***MONDAY, AUGUST 18***
MR. X: A VISION OF LEOS CARAX, Tessa-Louise Salomé
Film Forum
Born Alexandre Dupont, Carax, despite having made only one film in the 21 years between Les Amants du Pont Neuf and Holy Motors, remains France’s flamboyant enfant terrible and the most romantic of filmmakers, creating in many ways, in himself, a second New Wave, adding to the legends of the artist maudit. Louise-Salomé’s documentary portrait features clips, outtakes, stills (with Carax voice-overs); interviews with Juliette Binoche, Michel Piccoli, and favorite actor/alter ego Denis Lavant, even Kylie Minogue; critics Kent Jones and Richard Brody; directors Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Harmony Korine; but even more, via her own startling use of camera and editing, the flavor of a Carax film itself.
READ MORE
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, Lewis Milestone
MoMA
Milestone’s Oscar-winning depiction of the disillusionment of German youth after experiencing the realities of war parallels G. W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918 on essentially the same subject, and was made the same year.
READ MORE
LES AMANTS DU PONT NEUF, Leos Carax
Film Forum
On an under-construction Pont Neuf, Paris’ oldest bridge, hard-drinking street performer Denis Lavant and a post-relationship, losing-her-sight artist Juliette Binoche live as vagrants, but form a bond. Memorably over-the-top production – a full-size bridge stand-in had to built when the real one because unavailable – with Binoche’s water-ski down the Seine as fireworks explode a memorable highlight.
READ MORE
HOLY MOTORS, Leos Carx
Film Forum
Leos Carax steps from his apartment into a crowded cinema. Seeming family man Denis Lavant enters a limo driven by Edith Scob (later donning a white plastic face mask à la Franju’s Eyes Without A Face, screening on August 17) and via dossiers, makeup and costumes, plays a beggar, an actor, Eva Mendes’ kidnapper, a concerned father (to Carax’s own daughter), two hitmen; and an old flame of Kylie Minogue – or is it not acting? Carax’s triumphant and enigmatic return to feature filmmaking.
READ MORE
LEVEL FIVE, Chris Marker
BAM
Marker’s shock-to-the-senses mind-melter concerns a woman (Belkhodja) haunted by the loss of her lover while working on programming a video game about World War II’s Battle of Okinawa. Melding retro-futuristic sci-fi imagery, references to American film noir, and reflections on traumas in Japanese history into a visually and philosophically provocative puzzle, Level Five is a hallucinatory visual essay on memory, tragedy, and early digital culture.
READ MORE
ABUSE OF WEAKNESS, Catherine Breillait
Film Society of Lincoln Center
In 2004, at the age of 56, Catherine Breillat suffered a serious stroke. Her left side was initially paralyzed and after five months in the hospital she worked like a demon to walk again. Not long after, she prepared a screenplay of her novel Bad Love and decided to cast the notorious “swindler of the stars,” Christophe Rocancourt, fresh from a jail term for fraud. Over the next several months, Rocancourt took advantage of Breillat’s condition and stood by her side as she wrote him checks amounting to €650,000. She later took him to court, won her case, and chronicled the experience in a book that she has now adapted into a uniquely haunting film, which features a bold, tough performance by Isabelle Huppert as the Breillat figure and French/Portuguese rapper Kool Shen as the con man.
READ MORE
THE PROWLER, Joseph Losey
Film Society of Lincoln Center
A rare critique of the sexual stereotyping in film noir and a treatise on the hidden injuries of class, The Prowler is the greatest work of Losey’s pre-blacklist period and one of Dalton Trumbo’s best scripts. A former high-school basketball star turned cop (Van Heflin) seething with resentment for the more privileged seduces a lonely rich housewife (Evelyn Keyes) and commits the perfect crime in order to obtain his dream: owning a motel in Las Vegas (“It’s making money while you’re asleep”). There’s just one little problem, which leads him to take desperate measures… Trumbo used fellow blacklist victim Hugo Butler’s name as a front for his suspenseful and bleak screenplay.
READ MORE
***TUESDAY, AUGUST 19***
FOUR SONS, John Ford
MoMA
Ford’s film centers on a German mother whose sons fight and die on both sides of the war, again expressing the theme of a common humanity. The film is heavily influenced by F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, shot on some of the same sets the preceding year at Fox.
READ MORE
MAUVAIS SANG, Leos Carax
Film Forum
Did Michel Piccoli and Hans Meyer’s partner jump or was he pushed? Either way, the American Lady wants her money in two weeks. To pull a new job, they’ll need partner’s son Denis Lavant, busy now dumping Julie Delpy and reinventing alienation – and then he meets Piccoli’s 30-years-younger girlfriend Juliette Binoche. Carax’s deliriously intense mix of New Wave style with full-blown French Romanticism, its dazzling colors keyed to a retina-searing red.
READ MORE
ZULU, Cy Endfield
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Endfield’s reenactment of a great British victory in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 has become one of the most influential films of the 1960s (Peter Jackson and Ridley Scott’s overt imitations are just the beginning!). Endfield presents the contradictions of imperialism as a company of Welsh soldiers give their all for someone else’s Queen and Country, fighting against a people defending their homeland. But he never tips his hand, improbably but persuasively crafting an ambiguous parable. Zulu might be the most conventionally epic of Endfield’s films, but it is no less complex and political than the movies upon which his reputation as a member of Red Hollywood was founded.
READ MORE
HELL DRIVERS, Cy Endfield
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Like Joseph Losey, Cy Endfield thrived in his British exile. And together they established the star of Stanley Baker, who here plays Tom Yately, a tough ex-con truck driver who must risk life and limb for his unscrupulous boss at Hawlett’s Trucking Company. Tensions arise due to the unreasonably high expectations the company holds for its drivers and a rivalry soon emerges between Tom and another trucker, Red (Patrick McGoohan). Tom and Red’s antagonism not only pushes both men to their limits but also winds up unveiling the crooked practices being carried out behind closed doors at Hawlett’s. This film notably features an early performance by Sean Connery.
READ MORE
JEALOUSLY, Phillipe Garrel
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Philippe Garrel is a true child of French cinema. His father was the great actor Maurice Garrel, he made a second home for himself in the Cinémathèque Française, he shot his first film at the age of 16, and he rode through the streets of Paris shooting newsreels of May ’68 with Godard in his red Ferrari. From the start, Garrel’s intimate, handcrafted cinema has stayed elementally close to the conditions of silent film—the unadorned beauty of faces, figures, and light—and revisited the same deeply personal themes of loss, mourning, and rejuvenation through love. In this sharp, vigorous film, shot in glorious black and white by the great Willy Kurant (Masculine Feminine), Garrel takes a fresh look at his titular subject, patiently following the professional and emotional crosscurrents between two romantically entwined theater actors played by the director’s son Louis and Anna Mouglalis. With a beautiful score by Jean-Louis Aubert. A 51st New York Film Festival selection, voted best undistributed film of 2013 in Film Comment’s year-end poll.
READ MORE
SECRETS OF THE SHADOW WORLD, George Kuchar
Light Industry
“With a new millennium almost upon us, images of space aliens invading the marketplace and sleeping habits of consumers worldwide, this miniseries abducts the viewers into the universe of John A. Keel (via a video time-warp supplied by me with Rockefeller Foundation funding). It’s a leisurely expedition through a maze of kitchens and cerebral convolutions in search of the mysteries behind the mundane (or vice versa!). Mr. Keel, an author and stage magician, has made a profound impact on the pop-culture we swim in. His research and books on the UFO enigma have ignited an explosive wild-fire of imaginative invocations such as the X-Files TV show and the Men in Black blockbuster movie. Yet you never hear about him and he never hears from the movie and television companies. In this video you see and hear him. You also see and hear a whole lot of other people and some animals. The whole show runs almost 2 hours and 20 minutes, but be sure to stay for part 3 as the UFO/Horror author, Whitley Strieber, teams up with my old star Donna Kerness to reveal exclusive revelations on the ‘visitor’ experience. See this video… then read their books — and pray it’s not true!” – GK
In conjunction with the publication of The George Kuchar Reader, edited by Andrew Lampert, Light Industry hosts a screening of Kuchar’s tripartite Fortean epic Secrets of the Shadow World. The culmination of the artist’s life-long fascination with paranormal phenomena, Secrets features spooky tales of the chupacabra, Sasquatch, flying saucers, and the death of film via a maelstrom of wipes, swirls, chromakey, and other instruments of lo-fi videographic excess, all set to an anachronistic soundtrack of syrupy mood music. And though the work’s ostensible subject is extraterrestrial, its true focus is on the ultra-ordinary, the banal interactions which Kuchar renders with incredible tenderness and wit—his ersatz stars shine brightest while eating a sandwich. Indeed, Keel offers a remark at one point about his own work that doubles as an apposite description of Kuchar’s project: “The book is not about people from outer space. It’s about people right here on earth.”
READ MORE
***WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20***
RAGING BULL, Martin Scorsese
MoMA
Scorsese’s depiction of boxer Jake La Motta won De Niro an Oscar. La Motta, despite being thuggish and self-destructive, won several championships, including one victory in five tries over his primary nemesis, the gifted Sugar Ray Robinson. The film’s graphic imagery and Oscar-winning cutting by Schoonmaker captured boxing that was unlike anything that had ever been committed to film
READ MORE
POLA X, Leos Carax
Film Forum
Successful novelist Guillaume Depardieu (Gérard’s son) lives in a magnificent château and is certainly close with mother Catherine Deneuve (he lights two cigarettes and giver her one, they banter while she’s nude in her bath) and also motorcycles over to his blonde waif cousin/fiancée Delphine Chuillot. But one day gaunt, mysterious Katy Golubeva wanders out of the woods to announce she’s his sister, and things proceed to get incestuously graphic. Controversial – but relatively faithful – adaptation of Herman Melvilles’ Pierre.
READ MORE
I STOLE A MILLION, Frank Tuttle
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Nathanael West: Communist or fellow traveler? Both, but he died too young to be disillusioned or exiled. A B-movie writer? Yes, but his scripts are closer to his novels than the films adapted from them. I Stole a Million is an absurdist version of film noir in which the American Dream goes obscenely wrong for decent but impetuous taxi driver Joe Lourik (George Raft), who tries to buy his own cab but soon finds himself turning to crime amid money disputes with the company he enlists to help him do so. West’s pessimistic script serves as the foundation for a gripping parable about the perils of trying to control one’s own economic fate under capitalism.
READ MORE
HEAVEN WITH A BARBED WIRE FENCE, Ricardo Cortez
Film Society of Lincoln Center
This late-Depression road movie was criticized for scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo’s leftist touches, but these touches are precisely what sets it apart today. Four strangers form a vagabond community and travel west aboard freight cars. This film marked the screen debut of Glenn Ford as Joe, one of Trumbo’s natural-born suckers whose innocence is a form of grace and whose misogyny is cured by Anita, an indocumentada (a refugee from Franco’s Spain) played by Jean Rogers. It’s worth the price of admission just to watch a bum (Richard Conte, also making his debut) craft a free meal from a cup of hot water and countertop condiments at a diner.
READ MORE
RED HOLLYWOOD, Thom Andersen and Noel Burch
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Working from extensive original research, this revelatory documentary—newly remastered and re-edited—offers a unique perspective on Hollywood filmmaking from the 1930s to the 1950s, when “Red” screenwriters and directors worked within the studio system to make films that challenged issues of class, war, race, and gender. Andersen and Burch use clips from 53 different films spanning numerous genres in order to demonstrate how this network of filmmakers’ ideology affected the meaning and reception of their work, as well as interviews with many of the artists (such as Paul Jarrico, Ring Lardner, Jr., Alfred Levitt, and Abraham Polonsky) who were blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
READ MORE
***THURSDAY, AUGUST 21***
GUN CRAZY, Joseph H. Lewis
Film Forum
A bank robbery shot from inside the getaway car in a single take, as vicious carny girl Peggy Cummins leads good-hearted gun buff John Dall into a life of crime.
READ MORE
WE ARE MARI PEPA, Samuel Kishi Leopo
Anthology Film Archives
Samuel Kishi Leopo’s first feature, expanded from his earlier short film, is a finely observed, heartfelt chronicle of the lives and loves of a group of school-age punk rockers in Guadalajara as they approach the transition into adulthood. Beautifully unhurried and uneventful, WE ARE MARI PEPA focuses on its protagonists’ milieu and on the rhythm of their daily lives rather than on contrived plot mechanics, observing as they make music (their sole song features the refrain, “Natasha, I wanna cum in your face!”), barely tolerate their uncomprehending families, kill time, and look for love. Having just completed their school year, the boys find themselves facing the daunting realities of growing up, in a world where they have few options and where they’re destined to grow apart from each other.
WE ARE MARI PEPA is distinguished above all by the terrific performances from its four teenage leads, whose astonishingly natural rapport with each other seems too genuine to be faked – indeed, that they happen to be real-life childhood friends lends the film a strong dose of documentary authenticity. Showing a sure hand in his direction of these non-professional actors, as well as a keen compositional eye and an indelible sense of place, Leopo has created a film that is both funny and bittersweet.
READ MORE
THE KILLING, Stanley Kubrick
Film Forum
Ex-con Sterling Hayden puts together the usual suspects — including sniveling runt Elisha Cook Jr. (married to rotten-to-the-core Marie Windsor), a chess-playing wrestler, and trigger-happy weirdo Timothy Carey — to pull off a racetrack heist, as the inevitable ironic twist awaits.
READ MORE
THE BIG NIGHT, Joseph Losey
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Joseph Losey’s last American film tells the story of a teenager trying to become a man in one night, foreshadowing Rebel Without a Cause—although the hero here must confront an adult world. Okay, so John Drew Barrymore is no James Dean. But even so, this film does feature the final screen role of Dorothy Comingore, who was redbaited, made a scapegoat by the Hearst press after playing Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane, and, as a result, lost everything. Fellow blacklistees Ring Lardner, Jr. and Hugo Butler also worked on the script, adapted by Stanley Ellin from his own novel, Dreadful Summit.
READ MORE
THE TRIP TO ITALY, Michael Winterbottom
Film Society of Lincoln Center
In the sequel to IFC Center smash hit The Trip, comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon return as comedians “Steve Coogan” and “Rob Brydon” for another hilarious culinary road trip. Following in the footsteps of the Romantic poets’ grand tour of Italy, Steve and Rob wine, dine and try to out-impersonate each other in gorgeous settings from Liguria to Capri. As the trip stretches on, our tour guides riff, rift and reflect, creating a riotous, surprisingly touching portrait of friendship, family and career.
READ MORE
The post 23 Films to See This Week: Leos Carax, Chris Marker, George Kuchar + More appeared first on BlackBook.