Sundays may be a “wan, stuff shadow of a robust Saturday” or a day of “forced leisure for folks who have no aptitude for leisure,” but a weekend is still a weekend. The pleasure of a Friday night, the knowing the burdens of work week have a brief respite carry themselves into the following two days of leisure, and what better way to indulge in that leisure than heading to the cinema.
And this weekend, there are more than enough wonderful films showing around New York for you to disappear into. Whether it’s your favorite John Waters, classic Wilder, or some wonderful Les Blank there is surely something to satisfy every cinematic appetite. I’ve rounded up the best of what’s playing around the city, so peruse our list, and enjoy.
***FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5***
FEMALE TROUBLE, John Waters
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Waters’s hysterical, full-throated assault on celebrity culture pivots on an unforgettable performance by Divine as Dawn Davenport, a runaway teen who falls into a life of petty thievery only to becomes a media icon with the help of a pair of sexually repressed, upper-crust hairdressers. Divine called Female Trouble his favorite of his own films, and it’s not hard to see why: everything about the film, from the theme song down, is marked by his electric, gender-defying presence. (He also plays the male truck driver who, in one of the movie’s most grotesque scenes, knocks Dawn up.) But it’s the couple, played by David Lochary (“we rarely eat any form of noodle”) and Mary Vivian Pearce (“spare me your anatomy”), who become both the chief targets of Waters’s satire and, with their theory of beauty’s relationship to transgression and crime, improbable mouthpieces for his filmmaking philosophy. With memorable turns by Mink Stole as Dawn’s ill-fated daughter and Edith Massey as their hot-blooded next-door neighbor.
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EARLY SHORTS BY JOHN WATERS
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Hag in a Black Leather Jacket
In Waters’s first short—shot on stolen 8mm film for $30 on his parents’ rooftop when he was still a teenager, and screened precisely once after its completion—a wedding ceremony between an African-American man and a white ballerina takes a turn for the surreal.
Roman Candles
Under the influence of Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, Waters designed this free-form, disruptive collage of image and sound to be triple-projected on three screens side by side.Roman Candles found Waters, then fresh out of film school, testing out a handful of techniques he’d refine in his first two features, not to mention working for the first time with many of the actors—Divine, David Lochary, Mink Stole—who would soon become constant presences in his life and work.
Eat Your Makeup
Maelcum Soul—“the Kiki of Baltimore”—plays a nanny who forces young women to suffer brutal deaths-by-modeling in Waters’s first narrative short, which also includes a 17-year-old Divine doing his best Jackie Kennedy impression.
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WERNER HERZOG EATS HIS SHOE + IN HEAVEN THERE IS NO BEER?, Les Blank
BAM
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
The title says it all, as the eccentric German filmmaker does penance for losing a bet to director Errol Morris, whilst expounding on his art-making philosophy.
In Heaven There is No Beer?
Polka power! Blank’s infectious valentine to the Bohemian dance and its devotees in Polish America goes from a beachside “polkabration” in Connecticut to a Catholic polka mass in Wisconsin and beyond.
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YUM, YUM, YUM! + ALWAYS FOR PLEASURE, Les Blank
BAM
Yum, Yum, Yum! A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking
Blank celebrates Louisiana cuisine in this feast of gustatory delights, from shrimp crepes to okra etouffee to frog legs, set to a hot zydeco soundtrack.
Always For Pleasure
Blank’s freewheeling tour through the sights and sounds of New Orleans features a jazz funeral, Mardi Gras parades, and a crawfish boil, with appearances by local jazz luminaries like Kid Thomas Valentine, Allen Toussaint, and Blue Lu Barker.
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MEMPHIS, Tim Sutton
IFC Center
Surrounded by lovers, legends, hustlers, preachers and a wolfpack of kids, a strange singer (singular recording artist Willis Earl Beal, who also wrote the score) drifts through this mythic city of ancient oaks, shattered windows and burning spirituality. Shown in frag- ments, his journey of self-discovery drags him from love and happiness right to the edge of another dimension.
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NIGHT AT THE CROSSROADS, Jean Renoir
Anthology Film Archives
“Renoir’s most mysterious film. […] [T]o wit: characters from Dostoevsky in the sets from UNE TÉNÉBREUSE AFFAIRE. Maigret fans will say, ‘Of course, because Simenon = Dostoevsky + Balzac.’ I say that LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR proves that this equation is only true insofar as Renoir verifies it. […]
“The shots which ring out in the night, the roar of a Bugatti racing after the smugglers (a brilliant sequence speeding through the streets of the slumbering village), the dazed or shady looks of the inhabitants of the godforsaken hamlet. Winna Winfried’s English accent and her old-fashioned eroticism. Pierre Renoir’s drooping falcon’s eye, the smell of the rain and the fields soaked by the mist, every detail, every second of every shot, makes LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR the only great French detective movie – in fact, the greatest of all adventure movies.” –Jean-Luc Godard, CAHIERS DU CINÉMA
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A MAN’S NECK, Julien Duvivier
Anthology Film Archives
Julien Duvivier would go on to adapt Simenon for his 1946 classic PANIQUE, but this earlier Maigret film is a little-known masterpiece of 1930s French cinema. A peerlessly atmospheric work of astonishing cinematic invention, its experiments with sound, editing, and photography bring it within hailing distance of the avant-garde.
“This top-notch thriller, one of the first of Simenon’s Inspector Maigret stories to be filmed, stars the incomparable Harry Baur as Maigret. It’s full of priceless period Parisian cafe atmosphere à la Brassaï, and includes an all-too-brief appearance by the great ‘tragedian of song’, Damia.” –Elliott Stein, VILLAGE VOICE
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HOUSE, Nobuhiko Obayashi
IFC Center
Ad-man extraordinaire Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 head-trip is part psychedelic ghost yarn, part stream-of-consciousness bedtime story, part Scooby Doo by way of Dario Argento. The hallucinatory tale centers on a schoolgirl who travels with six classmates to her ailing aunt’s creaky country home, where she comes face to face with evil spirits, bloodthirsty pianos, and a demonic housecat.
At once absurd and nightmarish, HOUSE is steeped in the imperturbable illogic of a child’s dreams. And no wonder—the director fashioned the script after the eccentric musings of his eleven-year-old daughter, then employed all the tricks in his analog arsenal (mattes, animation, collage and more) to make them a visually astonishing, raucous reality. Never before released in the United States, and a bona fide cult classic in the making, HOUSE is one of the most exciting genre discoveries in years.
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SERIAL MOM, John Waters
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
In this scathing suburban satire—a kind of spiritual sequel to Polyester—Waters continued to develop his interest in unorthodox, tight-knit domestic groups, his obsession with the connections between cruelty, criminality, and fame, and his deep feeling for the closeness of humor to disgust. Serial Mom, like its immediate predecessors, was another polished Hollywood production, but with a harsher MPAA rating than Hairspray or Cry-Baby to go along with its edgier premise: a conscientious mother of two (Kathleen Turner, in a rafter-shaking performance) casually takes up serial murder out of a combination of boredom and mild irritation at perceived slights and faux pas. The result is one of Waters’s most sustained critiques of a world in which life is supposedly safe and secure—unless, that is, you wear white shoes after Labor Day.
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***SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6***
FITZCARRALDO, Les Blank
BAM
Herzog’s mesmerizing tale of megalomaniac obsession concerns a Caruso-loving Irish adventurer (Kinski) on a nigh-insane quest to build an opera house in the Peruvian rainforest and transport a steamship over a mountain—as ambitiously deranged an undertaking as Herzog’s own notoriously fanatical filming practices, captured in Blank’s “making of” documentary Burden of Dreams.
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HALF BAKED, Tamra Davis
IFC Center
“The plot is just a thin outline for Chappelle to freelance and cut up with his distinctive brand of comic insanity. His delivery and wit rule the day. Chappelle can make you laugh just by looking at you, and it’s only gravy that he spits out one-liners with such relish. Only Chappelle would think to have his janitor character finish off a hard workday by raising his arms and exclaiming, ‘Freedom!’ or stare at his candy bar and riff, ‘Abba Zabba, you my only friend.’
“HALF BAKED is riotous even to the sober. Any reservations you have about the film go quickly up in smoke.” – Arizona Daily Star
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THE MOTHER, Roger Michell
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
A recently widowed grandmother turns horny and has a secret affair with her daughter’s much younger, loutish boyfriend (played by pre-Bond Daniel Craig). Gerontophilia never seemed so exciting.
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A TRIBUTE TO HARUN FAROCKI: IN COMPARISON AND WORKERS LEAVING THE FACTORY
Museum of the Moving Image
The prolific German filmmaker Harun Farocki (1944-2014) made more than 100 films with a unique combination of documentary and experimental techniques, finding new ways to use cinema as a tool to analyze and reveal the social and political undercurrents of modern life. This tribute program features two of his strongest works. Beautifully filmed in 16mm, In Comparison (2009, 61 mins. 16mm) is a visual essay that compares methods of brick production around the world. The Lumière Brothers’ Workers Leaving the Factory was the first film ever shown to the public. On its centennial, Farocki made a film of the same title (1995, 36 mins. Digital projection) looking at scenes through cinema history of workers leaving factories as a way of analyzing the decline of industrial production.
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FEDORA, Billy Wilder
Film Forum
So, washed up producer William Holden’s big comeback project, an adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, to feature the electrifying return from retirement of Garboesque eternally-youthful screen legend Fedora (Marthe Keller), goes down the drain when she throws herself under a train in real life. Flashback two weeks, as Holden sneaks in to her remote Greek island hideaway to make his desperate pitch, finding she’s been kept prisoner there by creepy Countess Hildegard Knef, overprotective servant Frances Sternhagen, and virtuosic plastic surgeon José Ferrer. But who’s really telling the truth? Adapting from Crowned Heads, a novel by ex-actor Thomas Tryon, Wilder and longtime co-scripter I.A.L Diamond moved back from their frantic comedy style (Some Like it Hot, One, Two, Three) to his Noir roots (Sunset Boulevard), and to an evocation of a kind of Hollywood glamour that even in the 1970s seemed like the distant past.
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BURDEN OF DREAMS, Les Blank
BAM
“I live my life, or I end my life with this project.” So proclaims visionary filmmaker Werner Herzog as he contends with cast changes, warring Indian tribes, inclement weather, half-crazy leading man Klaus Kinski, and his own hubris as he attempts to film his magnum opus,Fitzcarraldo, in the South American jungle. Burden of Dreams—called “one of the most remarkable documentaries ever made about the making of a movie” by Roger Ebert—is a firsthand testament to the very fine line between genius and madness.
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HAIRSPRAY, John Waters
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
After spending six films and 20 years overturning the principles and conventions of his middle-class Catholic upbringing, Waters made this affectionate, PG-rated tribute to growing up in early-1960s Baltimore—and promptly became a crossover sensation. A bundle of narratives centered around Tracy (Ricki Lake), a heavyset teenager who dances a mean Limbo Rock, and her fight to integrate a local TV dance show—inspired by the real-lifeThe Buddy Deane Show, which ended its run in 1964 after a series of NAACP protests—Hairspray proudly carried over the sharp-edged, often self-incriminating irony of Waters’s earlier films. The movie’s tone, on the other hand, was warmer, gentler, and more reflective than those movies ever would have allowed. What seemed like a new beginning for Waters turned out to be a farewell for Divine, whose dual role as both Tracy’s mom and the TV station’s bigoted owner was his final screen performance.
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THE WOMEN, George Cukor
IFC Center
“‘This story isn’t new – it comes to most wives,’ counsels Lucile Watson’s sage matriarch upon the news that her daughter Mary Haines (Norma Shearer) has lost her husband’s affections – to a perfume salesgirl in the man-eating mould of Joan Crawford, no less. Ma’s advice is as seasoned as her unblinking reaction: Mary should hold her tongue, not only if she wants her man back (and rest assured he hasn’t tired of her, only himself), but because her girlfriends will never hold theirs. ‘I’m an old woman, my dear – I know my sex.’
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POLYESTER, John Waters
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
For his typically subversive take on the Hollywood melodrama, Waters shifted his focus from Baltimore’s urban crannies to its middle-class suburbs. Divine—in his penultimate performance for Waters—plays a sharp-nosed suburban housewife caught between the demands of her philandering porn-hawking husband, her go-go dancer daughter, and her glue-sniffing son, a foot-fetishist wanted for mangling the toes of a series of women. Her only solace is in the company of her old friend Cuddles (Edith Massey) and in her new covert romance with the dashing art-house movie theater owner Todd Tomorrow (Tab Hunter, a Hollywood star whose old-fashioned good looks make him hilariously—and pointedly—out of place among Waters’s Dreamlanders). Presented in Odorama™, a system Waters devised in which theatergoers were handed scratch-and-sniff cards to use during the film, Polyester is a key transitional film in Waters’s career, and a pivotal entry in the history of the sordid-suburbia black comedy. (Todd Solondz, eat your heart out!)
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NIGHT GAMES, Mai Zetterling
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
The Swedish art shocker that made board member Shirley Temple Black quit the San Francisco International Film Festival in protest over their refusal to pull it from the screening schedule.
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CECILE IS DEAD!, Maurice Tourneur
Anthology Film Archives
The second of three films that featured Albert Préjean as Maigret, CECILE IS DEAD is also one of the last films by the great Maurice Tourneur, who after emigrating to the US in 1914, rose to great prominence during the silent era, only to return to France in the 1930s after his Hollywood career faltered. The father of Jacques Tourneur, who would become one of the most gifted Hollywood filmmakers of the 1940s and 50s, Maurice was a gifted pictorialist whose films are too-rarely screened today. CECILE IS DEAD is a suspenseful and witty black comedy whose expressionism hearkens back to Tourneur’s silent classics.
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DESPERATE LIVING, John Waters
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
Mortville—the fictional setting of Waters’s mid-career masterpiece—is a dangerous place. Ruled by a despotic queen (Edith Massey) and her small army of leathered-up Nazi enforcers, overrun with ruin, dilapidation, and decay, and populated by a motley crew of outlaws and outcasts, it’s a vision of what the world might look like if Waters were God. When two runaways, a mentally unstable suburban housewife (Mink Stole) and her obese maid (Jean Hill), disrupt the town’s already unstable balance of power, chaos and revolution ensue. Amateur sex-change-operation reversals, attempts at biological warfare, cross-dressing highway patrolmen, butch-lesbian wrestlers, frozen babies, and nudist-colony digressions: Waters’s first feature made without Divine or David Lochary—the latter passed away the year of the film’s release—is a catalogue of horrors that veers between comedy and disgust, or, as Waters himself described it, “a fairy tale for fucked-up children.”
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***SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7***
THE CONFORMIST, Bernardo Bertolucci
Film Forum
In Mussolini’s Italy, repressed Jean-Louis Trintignant, trying to purge memories of a youthful, homosexual episode – and murder – joins the Fascists in a desperate attempt to fit in. As the reluctant Judas motors to his personal Gethsemane (the assassination of his leftist mentor), he flashes back to a dance party for the blind; an insane asylum in a stadium’ and wife Stefania Sandrelli and lover Dominique Sanda dancing the tango in a working class hall. But those are only a few of this political thriller’s anthology pieces, others including Trintignant’s honeymoon coupling with Sandrelli in a train compartment as the sun sets outside their window; a bimbo lolling on the desk of a fascist functionary, glimpsed in the recesses of his cavernous office; a murder victim’s hands leaving bloody streaks on a limousine parked in a wintry forest. Bernardo Bertolucci’s masterpiece, adapted from the Alberto Moravia novel, boasts an authentic Art Deco look created by production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, a score by the great Georges Delerue (Contempt, Jules and Jim, and That Man From Rio) and breathtaking color cinematography by Vittoria Storaro, who supervised this director approved restoration.
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THE BLUES ACCORDING TO LIGHTNIN’ HOPKINS + A WELL SPENT LIFE, Les Blank
BAM
The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins
Lightnin’ Hopkins was a renowned Texas bluesman. With remarkable intimacy, Blank captures his music and musings (“The blues is just a funny feelin’, yet people call it a mighty bad disease”) in this celebration of a legend that doubles as a portrait of the people and culture of Houston, TX—captured vividly at a BBQ and an all-black rodeo.
A Well Spent Life
Texas sharecropper turned blues guitar great Mance Lipscomb recounts his remarkable life story in one of Blank’s most moving documentaries (and Kurt Vonnegut’s favorite movie). Filmed when the legend was well into his 70s (he didn’t release his first album until age 65), A Well Spent Life captures a remarkably sweet soul who was one of the most revered songsters of all time.
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THERSE, Alain Cavailer
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
The insane life of nutcase Saint Theresa, told in a haunting, minimalist way. Yes, she was in love with Jesus—but does that make her a bad person? Catholic lunacy at its most disturbing.
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KILLER JOE, William Friedkin
The Film Society of Lincoln Center
The best Russ Meyer film of the decade—only it’s directed by an 80-year-old William Friedkin, proving the adage “old chickens make good soup.” Gina Gershon, your performance here shocked me raw!
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