept and then interviews renowned film historians and filmmakers who debate the importance of these “Nazi movies of the poison cabinet”: are they worth keeping? Do we need to show them? How do we approach this dark legacy?
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SAFE, Todd Haynes
Museum of the Moving Image
Moore is utterly compelling as a housewife who becomes allergic to the chemical toxins in her environment. Terrence Rafferty wrote that Moore is “amazingly vivid and touching; this is a heartbreaking portrait of a woman in full, panicked retreat from life.”
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THE OUTRAGEOUS SOPHIE TUCKER, William Gazecki
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Spend an evening winding through the many personalities of the so-called “Queen of Vaudeville”: theater, radio, and television icon Sophie Tucker. Born in Russia into a poor Jewish family in 1887, her campaign to capture Hollywood’s heart is one of the most marvelous rags-to-riches stories of the century. The hallmark styles of Mae West, Bette Midler, and even Madonna all find some roots in Tucker’s brassy nonchalance, and The Outrageous Sophie Tucker captures it all, with the help of 400 newly discovered scrapbooks that belonged to the Queen herself.
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MARIUS, Alexander Korda
Anthology Film Archives
Having gained fame as a playwright, Marcel Pagnol soon became intoxicated by the possibilities of sound cinema, a fascination that would ultimately lead him to create his own production studios, and to write, produce, and direct numerous films. He began his film career by adapting his own play to create MARIUS, the first in a Marseilles-set trilogy that would later include FANNY (also adapted from the stage-play) and CÉSAR (which was written directly for the screen). In MARIUS, César (Raimu) is a cafe owner whose son Marius (Pierre Fresnay) loves Fanny (Orane Demazis), the daughter of a fishmonger, but also longs to live the adventurous life of a sailor. Even though the young couple become lovers and plan to marry, Fanny realizes that she cannot hold Marius from his dreams.
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THE AWFUL TRUTH, Leo McCarey
IFC Center
“Leo McCarey’s largely improvised 1937 film is one of the funniest of the screwball comedies, and also one of the most serious at heart. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are a pair of world-weary socialites who decide to drop the pretense of their wide-open marriage, but fate and Ralph Bellamy draw them together again. The awful truth is that they need each other, and McCarey, with his profound faith in monogamy, leads them gradually and hilariously to that crucial discovery. The issues deepen in a subtle, natural way: the film begins as a trifle and ends as something beautiful and affirmative. A classic.” – Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
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FANNY, Marc Allegret
Anthology Film Archives
In the second part of the trilogy, the young and beautiful Fanny discovers that she is pregnant after her lover, Marius, has deserted her to follow the adventurous life of the sea. After finding succor in the kindness of the equally bereaved César, Fanny reluctantly accepts the marriage offer of an older wealthy suitor Panisse (Charpin), in order to make the child legitimate. Unaware that he is now a father, Marius returns to marry Fanny, but is sent away by his father César in order to prevent further unhappiness.
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CESAR, Marcel Pagnol
Anthology Film Archives
The final film in Pagnol’s trilogy begins with the death of César’s best friend, old Panisse, the town merchant who has devoted his wealth and love to the happiness of his young wife, Fanny, and their son. After the death of Panisse, the son is told by his mother that his real father is the legendary Marius, César’s son, who left Marseilles twenty years earlier to travel the world. Feeling betrayed, the son sets out to find Marius, who is living quietly in a nearby town. The only film in the trilogy that Pagnol directed himself, CÉSAR is a deeply moving finale to a series of films that is one of the great accomplishments of 1930s French cinema.
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OTHELLO, Orson Welles
Film Forum
As Welles’ Othello lies dead, a horrified Iago is hoisted above the crowd in an iron cage – and then the play begins. Shakespeare’s classic of jealousy and retribution becomes one of Welles’ most dazzling works, from its baroque Venetian beginning to the stunning murder sequence in a Turkish bath.
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IT’S ALL TRUE, Richard Wilson, Myron Meisel & Bill Krohn
Film Forum
Reconstruction of Welles’ aborted 1942 South American project, with his color footage of Carnival in Rio, the “blessing of the bull,” and the near-complete semi-documentary story of four fishermen’s 2,000-mile sea voyage to Rio on a tiny raft. Full title: It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles.
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MACBETH (ORIGINAL RELEASE VERSION), Orson Welles
Film Forum
In the gloomy, claustrophobic atmosphere of a studio-shot primitive world, a feudal lord (Welles in the title role) decides to go for the kingship, with horrifically fated results. The 89-minute U.S. release version, with the actors’ voices dubbed with American accents.
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FAR FROM HEAVEN, Todd Haynes
Museum of the Moving Image
Moore received one of her four Oscar nominations as a 1950s housewife who falls in love with her black gardener in Todd Haynes’s exquisite update of Douglas Sirk’s Technicolor melodramas.
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