Metrograph No. 1

No.1

S

16

G

PR I N

“ JEAN EUSTACHE IN A ROCKY T-SHIRT. This is the image we had in mind while producing this first calendar. The post– New Wave hero acknowledging one of cinema’s longest-running pop-culture phenomenons (recently brought back to glorious life in the hands of a young auteur). Great cinema is there waiting for you to find it, revive it, reconsider it. The dismissed film now recognized as a classic, the forgotten box office hit newly resurrected, the high and the low, the refined and the rough. We want to revive the joy of going to the movies, in a newly designed venue that will be welcoming to all filmgoers for a breezy afternoon matinee, a Saturday night out at the movies, a day-long epic binge, or a late-night marathon—all are waiting for you through the doors of Metrograph. Films you already love, and films you soon will. Films we want to show you, that we feel we need to show you. Expect Jean Eustache. In a Rocky t-shirt.”

Jacob Perlin Artistic & Programming Director

Calendar program by Jacob Perlin & Aliza Ma

Program edited by Michael Koresky

Design by Studio of annakarlin.com

Founded by Alexander Olch

CONTENTS

I Remember the Fabled Rat Man by Luc Sante Surrender to the Screen Entering the Screen by Molly Haskell Noah Baumbach’s Dream Double Feature Jean Eustache The Student Nurses Chasing the Film Spirit by Tsai Ming-liang Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z A Space Program Carol on 35mm Ultimate IB: Three Technicolor Classics Old & Improved Three Wiseman Office in 3D Afternoon Sidewalk Stories The Criterion Collection Live!

6th Old-School Kung Fu Fest Los Sures Hockney Theory of Obscurity: A Film About the Residents The Measure of a Man & Four Films Starring Vincent Lindon Fassbinder’s Top 10 Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands

2 4 12 16 18 22 24 26 38 39 40 42 46 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 58 62

“ JEAN EUSTACHE IN A ROCKY T-SHIRT. This is the image we had in mind while producing this first calendar. The post– New Wave hero acknowledging one of cinema’s longest-running pop-culture phenomenons (recently brought back to glorious life in the hands of a young auteur). Great cinema is there waiting for you to find it, revive it, reconsider it. The dismissed film now recognized as a classic, the forgotten box office hit newly resurrected, the high and the low, the refined and the rough. We want to revive the joy of going to the movies, in a newly designed venue that will be welcoming to all filmgoers for a breezy afternoon matinee, a Saturday night out at the movies, a day-long epic binge, or a late-night marathon—all are waiting for you through the doors of Metrograph. Films you already love, and films you soon will. Films we want to show you, that we feel we need to show you. Expect Jean Eustache. In a Rocky t-shirt.”

Jacob Perlin Artistic & Programming Director

Calendar program by Jacob Perlin & Aliza Ma

Program edited by Michael Koresky

Design by Studio of annakarlin.com

Founded by Alexander Olch

CONTENTS

I Remember the Fabled Rat Man by Luc Sante Surrender to the Screen Entering the Screen by Molly Haskell Noah Baumbach’s Dream Double Feature Jean Eustache The Student Nurses Chasing the Film Spirit by Tsai Ming-liang Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z A Space Program Carol on 35mm Ultimate IB: Three Technicolor Classics Old & Improved Three Wiseman Office in 3D Afternoon Sidewalk Stories The Criterion Collection Live!

6th Old-School Kung Fu Fest Los Sures Hockney Theory of Obscurity: A Film About the Residents The Measure of a Man & Four Films Starring Vincent Lindon Fassbinder’s Top 10 Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands

2 4 12 16 18 22 24 26 38 39 40 42 46 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 58 62

Essay

4

I REMEMBER THE FABLED RAT MAN APOLOGIES TO JOE BRAINARD

By LUC SANTE

I remember seeing Dovzhenko’s Earth at the old Anthology Film Archives in the Public Theater, with high wooden partitions between the seats and absolute silence reigning—apart from coughs, belches, and someone eating (I think) pistachios.

I remember seeing Hatari! every day during a crossing of the Atlantic aboard the S.S. France when I was eight.

I remember going to a rare screening of Abel Gance’s J’accuse at Columbia University when I had taken some kind of downers and slept through almost the entire picture, and my anger at myself when I woke up during the final scene with the spirits of the dead soldiers.

I remember how, when I was a student at Columbia, they’d screen Andy Warhol’s Blow Job every year, and every year dozens of angry frat boys would noisily exit partway through.

I remember my last acid trip, sometime in the ’80s, when I went to a short-lived East Side art house (the D. W. Griffith, I think) and saw Point Blank for maybe the third time, and it was the perfect movie for the circumstances.

I remember seeing Putney Swope at the Pagode in Paris and feeling very superior because the Parisians didn’t get most of the jokes.

I remember seeing that Ray Charles biopic at an outdoor stone arena in Croatia that might have been built by the Romans.

I remember seeing The Man Who Fell to Earth on opening day, and my seat was the farthest left in the front row, so that the whole picture was subject to anamorphic distortion.

I remember cutting high school and lining up to see Catch-22 on opening day, and what a letdown it was.

I remember standing in a long queue for a Marx Brothers festival at one of the theaters on Place de l’Odéon in Paris, and seeing the fabled Rat Man for the first time. He would lock eyes with a victim, then slide a large, realistic rubber rat from his sleeve while making a vomiting noise.

Luc Sante

5

I remember seeing Last Tango in Paris at a drive-in theater in New Jersey; when the picture began and turned out to be subtitled, at least half the cars pulled out.

I remember seeing Samson pull down the columns of the temple on a drive-in screen across the parking lot from the Channel Lumber store where my parents were shopping.

I remember when you could come into theaters in the middle of the picture and then stay on to see the beginning.

I remember that when I saw Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron at the old Olympia on the Upper West Side, I heard a teenager in the men’s room use the term “chill out,” which I had never encountered before.

I remember a double bill of Eyeball and Suspiria on 42nd Street—the first was a huge hit with the audience, who talked back to the screen throughout, but the second resulted in a mass exit.

I remember numerous times at many theaters when half the crowd would be yelling “Focus!” at the projection booth for long minutes before something was done.

I remember when I discovered that the Thalia, which booked a daily double bill of classics, also ran an unannounced third feature around noon, and the deleterious effect this had on my classroom attendance.

I remember coming out of a screening of Imamura’s Black Rain and walking many blocks to the subway bawling my eyes out.

I remember once sneaking into the Strand Theater in Summit, New Jersey, through the back door, propped open by some other kids.

I remember getting in trouble with my mother because of two pictures I’d seen at the Strand that she thought were indecent: Fun in Acapulco and The Disorderly Orderly.

I remember seeing William Klein’s movie about Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers at a prestige house on the East Side, maybe Kips Bay; those were some different times.

I remember seeing Empire of the Ants at the New Edison on 103rd Street, and the audience cheering on the ants.

I remember always intending to go to the Chinese theater under the Manhattan Bridge, but I tarried too long.

Luc Sante’s books include Low Life, Kill All Your Darlings, and The Other Paris, and he has written essays on many films, including Burroughs: the Movie, The Docks of New York, Metropolitan, and Vivre sa vie.

Essay

4

I REMEMBER THE FABLED RAT MAN APOLOGIES TO JOE BRAINARD

By LUC SANTE

I remember seeing Dovzhenko’s Earth at the old Anthology Film Archives in the Public Theater, with high wooden partitions between the seats and absolute silence reigning—apart from coughs, belches, and someone eating (I think) pistachios.

I remember seeing Hatari! every day during a crossing of the Atlantic aboard the S.S. France when I was eight.

I remember going to a rare screening of Abel Gance’s J’accuse at Columbia University when I had taken some kind of downers and slept through almost the entire picture, and my anger at myself when I woke up during the final scene with the spirits of the dead soldiers.

I remember how, when I was a student at Columbia, they’d screen Andy Warhol’s Blow Job every year, and every year dozens of angry frat boys would noisily exit partway through.

I remember my last acid trip, sometime in the ’80s, when I went to a short-lived East Side art house (the D. W. Griffith, I think) and saw Point Blank for maybe the third time, and it was the perfect movie for the circumstances.

I remember seeing Putney Swope at the Pagode in Paris and feeling very superior because the Parisians didn’t get most of the jokes.

I remember seeing that Ray Charles biopic at an outdoor stone arena in Croatia that might have been built by the Romans.

I remember seeing The Man Who Fell to Earth on opening day, and my seat was the farthest left in the front row, so that the whole picture was subject to anamorphic distortion.

I remember cutting high school and lining up to see Catch-22 on opening day, and what a letdown it was.

I remember standing in a long queue for a Marx Brothers festival at one of the theaters on Place de l’Odéon in Paris, and seeing the fabled Rat Man for the first time. He would lock eyes with a victim, then slide a large, realistic rubber rat from his sleeve while making a vomiting noise.

Luc Sante

5

I remember seeing Last Tango in Paris at a drive-in theater in New Jersey; when the picture began and turned out to be subtitled, at least half the cars pulled out.

I remember seeing Samson pull down the columns of the temple on a drive-in screen across the parking lot from the Channel Lumber store where my parents were shopping.

I remember when you could come into theaters in the middle of the picture and then stay on to see the beginning.

I remember that when I saw Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron at the old Olympia on the Upper West Side, I heard a teenager in the men’s room use the term “chill out,” which I had never encountered before.

I remember a double bill of Eyeball and Suspiria on 42nd Street—the first was a huge hit with the audience, who talked back to the screen throughout, but the second resulted in a mass exit.

I remember numerous times at many theaters when half the crowd would be yelling “Focus!” at the projection booth for long minutes before something was done.

I remember when I discovered that the Thalia, which booked a daily double bill of classics, also ran an unannounced third feature around noon, and the deleterious effect this had on my classroom attendance.

I remember coming out of a screening of Imamura’s Black Rain and walking many blocks to the subway bawling my eyes out.

I remember once sneaking into the Strand Theater in Summit, New Jersey, through the back door, propped open by some other kids.

I remember getting in trouble with my mother because of two pictures I’d seen at the Strand that she thought were indecent: Fun in Acapulco and The Disorderly Orderly.

I remember seeing William Klein’s movie about Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers at a prestige house on the East Side, maybe Kips Bay; those were some different times.

I remember seeing Empire of the Ants at the New Edison on 103rd Street, and the audience cheering on the ants.

I remember always intending to go to the Chinese theater under the Manhattan Bridge, but I tarried too long.

Luc Sante’s books include Low Life, Kill All Your Darlings, and The Other Paris, and he has written essays on many films, including Burroughs: the Movie, The Docks of New York, Metropolitan, and Vivre sa vie.

6

Series

7

SURRENDER TO THE SCREEN MARCH 4 to 8

“Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything.

Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life . . . it was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to walk, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve . . . the experience of surrender to, of being transported by, what was on the screen. You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie—and to be kidnapped was to be overwhelmed by the physical presence of the image. The experience of ‘going to the movies’ was part of it. To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theater, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers.”

Susan Sontag

6

Series

7

SURRENDER TO THE SCREEN MARCH 4 to 8

“Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything.

Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life . . . it was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to walk, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve . . . the experience of surrender to, of being transported by, what was on the screen. You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie—and to be kidnapped was to be overwhelmed by the physical presence of the image. The experience of ‘going to the movies’ was part of it. To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theater, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers.”

Susan Sontag

8

Series

One of the essential joys of going to the movies is ritual: the lights dimming, the first beam of light on the screen, the familiar fanfare or logo (the arrow and target to announce “A Production of the Archers”), sitting in the dark with a roomful of strangers, waiting to be transported. Susan Sontag wrote of “the experience of surrender to, of being transported by, what was on the screen.” As we open Metrograph, we invite you to experience—or re-experience—films that bestow this singular magic, films that kidnap us into the theater and transport us to the world of filmgoing. In these movies, people watch and we watch them.

THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO

Woody Allen / 1985 / 35mm / 82 mins Set in New Jersey during the Great Depression, Woody Allen’s magical and poignant masterpiece stars Mia Farrow in one of her greatest roles, as a neglected housewife who escapes her drab life by going to the movies. When a handsome movie star (Jeff Daniels) literally steps off of the screen and into her life, it would seem she has found a way to leave her grim reality behind forever. Made during Allen’s most extraordinary decade of production (between Broadway Danny Rose and Hannah and Her Sisters), this is perhaps the greatest movie about the escapist power of movies—and the limitations of that magic. The show must go on, yet the lights must also come up.

March 4

1:30 pm / 3:30 pm / 5:30 pm / 7:30 pm / 10:00 pm

TAXI DRIVER

Martin Scorsese / 1976 35mm / 113 min New York City, 1976. All you need to know: Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Bernard Herrmann, Michael Chapman, Juliet Taylor. The cast: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Albert Brooks, Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepherd, Peter Boyle, and Steven Prince (Scorsese’s American Boy). Marquees advertising The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, steam rising from the street. De Niro’s Travis Bickle takes poor Cybill on a first date to see the naughty Sometime Sweet Susan at the Lyric on the Deuce. It’s all downhill from there.

March 4

2:00 pm / 4:30 pm / 7:00 pm / 9:30 pm

Preceded by BROADWAY BY LIGHT William Klein / 1958 / 35mm / 12 mins After releasing his brilliant collection of photographs Life Is Good and Good for You in New York, the groundbreaking photographer William Klein embarked on his first experiment in cinema: a gorgeous, abstract collage of the neon signs, ads, and marquees of Manhattan’s Times Square that is considered the “first pop film.”

9

Surrender to the Screen

FEMME FATALE

Brian De Palma / 2002 35mm / 114 mins Brian De Palma uses everything in his bag of cinematic tricks for this sumptuously shot, mind-bogglingly entertaining meta-movie masterwork.

Beginning with an elaborate jewel heist set at the Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Palais on opening night, Femme Fatale—starring Rebecca Romijn as a bad girl hurtling toward redemption and Antonio Banderas as the photographer who gets roped into her schemes—is constructed of one amazing set piece after another. It’s a movie high off the pleasures of movies.

March 5

4:30 pm

March 6

10:00 pm

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Peter Bogdanovich / 1971 / 35mm / 126 mins At just 31 years old, Bogdanovich immediately ascended to the heights of auteurism with this black-and-white evocation of the dying Old West, set in a dusty Texas town in the early fifties. Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, and Cybill Shepherd became instant sensations as a trio of teens unsure of their futures, but it’s Cloris Leachman as a lonely high-school football coach’s wife and Ben Johnson as the grizzled proprietor of the crumbling local movie house who linger longest in the memory.

March 5

2:00 pm

March 7

1:00 pm

THE LONG DAY CLOSES Terence Davies / 1992 35mm / 85 mins

There has been perhaps no greater screen tribute to the act of looking than this exquisite and sensual work of art from Terence Davies, England’s greatest living director. An achingly personal movie set in the director’s hometown of Liverpool in the 1950s, The Long Day Closes enters the mind of young Bud, a child on the verge of sexual awakening, who retreats into the world of movies to escape isolation and loneliness. Davies creates an extraordinary tapestry of images and sounds, which together form one of the purest works of cinematic poetry.

March 5

12:00 pm

March 6

5:30 pm

8

Series

One of the essential joys of going to the movies is ritual: the lights dimming, the first beam of light on the screen, the familiar fanfare or logo (the arrow and target to announce “A Production of the Archers”), sitting in the dark with a roomful of strangers, waiting to be transported. Susan Sontag wrote of “the experience of surrender to, of being transported by, what was on the screen.” As we open Metrograph, we invite you to experience—or re-experience—films that bestow this singular magic, films that kidnap us into the theater and transport us to the world of filmgoing. In these movies, people watch and we watch them.

THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO

Woody Allen / 1985 / 35mm / 82 mins Set in New Jersey during the Great Depression, Woody Allen’s magical and poignant masterpiece stars Mia Farrow in one of her greatest roles, as a neglected housewife who escapes her drab life by going to the movies. When a handsome movie star (Jeff Daniels) literally steps off of the screen and into her life, it would seem she has found a way to leave her grim reality behind forever. Made during Allen’s most extraordinary decade of production (between Broadway Danny Rose and Hannah and Her Sisters), this is perhaps the greatest movie about the escapist power of movies—and the limitations of that magic. The show must go on, yet the lights must also come up.

March 4

1:30 pm / 3:30 pm / 5:30 pm / 7:30 pm / 10:00 pm

TAXI DRIVER

Martin Scorsese / 1976 35mm / 113 min New York City, 1976. All you need to know: Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Bernard Herrmann, Michael Chapman, Juliet Taylor. The cast: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Albert Brooks, Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepherd, Peter Boyle, and Steven Prince (Scorsese’s American Boy). Marquees advertising The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, steam rising from the street. De Niro’s Travis Bickle takes poor Cybill on a first date to see the naughty Sometime Sweet Susan at the Lyric on the Deuce. It’s all downhill from there.

March 4

2:00 pm / 4:30 pm / 7:00 pm / 9:30 pm

Preceded by BROADWAY BY LIGHT William Klein / 1958 / 35mm / 12 mins After releasing his brilliant collection of photographs Life Is Good and Good for You in New York, the groundbreaking photographer William Klein embarked on his first experiment in cinema: a gorgeous, abstract collage of the neon signs, ads, and marquees of Manhattan’s Times Square that is considered the “first pop film.”

9

Surrender to the Screen

FEMME FATALE

Brian De Palma / 2002 35mm / 114 mins Brian De Palma uses everything in his bag of cinematic tricks for this sumptuously shot, mind-bogglingly entertaining meta-movie masterwork.

Beginning with an elaborate jewel heist set at the Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Palais on opening night, Femme Fatale—starring Rebecca Romijn as a bad girl hurtling toward redemption and Antonio Banderas as the photographer who gets roped into her schemes—is constructed of one amazing set piece after another. It’s a movie high off the pleasures of movies.

March 5

4:30 pm

March 6

10:00 pm

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Peter Bogdanovich / 1971 / 35mm / 126 mins At just 31 years old, Bogdanovich immediately ascended to the heights of auteurism with this black-and-white evocation of the dying Old West, set in a dusty Texas town in the early fifties. Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, and Cybill Shepherd became instant sensations as a trio of teens unsure of their futures, but it’s Cloris Leachman as a lonely high-school football coach’s wife and Ben Johnson as the grizzled proprietor of the crumbling local movie house who linger longest in the memory.

March 5

2:00 pm

March 7

1:00 pm

THE LONG DAY CLOSES Terence Davies / 1992 35mm / 85 mins

There has been perhaps no greater screen tribute to the act of looking than this exquisite and sensual work of art from Terence Davies, England’s greatest living director. An achingly personal movie set in the director’s hometown of Liverpool in the 1950s, The Long Day Closes enters the mind of young Bud, a child on the verge of sexual awakening, who retreats into the world of movies to escape isolation and loneliness. Davies creates an extraordinary tapestry of images and sounds, which together form one of the purest works of cinematic poetry.

March 5

12:00 pm

March 6

5:30 pm

10

Series

MATINEE

Surrender to the Screen

11

THE BLOB

Joe Dante / 1993 35mm / 99 mins

Irwin S. Yeaworth Jr. / 1958 35mm / 86 mins

Joe Dante’s affectionate ode to B monster movies of the fifties and sixties stars a boisterous John Goodman as a wannabe theater impresario modeled on William Castle. In a theater in Key West, while the Cuban missile crisis is unfolding, he is trying every trick trick in the book (buzzers on the seats, dry ice in the aisles) to promote his new sci-fi shocker Mant (“Half Man, Half Ant, All Terror!”), but real world events keep intruding. The Gremlins director’s good-natured comedy features impeccable period detail and is infused with a genuine movie love.

One of the nastiest—and most ingeniously named— monsters in movie history was made from just a simple mix of silicone and red dye. This gooey Technicolor gross-out from the era of fifties B-horror (see Matinee) redefines the term pulp fiction: its creature has no eyes, ears, claws, or even teeth—it just carelessly consumes and absorbs everything in its path, including in one scene, the screaming patrons of a movie house. Steve McQueen, playing a teen at 28, is a local bad boy who tries to stop the slop.

March 5 March 6

1:00 pm / 11:30 pm 12:30 pm

March 6 March 7

7:30 pm 3:30 pm

GOODBYE, DRAGON INN THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE

Víctor Erice / 1973 / 35mm / 95 mins

Once you fall under the singular spell of Víctor Erice’s classic of Spanish cinema, the film never leaves you. In one of the most magnetic performances ever given by a juvenile actor, six-year-old Ana Torrent (also wonderful in Cría cuervos a few years later) plays a girl hypnotized and terrified by a screening of Frankenstein that shows in her small village as part of a traveling movie show. Erice brilliantly enters a girl’s mysterious inner world, creating a transfixing portrait of childhood informed by movies and imagination.

March 5 March 6

5:30 pm 2:45 pm

VIVRE SA VIE

Tsai Ming-liang / 2003 / 35mm / 82 mins It’s a dark and rainy night; the streets of Taipei are empty. But the neon lights of a classic movie-house showing King Hu’s wuxia classic Dragon Inn remain bright and beckoning. However, this is the theater’s final screening before it shutters its doors forever. In this nearly wordless wonder, the theater—its screening room, projection booth, hallways, bathrooms—becomes a sort of haunted house. The film is a tribute to traditional movie-going, and is itself a modern classic.

Presented with support from Taipei Cultural Center of TECO in New York.

March 6 March 8

3:30 pm 1:00 pm

THE LAST DRAGON

Jean-Luc Godard / 1962 / 35mm / 85 mins

Michael Schultz / 1985 / 35mm / 96 mins

“He doesn’t analyze. He shows.” —Susan Sontag. An untouchable masterpiece, shot with cool precision and artful solemnity. It features Anna Karina in her most iconic role, as Nana Kleinfrankenheim, and was advertised by JLG himself as “a film on prostitution about a pretty Paris shopgirl who sells her body but keeps her soul while going through a series of adventures that allow her to experience all possible deep human emotions.” The film includes one of the most memorable images of the New Wave: Karina’s teary movie theater commune with The Passion of Joan of Arc’s Maria Falconetti.

One of two classics (along with Krush Groove) directed by Michael Schultz and released in 1985, The Last Dragon is a mix of what was on the minds of kids at the time: kung-fu, breakdancing, romance and El Debarge. No one who has seen this Saturday-afternoon stalwart can forget Bruce Leroy, the Bruce Lee-idolizing Harlem teen, and his nemesis, Sho’nuff (the great Julius Carry)—and especially not Vanity (“Can it be Vanity from Last Dragon?”). Featuring a showdown shot on the Deuce at the Victory Theater.

March 5 March 6

3:15 pm / 7.45 pm 5:00 pm

March 6

1:00 pm

10

Series

MATINEE

Surrender to the Screen

11

THE BLOB

Joe Dante / 1993 35mm / 99 mins

Irwin S. Yeaworth Jr. / 1958 35mm / 86 mins

Joe Dante’s affectionate ode to B monster movies of the fifties and sixties stars a boisterous John Goodman as a wannabe theater impresario modeled on William Castle. In a theater in Key West, while the Cuban missile crisis is unfolding, he is trying every trick trick in the book (buzzers on the seats, dry ice in the aisles) to promote his new sci-fi shocker Mant (“Half Man, Half Ant, All Terror!”), but real world events keep intruding. The Gremlins director’s good-natured comedy features impeccable period detail and is infused with a genuine movie love.

One of the nastiest—and most ingeniously named— monsters in movie history was made from just a simple mix of silicone and red dye. This gooey Technicolor gross-out from the era of fifties B-horror (see Matinee) redefines the term pulp fiction: its creature has no eyes, ears, claws, or even teeth—it just carelessly consumes and absorbs everything in its path, including in one scene, the screaming patrons of a movie house. Steve McQueen, playing a teen at 28, is a local bad boy who tries to stop the slop.

March 5 March 6

1:00 pm / 11:30 pm 12:30 pm

March 6 March 7

7:30 pm 3:30 pm

GOODBYE, DRAGON INN THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE

Víctor Erice / 1973 / 35mm / 95 mins

Once you fall under the singular spell of Víctor Erice’s classic of Spanish cinema, the film never leaves you. In one of the most magnetic performances ever given by a juvenile actor, six-year-old Ana Torrent (also wonderful in Cría cuervos a few years later) plays a girl hypnotized and terrified by a screening of Frankenstein that shows in her small village as part of a traveling movie show. Erice brilliantly enters a girl’s mysterious inner world, creating a transfixing portrait of childhood informed by movies and imagination.

March 5 March 6

5:30 pm 2:45 pm

VIVRE SA VIE

Tsai Ming-liang / 2003 / 35mm / 82 mins It’s a dark and rainy night; the streets of Taipei are empty. But the neon lights of a classic movie-house showing King Hu’s wuxia classic Dragon Inn remain bright and beckoning. However, this is the theater’s final screening before it shutters its doors forever. In this nearly wordless wonder, the theater—its screening room, projection booth, hallways, bathrooms—becomes a sort of haunted house. The film is a tribute to traditional movie-going, and is itself a modern classic.

Presented with support from Taipei Cultural Center of TECO in New York.

March 6 March 8

3:30 pm 1:00 pm

THE LAST DRAGON

Jean-Luc Godard / 1962 / 35mm / 85 mins

Michael Schultz / 1985 / 35mm / 96 mins

“He doesn’t analyze. He shows.” —Susan Sontag. An untouchable masterpiece, shot with cool precision and artful solemnity. It features Anna Karina in her most iconic role, as Nana Kleinfrankenheim, and was advertised by JLG himself as “a film on prostitution about a pretty Paris shopgirl who sells her body but keeps her soul while going through a series of adventures that allow her to experience all possible deep human emotions.” The film includes one of the most memorable images of the New Wave: Karina’s teary movie theater commune with The Passion of Joan of Arc’s Maria Falconetti.

One of two classics (along with Krush Groove) directed by Michael Schultz and released in 1985, The Last Dragon is a mix of what was on the minds of kids at the time: kung-fu, breakdancing, romance and El Debarge. No one who has seen this Saturday-afternoon stalwart can forget Bruce Leroy, the Bruce Lee-idolizing Harlem teen, and his nemesis, Sho’nuff (the great Julius Carry)—and especially not Vanity (“Can it be Vanity from Last Dragon?”). Featuring a showdown shot on the Deuce at the Victory Theater.

March 5 March 6

3:15 pm / 7.45 pm 5:00 pm

March 6

1:00 pm

12

Series

VARIETY

Bette Gordon / 1983 35mm / 100 mins

A young woman lands a job as a cashier in an X-rated (or porno) cinema in Times Square, and soon she finds herself drawn to what’s happening on the screen.

Writes director Bette Gordon, “Hitchcock has used the cool blonde before, always as the object of the male gaze and fantasy. But in this case the traditional male role is reversed; Christine becomes obsessed with watching and following a male client. She is the sleuth in a thriller whose terrain is the language of desire.” One of the great independent films of the 1980s, featuring a who-who’s of the New York vanguard: Nan Goldin and Luis Guzmán, written by Kathy Acker, photography by Tom DiCillo with music

by John Lurie. � Q&A with director Bette Gordon and critic Amy Taubin.

March 6

7:00 pm

DEMONS

Lamberto Bava / 1985 / 35mm / 88 mins Horror maven Lamberto Bava treats the hallowed space of the theater with all the respect he thinks it deserves: as a site for gore-strewn mayhem. In this nasty classic of Italian eighties horror, a group of university students end up trying to stay alive in an old, renovated movie house under siege by a host of demonic, hungry creatures. Where his father Mario wanted to scare the audience, son Lamberto would like to eat them.

Copresented by March 7 March 8

10:15 pm 3:15 pm

THE PROJECTIONIST

Harry Hurwitz / 1971 / 35mm / 88 mins A projectionist obsessed with old movies escapes into the worlds of the films he unspools. Footage from film classics inserts our nerdy protagonist (Chuck McCann) into his dream world. This singular film features street scenes shot on location in Times Square, theater interiors filmed in Asbury Park, NJ, innovative superimposition, surreal logic, and most significantly, Rodney Dangerfield as the house manager who gives his usher staff a dressing down.

March 5 March 7

9:30 pm 5:30 pm

Surrender to the Screen

13

AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON

John Landis / 1981 / 35mm / 97 mins

Landis, at age 31, was coming off Animal House (the highest grossing comedy in the history of Hollywood at the time) and The Blues Brothers when he revised a script first he conceived at age eighteen. One of the last, and greatest, examples of classic Hollywood horror, An American Werewolf in London is infused with a lifetime of lessons Landis learned from his own cinephilia. Highlights include a killer soundtrack, including “Bad Moon Rising”, “Blue Moon”, and “Moondance”; a genuinely melancholy conclusion; and a rampaging attack through Piccadilly Circus, following a very vocal lupine transformation in an X-rated movie house showing, naturally, See You Next Wednesday.

Copresented by March 8

5:15 pm / 10:00 pm

DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN Susan Seidelman / 1985 35mm / 104 mins

Get Into the Groove! This quintessential eighties downtown New York comedy stars Rosanna Arquette as a bored suburban housewife tracking romance in the personals, and becoming obsessed with Madonna’s mystery woman, Susan.

Featuring amnesia and mistaken identity, Susan Seidelman’s film has the classic tropes of screwball romances, and features love interest Aidan Quinn in the kind of role we wish we saw more of: a sexy projectionist. Perfect love is putting your feet up and sharing popcorn. � Q&A with director Susan Seidelman and cinematographer Ed Lachman.

March 8

7:30 pm

12

Series

VARIETY

Bette Gordon / 1983 35mm / 100 mins

A young woman lands a job as a cashier in an X-rated (or porno) cinema in Times Square, and soon she finds herself drawn to what’s happening on the screen.

Writes director Bette Gordon, “Hitchcock has used the cool blonde before, always as the object of the male gaze and fantasy. But in this case the traditional male role is reversed; Christine becomes obsessed with watching and following a male client. She is the sleuth in a thriller whose terrain is the language of desire.” One of the great independent films of the 1980s, featuring a who-who’s of the New York vanguard: Nan Goldin and Luis Guzmán, written by Kathy Acker, photography by Tom DiCillo with music

by John Lurie. � Q&A with director Bette Gordon and critic Amy Taubin.

March 6

7:00 pm

DEMONS

Lamberto Bava / 1985 / 35mm / 88 mins Horror maven Lamberto Bava treats the hallowed space of the theater with all the respect he thinks it deserves: as a site for gore-strewn mayhem. In this nasty classic of Italian eighties horror, a group of university students end up trying to stay alive in an old, renovated movie house under siege by a host of demonic, hungry creatures. Where his father Mario wanted to scare the audience, son Lamberto would like to eat them.

Copresented by March 7 March 8

10:15 pm 3:15 pm

THE PROJECTIONIST

Harry Hurwitz / 1971 / 35mm / 88 mins A projectionist obsessed with old movies escapes into the worlds of the films he unspools. Footage from film classics inserts our nerdy protagonist (Chuck McCann) into his dream world. This singular film features street scenes shot on location in Times Square, theater interiors filmed in Asbury Park, NJ, innovative superimposition, surreal logic, and most significantly, Rodney Dangerfield as the house manager who gives his usher staff a dressing down.

March 5 March 7

9:30 pm 5:30 pm

Surrender to the Screen

13

AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON

John Landis / 1981 / 35mm / 97 mins

Landis, at age 31, was coming off Animal House (the highest grossing comedy in the history of Hollywood at the time) and The Blues Brothers when he revised a script first he conceived at age eighteen. One of the last, and greatest, examples of classic Hollywood horror, An American Werewolf in London is infused with a lifetime of lessons Landis learned from his own cinephilia. Highlights include a killer soundtrack, including “Bad Moon Rising”, “Blue Moon”, and “Moondance”; a genuinely melancholy conclusion; and a rampaging attack through Piccadilly Circus, following a very vocal lupine transformation in an X-rated movie house showing, naturally, See You Next Wednesday.

Copresented by March 8

5:15 pm / 10:00 pm

DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN Susan Seidelman / 1985 35mm / 104 mins

Get Into the Groove! This quintessential eighties downtown New York comedy stars Rosanna Arquette as a bored suburban housewife tracking romance in the personals, and becoming obsessed with Madonna’s mystery woman, Susan.

Featuring amnesia and mistaken identity, Susan Seidelman’s film has the classic tropes of screwball romances, and features love interest Aidan Quinn in the kind of role we wish we saw more of: a sexy projectionist. Perfect love is putting your feet up and sharing popcorn. � Q&A with director Susan Seidelman and cinematographer Ed Lachman.

March 8

7:30 pm

14

Essay

ENTERING THE SCREEN

By MOLLY HASKELL

Molly Haskell

15

14

Essay

ENTERING THE SCREEN

By MOLLY HASKELL

Molly Haskell

15

16

Essay

It is May 2015, Paris, a glorious sunny afternoon. Instead of wandering the streets, flaneur-style, I’m standing on line at a small revival theater in the Fifth Arrondissement, waiting to see Mizoguchi’s Princess Yang Kwei-Fei. Eventually the velvet cord is released, and about fifty of us descend the narrow stairs into the bowels of the tiny screening room. It is dark and quiet, but the screen is large and, despite a full house, there is not a cell phone in sight, not even a murmur of conversation, even though the movie has not yet begun.

Paris is still the temple of cinema, where I worshipped in 1962 and where my husband-to-be, Andrew Sarris, then unknown to me, also worshipped. We spent ten months in hotels a few blocks from each other, and would compare notes four years later when we met. That time in Paris was a kind of second birth—for both of us, I think—as people are said to have, into knowledge and awareness and even identity. Like many of my generation, I had been a “religious” moviegoer as a child and adolescent; had been shocked and thrilled by my first French movie, Diabolique. Such sophistication, such sexual ambiguity! Not like Doris Day (whom I also loved). Not like Richmond, where I lived.

But it was in Paris that year I was initiated into the church of cinephiles, even if I didn’t know it yet. It was watching Godard and Truffaut, John Ford and Ophuls, Lubitsch and Antonioni, Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Chabrol, Murnau and Keaton and Sam Fuller, and reading Cahiers du cinéma, that I entered the screen and the screen entered me. I was lucky to have this compound self compounded still further, and infinitely enriched, when I married the man—the aforementioned Andrew—who loved and understood movies even better than I did. It is as difficult to dissect in these two joined selves where movies left off and we began as to separate the elements of marriage itself. But that both love and movie-love are mysteriously and impenetrably life-altering no one would deny.

Which is surely why movies about movies are almost as old as movies themselves, as if we felt an urgency right from the start to get a handle on how this incredible medium was reshaping our minds and imaginations. Larger-than-life characters and the stars who play them—alchemized in cinema’s most elusive mystery— colonize our minds to an almost frightening degree. Such is the premise given delirious expression in the reciprocal reel-life real-life shenanigans of Woody Allen’s glorious 1985 comedy The Purple Rose of Cairo. As in its brilliant Pirandellian forerunner, Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr., a smitten moviegoer gets to break the fourth wall, leap into the screen, inject his or her humble self into the action of those tuxedo-wearing nobs.

Allen’s then-muse Mia Farrow plays Cecilia, a sweet, klutzy waitress in Depressionera New Jersey (a redundancy in this film), who drops plates by day and is abused at night by her lout of a husband (Danny Aiello). Cecilia manages to save enough money from her often-docked paychecks to regularly attend the local cinema and buy fan magazines in order to stay abreast of the latest Hollywood gossip. Hers is one of those “humdrum lives” into which Lina Lamont, the silent film diva of Singin’ in the Rain, would promise to “bring a little joy.”

Molly Haskell

17

But aren’t all our lives a little humdrum when compared to the toxic glamor of those stars—not excluding the “frumpy” protagonist we’re now watching? Movies are Cecilia’s solace and stimulation, the art nouveau sets and drawing room banter her immersion fantasy, the blandly handsome hero Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) her lover ideal. As she sits in the movie theater night after night, both transfixed and transfixing, her face takes on the luminosity of a religious devotee.

One night her love object returns the favor by descending from the screen and, to the fury and paralysis of the cast (and audience hisses) begins courting her in real life. In the urban squalor of New Jersey, the safari-suited hero becomes a fumbling naïf with limited practical skills, adrift without his scripted dialogue.

The predicament ripples with ironies: a lovely insider joke about actual stars who were reported to be similarly bereft in actual conversations; and the perpetually disillusioning awareness that our idols, these charismatic creatures who are our tutors in manners and mores and above all in the language of romance, are empty of soul and intangible as smoke.

Moreover, where there is movie magic, can money be far behind? The conceit takes on another head-spinning layer when Baxter’s alter ego arrives on the scene—Gil Shepherd, the actor who plays Tom, is in danger of career flameout if Tom doesn’t get back in the story where he belongs. Gil, the “real” actor would seem to be a more appropriate suitor but is soon revealed as a cynical puppet in still another play, one in which studio heads and publicists are pulling the strings.

Somehow this strange mixed heritage of business and art, crassness and poetry, is the necessary equilibrium, the DNA of the medium we adore. In his most magical film, Allen keeps all the balls in the air, the ineffable and the mundane, the meta, the metaphysical and the radiantly real. Or should I say “real”?

Molly Haskell is an author and film critic living in New York. She has taught film at Columbia University, and her books include From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (1974), Frankly My Dear: “Gone with the Wind” Revisited (2009), and My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation (2013).

The Purple Rose of Cairo plays at Metrograph on March 4 (see page 6).

16

Essay

It is May 2015, Paris, a glorious sunny afternoon. Instead of wandering the streets, flaneur-style, I’m standing on line at a small revival theater in the Fifth Arrondissement, waiting to see Mizoguchi’s Princess Yang Kwei-Fei. Eventually the velvet cord is released, and about fifty of us descend the narrow stairs into the bowels of the tiny screening room. It is dark and quiet, but the screen is large and, despite a full house, there is not a cell phone in sight, not even a murmur of conversation, even though the movie has not yet begun.

Paris is still the temple of cinema, where I worshipped in 1962 and where my husband-to-be, Andrew Sarris, then unknown to me, also worshipped. We spent ten months in hotels a few blocks from each other, and would compare notes four years later when we met. That time in Paris was a kind of second birth—for both of us, I think—as people are said to have, into knowledge and awareness and even identity. Like many of my generation, I had been a “religious” moviegoer as a child and adolescent; had been shocked and thrilled by my first French movie, Diabolique. Such sophistication, such sexual ambiguity! Not like Doris Day (whom I also loved). Not like Richmond, where I lived.

But it was in Paris that year I was initiated into the church of cinephiles, even if I didn’t know it yet. It was watching Godard and Truffaut, John Ford and Ophuls, Lubitsch and Antonioni, Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Chabrol, Murnau and Keaton and Sam Fuller, and reading Cahiers du cinéma, that I entered the screen and the screen entered me. I was lucky to have this compound self compounded still further, and infinitely enriched, when I married the man—the aforementioned Andrew—who loved and understood movies even better than I did. It is as difficult to dissect in these two joined selves where movies left off and we began as to separate the elements of marriage itself. But that both love and movie-love are mysteriously and impenetrably life-altering no one would deny.

Which is surely why movies about movies are almost as old as movies themselves, as if we felt an urgency right from the start to get a handle on how this incredible medium was reshaping our minds and imaginations. Larger-than-life characters and the stars who play them—alchemized in cinema’s most elusive mystery— colonize our minds to an almost frightening degree. Such is the premise given delirious expression in the reciprocal reel-life real-life shenanigans of Woody Allen’s glorious 1985 comedy The Purple Rose of Cairo. As in its brilliant Pirandellian forerunner, Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr., a smitten moviegoer gets to break the fourth wall, leap into the screen, inject his or her humble self into the action of those tuxedo-wearing nobs.

Allen’s then-muse Mia Farrow plays Cecilia, a sweet, klutzy waitress in Depressionera New Jersey (a redundancy in this film), who drops plates by day and is abused at night by her lout of a husband (Danny Aiello). Cecilia manages to save enough money from her often-docked paychecks to regularly attend the local cinema and buy fan magazines in order to stay abreast of the latest Hollywood gossip. Hers is one of those “humdrum lives” into which Lina Lamont, the silent film diva of Singin’ in the Rain, would promise to “bring a little joy.”

Molly Haskell

17

But aren’t all our lives a little humdrum when compared to the toxic glamor of those stars—not excluding the “frumpy” protagonist we’re now watching? Movies are Cecilia’s solace and stimulation, the art nouveau sets and drawing room banter her immersion fantasy, the blandly handsome hero Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) her lover ideal. As she sits in the movie theater night after night, both transfixed and transfixing, her face takes on the luminosity of a religious devotee.

One night her love object returns the favor by descending from the screen and, to the fury and paralysis of the cast (and audience hisses) begins courting her in real life. In the urban squalor of New Jersey, the safari-suited hero becomes a fumbling naïf with limited practical skills, adrift without his scripted dialogue.

The predicament ripples with ironies: a lovely insider joke about actual stars who were reported to be similarly bereft in actual conversations; and the perpetually disillusioning awareness that our idols, these charismatic creatures who are our tutors in manners and mores and above all in the language of romance, are empty of soul and intangible as smoke.

Moreover, where there is movie magic, can money be far behind? The conceit takes on another head-spinning layer when Baxter’s alter ego arrives on the scene—Gil Shepherd, the actor who plays Tom, is in danger of career flameout if Tom doesn’t get back in the story where he belongs. Gil, the “real” actor would seem to be a more appropriate suitor but is soon revealed as a cynical puppet in still another play, one in which studio heads and publicists are pulling the strings.

Somehow this strange mixed heritage of business and art, crassness and poetry, is the necessary equilibrium, the DNA of the medium we adore. In his most magical film, Allen keeps all the balls in the air, the ineffable and the mundane, the meta, the metaphysical and the radiantly real. Or should I say “real”?

Molly Haskell is an author and film critic living in New York. She has taught film at Columbia University, and her books include From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (1974), Frankly My Dear: “Gone with the Wind” Revisited (2009), and My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation (2013).

The Purple Rose of Cairo plays at Metrograph on March 4 (see page 6).

Event

18

19

“When Jake asked me if there was a double feature I’d like to present at his new theater, I said, ‘That’s easy, Eyes Wide Shut and Babe: Pig in the City. When Jake asked me if I would write something about them, I thought, I can’t believe you’re going to make me defend this decision. But here’s a try. Both movies take place in strange alternate cities. Part storybook, part nightmare. I’ve never been to these places, but I know what they are. One has a disturbing and harrowing chase scene that concludes with a pig rescuing a deranged, drowning dog hanging upside down by a chain. The other has a disturbing and harrowing pot-induced marital argument in a bedroom. All I know is, I get a similar hit off these two movies.

They’re so otherworldly that I sometimes doubt my memory of them. They feel like dreams I had as a kid, or movies I once pretended to have seen.”

Noah Baumbach � Introduced by Noah Baumbach

BABE: PIG IN THE CITY

NOAH BAUMBACH’S DREAM DOUBLE FEATURE MARCH 5

George Miller / 1998 / 35mm / 97 mins The 1995 hit Babe was a charmer: a barnyard fable about an adorable porker learning about loss, friendship, and tolerance. Three years later, that film’s producer and cowriter, George Miller, stepped up to the director’s chair for the sequel, Babe: Pig in the City, and the result feels less like the first film than it does Miller’s twisted Mad Max series. In Miller’s wildly imaginative, more than a little scary sequel, our piggy hero and the farmer’s wife, en route to a state fair, accidentally end up lost in the big city, a dystopic metropolis of eye-popping set design.

7:00 pm

EYES WIDE SHUT

Stanley Kubrick / 1999 / 35mm / 159 mins The ultimate final film (“under the rainbow”) is a journey of the mind in which a wealthy Upper East Side doctor is sent into a spiral of jealousy and erotic curiosity after his wife admits to a years-old, unconsummated attraction. This singular masterpiece is marked by cool blues and unholy reds, sinuous Steadicam shots, delicate dissolves, and a dreamlike, Christmas-time New York reconstructed on a soundstage at London’s Pinewood Studios.

9:15 pm

Event

18

19

“When Jake asked me if there was a double feature I’d like to present at his new theater, I said, ‘That’s easy, Eyes Wide Shut and Babe: Pig in the City. When Jake asked me if I would write something about them, I thought, I can’t believe you’re going to make me defend this decision. But here’s a try. Both movies take place in strange alternate cities. Part storybook, part nightmare. I’ve never been to these places, but I know what they are. One has a disturbing and harrowing chase scene that concludes with a pig rescuing a deranged, drowning dog hanging upside down by a chain. The other has a disturbing and harrowing pot-induced marital argument in a bedroom. All I know is, I get a similar hit off these two movies.

They’re so otherworldly that I sometimes doubt my memory of them. They feel like dreams I had as a kid, or movies I once pretended to have seen.”

Noah Baumbach � Introduced by Noah Baumbach

BABE: PIG IN THE CITY

NOAH BAUMBACH’S DREAM DOUBLE FEATURE MARCH 5

George Miller / 1998 / 35mm / 97 mins The 1995 hit Babe was a charmer: a barnyard fable about an adorable porker learning about loss, friendship, and tolerance. Three years later, that film’s producer and cowriter, George Miller, stepped up to the director’s chair for the sequel, Babe: Pig in the City, and the result feels less like the first film than it does Miller’s twisted Mad Max series. In Miller’s wildly imaginative, more than a little scary sequel, our piggy hero and the farmer’s wife, en route to a state fair, accidentally end up lost in the big city, a dystopic metropolis of eye-popping set design.

7:00 pm

EYES WIDE SHUT

Stanley Kubrick / 1999 / 35mm / 159 mins The ultimate final film (“under the rainbow”) is a journey of the mind in which a wealthy Upper East Side doctor is sent into a spiral of jealousy and erotic curiosity after his wife admits to a years-old, unconsummated attraction. This singular masterpiece is marked by cool blues and unholy reds, sinuous Steadicam shots, delicate dissolves, and a dreamlike, Christmas-time New York reconstructed on a soundstage at London’s Pinewood Studios.

9:15 pm

Series

20

21

THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE 1973 / 35mm / 210 mins

Jean Eustache’s biggest claim to fame—or, in some circles, notoriety—is this endlessly captivating, dialogue-driven, lightly autobiographical masterpiece. JeanPierre Léaud perfectly embodies Alexandre, a hangdog romantic who eventually becomes involved in a three-way affair with two women, played by Bernadette Lafont and Françoise Lebrun. A blistering yet humane portrait of post–May ’68 waywardness and sexual discontent, The Mother and the Whore is a caustically funny and intellectually rich film that generates partisans whenever it screens.

Filmmaker Philippe Garrel wrote, “Jean Eustache is a genius. The Mother and the Whore is the Rules of the Game of our generation.” � Actor Françoise Lebrun will appear in person at the March 9, 7:30 p.m., screening.

March March March March

9 10 11 13

1:30 pm / 7:30 pm 1:00 pm 6:45 pm 11:30 am

BAD COMPANY

JEAN EUSTACHE

MARCH 9 to 17

The giants of film history that defined the cinema-changing Nouvelle Vague were undeniable: Godard, Truffaut, Varda, Demy, Chabrol. But the generation of filmmakers who followed them—children of May ’68—produced movies as provocative and thrilling as anything seen in any film epoch: Chantal Akerman, Benoît Jacquot, Jacques Doillon, Philippe Garrel, and in an orbit all his own, Jean Eustache. The brilliant Eustache, an electrician and construction worker turned director, made intellectually searching, unpredictable films that uncovered sharp and raw truths about human nature, and which were as attuned to the landscape and people of the Southern provinces where he grew up as the contemporary youth movements of Paris that were capturing the imagination of his peers. His most towering work, The Mother and the Whore (1973), is a rightfully beloved epic of generational angst, but his entire oeuvre—narratives, experimental documentaries, essay films, and interviews—collected here for the first time in New York in over a decade, evinces a mastery of the form, an idiosyncratic, naturalistic humor, and an inquisitive artistic nature. Presented with support from Unifrance, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, and Institut Français.

Special thanks to Amélie Garin Davet, Mathieu Fournet, and Françoise Lebrun.

1963 / 35mm / 40 mins

SANTA CLAUS HAS BLUE EYES

1967 / 35mm / 47 mins

Bad Company (also known as Robinson’s Place) hangs out with a couple of suburban pinball-lovers looking to pick up girls. Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (which Eustache made with film stock given to him

by Godard left over from Masculin fémimin) follows a habitually unemployed layabout, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, trying to woo women and keep himself warm as winter approaches—ultimately finding work as a street-corner St. Nick.

In his first two films, Eustache established his remarkable talent for precise anecdotal narratives about shiftless, hormonally driven young men. � Introduced by Molly Haskell on March 13th.

March 13 March 14

3:15 pm 9:30 pm

Series

20

21

THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE 1973 / 35mm / 210 mins

Jean Eustache’s biggest claim to fame—or, in some circles, notoriety—is this endlessly captivating, dialogue-driven, lightly autobiographical masterpiece. JeanPierre Léaud perfectly embodies Alexandre, a hangdog romantic who eventually becomes involved in a three-way affair with two women, played by Bernadette Lafont and Françoise Lebrun. A blistering yet humane portrait of post–May ’68 waywardness and sexual discontent, The Mother and the Whore is a caustically funny and intellectually rich film that generates partisans whenever it screens.

Filmmaker Philippe Garrel wrote, “Jean Eustache is a genius. The Mother and the Whore is the Rules of the Game of our generation.” � Actor Françoise Lebrun will appear in person at the March 9, 7:30 p.m., screening.

March March March March

9 10 11 13

1:30 pm / 7:30 pm 1:00 pm 6:45 pm 11:30 am

BAD COMPANY

JEAN EUSTACHE

MARCH 9 to 17

The giants of film history that defined the cinema-changing Nouvelle Vague were undeniable: Godard, Truffaut, Varda, Demy, Chabrol. But the generation of filmmakers who followed them—children of May ’68—produced movies as provocative and thrilling as anything seen in any film epoch: Chantal Akerman, Benoît Jacquot, Jacques Doillon, Philippe Garrel, and in an orbit all his own, Jean Eustache. The brilliant Eustache, an electrician and construction worker turned director, made intellectually searching, unpredictable films that uncovered sharp and raw truths about human nature, and which were as attuned to the landscape and people of the Southern provinces where he grew up as the contemporary youth movements of Paris that were capturing the imagination of his peers. His most towering work, The Mother and the Whore (1973), is a rightfully beloved epic of generational angst, but his entire oeuvre—narratives, experimental documentaries, essay films, and interviews—collected here for the first time in New York in over a decade, evinces a mastery of the form, an idiosyncratic, naturalistic humor, and an inquisitive artistic nature. Presented with support from Unifrance, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, and Institut Français.

Special thanks to Amélie Garin Davet, Mathieu Fournet, and Françoise Lebrun.

1963 / 35mm / 40 mins

SANTA CLAUS HAS BLUE EYES

1967 / 35mm / 47 mins

Bad Company (also known as Robinson’s Place) hangs out with a couple of suburban pinball-lovers looking to pick up girls. Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (which Eustache made with film stock given to him

by Godard left over from Masculin fémimin) follows a habitually unemployed layabout, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, trying to woo women and keep himself warm as winter approaches—ultimately finding work as a street-corner St. Nick.

In his first two films, Eustache established his remarkable talent for precise anecdotal narratives about shiftless, hormonally driven young men. � Introduced by Molly Haskell on March 13th.

March 13 March 14

3:15 pm 9:30 pm

Series

22

THE PIG (LE COCHON) 1970 / 16mm / 50 mins

Eustache’s patiently observed documentary, codirected by Jean-Michel Barjol, follows a day in the life of a group of farmers in Southern France as they embark on the arduous slaughter, dismemberment, and, finally, the loving culinary preparation of a pig. It’s an elegantly simple, unshowy tale of the beauty of nature, toil, and craftsmanship.

March 12 March 13

7:15 pm 5:30 pm 1977 / 35mm / 50 mins

PHOTOS OF ALEX

1980 / 16mm / 15 mins 1980 / 16mm / 34 minutes

The idiosyncratic personality and the sheer breadth of Eustache’s artistry is clear in every moment in this selection of short films he made in the latter part of his career—films about history, art, and the porous boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. In A Dirty Story, Eustache mirrors two halves—one framed as documentary, the other a fictional drama—concerning a repentant sexual voyeur (Michel Lonsdale); in Photos of Alex, he questions the reliability of memory and images via the dialogue of a young woman describing a series of her photographs to a teenage listener; in Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Delights, he watches with detached skepticism as the titular oil painting is analyzed by Jean Frapat in a lecture to a small audience.

March 10 March 12

7:15 pm 2:30 pm

MY LITTLE LOVES (MES PETITES AMOUREUSES) 1974 / 35mm / 123 mins

Coming-of-age, Eustache-style: the director followed up The Mother and the Whore with an intimate drama based on his childhood, about a boy’s awkward, provincial adolescence in the South of France. This unsentimental, elegantly somber, visually driven film about sexual self-discovery and the passage of time was gorgeously photographed by the legendary Nestor Almendros. Eustache’s only other feature-length narrative film other than The Mother and the Whore, it owns a rightful place next to that film as a true masterpiece.

March March March March March

10 11 12 14 16

4:45 pm / 9:30 pm 1:30 pm / 10:30 pm 4:45 pm / 10:30 pm 7:00 pm 5:00 pm

23

THE VIRGIN OF PESSAC

1968 / 16mm / 55 mins

THE VIRGIN OF PESSAC

1979 / 16mm / 67 mins

With a mixture of humor and awe, Eustache documents a bizarre ceremony held in the town where he was born: every year a young woman is named by the mayor and village elders as the most virtuous. In fact he was so fascinated, he did it twice: these two hour-long films, surveying the same event, were filmed in 1968 and 1979, respectively.

March 13 March 15

A DIRTY STORY (UNE SALE HISTOIRE)

HIERONYMOUS BOSCH’S GARDEN OF DELIGHTS

Jean Eustache

9:15 pm 9:00 pm

NUMÉRO ZERO

1971 / 35mm / 107 mins Eustache’s seventy-one-year-old grandmother, Odette Robert, tells the story of her life—its tragedies, joys, and surprises—in one uninterrupted conversation in this singular film, a meditation on personal and collective histories that pays tribute to an earlier, rapidly disappearing generation of rural French people.

March 12 March 17

8:45 pm 7:00 pm

THE LOST SORROWS OF JEAN EUSTACHE LES MINISTÈRES DE L’ART

Angel Diaz / 1997 / Digital / 52 mins Philippe Garrel / 1989 / Digital / 52 mins

Cinephilia heaven alert: a 1997 documentary about the art of Eustache; and Les ministères de l’art, in which director Philippe Garrel surveys the post–New Wave generation of French filmmakers who made daring, quietly revolutionary art throughout the seventies.

March 11 March 17

4:15 pm 9:30 pm

MASCULIN FÉMININ

Jean-Luc Godard / 1966 / 35mm / 103 mins After Jean-Luc Godard finished this rigorous and funny New Wave delight— about the political and pop cultural engagements and blind spots of the newly ascendant “Ye-Ye” youth generation in sixties Paris—he donated unused film from the shoot to an actual child of Marx and Coc-Cola, Jean Eustache. Thanks to the generous gift, Eustache was able to make Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes, also starring Masculin féminin’s Jean-Pierre Léaud.

March 12 March 13

11:00 pm 7:00 pm

Series

22

THE PIG (LE COCHON) 1970 / 16mm / 50 mins

Eustache’s patiently observed documentary, codirected by Jean-Michel Barjol, follows a day in the life of a group of farmers in Southern France as they embark on the arduous slaughter, dismemberment, and, finally, the loving culinary preparation of a pig. It’s an elegantly simple, unshowy tale of the beauty of nature, toil, and craftsmanship.

March 12 March 13

7:15 pm 5:30 pm 1977 / 35mm / 50 mins

PHOTOS OF ALEX

1980 / 16mm / 15 mins 1980 / 16mm / 34 minutes

The idiosyncratic personality and the sheer breadth of Eustache’s artistry is clear in every moment in this selection of short films he made in the latter part of his career—films about history, art, and the porous boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. In A Dirty Story, Eustache mirrors two halves—one framed as documentary, the other a fictional drama—concerning a repentant sexual voyeur (Michel Lonsdale); in Photos of Alex, he questions the reliability of memory and images via the dialogue of a young woman describing a series of her photographs to a teenage listener; in Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Delights, he watches with detached skepticism as the titular oil painting is analyzed by Jean Frapat in a lecture to a small audience.

March 10 March 12

7:15 pm 2:30 pm

MY LITTLE LOVES (MES PETITES AMOUREUSES) 1974 / 35mm / 123 mins

Coming-of-age, Eustache-style: the director followed up The Mother and the Whore with an intimate drama based on his childhood, about a boy’s awkward, provincial adolescence in the South of France. This unsentimental, elegantly somber, visually driven film about sexual self-discovery and the passage of time was gorgeously photographed by the legendary Nestor Almendros. Eustache’s only other feature-length narrative film other than The Mother and the Whore, it owns a rightful place next to that film as a true masterpiece.

March March March March March

10 11 12 14 16

4:45 pm / 9:30 pm 1:30 pm / 10:30 pm 4:45 pm / 10:30 pm 7:00 pm 5:00 pm

23

THE VIRGIN OF PESSAC

1968 / 16mm / 55 mins

THE VIRGIN OF PESSAC

1979 / 16mm / 67 mins

With a mixture of humor and awe, Eustache documents a bizarre ceremony held in the town where he was born: every year a young woman is named by the mayor and village elders as the most virtuous. In fact he was so fascinated, he did it twice: these two hour-long films, surveying the same event, were filmed in 1968 and 1979, respectively.

March 13 March 15

A DIRTY STORY (UNE SALE HISTOIRE)

HIERONYMOUS BOSCH’S GARDEN OF DELIGHTS

Jean Eustache

9:15 pm 9:00 pm

NUMÉRO ZERO

1971 / 35mm / 107 mins Eustache’s seventy-one-year-old grandmother, Odette Robert, tells the story of her life—its tragedies, joys, and surprises—in one uninterrupted conversation in this singular film, a meditation on personal and collective histories that pays tribute to an earlier, rapidly disappearing generation of rural French people.

March 12 March 17

8:45 pm 7:00 pm

THE LOST SORROWS OF JEAN EUSTACHE LES MINISTÈRES DE L’ART

Angel Diaz / 1997 / Digital / 52 mins Philippe Garrel / 1989 / Digital / 52 mins

Cinephilia heaven alert: a 1997 documentary about the art of Eustache; and Les ministères de l’art, in which director Philippe Garrel surveys the post–New Wave generation of French filmmakers who made daring, quietly revolutionary art throughout the seventies.

March 11 March 17

4:15 pm 9:30 pm

MASCULIN FÉMININ

Jean-Luc Godard / 1966 / 35mm / 103 mins After Jean-Luc Godard finished this rigorous and funny New Wave delight— about the political and pop cultural engagements and blind spots of the newly ascendant “Ye-Ye” youth generation in sixties Paris—he donated unused film from the shoot to an actual child of Marx and Coc-Cola, Jean Eustache. Thanks to the generous gift, Eustache was able to make Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes, also starring Masculin féminin’s Jean-Pierre Léaud.

March 12 March 13

11:00 pm 7:00 pm

24

25

THE STUDENT NURSES One Week Only MARCH 11 to 17

THE STUDENT NURSES

Stephanie Rothman / 1970 / 35mm / 80 mins

The sole female filmmaker in a renowned boys’ club, Stephanie Rothman made a small, but significant series of subversive exploitation films. One of her greatest films is the ensemble drama The Student Nurses, which forgoes cheap psychologizing and sexual gratuity for a nuanced take on the professional and personal options faced by women. Though she was recognized at the time by some astute critics, it’s only recently that Rothman’s work has been unequivocally acknowledged for what it is: incisive, funny, and bursting with ideas, and a crucial counter to the overwhelmingly male vision of the American seventies. We’re pleased to present The Student Nurses in a new 35mm print from Academy Film Archives, with support from the Women’s Film Preservation Fund and Cinema Conservancy. � Director Stephanie Rothman will appear in person on March 11.

24

25

THE STUDENT NURSES One Week Only MARCH 11 to 17

THE STUDENT NURSES

Stephanie Rothman / 1970 / 35mm / 80 mins

The sole female filmmaker in a renowned boys’ club, Stephanie Rothman made a small, but significant series of subversive exploitation films. One of her greatest films is the ensemble drama The Student Nurses, which forgoes cheap psychologizing and sexual gratuity for a nuanced take on the professional and personal options faced by women. Though she was recognized at the time by some astute critics, it’s only recently that Rothman’s work has been unequivocally acknowledged for what it is: incisive, funny, and bursting with ideas, and a crucial counter to the overwhelmingly male vision of the American seventies. We’re pleased to present The Student Nurses in a new 35mm print from Academy Film Archives, with support from the Women’s Film Preservation Fund and Cinema Conservancy. � Director Stephanie Rothman will appear in person on March 11.

26

Essay

CHASING THE FILM SPIRIT

By TSAI MING-LIANG

Tsai Ming-Liang

27

Since early on, there has been a persistent, mysterious image imprinted in my memory banks: a brilliant carp spirit who has taken on the form of a beautiful woman emerging from a pond, vividly glistening, dazzling and unforgettable. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized this image came from a film—based on an old fable—made in Mainland China in the 1950s called Chasing the Fish Spirit.

It depicts a divine encounter between a penurious scholar and the fish spirit in a garden. It was not the first film I ever saw; my grandmother and grandfather were the biggest cinephiles I knew, and we started going to movies together when I was three years old. We would go to the cinema twice a day, everyday. Sometimes we would watch the same film over and over again, and sometimes we would find different cinemas to watch something new. That was a golden age for cinema, and I’m proud my childhood coincided with that time.

When I was 20 years old, I left my hometown of Kuching, Malaysia. That small town had about a dozen cinemas in which I lingered. They were indelible. Years later when I returned for the first time, I found they had all been demolished, except one, which no longer showed film. It had become a market for various knicknacks.

I saw very clearly then that I came into this world at a time of unprecedented rapid change. I couldn’t help but feel wistful and melancholy. Later when I began to make films, I started to have a recurring dream about a cinema called the Odeon, and I had it often until I was 40 years old. I didn’t understand it at all. It didn’t occur to me in my everyday thoughts and yet it presented itself to me each night.

Perhaps, I thought, it meant that I was getting old?

In 2000, when I made What Time Is It There?, I found an old cinema on the outskirts of Taipei where I wanted to shoot. The feeling of being there had a flavor of death and fecundity, as though I were meeting an old lost friend. Afterwards, I chose this dilapidated old theater—perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy—as the venue for my premiere. It was a dark and stormy night, but the theater was packed. The next day the theater manager called to ask if I would enter into a partnership with him. Of course I turned down this terrible business proposal. He said to me, “Then I have no option but to close the cinema.” I responded, “Wait a minute, okay, rent it to me for one year.” During the subsequent year, I made Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Nowadays everyone watches movies on planes. On any given flight, no matter the airline, you can choose from hundreds of films: Hollywood, Bollywood, all different types of movies. However, you can count on one thing: you’ll never find a Tsai Ming-liang picture on a plane, as I make films that have to be seen on the big screen. If this were not the case, people watching a film of mine on a plane might be confounded into thinking the small screen on the seat in front of them was broken.

Tsai Ming-liang is the director of Goodbye, Dragon Inn, which plays at Metrograph on March 6 and 8 (see page 9). His latest film, Afternoon, opens at Metrograph April 1 (see page 49).

Translated by Aliza Ma.

26

Essay

CHASING THE FILM SPIRIT

By TSAI MING-LIANG

Tsai Ming-Liang

27

Since early on, there has been a persistent, mysterious image imprinted in my memory banks: a brilliant carp spirit who has taken on the form of a beautiful woman emerging from a pond, vividly glistening, dazzling and unforgettable. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized this image came from a film—based on an old fable—made in Mainland China in the 1950s called Chasing the Fish Spirit.

It depicts a divine encounter between a penurious scholar and the fish spirit in a garden. It was not the first film I ever saw; my grandmother and grandfather were the biggest cinephiles I knew, and we started going to movies together when I was three years old. We would go to the cinema twice a day, everyday. Sometimes we would watch the same film over and over again, and sometimes we would find different cinemas to watch something new. That was a golden age for cinema, and I’m proud my childhood coincided with that time.

When I was 20 years old, I left my hometown of Kuching, Malaysia. That small town had about a dozen cinemas in which I lingered. They were indelible. Years later when I returned for the first time, I found they had all been demolished, except one, which no longer showed film. It had become a market for various knicknacks.

I saw very clearly then that I came into this world at a time of unprecedented rapid change. I couldn’t help but feel wistful and melancholy. Later when I began to make films, I started to have a recurring dream about a cinema called the Odeon, and I had it often until I was 40 years old. I didn’t understand it at all. It didn’t occur to me in my everyday thoughts and yet it presented itself to me each night.

Perhaps, I thought, it meant that I was getting old?

In 2000, when I made What Time Is It There?, I found an old cinema on the outskirts of Taipei where I wanted to shoot. The feeling of being there had a flavor of death and fecundity, as though I were meeting an old lost friend. Afterwards, I chose this dilapidated old theater—perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy—as the venue for my premiere. It was a dark and stormy night, but the theater was packed. The next day the theater manager called to ask if I would enter into a partnership with him. Of course I turned down this terrible business proposal. He said to me, “Then I have no option but to close the cinema.” I responded, “Wait a minute, okay, rent it to me for one year.” During the subsequent year, I made Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Nowadays everyone watches movies on planes. On any given flight, no matter the airline, you can choose from hundreds of films: Hollywood, Bollywood, all different types of movies. However, you can count on one thing: you’ll never find a Tsai Ming-liang picture on a plane, as I make films that have to be seen on the big screen. If this were not the case, people watching a film of mine on a plane might be confounded into thinking the small screen on the seat in front of them was broken.

Tsai Ming-liang is the director of Goodbye, Dragon Inn, which plays at Metrograph on March 6 and 8 (see page 9). His latest film, Afternoon, opens at Metrograph April 1 (see page 49).

Translated by Aliza Ma.

Series

WELCOME TO METROGRAPH

At Metrograph, you will experience all kinds of movies. What will unite them all is—simply—that we believe in them, and we think they are films you should see.

This is the first installment in a year-long, alphabetically ordered series that offers films we consider must-sees; a pinnacle of a filmmaker’s career or an overlooked, demands-reconsideration masterpiece. Call it a very unofficial “Metrograph canon,” with one film only per director. A mid-career Scorsese, a left-field Assayas, documentary shorts by must-know filmmaker Madeline Anderson, a classic noir

by John Farrow, or Andy Warhol’s double-system projected Chelsea Girls . . . These are films we couldn’t wait to show, so we had to create a series to justify it.

A TO

29

Check www.metrograph.com for dates and showtimes for all Welcome to Metrograph screenings.

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

Martin Scorsese / 1993 / 35mm / 139 minutes

z

MARCH 16

to APRIL 21

It’s one breathtaking composition after another in Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece about social mores amongst New York’s viperous moneyed classes in late nineteenth-century New York. Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer suffer beautifully as wealthy lawyer Newland Archer and divorced pariah Ellen Olenska; and look at this lineup of craftspeople: cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, production designer Dante Ferretti, and composer Elmer Bernstein.

MADELINE ANDERSON SHORTS INTEGRATION REPORT 1

1960 / Digital / 20 mins

A TRIBUTE TO MALCOLM X

1967 / 16mm / 16 minutes

I AM SOMEBODY

1970 / 16mm / 30 minutes In her long career, Madeline Anderson has worked as producer, director and editor alongside documentary titans William Greaves on Black Journal and Richard Leacock. The three classics here, including the newly restored I Am Somebody, are among the finest works documentary journalism produced in that groundbreaking decade. � Q&A with director Madeline Anderson.

Series

WELCOME TO METROGRAPH

At Metrograph, you will experience all kinds of movies. What will unite them all is—simply—that we believe in them, and we think they are films you should see.

This is the first installment in a year-long, alphabetically ordered series that offers films we consider must-sees; a pinnacle of a filmmaker’s career or an overlooked, demands-reconsideration masterpiece. Call it a very unofficial “Metrograph canon,” with one film only per director. A mid-career Scorsese, a left-field Assayas, documentary shorts by must-know filmmaker Madeline Anderson, a classic noir

by John Farrow, or Andy Warhol’s double-system projected Chelsea Girls . . . These are films we couldn’t wait to show, so we had to create a series to justify it.

A TO

29

Check www.metrograph.com for dates and showtimes for all Welcome to Metrograph screenings.

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

Martin Scorsese / 1993 / 35mm / 139 minutes

z

MARCH 16

to APRIL 21

It’s one breathtaking composition after another in Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece about social mores amongst New York’s viperous moneyed classes in late nineteenth-century New York. Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer suffer beautifully as wealthy lawyer Newland Archer and divorced pariah Ellen Olenska; and look at this lineup of craftspeople: cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, production designer Dante Ferretti, and composer Elmer Bernstein.

MADELINE ANDERSON SHORTS INTEGRATION REPORT 1

1960 / Digital / 20 mins

A TRIBUTE TO MALCOLM X

1967 / 16mm / 16 minutes

I AM SOMEBODY

1970 / 16mm / 30 minutes In her long career, Madeline Anderson has worked as producer, director and editor alongside documentary titans William Greaves on Black Journal and Richard Leacock. The three classics here, including the newly restored I Am Somebody, are among the finest works documentary journalism produced in that groundbreaking decade. � Q&A with director Madeline Anderson.

30

Series

ANGER: FIVE FILMS

1947 / 35mm / 20 mins

PUCE MOMENT

1949 / 16mm / 6 mins

RABBIT’S MOON

1950 / 35mm / 7 mins

SCORPIO RISING KUSTOM KAR KOMMANDOS

31

BEACH RED

35mm restored prints courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preservation funding provided by The Film Foundation.

FIREWORKS

Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z

1964 / 35mm / 28 mins 1970 / 35mm / 3 mins

Immerse yourself in the explosive, sensual, and gorgeously gawdy world of aheadof-his-time, rule-flouting experimental filmmaker extraordinaire Kenneth Anger with five of his greatest short films.

BAD TIMING

Nicolas Roeg / 1980 35mm / 123 mins Sex and violence sear the screen in this one-of-akind modern classic with unforgettable performances from Theresa Russell and Art Garfunkel. Roeg, as vital a filmmaker as they come, pushes his trademark nonlinear editing to the extreme. In fact, extreme is the operative word here in describing every aspect of this great, visionary, go-forbroke, gauntlet-throwdown from a cinematic titan.

BARRY LYNDON

Stanley Kubrick / 1975 / 35mm / 184 mins A sublimely blank Ryan O’Neal is an opportunistic Irishman climbing the social ladder from ambitious villager to uncommitted soldier to spoiled nobleman in Kubrick’s Thackeray adaptation, as sourly witty as it is visually sumptuous.

Specially constructed NASA lenses helped Kubrick capture natural candlelight, but that’s just one of this picaresque tale’s bountiful visual splendors. It’s not easy to select just one Kubrick film, but Barry Lyndon, a favorite of many, represents the ultimate example of his meticulous mastery, and explodes the notion that his films are without emotion.

Cornel Wilde / 1967 / 35mm / 105 mins Golden-age Hollywood star Cornel Wilde had a second career as a daring, idiosyncratic auteur of visceral, virile cinema. Beach Red is a revelation, a twofisted depiction of a U.S. Marine Corps troop landing on a Pacific island in the Philippines during World War II. Harrowing and bursting with color, Wilde’s film was taken at the time a commentary on the then-ongoing Vietnam War, and can now be seen as a precursor to, if not a direct influence on, Malick’s The Thin Red Line.

THE BEGUILED

Don Siegel / 1971 35mm / 105 mins Clint Eastwood gets taken down a peg or two (or three) by a houseful of sexually repressed women, and a turtle is caught in the crossfire. In Don Siegel’s moody Southern Gothic masterwork, he stars as a wounded Civil War soldier being cared for, lusted after, and, finally, psychologically and physically done in by the staff and pupils of an all-girl boarding school, headed up by Geraldine Page at her most imperious. The Beguiled is a Freudian hothouse, filmed with intense, gloomy precision by Bruce Surtees, who lensed such seventies essentials as Blume in Love, Lenny, and Escape from Alcatraz.

THE BIG CLOCK

John Farrow / 1948 35mm / 95 mins Charles Laughton is at his sinister best in this New York– set forties noir about a crime reporter (Ray Milland) hired by his newspaper tycoon boss (Laughton) to investigate a murder. Deliciously cynical and evocatively shot in high-contrast black-and-white by John Seitz (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard), The Big Clock is one of the best-plotted thrillers of its era— which is saying a lot. The oft-overlooked Farrow, a favorite of critic Elliott Stein, is due for reconsideration. We promise to find a reason to screen Alias Nick Beal and The Hitler Gang sometime soon.

30

Series

ANGER: FIVE FILMS

1947 / 35mm / 20 mins

PUCE MOMENT

1949 / 16mm / 6 mins

RABBIT’S MOON

1950 / 35mm / 7 mins

SCORPIO RISING KUSTOM KAR KOMMANDOS

31

BEACH RED

35mm restored prints courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preservation funding provided by The Film Foundation.

FIREWORKS

Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z

1964 / 35mm / 28 mins 1970 / 35mm / 3 mins

Immerse yourself in the explosive, sensual, and gorgeously gawdy world of aheadof-his-time, rule-flouting experimental filmmaker extraordinaire Kenneth Anger with five of his greatest short films.

BAD TIMING

Nicolas Roeg / 1980 35mm / 123 mins Sex and violence sear the screen in this one-of-akind modern classic with unforgettable performances from Theresa Russell and Art Garfunkel. Roeg, as vital a filmmaker as they come, pushes his trademark nonlinear editing to the extreme. In fact, extreme is the operative word here in describing every aspect of this great, visionary, go-forbroke, gauntlet-throwdown from a cinematic titan.

BARRY LYNDON

Stanley Kubrick / 1975 / 35mm / 184 mins A sublimely blank Ryan O’Neal is an opportunistic Irishman climbing the social ladder from ambitious villager to uncommitted soldier to spoiled nobleman in Kubrick’s Thackeray adaptation, as sourly witty as it is visually sumptuous.

Specially constructed NASA lenses helped Kubrick capture natural candlelight, but that’s just one of this picaresque tale’s bountiful visual splendors. It’s not easy to select just one Kubrick film, but Barry Lyndon, a favorite of many, represents the ultimate example of his meticulous mastery, and explodes the notion that his films are without emotion.

Cornel Wilde / 1967 / 35mm / 105 mins Golden-age Hollywood star Cornel Wilde had a second career as a daring, idiosyncratic auteur of visceral, virile cinema. Beach Red is a revelation, a twofisted depiction of a U.S. Marine Corps troop landing on a Pacific island in the Philippines during World War II. Harrowing and bursting with color, Wilde’s film was taken at the time a commentary on the then-ongoing Vietnam War, and can now be seen as a precursor to, if not a direct influence on, Malick’s The Thin Red Line.

THE BEGUILED

Don Siegel / 1971 35mm / 105 mins Clint Eastwood gets taken down a peg or two (or three) by a houseful of sexually repressed women, and a turtle is caught in the crossfire. In Don Siegel’s moody Southern Gothic masterwork, he stars as a wounded Civil War soldier being cared for, lusted after, and, finally, psychologically and physically done in by the staff and pupils of an all-girl boarding school, headed up by Geraldine Page at her most imperious. The Beguiled is a Freudian hothouse, filmed with intense, gloomy precision by Bruce Surtees, who lensed such seventies essentials as Blume in Love, Lenny, and Escape from Alcatraz.

THE BIG CLOCK

John Farrow / 1948 35mm / 95 mins Charles Laughton is at his sinister best in this New York– set forties noir about a crime reporter (Ray Milland) hired by his newspaper tycoon boss (Laughton) to investigate a murder. Deliciously cynical and evocatively shot in high-contrast black-and-white by John Seitz (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard), The Big Clock is one of the best-plotted thrillers of its era— which is saying a lot. The oft-overlooked Farrow, a favorite of critic Elliott Stein, is due for reconsideration. We promise to find a reason to screen Alias Nick Beal and The Hitler Gang sometime soon.

32

Series

THE BLOOD OF A POET Jean Cocteau / 1930 35mm / 55 mins

Images that get in your head and stay there: an artist draws a mouth that moves on its own; a man walks through a mirror; a snowball fight turns deadly; a woman transforms into a statue. This early-sound masterpiece and debut film from essential twentieth-century artist-poet Jean Cocteau is a benchmark of cinematic surrealism.

Preceded by UN CHANT D’AMOUR Jean Genet / 1950 / 35mm / 26 mins Genet’s only film, a masterful, wordless work of visual poetry set in prison, is perhaps the most explicitly homoerotic movie ever made.

BOARDING GATE

Olivier Assayas / 2007 / 35mm / 106 mins A high-heeled Asia Argento clacks across the screen with flair in Assayas’s artfully sleazoid, globe-hopping, corporate espionage thriller, featuring a staggering extended scene, à la Contempt, of a couple playing out their sadomasochistic relationship throughout an apartment’s many rooms and hallways, with the threat of murder dangling in the air. Part of Assayas’s unofficial international trilogy (along with demonlover and Clean), Boarding Gate is equal parts fever-dream and paranoid mystery.

THE BOSTON STRANGLER

Richard Fleischer / 1968 / 35mm / 116 mins Tony Curtis gives the rawest performance of his career in Fleischer’s unsettling film about the titular serial killer. Incorporating then-modern techniques such as multi-panel matting and handheld documentary-like shooting, Fleischer creates a work of jarring psychological complexity, moral urgency, and severe, severe dread.

Also starring Henry Fonda and George Kennedy.

THE BOY FRIEND

Ken Russell / 1971 / 35mm / 137 mins Another year, another great 1970s Ken Russell film. Twiggy is undeniable as an adorable stage ingénue in his opulent, widescreen musical—made just one year after he exploded onto the international stage with Women in Love—a tributecum-slaughter of Busby Berkeley spectacle, pushed over the edge to pure mania.

Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z

33

THE CASSANDRA CAT

Vojtech Jasny / 1963 / 35mm / 91 mins Yes, this is the plot: a troupe of performers arrives in a small village, accompanied by a cat wearing glasses; when its glasses are removed, the cat can change people into different psychedelic colors reflecting their best or worst selves. We are deeply grateful that this Czech New Wave film exists, and you will be too.

(Film pictured on back cover.)

CAT PEOPLE

Jacques Tourneur / 1942 35mm / 73 mins The plot is pure pulp—an Eastern-European immigrant (Simone Simon) turns into a killer feline if she’s sexually aroused—but the treatment is pure art in this quintessential B horror masterpiece, harnessing the elegant direction of Tourneur and the auteurist vision of producer Val Lewton, who knew how to make the urban everyday—walking alone late at night near a bus stop—into the scariest damn thing imaginable.

CHAMELEON STREET

Wendell B. Harris Jr. / 1989 DCP / 94 mins L. A. Weekly called this grimly funny American independent treasure “one of the ten best films of the decade”– and they’re right. Based on a true story, it’s a singular, stylishly constructed tale of Doug Street, a Detroit man who, unsatisfied with his life, becomes a con artist impersonating, variously, a reporter, a surgeon, a lawyer, and more. A great work of both allegory and realism, Chameleon Street won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 1989.

32

Series

THE BLOOD OF A POET Jean Cocteau / 1930 35mm / 55 mins

Images that get in your head and stay there: an artist draws a mouth that moves on its own; a man walks through a mirror; a snowball fight turns deadly; a woman transforms into a statue. This early-sound masterpiece and debut film from essential twentieth-century artist-poet Jean Cocteau is a benchmark of cinematic surrealism.

Preceded by UN CHANT D’AMOUR Jean Genet / 1950 / 35mm / 26 mins Genet’s only film, a masterful, wordless work of visual poetry set in prison, is perhaps the most explicitly homoerotic movie ever made.

BOARDING GATE

Olivier Assayas / 2007 / 35mm / 106 mins A high-heeled Asia Argento clacks across the screen with flair in Assayas’s artfully sleazoid, globe-hopping, corporate espionage thriller, featuring a staggering extended scene, à la Contempt, of a couple playing out their sadomasochistic relationship throughout an apartment’s many rooms and hallways, with the threat of murder dangling in the air. Part of Assayas’s unofficial international trilogy (along with demonlover and Clean), Boarding Gate is equal parts fever-dream and paranoid mystery.

THE BOSTON STRANGLER

Richard Fleischer / 1968 / 35mm / 116 mins Tony Curtis gives the rawest performance of his career in Fleischer’s unsettling film about the titular serial killer. Incorporating then-modern techniques such as multi-panel matting and handheld documentary-like shooting, Fleischer creates a work of jarring psychological complexity, moral urgency, and severe, severe dread.

Also starring Henry Fonda and George Kennedy.

THE BOY FRIEND

Ken Russell / 1971 / 35mm / 137 mins Another year, another great 1970s Ken Russell film. Twiggy is undeniable as an adorable stage ingénue in his opulent, widescreen musical—made just one year after he exploded onto the international stage with Women in Love—a tributecum-slaughter of Busby Berkeley spectacle, pushed over the edge to pure mania.

Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z

33

THE CASSANDRA CAT

Vojtech Jasny / 1963 / 35mm / 91 mins Yes, this is the plot: a troupe of performers arrives in a small village, accompanied by a cat wearing glasses; when its glasses are removed, the cat can change people into different psychedelic colors reflecting their best or worst selves. We are deeply grateful that this Czech New Wave film exists, and you will be too.

(Film pictured on back cover.)

CAT PEOPLE

Jacques Tourneur / 1942 35mm / 73 mins The plot is pure pulp—an Eastern-European immigrant (Simone Simon) turns into a killer feline if she’s sexually aroused—but the treatment is pure art in this quintessential B horror masterpiece, harnessing the elegant direction of Tourneur and the auteurist vision of producer Val Lewton, who knew how to make the urban everyday—walking alone late at night near a bus stop—into the scariest damn thing imaginable.

CHAMELEON STREET

Wendell B. Harris Jr. / 1989 DCP / 94 mins L. A. Weekly called this grimly funny American independent treasure “one of the ten best films of the decade”– and they’re right. Based on a true story, it’s a singular, stylishly constructed tale of Doug Street, a Detroit man who, unsatisfied with his life, becomes a con artist impersonating, variously, a reporter, a surgeon, a lawyer, and more. A great work of both allegory and realism, Chameleon Street won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 1989.

34

Series

THE CHELSEA GIRLS

Paul Morrissey & Andy Warhol 1966 / 16mm / 210 minutes A peek into various rooms of Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, populated by Warhol’s Superstars, hopped-up or strung-out. Nico, Brigid Berlin, Ondine, Mary Woronov, Mario Montez, Edie Sedgwick— all make appearances in front of the penetrating, unforgiving camera, their personas writ large. Projected double system, two 16mm films screened next to each other to make a wide frame; the sound moving from one side to the other, picking up the alternately wonderfully verbose speeches and mumblings of these incredible personalities: it’s the kind of cinematic event that, by design, can only be experienced on the big screen.

THE CLOCK

Vincente Minnelli / 1945 / 35mm / 90 mins Judy Garland and Robert Walker fall in love over the course of 24 hours in New York in Minnelli’s heart-warming, exquisitely crafted romance, the first nonmusical for both Minnelli and Garland. With an authentic feel for the people and textures of the Big Apple, including an enormous set of the old Penn Station (though it was filmed on a beautifully detailed MGM soundstage), The Clock is a love story unparalleled in its lyrical innocence and in its depiction of the honesty of new romance.

CLOSE-UP

Abbas Kiarostami / 1990 / 35mm / 98 mins In Tehran in the eighties, a young man impersonated famous director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and lied his way into a family’s home. This bizarre real-life news event inspired this fascinating and intensely moving documentary-fiction from the great Iranian director Kiarostami, a meditation on art and identity like no other. It’s one of just a handful of true modernist milestones in the history of cinema.

Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z

35

COMRADES: ALMOST A LOVE STORY Peter Chan / 1996 35mm / 118 mins

Prolific Second Wave Chinese filmmaker Peter Chan’s lyrical boy-meets-girl chronicle stars Maggie Cheung and Leon Lai as a couple of mainlanders living in Hong Kong who fall into each other’s arms to deal with their urban isolation and end up in New York’s Chinatown. This spellbinding romance features gorgeous cinematography by Jingle Ma (Rumble in the Bronx) and songs by pan-Asian sensation Teresa Teng.

THE COOL WORLD

Shirley Clarke / 1963 35mm / 105 mins Summer, Harlem, 1963. In Clarke’s grim, confrontational, and completely captivating vérité-style classic, mostly nonprofessional actors—the phenomenal debut of Rony Clanton, along with the established Carl Lee and Clarence Williams III—bring to gritty life a novel by Warren Miller that revolves around a teenager aspiring to be a gang member.

Loose and freeform-feeling yet assembled with a complete artistic vision, Clarke’s film moves to the improvised rhythms of the street. Screening in a new 35mm print. � Q&A with actor Rony Clanton.

JULIE DASH SHORTS FOUR WOMEN

1975 / 16mm / 7 mins

THE DIARY OF AN AFRICAN NUN

1977 / 35mm / 13 mins

Milton Moses Ginsberg / 1969 / 35mm / 110 mins

ILLUSIONS

1982 / 16mm / 34 mins

A singular film of the independent sixties. Rip Torn, the king of gruff, stars as a married psychoanalyst recording his indiscretions on camera, unbeknownst to the women—including Sally Kirkland and Viveca Lindfors—caught in the frame at various moments of emotional distress. Exploding with camera flare-outs, Coming Apart is a minefield of cinematic and emotional disruption, audacious and harrowingly intimate. There is nothing else like it.

Julie Dash, director of the groundbreaking, visually striking 1991 film Daughters of the Dust began her career with these marvelous shorts: a dance film set to Nina Simone, an Alice Walker adaptation set in Uganda, and a drama about racial identity set in World War II-era Hollywood.

COMING APART

� Director Milton Moses Ginsberg will appear in person.

34

Series

THE CHELSEA GIRLS

Paul Morrissey & Andy Warhol 1966 / 16mm / 210 minutes A peek into various rooms of Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, populated by Warhol’s Superstars, hopped-up or strung-out. Nico, Brigid Berlin, Ondine, Mary Woronov, Mario Montez, Edie Sedgwick— all make appearances in front of the penetrating, unforgiving camera, their personas writ large. Projected double system, two 16mm films screened next to each other to make a wide frame; the sound moving from one side to the other, picking up the alternately wonderfully verbose speeches and mumblings of these incredible personalities: it’s the kind of cinematic event that, by design, can only be experienced on the big screen.

THE CLOCK

Vincente Minnelli / 1945 / 35mm / 90 mins Judy Garland and Robert Walker fall in love over the course of 24 hours in New York in Minnelli’s heart-warming, exquisitely crafted romance, the first nonmusical for both Minnelli and Garland. With an authentic feel for the people and textures of the Big Apple, including an enormous set of the old Penn Station (though it was filmed on a beautifully detailed MGM soundstage), The Clock is a love story unparalleled in its lyrical innocence and in its depiction of the honesty of new romance.

CLOSE-UP

Abbas Kiarostami / 1990 / 35mm / 98 mins In Tehran in the eighties, a young man impersonated famous director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and lied his way into a family’s home. This bizarre real-life news event inspired this fascinating and intensely moving documentary-fiction from the great Iranian director Kiarostami, a meditation on art and identity like no other. It’s one of just a handful of true modernist milestones in the history of cinema.

Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z

35

COMRADES: ALMOST A LOVE STORY Peter Chan / 1996 35mm / 118 mins

Prolific Second Wave Chinese filmmaker Peter Chan’s lyrical boy-meets-girl chronicle stars Maggie Cheung and Leon Lai as a couple of mainlanders living in Hong Kong who fall into each other’s arms to deal with their urban isolation and end up in New York’s Chinatown. This spellbinding romance features gorgeous cinematography by Jingle Ma (Rumble in the Bronx) and songs by pan-Asian sensation Teresa Teng.

THE COOL WORLD

Shirley Clarke / 1963 35mm / 105 mins Summer, Harlem, 1963. In Clarke’s grim, confrontational, and completely captivating vérité-style classic, mostly nonprofessional actors—the phenomenal debut of Rony Clanton, along with the established Carl Lee and Clarence Williams III—bring to gritty life a novel by Warren Miller that revolves around a teenager aspiring to be a gang member.

Loose and freeform-feeling yet assembled with a complete artistic vision, Clarke’s film moves to the improvised rhythms of the street. Screening in a new 35mm print. � Q&A with actor Rony Clanton.

JULIE DASH SHORTS FOUR WOMEN

1975 / 16mm / 7 mins

THE DIARY OF AN AFRICAN NUN

1977 / 35mm / 13 mins

Milton Moses Ginsberg / 1969 / 35mm / 110 mins

ILLUSIONS

1982 / 16mm / 34 mins

A singular film of the independent sixties. Rip Torn, the king of gruff, stars as a married psychoanalyst recording his indiscretions on camera, unbeknownst to the women—including Sally Kirkland and Viveca Lindfors—caught in the frame at various moments of emotional distress. Exploding with camera flare-outs, Coming Apart is a minefield of cinematic and emotional disruption, audacious and harrowingly intimate. There is nothing else like it.

Julie Dash, director of the groundbreaking, visually striking 1991 film Daughters of the Dust began her career with these marvelous shorts: a dance film set to Nina Simone, an Alice Walker adaptation set in Uganda, and a drama about racial identity set in World War II-era Hollywood.

COMING APART

� Director Milton Moses Ginsberg will appear in person.

36

Series

DAY OF THE DEAD

George A. Romero / 1985 / 35mm / 96 mins Perhaps the most under-appreciated of Romero’s moral tales (moral tales starring zombies, of course), Day of the Dead takes place almost entirely at an underground army bunker on lockdown, as they fend off the advances of the evergrowing battalion of the bloodthirsty undead gathering outside. More than ever, Romero here invites us to wonder whether the hungry dead or the living are the real monsters.

Copresented by

DEEP END

Jerzy Skolimowski / 1970 / 35mm / 88 mins With Swinging London coming to an end, a teenager gets a job in a moldy bathhouse where he grows desperately infatuated with a twenty-something coworker (Jane Asher). Polish master Skolimowski, viewing England as an outsider, crafts a film besotted with grey skies and grim interiors, and yearning with desire.

DEMON POND

Masahiro Shinoda / 1979 / 35mm / 123 minutes Based on a Meiji-era fable and kabuki play, Demon Pond takes place in a village that must fend off a mythic creature that lives in local waters: the only way to keep it at bay—and stop it from flooding the town—is to ring a bell three times a day.

The great Japanese New Wave director—best known for Pale Flower (1964) and Double Suicide (1969)—crafted this bewitching fantasy.

DEUX FOIS

Jackie Raynal / 1968 16mm / 65 minutes “Tonight will be the end of all meaning. Ladies and gentlemen: Good evening.”

Before she came to New York and opened the legendary Bleecker Street Cinema, and after she edited for Eric Rohmer and Jean Eustache, Jackie Raynal made this wildly inventive experimental feature. It’s the centerpiece film of the Zanzibar Group, a group of young artists and filmmakers making underground films, full of the energy and apathy of May ’68. � Q&A with director Jackie Raynal.

Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z

37

THE DEVIL PROBABLY Robert Bresson / 1977 35mm / 95 mins

As The Devil Probably begins, we see newspaper reports of a teen found dead by gunshot wound; the film then flashes back to chart the march toward death of this nihilistic, atheistic youth, as he indifferently rails against a corrupt, wretched world. This uncompromising latecareer masterpiece from Robert Bresson is deeply disturbing yet strangely elating, and one of the greatest works by one of the greatest directors.

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

Rouben Mamoulian / 1931 / 35mm / 98 mins Mamoulian’s 1931 adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic horror story— produced by Paramount at the same time that Universal was in the midst of its legendary monster movie cycle—has never been outdone. An astonishing work of early sound Hollywood cinema, filled with all manner of visual effects and experiments, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a textbook of all the possibilities of cinema. With Fredric March in his first Oscar-winning role and a sexy Miriam Hopkins as Mr. Hyde’s terrorized object of affection.

DUCK, YOU SUCKER

Sergio Leone / 1971 / 35mm / 138 minutes The Spaghetti western on steroids: one of Leone’s most visually intense, thrilling, and totally irreverent films—and that’s saying something—stars Rod Steiger and James Coburn as, respectively, a Mexican bandit and an Irish rebel who team up to rob a bank during the aftermath of the Mexican revolution.

THE 8 DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER

Lau Kar-leung / 1984 / 35mm / 98 mins The legendary Gordon Liu is the avowed pacifist son of an imperial clan driven to take revenge on those who have slaughtered his family in one of the all-time greatest kung-fu movies. This late-period Shaw Brothers Studio masterpiece was directed by pioneering action-choreographer Lau Kar-leung.

36

Series

DAY OF THE DEAD

George A. Romero / 1985 / 35mm / 96 mins Perhaps the most under-appreciated of Romero’s moral tales (moral tales starring zombies, of course), Day of the Dead takes place almost entirely at an underground army bunker on lockdown, as they fend off the advances of the evergrowing battalion of the bloodthirsty undead gathering outside. More than ever, Romero here invites us to wonder whether the hungry dead or the living are the real monsters.

Copresented by

DEEP END

Jerzy Skolimowski / 1970 / 35mm / 88 mins With Swinging London coming to an end, a teenager gets a job in a moldy bathhouse where he grows desperately infatuated with a twenty-something coworker (Jane Asher). Polish master Skolimowski, viewing England as an outsider, crafts a film besotted with grey skies and grim interiors, and yearning with desire.

DEMON POND

Masahiro Shinoda / 1979 / 35mm / 123 minutes Based on a Meiji-era fable and kabuki play, Demon Pond takes place in a village that must fend off a mythic creature that lives in local waters: the only way to keep it at bay—and stop it from flooding the town—is to ring a bell three times a day.

The great Japanese New Wave director—best known for Pale Flower (1964) and Double Suicide (1969)—crafted this bewitching fantasy.

DEUX FOIS

Jackie Raynal / 1968 16mm / 65 minutes “Tonight will be the end of all meaning. Ladies and gentlemen: Good evening.”

Before she came to New York and opened the legendary Bleecker Street Cinema, and after she edited for Eric Rohmer and Jean Eustache, Jackie Raynal made this wildly inventive experimental feature. It’s the centerpiece film of the Zanzibar Group, a group of young artists and filmmakers making underground films, full of the energy and apathy of May ’68. � Q&A with director Jackie Raynal.

Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z

37

THE DEVIL PROBABLY Robert Bresson / 1977 35mm / 95 mins

As The Devil Probably begins, we see newspaper reports of a teen found dead by gunshot wound; the film then flashes back to chart the march toward death of this nihilistic, atheistic youth, as he indifferently rails against a corrupt, wretched world. This uncompromising latecareer masterpiece from Robert Bresson is deeply disturbing yet strangely elating, and one of the greatest works by one of the greatest directors.

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

Rouben Mamoulian / 1931 / 35mm / 98 mins Mamoulian’s 1931 adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic horror story— produced by Paramount at the same time that Universal was in the midst of its legendary monster movie cycle—has never been outdone. An astonishing work of early sound Hollywood cinema, filled with all manner of visual effects and experiments, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a textbook of all the possibilities of cinema. With Fredric March in his first Oscar-winning role and a sexy Miriam Hopkins as Mr. Hyde’s terrorized object of affection.

DUCK, YOU SUCKER

Sergio Leone / 1971 / 35mm / 138 minutes The Spaghetti western on steroids: one of Leone’s most visually intense, thrilling, and totally irreverent films—and that’s saying something—stars Rod Steiger and James Coburn as, respectively, a Mexican bandit and an Irish rebel who team up to rob a bank during the aftermath of the Mexican revolution.

THE 8 DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER

Lau Kar-leung / 1984 / 35mm / 98 mins The legendary Gordon Liu is the avowed pacifist son of an imperial clan driven to take revenge on those who have slaughtered his family in one of the all-time greatest kung-fu movies. This late-period Shaw Brothers Studio masterpiece was directed by pioneering action-choreographer Lau Kar-leung.

38

Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z

39

EQUINOX FLOWER Yasujiro Ozu / 1958 35mm / 118 mins

Ozu was skeptical when Shochiku Studios forced him to shoot his first film in color in 1958, but the result was extraordinary. This very Ozu tale of a traditional father butting heads with his modernminded daughter is as splendid and moving and aching as any of the Japanese master’s great works, with one beautiful composition after another.

FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI

Hou Hsiao-hsien / 1998 / 35mm / 125 mins The camera seems to have a mind of its own, floating and drifting among the candlelit, opium-drenched dens of a Shanghai brothel in the late nineteenth century, surveying a quiet, expertly modulated, yet devastating drama as it unfolds among the various courtesans. This might be the greatest work by the exceptional Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien.

FRANTIC

Roman Polanski / 1988 35mm / 115 mins Polanski’s tightly wound thriller stars Harrison Ford as a doctor whose wife disappears from their hotel room while they’re visiting Paris. Fueled by an intense, ever-escalating criminal plot, the film moves through neighborhoods, with a great sense of the city’s composition, and has a serious preoccupation with Grace Jones.

THE FRENCH

William Klein / 1982 16mm / 130 mins The great photographer and filmmaker William Klein goes behind the scenes of RolandGarros (French Open) in this intimate and detailed documentary, which is the finest film ever made about tennis.

COMING SOON

38

Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z

39

EQUINOX FLOWER Yasujiro Ozu / 1958 35mm / 118 mins

Ozu was skeptical when Shochiku Studios forced him to shoot his first film in color in 1958, but the result was extraordinary. This very Ozu tale of a traditional father butting heads with his modernminded daughter is as splendid and moving and aching as any of the Japanese master’s great works, with one beautiful composition after another.

FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI

Hou Hsiao-hsien / 1998 / 35mm / 125 mins The camera seems to have a mind of its own, floating and drifting among the candlelit, opium-drenched dens of a Shanghai brothel in the late nineteenth century, surveying a quiet, expertly modulated, yet devastating drama as it unfolds among the various courtesans. This might be the greatest work by the exceptional Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien.

FRANTIC

Roman Polanski / 1988 35mm / 115 mins Polanski’s tightly wound thriller stars Harrison Ford as a doctor whose wife disappears from their hotel room while they’re visiting Paris. Fueled by an intense, ever-escalating criminal plot, the film moves through neighborhoods, with a great sense of the city’s composition, and has a serious preoccupation with Grace Jones.

THE FRENCH

William Klein / 1982 16mm / 130 mins The great photographer and filmmaker William Klein goes behind the scenes of RolandGarros (French Open) in this intimate and detailed documentary, which is the finest film ever made about tennis.

COMING SOON

40

41

CAROL

A SPACE PROGRAM

ON 35MM

One Week Only

One Night Only

MARCH 18 to 24

MARCH 26 CAROL

A SPACE PROGRAM

Todd Haynes / 2015 / 35mm / 118 mins

World-renowned contemporary artist Tom Sachs transformed New York’s Park Avenue Armory into a space station, immersing visitors into a large-scale installation titled “Space Program 2.0: Mars.” In his first feature film, director Van Neistat gives viewers an intimate glimpse into Sachs’s production—complex and rich with scientific ritual—following the crew as they embark on a risky mission to the red planet. A Space Program is a vivid work of art on its own terms.

Join us for a very special, rare 35mm screening of the best American movie of 2015.

Todd Haynes’s exquisite film, adapted from the novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, about a romance blossoming between a wealthy married woman and a young department store clerk in 1950s New York, features extraordinarily precise and moving performances by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, and astonishing craft on every technical level. A love story for the ages, with every nuance captured with remarkable detail and beauty by cinematographer Ed Lachman, who will appear in person to talk about the film.

A Zeitgeist Films release.

� Q&A with cinematographer Ed Lachman.

Van Neistat / 2015 / DCP / 72 mins

40

41

CAROL

A SPACE PROGRAM

ON 35MM

One Week Only

One Night Only

MARCH 18 to 24

MARCH 26 CAROL

A SPACE PROGRAM

Todd Haynes / 2015 / 35mm / 118 mins

World-renowned contemporary artist Tom Sachs transformed New York’s Park Avenue Armory into a space station, immersing visitors into a large-scale installation titled “Space Program 2.0: Mars.” In his first feature film, director Van Neistat gives viewers an intimate glimpse into Sachs’s production—complex and rich with scientific ritual—following the crew as they embark on a risky mission to the red planet. A Space Program is a vivid work of art on its own terms.

Join us for a very special, rare 35mm screening of the best American movie of 2015.

Todd Haynes’s exquisite film, adapted from the novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, about a romance blossoming between a wealthy married woman and a young department store clerk in 1950s New York, features extraordinarily precise and moving performances by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, and astonishing craft on every technical level. A love story for the ages, with every nuance captured with remarkable detail and beauty by cinematographer Ed Lachman, who will appear in person to talk about the film.

A Zeitgeist Films release.

� Q&A with cinematographer Ed Lachman.

Van Neistat / 2015 / DCP / 72 mins

Event

42

43

There’s nothing like an original IB Technicolor print: these original three-strip dye- transfer prints offer the kinds of thrillingly vivid colors that are sadly a thing of the past. Yet they live on in a handful of rare original prints, three of which we present today. Each film is the ultimate example of its own kind: Vertigo, the ultimate Hitchcock; Singin’ in the Rain, the ultimate Hollywood musical; Hatari!, the ultimate Hawks men-at-work movie.

All in one day!

SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN

Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly / 1952 / 35mm / 103 minutes The greatest movie musical of all time, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s meta marvel takes place near the tail end of the silent film era, when Hollywood’s biggest stars were anxiety-ridden about the looming threat of talking pictures.

Kelly’s muscular athleticism as a dancer was never put to better use than in his role as arrogant movie star Don Lockwood, but every bit his show-stopping equal are Donald O’Connor as piano man Cosmo Brown, Debbie Reynolds as up-and-coming dance girl Kathy Selden, and an Oscar-nominated Jean Hagen as vindictive, banshee-voiced superstar Lina Lamont.

1:30 pm

ULTIMATE IB: THREE TECHNICOLOR CLASSICS

HATARI!

Howard Hawks / 1962 / 35mm / 157 mins Cahiers du cinéma’s critics and future filmmakers dubbed themselves the Hitchcocko-Hawksians, but they might have well created a subcategory called “Hatarians” for the many admirers of this masterpiece in their ranks. This is the pinnacle of Hawks’s obsessive adventure-comedies focusing on friendships between men, their proverbial lives and loves, set against backdrops of dangerous, specialized work (in this case big game hunting). More than a little nuts and immensely entertaining, it’s sprawling, vibrant, and features a baby elephant.

6:00 pm

One Day Only MARCH 19

VERTIGO

Alfred Hitchcock / 1958 / 35mm / 128 mins This is the one. Named in Sight & Sound’s 2012 international critics poll as the greatest movie ever made (displacing Citizen Kane after decades), Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a confounding—and confoundingly perfect—work of art, a tale of obsession that still has the power to shock. The haunted stares of James Stewart, as retired private eye Scottie and Kim Novak, as the object of his increasingly twisted desire, have become the look of cinema itself.

9:00 pm

Event

42

43

There’s nothing like an original IB Technicolor print: these original three-strip dye- transfer prints offer the kinds of thrillingly vivid colors that are sadly a thing of the past. Yet they live on in a handful of rare original prints, three of which we present today. Each film is the ultimate example of its own kind: Vertigo, the ultimate Hitchcock; Singin’ in the Rain, the ultimate Hollywood musical; Hatari!, the ultimate Hawks men-at-work movie.

All in one day!

SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN

Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly / 1952 / 35mm / 103 minutes The greatest movie musical of all time, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s meta marvel takes place near the tail end of the silent film era, when Hollywood’s biggest stars were anxiety-ridden about the looming threat of talking pictures.

Kelly’s muscular athleticism as a dancer was never put to better use than in his role as arrogant movie star Don Lockwood, but every bit his show-stopping equal are Donald O’Connor as piano man Cosmo Brown, Debbie Reynolds as up-and-coming dance girl Kathy Selden, and an Oscar-nominated Jean Hagen as vindictive, banshee-voiced superstar Lina Lamont.

1:30 pm

ULTIMATE IB: THREE TECHNICOLOR CLASSICS

HATARI!

Howard Hawks / 1962 / 35mm / 157 mins Cahiers du cinéma’s critics and future filmmakers dubbed themselves the Hitchcocko-Hawksians, but they might have well created a subcategory called “Hatarians” for the many admirers of this masterpiece in their ranks. This is the pinnacle of Hawks’s obsessive adventure-comedies focusing on friendships between men, their proverbial lives and loves, set against backdrops of dangerous, specialized work (in this case big game hunting). More than a little nuts and immensely entertaining, it’s sprawling, vibrant, and features a baby elephant.

6:00 pm

One Day Only MARCH 19

VERTIGO

Alfred Hitchcock / 1958 / 35mm / 128 mins This is the one. Named in Sight & Sound’s 2012 international critics poll as the greatest movie ever made (displacing Citizen Kane after decades), Hitchcock’s Vertigo is a confounding—and confoundingly perfect—work of art, a tale of obsession that still has the power to shock. The haunted stares of James Stewart, as retired private eye Scottie and Kim Novak, as the object of his increasingly twisted desire, have become the look of cinema itself.

9:00 pm

Series

44

45

Every Sunday starting March 20, we’re pleased to present a recent or brand new 35mm restoration. In some cases, these screenings mark the first times these prints have been shown to the public.

CRAIG’S WIFE

Dorothy Arzner / 1936 / 35mm / 73 mins “Dorothy Arzner was the only woman director to survive in the U.S. motion picture industry during the Golden Era. She worked steadily, directing twenty films released between 1927 and 1940. She has the largest directorial body of work by a woman within the studio system, but she has been virtually ignored in most film history books and classes . . . I keep a photo of Dorothy Arzner on my desk as an inspiration and a reminder to keep making films, even in the face of this challenging industry that still does not recognize women directors.”

—Bette Gordon, filmmaker Arzner’s 1936 melodrama Craig’s Wife is headlined by Rosalind Russell, in an early starring role as a fierce, duplicitous housewife. Preservation print courtesy of the Library of Congress. � Introduced by filmmaker Bette Gordon.

March 20

1:00 pm

MY FAVORITE WIFE

OLD & IMPROVED MARCH 20

to APRIL 24

Garson Kanin / 1940 35mm / 88 mins

She’s been shipwrecked and thought dead for seven years; her husband’s about to tie the knot again when she’s rescued—the timing couldn’t be worse. Undoubtedly one of the wackiest of all the “comedies of remarriage” from Hollywood’s golden age, this screwball delight— one of a handful of directorial efforts from screen- and play-writing god Garson Kanin—reunites The Awful Truth terrific twosome Cary Grant and Irene Dunne.

Preservation print courtesy of the Library of Congress April 3

1:00 pm

Series

44

45

Every Sunday starting March 20, we’re pleased to present a recent or brand new 35mm restoration. In some cases, these screenings mark the first times these prints have been shown to the public.

CRAIG’S WIFE

Dorothy Arzner / 1936 / 35mm / 73 mins “Dorothy Arzner was the only woman director to survive in the U.S. motion picture industry during the Golden Era. She worked steadily, directing twenty films released between 1927 and 1940. She has the largest directorial body of work by a woman within the studio system, but she has been virtually ignored in most film history books and classes . . . I keep a photo of Dorothy Arzner on my desk as an inspiration and a reminder to keep making films, even in the face of this challenging industry that still does not recognize women directors.”

—Bette Gordon, filmmaker Arzner’s 1936 melodrama Craig’s Wife is headlined by Rosalind Russell, in an early starring role as a fierce, duplicitous housewife. Preservation print courtesy of the Library of Congress. � Introduced by filmmaker Bette Gordon.

March 20

1:00 pm

MY FAVORITE WIFE

OLD & IMPROVED MARCH 20

to APRIL 24

Garson Kanin / 1940 35mm / 88 mins

She’s been shipwrecked and thought dead for seven years; her husband’s about to tie the knot again when she’s rescued—the timing couldn’t be worse. Undoubtedly one of the wackiest of all the “comedies of remarriage” from Hollywood’s golden age, this screwball delight— one of a handful of directorial efforts from screen- and play-writing god Garson Kanin—reunites The Awful Truth terrific twosome Cary Grant and Irene Dunne.

Preservation print courtesy of the Library of Congress April 3

1:00 pm

Series

46

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Josef von Sternberg / 1935 35mm / 88 minutes

There have been many film versions of it over the past hundred years—but this one is by Josef von Sternberg. His little-seen adaptation of the classic Russian novel boils the source material down to a sweaty essence. The film was shot by Lucien Ballard (who also was the cinematographer on Craig’s Wife, another Old & Improved pick, not to mention Kubrick’s The Killing and Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch!), and stars Peter Lorre, a natural fit for Dostoevsky’s antihero for the ages, Raskolnikov.

Restoration courtesy of the Library of Congress.

April 3

1:00 pm

JOYCE AT 34

Joyce Chopra / 1971 / 16mm

SHORTS FROM NEW YORK’S YOUTH FILM DISTRIBUTION CENTER In feminist filmmaker Joyce Chopra’s Joyce at 34 (a collaboration with Claudia Weill, who would later direct the great unsung Girlfriends), Chopra examines the demands of juggling a baby and a professional career. In this program we also present a selection of shorts from the Youth Film Distribution Center, founded in 1969 so that young filmmakers between the ages of fourteen and twenty could make films on 16mm, many shot on the Lower East Side.

Prints courtesy Reserve Film and Video Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts April 10

1:00 pm

Old & Improved

47

MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON

Apichatpong Weerasethakul / 2000 / 35mm / 83 mins World-renowned Thai filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Cannes Film Festival Palme d’or winner for his Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) established his idiosyncratic flair and cinematic boldness right off the bat with his supremely confident 16mm-shot debut. A documentary-fiction hybrid following the denizens of a small village outside Bangkok, the film is told in an “exquisite corpse” style, with one villager handing the story off to the next and so on.

Restored in 2013 by the Austrian Film Museum and Cineteca di Bologna/L’immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, LISTO laboratory in Vienna, Technicolor Ltd in Bangkok, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Restoration funded by Doha Film Institute.

April 17

1:00 pm

TOUKI BOUKI

Djibril Diop Mambéty / 1973 35mm / 85 mins The cult of admirers surrounding this masterpiece by Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty grows by the year. By turns naturalistic and audaciously surreal, this postcolonialist dream movie follows a pair of young lovers who dream of abandoning their small village for the cosmopolitan streets of France.

Restored in 2008 by Cineteca di Bologna/L’immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and the family of Djibril Diop Mambéty. Restoration funded by Armani, Cartier, Qatar Airways and Qatar Museum Authority.

April 24

1:00 pm

Series

46

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Josef von Sternberg / 1935 35mm / 88 minutes

There have been many film versions of it over the past hundred years—but this one is by Josef von Sternberg. His little-seen adaptation of the classic Russian novel boils the source material down to a sweaty essence. The film was shot by Lucien Ballard (who also was the cinematographer on Craig’s Wife, another Old & Improved pick, not to mention Kubrick’s The Killing and Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch!), and stars Peter Lorre, a natural fit for Dostoevsky’s antihero for the ages, Raskolnikov.

Restoration courtesy of the Library of Congress.

April 3

1:00 pm

JOYCE AT 34

Joyce Chopra / 1971 / 16mm

SHORTS FROM NEW YORK’S YOUTH FILM DISTRIBUTION CENTER In feminist filmmaker Joyce Chopra’s Joyce at 34 (a collaboration with Claudia Weill, who would later direct the great unsung Girlfriends), Chopra examines the demands of juggling a baby and a professional career. In this program we also present a selection of shorts from the Youth Film Distribution Center, founded in 1969 so that young filmmakers between the ages of fourteen and twenty could make films on 16mm, many shot on the Lower East Side.

Prints courtesy Reserve Film and Video Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts April 10

1:00 pm

Old & Improved

47

MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON

Apichatpong Weerasethakul / 2000 / 35mm / 83 mins World-renowned Thai filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Cannes Film Festival Palme d’or winner for his Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) established his idiosyncratic flair and cinematic boldness right off the bat with his supremely confident 16mm-shot debut. A documentary-fiction hybrid following the denizens of a small village outside Bangkok, the film is told in an “exquisite corpse” style, with one villager handing the story off to the next and so on.

Restored in 2013 by the Austrian Film Museum and Cineteca di Bologna/L’immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, LISTO laboratory in Vienna, Technicolor Ltd in Bangkok, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Restoration funded by Doha Film Institute.

April 17

1:00 pm

TOUKI BOUKI

Djibril Diop Mambéty / 1973 35mm / 85 mins The cult of admirers surrounding this masterpiece by Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty grows by the year. By turns naturalistic and audaciously surreal, this postcolonialist dream movie follows a pair of young lovers who dream of abandoning their small village for the cosmopolitan streets of France.

Restored in 2008 by Cineteca di Bologna/L’immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and the family of Djibril Diop Mambéty. Restoration funded by Armani, Cartier, Qatar Airways and Qatar Museum Authority.

April 24

1:00 pm

Series

48

49

HIGH SCHOOL

1968 / 35mm / 75 mins Wiseman’s peek into the halls, gyms, classrooms, and administrative offices of Philadelphia’s Northeast High School is much more than a day-in-the-life documentary. It’s a humorous yet withering portrayal of the myopia and deficiencies fostered by the drab institutional approach of the American school system. During these tender years, pimpled, impressionable teens are subject to a barrage of lessons that only serve to reinforce social and gender conformity. An off-the-cuff sex-ed lecture by a visiting gynecologist to a roomful of boys remains one of the most giddily shocking scenes in American movies. The glory days these ain’t.

March 25-31

6:00 pm

TITICUT FOLLIES

1967 / 35mm / 80 mins

THREE WISEMAN

MARCH 25

to APRIL 14

Among the greatest and most influential documentary filmmakers who ever lived, Frederick Wiseman is more than just a capturer of reality on screen: he’s a conjurer of unforgettable images and a true artist, chronicling the last half century of American life. Still going strong at age 85 (his latest film, In Jackson Heights, was one of the very best of 2015), Wiseman began his career in the late sixties, and his particular artistic voice was present from the start, with his excoriating take on a Massachusetts mental care facility, Titicut Follies. Soon after, Wiseman made two more films about American institutions, High School and Hospital, both of them brilliantly zeroing in on the unpredictable human interactions and everyday challenges it takes to make such structures function—if they do at all.

We are thrilled to present new 35mm prints of these amazing three films, which mark the brilliant beginnings of one of cinema’s greatest living artists, who this year celebrates his fiftieth year working in film.

The films were preserved by the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center from original camera negatives in the Zipporah Films Collection.

Frederick Wiseman burst onto the scene in 1967 with what remains his most controversial film, a detached yet rigorous examination of the conditions at a mental health facility. Set in Massachusetts’ Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, the film peers relentlessly at the routine humiliations enacted by the guards upon the inmates, which range from forced nudity, bullying, and tube feeding—not to mention a bizarre talent show that inspired the film’s title. Filled with unforgettable images and powerful, pointed editing, Titicut Follies is not only an artistic triumph—it exacted real social change.

April 1-7

6:00 pm

HOSPITAL

1970 / 35mm / 84 mins In 1970, after he had recently surveyed the inner workings of a Massachusetts mental hospital and a Philadelphia high school, Wiseman decided to train his camera on the patients and staff of the large and bustling Metropolitan Hospital in New York City. The result is a hypnotic and hugely empathetic look at individual crisis and looming bureaucracy. The amazing moments pile up: nurses caring for a neglected toddler who had fallen out a window; a long-haired Midwestern transplant having a very bad, paranoid reaction to a drug trip; a woman denied health-care coverage because of preexisting conditions, in a scene that remains sadly relevant.

April 8-14

6:00 pm

Series

48

49

HIGH SCHOOL

1968 / 35mm / 75 mins Wiseman’s peek into the halls, gyms, classrooms, and administrative offices of Philadelphia’s Northeast High School is much more than a day-in-the-life documentary. It’s a humorous yet withering portrayal of the myopia and deficiencies fostered by the drab institutional approach of the American school system. During these tender years, pimpled, impressionable teens are subject to a barrage of lessons that only serve to reinforce social and gender conformity. An off-the-cuff sex-ed lecture by a visiting gynecologist to a roomful of boys remains one of the most giddily shocking scenes in American movies. The glory days these ain’t.

March 25-31

6:00 pm

TITICUT FOLLIES

1967 / 35mm / 80 mins

THREE WISEMAN

MARCH 25

to APRIL 14

Among the greatest and most influential documentary filmmakers who ever lived, Frederick Wiseman is more than just a capturer of reality on screen: he’s a conjurer of unforgettable images and a true artist, chronicling the last half century of American life. Still going strong at age 85 (his latest film, In Jackson Heights, was one of the very best of 2015), Wiseman began his career in the late sixties, and his particular artistic voice was present from the start, with his excoriating take on a Massachusetts mental care facility, Titicut Follies. Soon after, Wiseman made two more films about American institutions, High School and Hospital, both of them brilliantly zeroing in on the unpredictable human interactions and everyday challenges it takes to make such structures function—if they do at all.

We are thrilled to present new 35mm prints of these amazing three films, which mark the brilliant beginnings of one of cinema’s greatest living artists, who this year celebrates his fiftieth year working in film.

The films were preserved by the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center from original camera negatives in the Zipporah Films Collection.

Frederick Wiseman burst onto the scene in 1967 with what remains his most controversial film, a detached yet rigorous examination of the conditions at a mental health facility. Set in Massachusetts’ Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, the film peers relentlessly at the routine humiliations enacted by the guards upon the inmates, which range from forced nudity, bullying, and tube feeding—not to mention a bizarre talent show that inspired the film’s title. Filled with unforgettable images and powerful, pointed editing, Titicut Follies is not only an artistic triumph—it exacted real social change.

April 1-7

6:00 pm

HOSPITAL

1970 / 35mm / 84 mins In 1970, after he had recently surveyed the inner workings of a Massachusetts mental hospital and a Philadelphia high school, Wiseman decided to train his camera on the patients and staff of the large and bustling Metropolitan Hospital in New York City. The result is a hypnotic and hugely empathetic look at individual crisis and looming bureaucracy. The amazing moments pile up: nurses caring for a neglected toddler who had fallen out a window; a long-haired Midwestern transplant having a very bad, paranoid reaction to a drug trip; a woman denied health-care coverage because of preexisting conditions, in a scene that remains sadly relevant.

April 8-14

6:00 pm

50

51

OFFICE IN 3D

MARCH 25 to 31

AFTERNOON

One Week Only

One Week Only OFFICE IN 3D

Johnnie To / 2015 / DCP / 119 mins Hugely popular Hong Kong auteur Johnnie To, primarily known for his action movies, surprised and delighted his fans this past year with the remarkable Office, a stylish, buoyant musical shot in 3D featuring grand, eye-popping set design reminiscent of Jacques Tati’s classic Playtime. Adapted from her own stage play

by Sylvia Chang, who also costars, Office takes place in an austere yet exquisitely realized high-rise, where two new assistants attempt to climb the corporate ladder and please the head honcho (played by the imperious Chang). Office received a limited New York release in 2015, and has been steadily accruing a major cult following ever since. Metrograph is thrilled to bring back this unmissable cinematic treat—also starring the legendary Chow Yun-Fat—in a special week-long run.

A China Lion release.

APRIL 1 to 7

AFTERNOON

Tsai Ming-liang / 2015 / DCP / 137 mins For the past twenty-five years, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang has distinguished himself as one of the most tirelessly brilliant filmmakers in the world with such beautifully crafted films about love, sex, and urban alienation as Vive l’amour (1995), What Time Is It There? (2001), Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), and I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2007), all of them starring his subtly expressive muse Lee Kang-sheng. Rarely does this great auteur appear onscreen himself and open up about his creative methods, so the new Afternoon, a film in four static shots in which the director sits with Lee Kang-sheng in a ramshackle rural house to discuss all manner of things professional and very personal, is an event. True Tsai fans, prepare to bliss out.

Presented with support from Taipei Cultural Center of TECO in New York.

50

51

OFFICE IN 3D

MARCH 25 to 31

AFTERNOON

One Week Only

One Week Only OFFICE IN 3D

Johnnie To / 2015 / DCP / 119 mins Hugely popular Hong Kong auteur Johnnie To, primarily known for his action movies, surprised and delighted his fans this past year with the remarkable Office, a stylish, buoyant musical shot in 3D featuring grand, eye-popping set design reminiscent of Jacques Tati’s classic Playtime. Adapted from her own stage play

by Sylvia Chang, who also costars, Office takes place in an austere yet exquisitely realized high-rise, where two new assistants attempt to climb the corporate ladder and please the head honcho (played by the imperious Chang). Office received a limited New York release in 2015, and has been steadily accruing a major cult following ever since. Metrograph is thrilled to bring back this unmissable cinematic treat—also starring the legendary Chow Yun-Fat—in a special week-long run.

A China Lion release.

APRIL 1 to 7

AFTERNOON

Tsai Ming-liang / 2015 / DCP / 137 mins For the past twenty-five years, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang has distinguished himself as one of the most tirelessly brilliant filmmakers in the world with such beautifully crafted films about love, sex, and urban alienation as Vive l’amour (1995), What Time Is It There? (2001), Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), and I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2007), all of them starring his subtly expressive muse Lee Kang-sheng. Rarely does this great auteur appear onscreen himself and open up about his creative methods, so the new Afternoon, a film in four static shots in which the director sits with Lee Kang-sheng in a ramshackle rural house to discuss all manner of things professional and very personal, is an event. True Tsai fans, prepare to bliss out.

Presented with support from Taipei Cultural Center of TECO in New York.

52

53

If you’re serious about movies, you know the Criterion Collection. For over thirty years, Criterion has been at the forefront of cinephile culture. From laserdisc to DVD to Blu-ray and the digital beyond, Criterion—a “national treasure” according to the New York Times—has remained committed to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions that offer the highest technical quality and which feature supplemental materials that shine a light on the art of filmmaking. Now, Metrograph is thrilled to team up with Criterion to give you the rare chance to peek into Criterion’s process and to meet key players involved in creating their releases. These series of live events, hosted by Criterion staff members, will allow for the kinds of expansive discussions and extra details not possible on DVD or Blu-ray, and feature onstage Q&As with special guests, clips of rare content, audience prizes, and more.

APRIL 6 Henry Street Settlement Presents

SIDEWALK STORIES One Night Only

APRIL 5

SIDEWALK STORIES

Charles Lane / 1989 / DCP / 97 mins A rare contemporary silent film, shot in beautiful black-and-white in downtown New York, Sidewalk Stories updates Chaplin’s The Kid, the tale of a tramp whose life is transformed after he begins to take care of an orphaned toddler, to a modern context; the result is a film about homelessness in New York that is serious without being condescending, a work of social advocacy and touching humor. � Q&A with filmmaker Charles Lane, moderated by David Garza, executive director of Henry Street Settlement.

ROBERT DREW AND THE ART OF POLITICS In the early sixties, at the same time that John F. Kennedy was changing American politics, reporter-filmmaker Robert Drew and his amazing dream team—which also included Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert Maysles—were transforming documentary cinema. Criterion’s new special edition set The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates collects the films in which Drew and his collaborators followed Kennedy from campaign trail to White House, and examines this historical period with a wealth of supplements; never before and perhaps never again would a filmmaker gain such intimate access to this iconic figure. For the inaugural Criterion Collection Live event on April 6, Criterion president Peter Becker will be joined by the legendary Pennebaker; Jill Drew (Robert Drew’s daughter-in-law and general manager of Drew Associates); and other special guests to discuss these major historical works. Admission also includes a complementary advance Blu-ray or DVD copy of the gift set and special screenings, including the alternate Richard Leacock cut of Primary (1960, 26 minutes), Crisis (1963, 53 minutes), and Faces of November (1964, 12 minutes).

52

53

If you’re serious about movies, you know the Criterion Collection. For over thirty years, Criterion has been at the forefront of cinephile culture. From laserdisc to DVD to Blu-ray and the digital beyond, Criterion—a “national treasure” according to the New York Times—has remained committed to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions that offer the highest technical quality and which feature supplemental materials that shine a light on the art of filmmaking. Now, Metrograph is thrilled to team up with Criterion to give you the rare chance to peek into Criterion’s process and to meet key players involved in creating their releases. These series of live events, hosted by Criterion staff members, will allow for the kinds of expansive discussions and extra details not possible on DVD or Blu-ray, and feature onstage Q&As with special guests, clips of rare content, audience prizes, and more.

APRIL 6 Henry Street Settlement Presents

SIDEWALK STORIES One Night Only

APRIL 5

SIDEWALK STORIES

Charles Lane / 1989 / DCP / 97 mins A rare contemporary silent film, shot in beautiful black-and-white in downtown New York, Sidewalk Stories updates Chaplin’s The Kid, the tale of a tramp whose life is transformed after he begins to take care of an orphaned toddler, to a modern context; the result is a film about homelessness in New York that is serious without being condescending, a work of social advocacy and touching humor. � Q&A with filmmaker Charles Lane, moderated by David Garza, executive director of Henry Street Settlement.

ROBERT DREW AND THE ART OF POLITICS In the early sixties, at the same time that John F. Kennedy was changing American politics, reporter-filmmaker Robert Drew and his amazing dream team—which also included Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert Maysles—were transforming documentary cinema. Criterion’s new special edition set The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates collects the films in which Drew and his collaborators followed Kennedy from campaign trail to White House, and examines this historical period with a wealth of supplements; never before and perhaps never again would a filmmaker gain such intimate access to this iconic figure. For the inaugural Criterion Collection Live event on April 6, Criterion president Peter Becker will be joined by the legendary Pennebaker; Jill Drew (Robert Drew’s daughter-in-law and general manager of Drew Associates); and other special guests to discuss these major historical works. Admission also includes a complementary advance Blu-ray or DVD copy of the gift set and special screenings, including the alternate Richard Leacock cut of Primary (1960, 26 minutes), Crisis (1963, 53 minutes), and Faces of November (1964, 12 minutes).

54

55

6TH OLD SCHOOL KUNG FU FEST

LOS SURES

ACTION CLASSICS FROM HONG KONG’S GOLDEN HARVEST STUDIO

One Week Only APRIL 15 to 21

APRIL 8 to 10 Subway Cinema, the crew behind the legendary New York Asian Film Festival (now in its 15th year), is teaming up with Metrograph to unleash the 6th edition of the annual Old School Kung Fu Fest (OSKFF), which celebrates the rarest, wildest, and most incredible martial arts and action cinema from the sixties to the nineties. Declared “an intensely amazing event” (Badass Digest) and a “kick-ass fest” (Time Out New York), this year’s OSKFF will focus on the output of Golden Harvest, which took over from Shaw Brothers as Hong Kong’s leading film studio in the late 1970s and all through the 1990s, and which introduced the talents of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Sammo Hung to the wider international audience, revolutionizing action cinema in the process. Program will include rare 35mm prints of Pedicab Driver (1989), The Man from Hong Kong (1975), Rumble in the Bronx (1995), and more.

Keep your eyes on subwaycinema.com and Facebook.com/NYAFF for more details coming soon.

Presented with the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office New York.

LOS SURES

Diego Echeverria / 1984 / DCP / 60 mins Thirty years ago, South Williamsburg was known as “Los Sures,” a place imbued with vibrant life, a community of close-knit Puerto Rican and Dominican families living amidst everyday economic struggle. Today, with the neighborhood fully gentrified, it feels vital to remember this lost world, and Diego Echeverria’s essential documentary, shot in the early eighties on 16mm, brings it all back to life, through the eyes of five different residents. Rediscovered in 2007, the film has become a cornerstone program of the Williamsburg arts nonprofit Union Docs, which not only restored the film but in 2015 began the “Living Los Sures” historical memory project, which helps fund filmmakers in continuing to document the neighborhood. � Q&A with director Diego Echeverria on April 15.

A Union Docs release.

54

55

6TH OLD SCHOOL KUNG FU FEST

LOS SURES

ACTION CLASSICS FROM HONG KONG’S GOLDEN HARVEST STUDIO

One Week Only APRIL 15 to 21

APRIL 8 to 10 Subway Cinema, the crew behind the legendary New York Asian Film Festival (now in its 15th year), is teaming up with Metrograph to unleash the 6th edition of the annual Old School Kung Fu Fest (OSKFF), which celebrates the rarest, wildest, and most incredible martial arts and action cinema from the sixties to the nineties. Declared “an intensely amazing event” (Badass Digest) and a “kick-ass fest” (Time Out New York), this year’s OSKFF will focus on the output of Golden Harvest, which took over from Shaw Brothers as Hong Kong’s leading film studio in the late 1970s and all through the 1990s, and which introduced the talents of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Sammo Hung to the wider international audience, revolutionizing action cinema in the process. Program will include rare 35mm prints of Pedicab Driver (1989), The Man from Hong Kong (1975), Rumble in the Bronx (1995), and more.

Keep your eyes on subwaycinema.com and Facebook.com/NYAFF for more details coming soon.

Presented with the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office New York.

LOS SURES

Diego Echeverria / 1984 / DCP / 60 mins Thirty years ago, South Williamsburg was known as “Los Sures,” a place imbued with vibrant life, a community of close-knit Puerto Rican and Dominican families living amidst everyday economic struggle. Today, with the neighborhood fully gentrified, it feels vital to remember this lost world, and Diego Echeverria’s essential documentary, shot in the early eighties on 16mm, brings it all back to life, through the eyes of five different residents. Rediscovered in 2007, the film has become a cornerstone program of the Williamsburg arts nonprofit Union Docs, which not only restored the film but in 2015 began the “Living Los Sures” historical memory project, which helps fund filmmakers in continuing to document the neighborhood. � Q&A with director Diego Echeverria on April 15.

A Union Docs release.

56

57

HOCKNEY One Week Only

THEORY OF OBSCURITY: A FILM ABOUT THE RESIDENTS

APRIL 22 to 28 HOCKNEY

One Night Only APRIL 25

Randall Wright / 2015 / DCP / 113 mins

THEORY OF OBSCURITY: A FILM ABOUT THE RESIDENTS

For the first time, the brilliant artist David Hockney has given us access to his personal archive of photographs and home movies; the result is an unparalleled visual diary of his life. Randall Wright’s new documentary Hockney weaves together a portrait of the multifaceted artist from this intimate, never-before-seen footage and frank interviews with close friends. One of the great surviving icons of the 1960s, Hockney started his career with nearly instant success, but in private he has struggled with his art, relationships, and the tragedy of AIDS, making his optimism and sense of adventure truly uplifting. Hockney is funny, inspiring, bold, and visionary, the definitive exploration.

Theory of Obscurity tells the story of the renegade sound and video collective known as The Residents. Many details surrounding the group are secret, including the identities of its members. They always perform wearing masks and costumes, which is part of their magic. Through fly-on-the-wall observations and candid interviews, this film tells the story of a group that has always played by its own set of rules. The film travels with the Residents around the U.S. and Europe during their 40th anniversary tour as they staged their elaborate productions, shooting more than twenty performances and also capturing rare behind-the-scenes moments.

A Film Movement release.

Don Hardy Jr. / 2015 / DCP / 87 mins

A Film Movement release.

56

57

HOCKNEY One Week Only

THEORY OF OBSCURITY: A FILM ABOUT THE RESIDENTS

APRIL 22 to 28 HOCKNEY

One Night Only APRIL 25

Randall Wright / 2015 / DCP / 113 mins

THEORY OF OBSCURITY: A FILM ABOUT THE RESIDENTS

For the first time, the brilliant artist David Hockney has given us access to his personal archive of photographs and home movies; the result is an unparalleled visual diary of his life. Randall Wright’s new documentary Hockney weaves together a portrait of the multifaceted artist from this intimate, never-before-seen footage and frank interviews with close friends. One of the great surviving icons of the 1960s, Hockney started his career with nearly instant success, but in private he has struggled with his art, relationships, and the tragedy of AIDS, making his optimism and sense of adventure truly uplifting. Hockney is funny, inspiring, bold, and visionary, the definitive exploration.

Theory of Obscurity tells the story of the renegade sound and video collective known as The Residents. Many details surrounding the group are secret, including the identities of its members. They always perform wearing masks and costumes, which is part of their magic. Through fly-on-the-wall observations and candid interviews, this film tells the story of a group that has always played by its own set of rules. The film travels with the Residents around the U.S. and Europe during their 40th anniversary tour as they staged their elaborate productions, shooting more than twenty performances and also capturing rare behind-the-scenes moments.

A Film Movement release.

Don Hardy Jr. / 2015 / DCP / 87 mins

A Film Movement release.

Series

58

59

FOUR FILMS STARRING VINCENT LINDON APRIL 15 to 17 To accompany the release of The Measure of a Man, we present a selection of films that showcase four of his greatest performances. Each of them uncovers a different facet of this generous and vital leading man, a tough-guy and a romantic hero in equal measure.

THE MEASURE OF A MAN

WELCOME

Philippe Lioret / 2009 / 35mm / 110 mins

APRIL 15 to 21

One Week Only THE MEASURE OF A MAN

Stéphane Brizé / 2015 / DCP / 93 mins One of the most robust and dynamic actors currently working in French cinema, Vincent Lindon won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 for The Measure of a Man. He is subtly overwhelming as unemployed everyman Thierry, who, after losing his factory job, must submit to a series of humiliating ordeals in his search for work. After numerous dead ends, Skype interviews, ritualized personal critiques by fellow jobseekers, Thierry finds a job, which proves no less soul-sucking. Brizé’s drama is powerful and moving depiction of our contemporary economic reality.

A Kino Lorber release. � Actor Vincent Lindon and director Stéphane Brizé will appear in person on April 15.

A seventeen-year-old Kurdish boy leaves Iraq to embark on a journey across Europe to meet his girlfriend in England. After he is put in a refugee camp, he meets a swimming coach who changes his life.

PATER

Alain Cavalier / 2011 / 35mm / 105 mins Lindon is the Prime Minister and director Cavalier is the President—or rather they’re themselves playing those parts in this self-referential take on performance and politics.

A FEW HOURS OF SPRING

Stéphane Brizé / 2012 / Digital / 108 mins A trucker is released from prison and moves back in with his mother, just as she is on the verge of a serious illness.

BASTARDS

Claire Denis / 2013 / DCP / 100 mins Denis’s cold, brutal revenge story stars Lindon as a tanker captain who returns to Paris after his brother-in-law commits suicide and uncovers the truth about the family’s involvement a nefarious sex ring.

Series

58

59

FOUR FILMS STARRING VINCENT LINDON APRIL 15 to 17 To accompany the release of The Measure of a Man, we present a selection of films that showcase four of his greatest performances. Each of them uncovers a different facet of this generous and vital leading man, a tough-guy and a romantic hero in equal measure.

THE MEASURE OF A MAN

WELCOME

Philippe Lioret / 2009 / 35mm / 110 mins

APRIL 15 to 21

One Week Only THE MEASURE OF A MAN

Stéphane Brizé / 2015 / DCP / 93 mins One of the most robust and dynamic actors currently working in French cinema, Vincent Lindon won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 for The Measure of a Man. He is subtly overwhelming as unemployed everyman Thierry, who, after losing his factory job, must submit to a series of humiliating ordeals in his search for work. After numerous dead ends, Skype interviews, ritualized personal critiques by fellow jobseekers, Thierry finds a job, which proves no less soul-sucking. Brizé’s drama is powerful and moving depiction of our contemporary economic reality.

A Kino Lorber release. � Actor Vincent Lindon and director Stéphane Brizé will appear in person on April 15.

A seventeen-year-old Kurdish boy leaves Iraq to embark on a journey across Europe to meet his girlfriend in England. After he is put in a refugee camp, he meets a swimming coach who changes his life.

PATER

Alain Cavalier / 2011 / 35mm / 105 mins Lindon is the Prime Minister and director Cavalier is the President—or rather they’re themselves playing those parts in this self-referential take on performance and politics.

A FEW HOURS OF SPRING

Stéphane Brizé / 2012 / Digital / 108 mins A trucker is released from prison and moves back in with his mother, just as she is on the verge of a serious illness.

BASTARDS

Claire Denis / 2013 / DCP / 100 mins Denis’s cold, brutal revenge story stars Lindon as a tanker captain who returns to Paris after his brother-in-law commits suicide and uncovers the truth about the family’s involvement a nefarious sex ring.

Series

60

61

10. THE RED SNOWBALL TREE

Vasily Shukshin / 1974 / 35mm / 110 mins Hugely popular in its home country, yet little known abroad and rarely screened, this Dostoevskian Soviet film concerns the attempts of a man with a criminal past to find serenity and beauty after being released from prison. This Mosfilm production was written and directed by Vasily Shukshin, who died tragically the year this film was released.

9. JOHNNY GUITAR

Nicholas Ray / 1954 / 35mm / 110 mins Ray’s cracking-good, psychologically complex western stars Joan Crawford at her best as a saloon owner trying to protect her friend from the noose wielded by an out-of-control lynch mob, headed up by a diabolical Mercedes McCambridge.

Sterling Hayden ably fills out the boots of the title character, who comes to help his former lover ward off the bad guys. This McCarthy-era allegory features stunning color photography and double entendres galore; it’s slowly come to be commonly identified as one of the great American films of the 1950s.

FASSBINDER’S TOP 10 APRIL 22 to 28 In anticipation of our U.S. premiere of the new documentary Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands, Metrograph presents a series counting down the legendary German director’s ten favorite films, as published in 1982, a year before his death. Encompassing Hollywood melodrama and musical, B-movies and acknowledged European masterpieces, these eclectic selections are testament to the idiosyncratic versatility of this singular artist of the cinema, not to mention his perspicacity and foresight: it would take a couple more decades at least for many of these films (Johnny Guitar, Salò, Lola Montès) to be rightly, widely declared among the greatest films ever made.

Check www.metrograph.com for dates and showtimes for all Fassbinder’sTop 10 screenings.

8. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

Charles Laughton / 1955 35mm / 92 mins 35mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preservation funding provided by The Film Foundation.

Charles Laughton never directed another film after this chilling masterpiece of psychological horror, making The Night of the Hunter one of the great one-offs in movie history. Robert Mitchum is at his most menacing as an ex-con disguised as a preacher, romancing and marrying a lonely widow (Shelley Winters) with the plans of murdering her and her two sweet children, and digging up her late husband’s buried treasure.

From this simple premise, Laughton creates a work of eerie beauty, with the feel of a particularly grim fairy tale, composed of one unforgettable black-and-white composition after another.

Series

60

61

10. THE RED SNOWBALL TREE

Vasily Shukshin / 1974 / 35mm / 110 mins Hugely popular in its home country, yet little known abroad and rarely screened, this Dostoevskian Soviet film concerns the attempts of a man with a criminal past to find serenity and beauty after being released from prison. This Mosfilm production was written and directed by Vasily Shukshin, who died tragically the year this film was released.

9. JOHNNY GUITAR

Nicholas Ray / 1954 / 35mm / 110 mins Ray’s cracking-good, psychologically complex western stars Joan Crawford at her best as a saloon owner trying to protect her friend from the noose wielded by an out-of-control lynch mob, headed up by a diabolical Mercedes McCambridge.

Sterling Hayden ably fills out the boots of the title character, who comes to help his former lover ward off the bad guys. This McCarthy-era allegory features stunning color photography and double entendres galore; it’s slowly come to be commonly identified as one of the great American films of the 1950s.

FASSBINDER’S TOP 10 APRIL 22 to 28 In anticipation of our U.S. premiere of the new documentary Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands, Metrograph presents a series counting down the legendary German director’s ten favorite films, as published in 1982, a year before his death. Encompassing Hollywood melodrama and musical, B-movies and acknowledged European masterpieces, these eclectic selections are testament to the idiosyncratic versatility of this singular artist of the cinema, not to mention his perspicacity and foresight: it would take a couple more decades at least for many of these films (Johnny Guitar, Salò, Lola Montès) to be rightly, widely declared among the greatest films ever made.

Check www.metrograph.com for dates and showtimes for all Fassbinder’sTop 10 screenings.

8. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

Charles Laughton / 1955 35mm / 92 mins 35mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preservation funding provided by The Film Foundation.

Charles Laughton never directed another film after this chilling masterpiece of psychological horror, making The Night of the Hunter one of the great one-offs in movie history. Robert Mitchum is at his most menacing as an ex-con disguised as a preacher, romancing and marrying a lonely widow (Shelley Winters) with the plans of murdering her and her two sweet children, and digging up her late husband’s buried treasure.

From this simple premise, Laughton creates a work of eerie beauty, with the feel of a particularly grim fairy tale, composed of one unforgettable black-and-white composition after another.

62

Series

7. DISHONORED

Fassbinder’s Top 10

63

4. FLAMINGO ROAD

Josef von Sternberg / 1931 35mm / 91 minutes

Michael Curtiz / 1949 35mm / 94 mins

Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg were one of the great actor-director pairs in movie history; through his lens she became an icon of startling depth and charisma.

In Dishonored, one of their most mesmerizing collaborations, Dietrich plays a Mata Hari-esque spy for the Austrian Secret Service tasked with gathering information on the Russians during World War I. Outrageous plotting, high chiaroscuro style, and the star’s earthy sensuality mark this unforgettable pre-code treasure.

Joan Crawford and Michael Curtiz reteamed after their Oscar-winning triumph Mildred Pierce for this underseen yet superb Hollywood melodrama.

Crawford stars as a carnival dancer who gets stranded in a backwater town and enters into an affair with a deputy sheriff controlled by the town’s corrupt political boss, only to find herself drawn into a political turmoil.

6. GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES

Howard Hawks / 1953 35mm / 91 mins

Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell burst onto the screen with blazing colors in this big, brassy musical from preeminent Hollywood wit Howard Hawks. The cooing flirt and the deadpan beauty are a pair of unapologetic gold-diggers and best friends strutting their natural wares on a cruise ship bound for Paris. The height of ironic fifties Technicolor spectacle, Hawks’s film is spangled with delightfully cheeky numbers, including “Two Little Girls from Little Rock”, “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?”, and Monroe’s iconic “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”.

5. SALÒ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM

Pier Paolo Pasolini / 1975 / 35mm / 116 mins The final film from Pier Paolo Pasolini remains one of the most shocking films ever made. Set during fascist Italy’s dark days during World War II, Salò updates writings of Marquis de Sade for a repugnant tale of four wealthy libertines who kidnap a group of teenage boys and girls and enact horrific humiliations and violence upon them. It is a formally and conceptually brilliant, if relentlessly nauseating, portrayal of man’s most debased instincts and the capitalist systems that allow them to thrive.

3. LOLA MONTÈS Max Ophuls / 1955 35mm / 116 mins

Perhaps the great Max Ophuls’s supreme cinematic spectacle, this Technicolor dazzler dramatizes with great panache and intelligence the life of the infamous nineteenthcentury courtesan. While the intricately choreographed photography is always splendid to look at, the film is also one of the most cutting films of its era about the historical treatment of women, its critique leading to an unforgettable final image.

2. THE NAKED AND THE DEAD

Raoul Walsh / 1958 / 35mm / 131 mins Norman Mailer’s breakthrough best seller, based on his own experiences in the Pacific during World War II, became a powerful film in the hands of the brilliant Hollywood workhorse Raoul Walsh. Shot in ‘scope and Technicolor on location in Panama, and featuring music by Bernard Herrmann, The Naked and the Dead follows a platoon on a reconnaissance mission, focusing on two different men, a hardened sergeant (Aldo Ray) and an idealistic lieutenant (Cliff Robertson).

1. THE DAMNED

Luchino Visconti / 1969 / 35mm / 156 mins Few filmmakers have been able to capture the terror and deceptive seductiveness of Nazi decadence like Luchino Visconti in his grand, scary, yet utterly irreverent chronicle of an incestuous German industrialist family as the Third Reich rises to power. Perched on the border between weighty melodrama and crass camp, Visconti’s film echoes the epic domestic dramas of Thomas Mann while treating recent German history as a florid nasty joke.

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Series

7. DISHONORED

Fassbinder’s Top 10

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4. FLAMINGO ROAD

Josef von Sternberg / 1931 35mm / 91 minutes

Michael Curtiz / 1949 35mm / 94 mins

Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg were one of the great actor-director pairs in movie history; through his lens she became an icon of startling depth and charisma.

In Dishonored, one of their most mesmerizing collaborations, Dietrich plays a Mata Hari-esque spy for the Austrian Secret Service tasked with gathering information on the Russians during World War I. Outrageous plotting, high chiaroscuro style, and the star’s earthy sensuality mark this unforgettable pre-code treasure.

Joan Crawford and Michael Curtiz reteamed after their Oscar-winning triumph Mildred Pierce for this underseen yet superb Hollywood melodrama.

Crawford stars as a carnival dancer who gets stranded in a backwater town and enters into an affair with a deputy sheriff controlled by the town’s corrupt political boss, only to find herself drawn into a political turmoil.

6. GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES

Howard Hawks / 1953 35mm / 91 mins

Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell burst onto the screen with blazing colors in this big, brassy musical from preeminent Hollywood wit Howard Hawks. The cooing flirt and the deadpan beauty are a pair of unapologetic gold-diggers and best friends strutting their natural wares on a cruise ship bound for Paris. The height of ironic fifties Technicolor spectacle, Hawks’s film is spangled with delightfully cheeky numbers, including “Two Little Girls from Little Rock”, “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?”, and Monroe’s iconic “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”.

5. SALÒ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM

Pier Paolo Pasolini / 1975 / 35mm / 116 mins The final film from Pier Paolo Pasolini remains one of the most shocking films ever made. Set during fascist Italy’s dark days during World War II, Salò updates writings of Marquis de Sade for a repugnant tale of four wealthy libertines who kidnap a group of teenage boys and girls and enact horrific humiliations and violence upon them. It is a formally and conceptually brilliant, if relentlessly nauseating, portrayal of man’s most debased instincts and the capitalist systems that allow them to thrive.

3. LOLA MONTÈS Max Ophuls / 1955 35mm / 116 mins

Perhaps the great Max Ophuls’s supreme cinematic spectacle, this Technicolor dazzler dramatizes with great panache and intelligence the life of the infamous nineteenthcentury courtesan. While the intricately choreographed photography is always splendid to look at, the film is also one of the most cutting films of its era about the historical treatment of women, its critique leading to an unforgettable final image.

2. THE NAKED AND THE DEAD

Raoul Walsh / 1958 / 35mm / 131 mins Norman Mailer’s breakthrough best seller, based on his own experiences in the Pacific during World War II, became a powerful film in the hands of the brilliant Hollywood workhorse Raoul Walsh. Shot in ‘scope and Technicolor on location in Panama, and featuring music by Bernard Herrmann, The Naked and the Dead follows a platoon on a reconnaissance mission, focusing on two different men, a hardened sergeant (Aldo Ray) and an idealistic lieutenant (Cliff Robertson).

1. THE DAMNED

Luchino Visconti / 1969 / 35mm / 156 mins Few filmmakers have been able to capture the terror and deceptive seductiveness of Nazi decadence like Luchino Visconti in his grand, scary, yet utterly irreverent chronicle of an incestuous German industrialist family as the Third Reich rises to power. Perched on the border between weighty melodrama and crass camp, Visconti’s film echoes the epic domestic dramas of Thomas Mann while treating recent German history as a florid nasty joke.

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65

FASSBINDER: TO LOVE WITHOUT DEMANDS One Week Only APRIL 29

to MAY 5

FASSBINDER: TO LOVE WITHOUT DEMANDS

Christian Braad Thomsen / 2015 / DCP / 106 mins In only sixteen years, Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed forty-four movies— the most impressive single artistic output in cinema. That they were almost all provocative, worthy, and aesthetically daring films makes him all the more astonishing a cinematic figure. In this new documentary, Christian Braad Thomsen, a writer and filmmaker who knew Fassbinder well and followed his career from its controversial beginnings, delves into the life and work of this singular bad-boy artist, starting with incredible footage of Fassbinder winning the grand prize at the 1969 Berlin Film Festival for his debut feature Love Is Colder Than Death—amidst boos and catcalls. Thomsen tells the Fassbinder story via footage from press conferences, rare TV interviews, and conversations with key collaborators, and offers probing analyses of his films, which were always informed by the tumultuous events of his life.

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65

FASSBINDER: TO LOVE WITHOUT DEMANDS One Week Only APRIL 29

to MAY 5

FASSBINDER: TO LOVE WITHOUT DEMANDS

Christian Braad Thomsen / 2015 / DCP / 106 mins In only sixteen years, Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed forty-four movies— the most impressive single artistic output in cinema. That they were almost all provocative, worthy, and aesthetically daring films makes him all the more astonishing a cinematic figure. In this new documentary, Christian Braad Thomsen, a writer and filmmaker who knew Fassbinder well and followed his career from its controversial beginnings, delves into the life and work of this singular bad-boy artist, starting with incredible footage of Fassbinder winning the grand prize at the 1969 Berlin Film Festival for his debut feature Love Is Colder Than Death—amidst boos and catcalls. Thomsen tells the Fassbinder story via footage from press conferences, rare TV interviews, and conversations with key collaborators, and offers probing analyses of his films, which were always informed by the tumultuous events of his life.

Notes

METROGRAPH.COM

Notes

METROGRAPH.COM