Y - JU
NE
MA
No.2
16
CONTENTS
Ravishing Revivals by Phillip Lopate Sin Alas Belladonna of Sadness The Big Bang with James Toback Kill Zone 2 A Weekend with Amy Heckerling Welcome to Metrograph: G to I Kaili Blues Spike Lee’s Dream Double Feature James M. Cain Weekend Old and Improved Magic Mike & Magic Mike XXL on 35mm Brian De Palma The Fits Cosmos Call Her Applebroog plus Three Films by Beth B B Movies: The Films of Beth B & Scott B Studio Ghibli Weekends Right Now, Wrong Then A Separation by Andrew Chan
Calendar program by Jacob Perlin & Aliza Ma
Program edited by Michael Koresky
Design by Studio of annakarlin.com
Founded by Alexander Olch
2 4 5 6 7 8 10 17 18 20 22 26 28 40 41 42 43 44 46 47
CONTENTS
Ravishing Revivals by Phillip Lopate Sin Alas Belladonna of Sadness The Big Bang with James Toback Kill Zone 2 A Weekend with Amy Heckerling Welcome to Metrograph: G to I Kaili Blues Spike Lee’s Dream Double Feature James M. Cain Weekend Old and Improved Magic Mike & Magic Mike XXL on 35mm Brian De Palma The Fits Cosmos Call Her Applebroog plus Three Films by Beth B B Movies: The Films of Beth B & Scott B Studio Ghibli Weekends Right Now, Wrong Then A Separation by Andrew Chan
Calendar program by Jacob Perlin & Aliza Ma
Program edited by Michael Koresky
Design by Studio of annakarlin.com
Founded by Alexander Olch
2 4 5 6 7 8 10 17 18 20 22 26 28 40 41 42 43 44 46 47
Essay
4
RAVISHING REVIVALS
By
PHILLIP LOPATE
Though I consider myself a fairly levelheaded person, not much given to mysticism, I’ve had certain movie experiences that I would say approached the magically sublime. Often they involved revivals of previously unavailable films I was dying to see. Being an incorrigible auteurist, I’ve brought a collector’s passion to my efforts to complete the sets of directors I revere. As most of this hunting took place in the days before VCRs and DVDs, I had to keep an eye out for rare titles popping up at a revival house, film festival, or museum, and then pounce. Usually there would be only one screening of the film. Was my ecstatic response, in the best instances, determined by the picture’s quality or my sense of privilege in catching up with it? Both. I’ve been particularly drawn to earlier works by great filmmakers, before they had created their ripe masterpieces. There is something delicious about retroactively seeing the promise of a mature manner before it has been totally perfected. For instance, when Antonioni’s L’avventura and La notte were all the rage, it became imperative to see the maestro’s apprentice films. I heard that a bootleg print of Le amiche had been smuggled into the U.S. and was to be projected one night at the Charles (a revival house on the Lower East Side, therefore a grungy forerunner of the Metrograph). The film had no subtitles, so a bilingual speaker, stationed to the side with a microphone, translated the dialogue into English seconds after it was uttered in Italian, in a flat monotone intriguingly at odds with the intense drama of alienation, suicide, and careless love being enacted onscreen. It did not hurt that this visually elegant film was adapted from a novel by one of my favorite writers, Cesare Pavese, and was drenched in his alluring melancholy, as was another early work by Antonioni, Story of a Love Affair, which also moved me deeply when I saw it. The New York Film Festival was a reliable source for filling in the gaps in great auteurs’ oeuvres. In this fashion I caught up not only with Antonioni’s bracing, bitter The Lady Without Camellias but also several of Max Ophuls’s stunningly lovely, worldly-wise, 1930s works, such as the romantic, snow-kissed Liebelei (with Magda Schneider, Romy’s mother), the backstage drama Divine, and the starlet tragedy La Signora di tutti, with its exquisite lakeside sequence tracking shot that rivals the water-shore separation scene in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu. Speaking of Mizoguchi, my wife and I were living in Madrid for a year in 1965, after graduating from college, and were poor as church mice but determined to see Princess Yang Kwei-Fei when it showed at the Cinemateca. We had saved our pesetas, only to discover at the box office that the screening had sold out. We lingered at the entrance, crestfallen, until an usher took pity on us and let us in a side-door for free. The titles were just going up as we found places on the carpet steps, and we watched, in thrall to this ravishing color film, not really sure what was going on as we tried to keep up with the fast Spanish subtitles. Curiously, I did not find the film so special when I revisited it years later. It strikes me as a bit too stately, lacking the customary hard edge of Mizoguchi (practically my favorite director), so perhaps this enraptured experience in Madrid can be chalked up to
Phillip Lopate
5
circumstance and youthful exuberance. I did have other enchanted encounters with Mizoguchi years later, as when I saw his first masterpiece, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, and the minor but ineffably affecting Miss Oyu. My most exalted movie experience occurred not in a movie theater at all. I was visiting the Bay Area and dropped in on my friend Tom Luddy, at that time director of the Pacific Film Archives. Tom sometimes let me go through the film cans that happened to be on hand in the PFA archives and pick out something I wanted to see. He would then have the staff projectionist screen it for me, and I would watch it alone, feeling blissfully spoiled. One afternoon I arrived late, and Tom mentioned they had just got in a 16mm subtitled print of Visconti’s Ossessione. Previously unseen in the United States because of a contract dispute (Visconti had never paid for rights to the James M. Cain novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, which he’d freely adapted), Ossessione ranked very high on my wish list. The problem was that the PFA was about to shut down for the night, and I was flying back to New York the next day. To my amazement, Tom kindly let me borrow the print and a 16mm projector. I took them back to my friend Herb Kohl’s house, where I was staying. I lost no time borrowing a sheet from Herb and tacking it against the wall. Threading the projector, my hands trembled, fearful of harming the only print of Ossessione in America. Herb liked movies well enough but was staggered to see the religious reverence and tremulous ardor with which I blocked out the light and set up the proper throw. I invited him to watch it, but he left soon after the first few minutes, pulled away by the swirling life of his children. Those familiar with the film, and its aching, fatalistic rural atmosphere of longing and eroticism, can picture the dusky black-and-white cinematography as it was projected on a wrinkled white sheet. The neorealist acting by Clara Calamai and Massimo Girotti seemed much more modest, believable, and naturalistic than the glamorous stylings of Lana Turner and John Garfield in the Hollywood version of the Cain novel. As I lay on my borrowed single bed, the images transporting me, I was happy beyond belief. Years later, I saw Ossessione again at the New York Film Festival; it was still noble, tragic, and superbly poetic, but I regard the time I saw it on a hanging sheet in Berkeley as the platonic incarnation of the movie. One last memory: it was snowing in a big way in New York, and the public school where I taught was closed for the day. I enticed my friend Peter M. away from his serious, responsible desk job so we could catch The Bad and the Beautiful, which was showing that afternoon as part of a Vincente Minnelli retrospective at the Carnegie Hall Cinema. Midtown had slowed down, there were barely any cars, and people were walking down the middle of the street without fear of being run over; some were even skiing along Seventh Avenue. Nothing could have suited the free holiday spirit more than this half-comic, half-melodramatic, sardonic confection about moviemaking, with Kirk Douglas playing a rat producer and Lana Turner thrusting her chest forward. We surrendered to its charms; we were in heaven. My friend Peter is no more—is indeed, for all I know, in heaven—but I still think back to that matinee as an instance of pure grace. Magic, if you will.
Phillip Lopate’s most recent books are Portrait Inside My Head and To Show and to Tell. He directs the nonfiction program at Columbia University. Ossessione plays at Metrograph on May 29 and 30. See page 21.
Essay
4
RAVISHING REVIVALS
By
PHILLIP LOPATE
Though I consider myself a fairly levelheaded person, not much given to mysticism, I’ve had certain movie experiences that I would say approached the magically sublime. Often they involved revivals of previously unavailable films I was dying to see. Being an incorrigible auteurist, I’ve brought a collector’s passion to my efforts to complete the sets of directors I revere. As most of this hunting took place in the days before VCRs and DVDs, I had to keep an eye out for rare titles popping up at a revival house, film festival, or museum, and then pounce. Usually there would be only one screening of the film. Was my ecstatic response, in the best instances, determined by the picture’s quality or my sense of privilege in catching up with it? Both. I’ve been particularly drawn to earlier works by great filmmakers, before they had created their ripe masterpieces. There is something delicious about retroactively seeing the promise of a mature manner before it has been totally perfected. For instance, when Antonioni’s L’avventura and La notte were all the rage, it became imperative to see the maestro’s apprentice films. I heard that a bootleg print of Le amiche had been smuggled into the U.S. and was to be projected one night at the Charles (a revival house on the Lower East Side, therefore a grungy forerunner of the Metrograph). The film had no subtitles, so a bilingual speaker, stationed to the side with a microphone, translated the dialogue into English seconds after it was uttered in Italian, in a flat monotone intriguingly at odds with the intense drama of alienation, suicide, and careless love being enacted onscreen. It did not hurt that this visually elegant film was adapted from a novel by one of my favorite writers, Cesare Pavese, and was drenched in his alluring melancholy, as was another early work by Antonioni, Story of a Love Affair, which also moved me deeply when I saw it. The New York Film Festival was a reliable source for filling in the gaps in great auteurs’ oeuvres. In this fashion I caught up not only with Antonioni’s bracing, bitter The Lady Without Camellias but also several of Max Ophuls’s stunningly lovely, worldly-wise, 1930s works, such as the romantic, snow-kissed Liebelei (with Magda Schneider, Romy’s mother), the backstage drama Divine, and the starlet tragedy La Signora di tutti, with its exquisite lakeside sequence tracking shot that rivals the water-shore separation scene in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu. Speaking of Mizoguchi, my wife and I were living in Madrid for a year in 1965, after graduating from college, and were poor as church mice but determined to see Princess Yang Kwei-Fei when it showed at the Cinemateca. We had saved our pesetas, only to discover at the box office that the screening had sold out. We lingered at the entrance, crestfallen, until an usher took pity on us and let us in a side-door for free. The titles were just going up as we found places on the carpet steps, and we watched, in thrall to this ravishing color film, not really sure what was going on as we tried to keep up with the fast Spanish subtitles. Curiously, I did not find the film so special when I revisited it years later. It strikes me as a bit too stately, lacking the customary hard edge of Mizoguchi (practically my favorite director), so perhaps this enraptured experience in Madrid can be chalked up to
Phillip Lopate
5
circumstance and youthful exuberance. I did have other enchanted encounters with Mizoguchi years later, as when I saw his first masterpiece, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, and the minor but ineffably affecting Miss Oyu. My most exalted movie experience occurred not in a movie theater at all. I was visiting the Bay Area and dropped in on my friend Tom Luddy, at that time director of the Pacific Film Archives. Tom sometimes let me go through the film cans that happened to be on hand in the PFA archives and pick out something I wanted to see. He would then have the staff projectionist screen it for me, and I would watch it alone, feeling blissfully spoiled. One afternoon I arrived late, and Tom mentioned they had just got in a 16mm subtitled print of Visconti’s Ossessione. Previously unseen in the United States because of a contract dispute (Visconti had never paid for rights to the James M. Cain novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, which he’d freely adapted), Ossessione ranked very high on my wish list. The problem was that the PFA was about to shut down for the night, and I was flying back to New York the next day. To my amazement, Tom kindly let me borrow the print and a 16mm projector. I took them back to my friend Herb Kohl’s house, where I was staying. I lost no time borrowing a sheet from Herb and tacking it against the wall. Threading the projector, my hands trembled, fearful of harming the only print of Ossessione in America. Herb liked movies well enough but was staggered to see the religious reverence and tremulous ardor with which I blocked out the light and set up the proper throw. I invited him to watch it, but he left soon after the first few minutes, pulled away by the swirling life of his children. Those familiar with the film, and its aching, fatalistic rural atmosphere of longing and eroticism, can picture the dusky black-and-white cinematography as it was projected on a wrinkled white sheet. The neorealist acting by Clara Calamai and Massimo Girotti seemed much more modest, believable, and naturalistic than the glamorous stylings of Lana Turner and John Garfield in the Hollywood version of the Cain novel. As I lay on my borrowed single bed, the images transporting me, I was happy beyond belief. Years later, I saw Ossessione again at the New York Film Festival; it was still noble, tragic, and superbly poetic, but I regard the time I saw it on a hanging sheet in Berkeley as the platonic incarnation of the movie. One last memory: it was snowing in a big way in New York, and the public school where I taught was closed for the day. I enticed my friend Peter M. away from his serious, responsible desk job so we could catch The Bad and the Beautiful, which was showing that afternoon as part of a Vincente Minnelli retrospective at the Carnegie Hall Cinema. Midtown had slowed down, there were barely any cars, and people were walking down the middle of the street without fear of being run over; some were even skiing along Seventh Avenue. Nothing could have suited the free holiday spirit more than this half-comic, half-melodramatic, sardonic confection about moviemaking, with Kirk Douglas playing a rat producer and Lana Turner thrusting her chest forward. We surrendered to its charms; we were in heaven. My friend Peter is no more—is indeed, for all I know, in heaven—but I still think back to that matinee as an instance of pure grace. Magic, if you will.
Phillip Lopate’s most recent books are Portrait Inside My Head and To Show and to Tell. He directs the nonfiction program at Columbia University. Ossessione plays at Metrograph on May 29 and 30. See page 21.
6
7
SIN ALAS One Week Only MAY 4 to 10
BELLADONNA OF SADNESS One Week Only
MAY 6 to 12
BELLADONNA OF SADNESS
Eiichi Yamamoto / 1973 / DCP / 93 mins
SIN ALAS
Ben Chace / 2015 / DCP / 90 mins A rare American production shot in Cuba, Sin Alas (Without Wings) comes on the heels of relaxed travel restrictions by the United States government. When the death of a famous ballerina stirs his long-buried emotions, an aging Cuban writer (Carlos Padròn) must reconcile the love and idealism of his youth with the everyday reality of contemporary Havana. Inspired by Jose Luis Borges’s story “The Zahir,” Sin Alas is director Ben Chace’s rapturous follow-up to his Wah Do Dem; the 16mm cinematography by Sean Price Williams (Heaven Knows What, Listen Up Philip) is typically miraculous.
One of the great lost masterpieces of Japanese and adult animation, Belladonna of Sadness has never before been officially released in the U.S. With its horned demons, haunted forests, and explicit eroticism, this mad, swirling, psychedelic light show is equal parts J. R. R. Tolkien and Gustav Klimt. Produced by the godfather of Japanese anime and manga, Osamu Tezuka, and directed by Eiichi Yamamoto, Belladonna—about an innocent young woman who makes a pact with the devil (voiced by Tatsuya Nakadai!) to take revenge on the local lord who raped her on her wedding night—unfolds as a series of spectacular, still watercolor paintings that bleed and twist together. Transgressive and not for the easily offended, Belladonna of Sadness has been newly restored from the original 35mm camera negative and sound elements, and features over eight minutes of footage cut from the original version. A Cinelicious Pics release.
6
7
SIN ALAS One Week Only MAY 4 to 10
BELLADONNA OF SADNESS One Week Only
MAY 6 to 12
BELLADONNA OF SADNESS
Eiichi Yamamoto / 1973 / DCP / 93 mins
SIN ALAS
Ben Chace / 2015 / DCP / 90 mins A rare American production shot in Cuba, Sin Alas (Without Wings) comes on the heels of relaxed travel restrictions by the United States government. When the death of a famous ballerina stirs his long-buried emotions, an aging Cuban writer (Carlos Padròn) must reconcile the love and idealism of his youth with the everyday reality of contemporary Havana. Inspired by Jose Luis Borges’s story “The Zahir,” Sin Alas is director Ben Chace’s rapturous follow-up to his Wah Do Dem; the 16mm cinematography by Sean Price Williams (Heaven Knows What, Listen Up Philip) is typically miraculous.
One of the great lost masterpieces of Japanese and adult animation, Belladonna of Sadness has never before been officially released in the U.S. With its horned demons, haunted forests, and explicit eroticism, this mad, swirling, psychedelic light show is equal parts J. R. R. Tolkien and Gustav Klimt. Produced by the godfather of Japanese anime and manga, Osamu Tezuka, and directed by Eiichi Yamamoto, Belladonna—about an innocent young woman who makes a pact with the devil (voiced by Tatsuya Nakadai!) to take revenge on the local lord who raped her on her wedding night—unfolds as a series of spectacular, still watercolor paintings that bleed and twist together. Transgressive and not for the easily offended, Belladonna of Sadness has been newly restored from the original 35mm camera negative and sound elements, and features over eight minutes of footage cut from the original version. A Cinelicious Pics release.
8
9
THE BIG BANG One Night Only
MAY 2
KILL ZONE 2
One Week Only MAY 13 to 19
THE BIG BANG
James Toback / 1989 / 35mm / 81 mins Screening in a recently unearthed 35mm print, James Toback’s long-unavailable The Big Bang is a study of New Yorkers, most of them the director’s friends and acquaintances, at the end of the eighties. After a hilarious opening scene with Toback pitching the film to a potential investor and theorizing that the creation of the universe was, in fact, a divine orgasm, the film plunges into a series of interviews on a wide range of subjects (per the film’s subtitle, “Sex, Life and the Cosmos”). The people onscreen are all identified initially by profession (the astronomer, the medical student, the filmmaker, the restaurateur, the gangster, the basketball star), many of them recognizable (Elaine Kaufman, Darryl Dawkins, Don Simpson, José Torres, Tony Sirico), others not, yet all engaging under Toback’s questioning. Somehow, Toback manages to synthesize all this into an effortless, evenly pitched analysis of the concerns of the modern world. � Followed by a Q&A with James Toback and James Wolcott, Contributing Editor and Columnist, Vanity Fair.
KILL ZONE 2 殺破狼2
Pou-soi Cheang / 2015 / DCP / 120 mins Winner for best action choreography at last year’s Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan, this over-the-top, wildly entertaining thriller features action superstars Tony Jaa (out of retirement after a stint as a Buddhist monk!) and Zhang Jin in a breakneck series of inventive, astonishingly choreographed, bone-crunching set pieces. Directed by Pou-soi Cheang, a longtime collaborator of Johnnie To, this giddy follow-up (not sequel) to the modern martial arts epic Kill Zone is a frenetic symphony of dirty cops, prison riots, and black-market organ transplants, providing an increasingly rare jolt of pure Hong Kong action cinema, an old-school cops-and-robbers chase movie with a twenty-first-century polish. A Well Go USA release.
8
9
THE BIG BANG One Night Only
MAY 2
KILL ZONE 2
One Week Only MAY 13 to 19
THE BIG BANG
James Toback / 1989 / 35mm / 81 mins Screening in a recently unearthed 35mm print, James Toback’s long-unavailable The Big Bang is a study of New Yorkers, most of them the director’s friends and acquaintances, at the end of the eighties. After a hilarious opening scene with Toback pitching the film to a potential investor and theorizing that the creation of the universe was, in fact, a divine orgasm, the film plunges into a series of interviews on a wide range of subjects (per the film’s subtitle, “Sex, Life and the Cosmos”). The people onscreen are all identified initially by profession (the astronomer, the medical student, the filmmaker, the restaurateur, the gangster, the basketball star), many of them recognizable (Elaine Kaufman, Darryl Dawkins, Don Simpson, José Torres, Tony Sirico), others not, yet all engaging under Toback’s questioning. Somehow, Toback manages to synthesize all this into an effortless, evenly pitched analysis of the concerns of the modern world. � Followed by a Q&A with James Toback and James Wolcott, Contributing Editor and Columnist, Vanity Fair.
KILL ZONE 2 殺破狼2
Pou-soi Cheang / 2015 / DCP / 120 mins Winner for best action choreography at last year’s Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan, this over-the-top, wildly entertaining thriller features action superstars Tony Jaa (out of retirement after a stint as a Buddhist monk!) and Zhang Jin in a breakneck series of inventive, astonishingly choreographed, bone-crunching set pieces. Directed by Pou-soi Cheang, a longtime collaborator of Johnnie To, this giddy follow-up (not sequel) to the modern martial arts epic Kill Zone is a frenetic symphony of dirty cops, prison riots, and black-market organ transplants, providing an increasingly rare jolt of pure Hong Kong action cinema, an old-school cops-and-robbers chase movie with a twenty-first-century polish. A Well Go USA release.
10
Series
Series
11
FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH 1982 / 35mm / 90 mins
“All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I’m fine.” It’s hard to believe now that Oscar-winner Sean Penn’s career in effect began with his bleach-blond, beyond-chilled-out surfer dude Spicoli. But that’s just one of the pleasures of the witty, frank Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a breakout for both first-time director Heckerling and debut screenwriter Cameron Crowe—who based the script on his experiences going undercover as a high school student in San Diego for Rolling Stone—as well as a wide-ranging cast of newbies: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nicolas Cage, Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, Eric Stoltz, and Forest Whitaker. � May 14: 6pm (Q&A with Amy Heckerling), 8:30pm (intro by Heckerling)
JOHNNY DANGEROUSLY 1984 / 35mm / 90 mins
A WEEKEND WITH AMY HECKERLING MAY 14 & 15
“You shouldn’t hang me on a hook, Johnny. My father hung me on a hook once. Once!” An early vehicle for Michael Keaton and SNL headliner Joe Piscopo, this 1980s classic is a note-perfect parody of 1930s gangster dramas, following Johnny Kelly from good-natured New York City newsboy to career criminal working for the mob. Like a Goodfellas satire before there was ever Goodfellas, Heckerling’s film shows her fleetness with broad, Jerry Lewis–style character comedy, including the indelible film-within-the-film “Your Testicles and You.” � May 14: 4pm
LOOK WHO’S TALKING 1990 / 35mm / 93 mins
“Put me back in!” Bruce Willis is the brilliantly incongruous choice to provide an infant’s voiceover in this charming, hugely successful comedy, starring John Travolta as a sweet-natured taxi driver, Kirstie Alley as the single mom who nearly gives birth in his speeding cab, and George Segal as the womanizing boss who got her in the family way. The first time any of us saw its Beach Boys–accompanied, Fantastic Voyage–like sperm-meets-egg opening, we knew it was a classic. � May 15: 4pm
CLUELESS
1995 / 35mm / 97 mins
From Sean Penn’s blond surfer burnout Spicoli to Alicia Silverstone’s adorable Beverly Hills do-gooder Cher, director Amy Heckerling has introduced some of the most memorable characters in American comedy. But her movies add up to much more than just the now-iconic people at their centers. Her films—including major, generation-defining teenage hits Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless, and slapstick riots like Johnny Dangerously and Look Who’s Talking—are uncommonly intelligent mainstream comedies that are endlessly rewatchable. We’re pleased to welcome Heckerling to the Metrograph for this short retrospective of her boisterous, massively successful, and influential films.
“So what did you do in school today?” “I broke in my purple clogs.” Pampered Beverly Hills good soul Cher plays high school matchmaker in Heckerling’s finger-on-thepulse smash. Anchored by star Alicia Silverstone and a cast of cuties—Paul Rudd, Brittany Murphy, Donald Faison, Stacey Dash, Jeremy Sisto, Breckin Meyer— this has slowly and surely become one of the most beloved and iconic of all teen comedies, full of quotable dialogue and lexicon-entering slang. � May 15: 6pm (Q&A with Amy Heckerling), 8:30pm (intro by Heckerling)
10
Series
Series
11
FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH 1982 / 35mm / 90 mins
“All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I’m fine.” It’s hard to believe now that Oscar-winner Sean Penn’s career in effect began with his bleach-blond, beyond-chilled-out surfer dude Spicoli. But that’s just one of the pleasures of the witty, frank Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a breakout for both first-time director Heckerling and debut screenwriter Cameron Crowe—who based the script on his experiences going undercover as a high school student in San Diego for Rolling Stone—as well as a wide-ranging cast of newbies: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nicolas Cage, Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, Eric Stoltz, and Forest Whitaker. � May 14: 6pm (Q&A with Amy Heckerling), 8:30pm (intro by Heckerling)
JOHNNY DANGEROUSLY 1984 / 35mm / 90 mins
A WEEKEND WITH AMY HECKERLING MAY 14 & 15
“You shouldn’t hang me on a hook, Johnny. My father hung me on a hook once. Once!” An early vehicle for Michael Keaton and SNL headliner Joe Piscopo, this 1980s classic is a note-perfect parody of 1930s gangster dramas, following Johnny Kelly from good-natured New York City newsboy to career criminal working for the mob. Like a Goodfellas satire before there was ever Goodfellas, Heckerling’s film shows her fleetness with broad, Jerry Lewis–style character comedy, including the indelible film-within-the-film “Your Testicles and You.” � May 14: 4pm
LOOK WHO’S TALKING 1990 / 35mm / 93 mins
“Put me back in!” Bruce Willis is the brilliantly incongruous choice to provide an infant’s voiceover in this charming, hugely successful comedy, starring John Travolta as a sweet-natured taxi driver, Kirstie Alley as the single mom who nearly gives birth in his speeding cab, and George Segal as the womanizing boss who got her in the family way. The first time any of us saw its Beach Boys–accompanied, Fantastic Voyage–like sperm-meets-egg opening, we knew it was a classic. � May 15: 4pm
CLUELESS
1995 / 35mm / 97 mins
From Sean Penn’s blond surfer burnout Spicoli to Alicia Silverstone’s adorable Beverly Hills do-gooder Cher, director Amy Heckerling has introduced some of the most memorable characters in American comedy. But her movies add up to much more than just the now-iconic people at their centers. Her films—including major, generation-defining teenage hits Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless, and slapstick riots like Johnny Dangerously and Look Who’s Talking—are uncommonly intelligent mainstream comedies that are endlessly rewatchable. We’re pleased to welcome Heckerling to the Metrograph for this short retrospective of her boisterous, massively successful, and influential films.
“So what did you do in school today?” “I broke in my purple clogs.” Pampered Beverly Hills good soul Cher plays high school matchmaker in Heckerling’s finger-on-thepulse smash. Anchored by star Alicia Silverstone and a cast of cuties—Paul Rudd, Brittany Murphy, Donald Faison, Stacey Dash, Jeremy Sisto, Breckin Meyer— this has slowly and surely become one of the most beloved and iconic of all teen comedies, full of quotable dialogue and lexicon-entering slang. � May 15: 6pm (Q&A with Amy Heckerling), 8:30pm (intro by Heckerling)
12
Series
WELCOME TO METROGRAPH
13
At Metrograph, you will experience all kinds of movies. What will unite them is—simply—that we believe in them, and we think they’re films you should see. This is the second installment in Welcome to Metrograph A to Z, a year-long, alphabetically ordered series offering films we consider must-sees; a pinnacle of a filmmaker’s career or an overlooked, demands-reconsideration masterpiece. These are films we couldn’t wait to show, so we had to create a series to justify it. Check metrograph.com for dates and showtimes.
G
THE GAUNTLET
Clint Eastwood / 1977 35mm / 109 mins In his long and formidable career as a director, Clint Eastwood has made numerous poetic, dark films about the nature of violence. He also made this rip-roaring road picture, a symphony of tangled metal and screwball repartee with Eastwood as a pissed-off, alcoholic cop assigned to escort a tough-as-nails hooker (played by his then-wife, Sondra Locke) from Vegas to Phoenix, where she’s a key witness in a mob trial. The simple trip becomes a death-defying pursuit, culminating in cinema’s ultimate bus hijacking.
TO
GILDA
I
MAY 6
to JUNE 5
Charles Vidor / 1946 35mm / 110 mins Doffing one black satin glove at a time, Rita Hayworth officially became a Hollywood icon as eye-meltingly beautiful showgirl and caged wife Gilda, “putting the blame on Mame,” singing and wiggling at the Buenos Aires casino owned by her shady crime boss husband, played by George Macready (who uses his “little friend” long before Tony Montana ever did). But no one gets to her more than ex-flame Glenn Ford, just hired as Macready’s henchman. This nasty love triangle forms the heart of Charles Vidor’s essential Hollywood noir. 35mm preservation print courtesy UCLA FIlm & Television Archive.
GIMME SHELTER
Albert Maysles, David Maysles & Charlotte Zwerin / 1970 / 35mm / 91 mins The Maysles’ record of the Rolling Stones’ infamous Altamont Speedway show in December 1969 is so much more than a concert film (though it’s an astonishingly brilliant one): it’s an epochal work and one of the great documentaries of all time, capturing a culture on the edge at the tail end of a tumultuous, violent decade. And of course there’s strutting, swaggering Mick, strutting across the stage to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Brown Sugar,” “Street Fighting Man,” and many more.
12
Series
WELCOME TO METROGRAPH
13
At Metrograph, you will experience all kinds of movies. What will unite them is—simply—that we believe in them, and we think they’re films you should see. This is the second installment in Welcome to Metrograph A to Z, a year-long, alphabetically ordered series offering films we consider must-sees; a pinnacle of a filmmaker’s career or an overlooked, demands-reconsideration masterpiece. These are films we couldn’t wait to show, so we had to create a series to justify it. Check metrograph.com for dates and showtimes.
G
THE GAUNTLET
Clint Eastwood / 1977 35mm / 109 mins In his long and formidable career as a director, Clint Eastwood has made numerous poetic, dark films about the nature of violence. He also made this rip-roaring road picture, a symphony of tangled metal and screwball repartee with Eastwood as a pissed-off, alcoholic cop assigned to escort a tough-as-nails hooker (played by his then-wife, Sondra Locke) from Vegas to Phoenix, where she’s a key witness in a mob trial. The simple trip becomes a death-defying pursuit, culminating in cinema’s ultimate bus hijacking.
TO
GILDA
I
MAY 6
to JUNE 5
Charles Vidor / 1946 35mm / 110 mins Doffing one black satin glove at a time, Rita Hayworth officially became a Hollywood icon as eye-meltingly beautiful showgirl and caged wife Gilda, “putting the blame on Mame,” singing and wiggling at the Buenos Aires casino owned by her shady crime boss husband, played by George Macready (who uses his “little friend” long before Tony Montana ever did). But no one gets to her more than ex-flame Glenn Ford, just hired as Macready’s henchman. This nasty love triangle forms the heart of Charles Vidor’s essential Hollywood noir. 35mm preservation print courtesy UCLA FIlm & Television Archive.
GIMME SHELTER
Albert Maysles, David Maysles & Charlotte Zwerin / 1970 / 35mm / 91 mins The Maysles’ record of the Rolling Stones’ infamous Altamont Speedway show in December 1969 is so much more than a concert film (though it’s an astonishingly brilliant one): it’s an epochal work and one of the great documentaries of all time, capturing a culture on the edge at the tail end of a tumultuous, violent decade. And of course there’s strutting, swaggering Mick, strutting across the stage to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Brown Sugar,” “Street Fighting Man,” and many more.
14
Series
HALLELUJAH THE HILLS Adolfas Mekas / 1964 35mm / 82 mins
This landmark of the New American Cinema from its resident prankster announces that rules are only meant to be broken. Mekas’s impassioned movie love is apparent throughout, but it’s just the wrapping on a package entirely his own. Like leading man Peter Beard traipsing naked through the Vermont snow, the film is an act of liberation, for cinema and for the generations of students Mekas taught as chairman of the People’s Film Dept. of Bard College. Ed Halter calls it “a dizzy time capsule of post-revolutionary anarchy, like bits of youth, energetic innocence formed in the snowdrifts of time.” This screening will be introduced by Adolfas Mekas’s widow, Pola Chapelle, on the occasion of the publication of The Adolfas Diaries, Volume 1, and will feature a live reading.
HANNAH AND HER SISTERS Woody Allen / 1986 35mm / 103 mins
“God, she’s beautiful.” That’s horribly sweatered Michael Caine in his least flattering— and maybe best—role, as Elliott, lusting after his sisterin-law Lee (Barbara Hershey), right under the nose of his sweet wife, Hannah (a gentle Mia Farrow). But there’s another sister, Holly (Dianne Wiest), unable to get her life together, and going on the worst date of all time with Hannah’s hypochrondriac ex-husband (Woody himself): to CBGB and the Café Carlyle! (“I had a great evening. It was like the Nuremberg trials”). A joy beginning to end, featuring some of the best SoHo location shots of the eighties and an unforgettably irascible Max von Sydow.
HARD BOILED
John Woo / 1992 / 35mm / 128 mins Essential. This Hong Kong action spectacular—the last film Woo made in Hong Kong before coming for a spell to Hollywood—stars Chow Yun-Fat as a seen-it-all detective named “Tequila” navigating the underworld of the territory’s gangster triads, and Tony Leung as an undercover agent and his reluctant partner. Pure visual poetry, Hard Boiled is a masterpiece of balletic choreography from one of the most innovative action filmmakers who ever lived.
Welcome to Metrograph: G to I
15
HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER’S APOCALYPSE Fax Bahr & George Hickenlooper / 1991 / 35mm / 96 mins
The ultimate documentary chronicle of the making of a film, charting the disastrous production of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in the Philippines in the 1970s. Said Coppola: “My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.”
HEAT
Michael Mann / 1995 35mm /170 mins “There is a flip side to that coin.” Mann’s L.A. action epic stars Robert De Niro as a career thief and Al Pacino as the detective long on his trail. A masterpiece of mood and atmosphere, punctuated by brilliant action sequences, including one of the most elaborately choreographed and realistic heists in American film, Heat is among the very best Hollywood films of the 1990s.
HIBISCUS TOWN 芙蓉镇
Xie Jin / 1986 / 35mm / 164 mins Hugely popular Third Generation filmmaker Xie Jin’s sweeping, classic melodrama of Chinese cinema is an epic narrative about a young woman and her husband trying to find happiness amidst rural poverty, and who find themselves caught up in the country’s Cultural Revolution of the Maoist late sixties. The film was significantly cut for international release, but we are pleased to present the original director’s cut.
HIGH AND LOW
Akira Kurosawa / 1963 / 35mm / 143 mins The staggering formal genius of Kurosawa is on full display in this tense kidnapping thriller based on an Ed McBain novel and set in contemporary Japan, starring Toshiro Mifune as a rich industrialist thrown into a nerve-shredding situation, first believing his son has been kidnapped, only to discover it was his chauffeur’s child. Enveloping extended set pieces, visual geometric precision, and unique narrative structure make High & Low a gripping suspense classic, and a cutting take on Japan’s wide economic disparity.
14
Series
HALLELUJAH THE HILLS Adolfas Mekas / 1964 35mm / 82 mins
This landmark of the New American Cinema from its resident prankster announces that rules are only meant to be broken. Mekas’s impassioned movie love is apparent throughout, but it’s just the wrapping on a package entirely his own. Like leading man Peter Beard traipsing naked through the Vermont snow, the film is an act of liberation, for cinema and for the generations of students Mekas taught as chairman of the People’s Film Dept. of Bard College. Ed Halter calls it “a dizzy time capsule of post-revolutionary anarchy, like bits of youth, energetic innocence formed in the snowdrifts of time.” This screening will be introduced by Adolfas Mekas’s widow, Pola Chapelle, on the occasion of the publication of The Adolfas Diaries, Volume 1, and will feature a live reading.
HANNAH AND HER SISTERS Woody Allen / 1986 35mm / 103 mins
“God, she’s beautiful.” That’s horribly sweatered Michael Caine in his least flattering— and maybe best—role, as Elliott, lusting after his sisterin-law Lee (Barbara Hershey), right under the nose of his sweet wife, Hannah (a gentle Mia Farrow). But there’s another sister, Holly (Dianne Wiest), unable to get her life together, and going on the worst date of all time with Hannah’s hypochrondriac ex-husband (Woody himself): to CBGB and the Café Carlyle! (“I had a great evening. It was like the Nuremberg trials”). A joy beginning to end, featuring some of the best SoHo location shots of the eighties and an unforgettably irascible Max von Sydow.
HARD BOILED
John Woo / 1992 / 35mm / 128 mins Essential. This Hong Kong action spectacular—the last film Woo made in Hong Kong before coming for a spell to Hollywood—stars Chow Yun-Fat as a seen-it-all detective named “Tequila” navigating the underworld of the territory’s gangster triads, and Tony Leung as an undercover agent and his reluctant partner. Pure visual poetry, Hard Boiled is a masterpiece of balletic choreography from one of the most innovative action filmmakers who ever lived.
Welcome to Metrograph: G to I
15
HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER’S APOCALYPSE Fax Bahr & George Hickenlooper / 1991 / 35mm / 96 mins
The ultimate documentary chronicle of the making of a film, charting the disastrous production of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in the Philippines in the 1970s. Said Coppola: “My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.”
HEAT
Michael Mann / 1995 35mm /170 mins “There is a flip side to that coin.” Mann’s L.A. action epic stars Robert De Niro as a career thief and Al Pacino as the detective long on his trail. A masterpiece of mood and atmosphere, punctuated by brilliant action sequences, including one of the most elaborately choreographed and realistic heists in American film, Heat is among the very best Hollywood films of the 1990s.
HIBISCUS TOWN 芙蓉镇
Xie Jin / 1986 / 35mm / 164 mins Hugely popular Third Generation filmmaker Xie Jin’s sweeping, classic melodrama of Chinese cinema is an epic narrative about a young woman and her husband trying to find happiness amidst rural poverty, and who find themselves caught up in the country’s Cultural Revolution of the Maoist late sixties. The film was significantly cut for international release, but we are pleased to present the original director’s cut.
HIGH AND LOW
Akira Kurosawa / 1963 / 35mm / 143 mins The staggering formal genius of Kurosawa is on full display in this tense kidnapping thriller based on an Ed McBain novel and set in contemporary Japan, starring Toshiro Mifune as a rich industrialist thrown into a nerve-shredding situation, first believing his son has been kidnapped, only to discover it was his chauffeur’s child. Enveloping extended set pieces, visual geometric precision, and unique narrative structure make High & Low a gripping suspense classic, and a cutting take on Japan’s wide economic disparity.
16
Series
HOLLYWOOD OR BUST Frank Tashlin / 1956 35mm / 95 mins
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis play, respectively, a gambler and an Anita Ekberg– loving movie geek who both accidentally win the same car in a raffle and end up taking an unlikely cross-country road trip side by side. Cartoonist-turned-filmmaker Frank Tashlin’s comedy was Martin and Lewis’ final movie together, and it’s as delightfully sardonic as any of their films, even if, according to Lewis, the two stars didn’t speak to each other between takes. There is also a dog that drives a car.
HORSE THIEF 盜馬賊
Tian Zhuangzhuang / 1986 / 35mm / 88 mins Martin Scorsese’s choice as the best film of the 1990s (though made in the 1980s, it wasn’t widely seen in the United States until early the next decade), Horse Thief is a remarkable work of realism. Filmed in Tibet by Fifth Generation Chinese director Tian Zhuangzhuang, it’s the simple story of a man who must steal horses so he can make money to keep his family alive. Taking you deep inside a particular cultural way of life, the film, is according to Scorsese, “that rare thing: a genuinely transcendental film.”
HUSBANDS
John Cassavetes / 1970 35mm / 131 mins Maximum-impact Cassavetes. The director-star pushes his actors and cinematic techniques to the extreme in this account of three married suburban New York dads— Cassavetes and two of his standbys, Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk—who, after reuniting following a friend’s funeral, leave their wives and kids for a brutally masculine weekend of binge-drinking and roughhousing. The rowdiest of all the writer-director’s films, Husbands brilliantly blurs the line between reality and performance.
Welcome to Metrograph: G to I
17
I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE
Pat Hartley & Dick Fontaine 1982 / Digital / 95 mins James Baldwin retraces his time in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, reflecting with his trademark brilliance and insight on the passage of more than two decades. From Selma and Birmingham and Atlanta; to the battleground beaches of St. Augustine, Florida, with Chinua Achebe; and back north for a visit to Newark with Amiri Baraka, Baldwin lays bare the fiction of progress in post–Civil Rights America, wondering “what happened to the children” and those “who did not die, but whose lives were smashed on Freedom Road.”
IMITATION OF LIFE Douglas Sirk / 1959 35mm / 125 mins
Sirk’s supreme tearjerker, this stealth investigation into race in America takes the form of a deceptively glossy melodrama, with bottleblonde Lana Turner as Lora, a single mother trying to raise a daughter and start an acting career. But as the film unfolds with Sirk’s usual visual splendor, he undercuts his own main narrative, focusing more intently on the fraught relationship between Lora’s African-American maid, Annie, and her mixed-race daughter, Sarah Jane, played by Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner in Oscar-nominated roles. Still potent, Imitation of Life is a subversive Hollywood masterpiece that brought the fifties to a close with a devastating wail—literally ending with a mournful spiritual by Mahalia Jackson.
IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS Rainer Werner Fassbinder 1978 / 35mm / 124 mins
Fassbinder’s most magnificently brutal film is the devastating story of an alienated, melancholy transsexual, Elvira (Volker Spengler), struggling to make sense of her life in contemporary West Germany after the dissolution of a relationship. In a Year of 13 Moons is a ravishing, raw depiction of existential human suffering as only Fassbinder could craft—featuring an unforgettable visit to an abattoir—and a major work in the wildly prolific director’s career. Courtesy TIFF Film Reference Library.
16
Series
HOLLYWOOD OR BUST Frank Tashlin / 1956 35mm / 95 mins
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis play, respectively, a gambler and an Anita Ekberg– loving movie geek who both accidentally win the same car in a raffle and end up taking an unlikely cross-country road trip side by side. Cartoonist-turned-filmmaker Frank Tashlin’s comedy was Martin and Lewis’ final movie together, and it’s as delightfully sardonic as any of their films, even if, according to Lewis, the two stars didn’t speak to each other between takes. There is also a dog that drives a car.
HORSE THIEF 盜馬賊
Tian Zhuangzhuang / 1986 / 35mm / 88 mins Martin Scorsese’s choice as the best film of the 1990s (though made in the 1980s, it wasn’t widely seen in the United States until early the next decade), Horse Thief is a remarkable work of realism. Filmed in Tibet by Fifth Generation Chinese director Tian Zhuangzhuang, it’s the simple story of a man who must steal horses so he can make money to keep his family alive. Taking you deep inside a particular cultural way of life, the film, is according to Scorsese, “that rare thing: a genuinely transcendental film.”
HUSBANDS
John Cassavetes / 1970 35mm / 131 mins Maximum-impact Cassavetes. The director-star pushes his actors and cinematic techniques to the extreme in this account of three married suburban New York dads— Cassavetes and two of his standbys, Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk—who, after reuniting following a friend’s funeral, leave their wives and kids for a brutally masculine weekend of binge-drinking and roughhousing. The rowdiest of all the writer-director’s films, Husbands brilliantly blurs the line between reality and performance.
Welcome to Metrograph: G to I
17
I HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE
Pat Hartley & Dick Fontaine 1982 / Digital / 95 mins James Baldwin retraces his time in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, reflecting with his trademark brilliance and insight on the passage of more than two decades. From Selma and Birmingham and Atlanta; to the battleground beaches of St. Augustine, Florida, with Chinua Achebe; and back north for a visit to Newark with Amiri Baraka, Baldwin lays bare the fiction of progress in post–Civil Rights America, wondering “what happened to the children” and those “who did not die, but whose lives were smashed on Freedom Road.”
IMITATION OF LIFE Douglas Sirk / 1959 35mm / 125 mins
Sirk’s supreme tearjerker, this stealth investigation into race in America takes the form of a deceptively glossy melodrama, with bottleblonde Lana Turner as Lora, a single mother trying to raise a daughter and start an acting career. But as the film unfolds with Sirk’s usual visual splendor, he undercuts his own main narrative, focusing more intently on the fraught relationship between Lora’s African-American maid, Annie, and her mixed-race daughter, Sarah Jane, played by Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner in Oscar-nominated roles. Still potent, Imitation of Life is a subversive Hollywood masterpiece that brought the fifties to a close with a devastating wail—literally ending with a mournful spiritual by Mahalia Jackson.
IN A YEAR OF 13 MOONS Rainer Werner Fassbinder 1978 / 35mm / 124 mins
Fassbinder’s most magnificently brutal film is the devastating story of an alienated, melancholy transsexual, Elvira (Volker Spengler), struggling to make sense of her life in contemporary West Germany after the dissolution of a relationship. In a Year of 13 Moons is a ravishing, raw depiction of existential human suffering as only Fassbinder could craft—featuring an unforgettable visit to an abattoir—and a major work in the wildly prolific director’s career. Courtesy TIFF Film Reference Library.
18
Series
Welcome to Metrograph: G to I
19
THE INNER SCAR (LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE) Philippe Garrel / 1972 35mm / 95 mins
“Features Pierre Clementi (nude) and the Andy Warhol superstar Nico (dressed in a loose robe), and a few others, including Philippe Garrel. Clementi speaks French; Nico sometimes complains in English and sometimes declaims in German verse, and sometimes sings for musical background on the soundtrack. There are no subtitles.” — New York Times, 1972. “One mustn’t ask yourself questions while watching . . . it should be watched for pleasure, as one can take pleasure from walking in the desert.” — Philippe Garrel “Personally, I find this film a masterpiece. A total masterpiece. I can’t explain it.” — Henri Langlois
L’INTRUS
Claire Denis / 2004 / 35mm / 130 mins In the most ambitious and haunting film from Claire Denis, one of the world’s foremost living filmmakers, an elderly man with many regrets about his past leaves his hermetic cabin existence in the snowy Alps for Korea and then Tahiti, in search of both a heart transplant and the estranged son he hasn’t seen in years. Featuring dreamlike camerawork and editing, and a lot of feral dogs, L’Intrus (The Intruder) pushes Denis’s elliptical style to the extreme, transforming the logic and laws of narrative, creating what can be best described as the Claire Denis film.
KAILI BLUES
One Week Only MAY 20 to 27
IT’S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly 1955 / 35mm / 102 mins
Among the most colorful, energetic, and downright crazy of the golden-age MGM musicals produced by the Arthur Freed Unit, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s codirectorial follow-up to Singin’ in the Rain is an exuberantly funny, dance-filled comedy about three former soldiers—Kelly, Dan Dailey, and choreographer extraordinaire Michael Kidd—who reunite ten years after the war to find each other’s lives dramatically changed. Cyd Charisse kicking up her heels at a sweaty boxing gym is only topped by the three men’s jaw-dropping trashcan-lid dance, which is in turn outdone by Gene Kelly on roller skates.
KAILI BLUES 路边野餐
Bi Gan / 2016 / DCP / 113 mins Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan’s brilliant directorial debut—which collected prizes at the Locarno Film Festival and recently screened at New York’s New Directors/ New Films festival—is an audacious work that announces a major new filmmaking talent. Country doctor Chen Sheng sets out on a train journey to search for his brother’s abandoned child, only to find himself in a dreamlike world where the boundaries between past, present, and future—and between fantasy and reality—are porous. This remarkable visual achievement, which feels as singular and alien as the films of the great Apichatpong Weerasethakul, was shot in the mining village Kaili, the director’s birthplace, and incorporates poetry he has been writing since he was a teenager. A Grasshopper Film release
18
Series
Welcome to Metrograph: G to I
19
THE INNER SCAR (LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE) Philippe Garrel / 1972 35mm / 95 mins
“Features Pierre Clementi (nude) and the Andy Warhol superstar Nico (dressed in a loose robe), and a few others, including Philippe Garrel. Clementi speaks French; Nico sometimes complains in English and sometimes declaims in German verse, and sometimes sings for musical background on the soundtrack. There are no subtitles.” — New York Times, 1972. “One mustn’t ask yourself questions while watching . . . it should be watched for pleasure, as one can take pleasure from walking in the desert.” — Philippe Garrel “Personally, I find this film a masterpiece. A total masterpiece. I can’t explain it.” — Henri Langlois
L’INTRUS
Claire Denis / 2004 / 35mm / 130 mins In the most ambitious and haunting film from Claire Denis, one of the world’s foremost living filmmakers, an elderly man with many regrets about his past leaves his hermetic cabin existence in the snowy Alps for Korea and then Tahiti, in search of both a heart transplant and the estranged son he hasn’t seen in years. Featuring dreamlike camerawork and editing, and a lot of feral dogs, L’Intrus (The Intruder) pushes Denis’s elliptical style to the extreme, transforming the logic and laws of narrative, creating what can be best described as the Claire Denis film.
KAILI BLUES
One Week Only MAY 20 to 27
IT’S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly 1955 / 35mm / 102 mins
Among the most colorful, energetic, and downright crazy of the golden-age MGM musicals produced by the Arthur Freed Unit, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s codirectorial follow-up to Singin’ in the Rain is an exuberantly funny, dance-filled comedy about three former soldiers—Kelly, Dan Dailey, and choreographer extraordinaire Michael Kidd—who reunite ten years after the war to find each other’s lives dramatically changed. Cyd Charisse kicking up her heels at a sweaty boxing gym is only topped by the three men’s jaw-dropping trashcan-lid dance, which is in turn outdone by Gene Kelly on roller skates.
KAILI BLUES 路边野餐
Bi Gan / 2016 / DCP / 113 mins Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan’s brilliant directorial debut—which collected prizes at the Locarno Film Festival and recently screened at New York’s New Directors/ New Films festival—is an audacious work that announces a major new filmmaking talent. Country doctor Chen Sheng sets out on a train journey to search for his brother’s abandoned child, only to find himself in a dreamlike world where the boundaries between past, present, and future—and between fantasy and reality—are porous. This remarkable visual achievement, which feels as singular and alien as the films of the great Apichatpong Weerasethakul, was shot in the mining village Kaili, the director’s birthplace, and incorporates poetry he has been writing since he was a teenager. A Grasshopper Film release
Event
20
SPIKE LEE’S DREAM DOUBLE FEATURE ELECTION YEAR EDITION
MAY 21
Spike Lee’s Dream Double Feature
21
In the second edition of our recurring special event in which artists select two films to show together in a special program, Spike Lee chooses a pair of searing Hollywood satires, particularly relevant in this election year. Ace in the Hole and A Face in the Crowd are both exhilaratingly tough works about American politics and the media. Spike Lee will be on hand to introduce these films, as well as his documentary short about the 2000 presidential election, We Wuz Robbed. � Introduced by Spike Lee.
ACE IN THE HOLE
A FACE IN THE CROWD
As cynical as movies get, and all the better for it: Billy Wilder’s follow-up to Sunset Boulevard was this even darker film starring Kirk Douglas as a wildly unscrupulous big-city reporter stuck in Albuquerque whose coverage of a local mine collapse crosses the line into amorality. But everyone is culpable in this prescient satire of the media circus.
In this blistering American drama from Elia Kazan, a charismatic drifter (Andy Griffith) goes from unknown Arkansas folk singer to radio discovery to national political superstar. Ruthlessly dissecting how easily and frighteningly celebrity can segue into demagoguery, the film is proof that the most outlandish fiction will eventually become reality.
Billy Wilder / 1951 / 35mm / 111 mins
Elia Kazan / 1957 / 35mm / 125 mins
Event
20
SPIKE LEE’S DREAM DOUBLE FEATURE ELECTION YEAR EDITION
MAY 21
Spike Lee’s Dream Double Feature
21
In the second edition of our recurring special event in which artists select two films to show together in a special program, Spike Lee chooses a pair of searing Hollywood satires, particularly relevant in this election year. Ace in the Hole and A Face in the Crowd are both exhilaratingly tough works about American politics and the media. Spike Lee will be on hand to introduce these films, as well as his documentary short about the 2000 presidential election, We Wuz Robbed. � Introduced by Spike Lee.
ACE IN THE HOLE
A FACE IN THE CROWD
As cynical as movies get, and all the better for it: Billy Wilder’s follow-up to Sunset Boulevard was this even darker film starring Kirk Douglas as a wildly unscrupulous big-city reporter stuck in Albuquerque whose coverage of a local mine collapse crosses the line into amorality. But everyone is culpable in this prescient satire of the media circus.
In this blistering American drama from Elia Kazan, a charismatic drifter (Andy Griffith) goes from unknown Arkansas folk singer to radio discovery to national political superstar. Ruthlessly dissecting how easily and frighteningly celebrity can segue into demagoguery, the film is proof that the most outlandish fiction will eventually become reality.
Billy Wilder / 1951 / 35mm / 111 mins
Elia Kazan / 1957 / 35mm / 125 mins
22
Series
23
Three classic films adapted from books by the legendary author James M. Cain, the versatile writer mostly remembered for his hardboiled fiction, and whose writings inspired essential landmarks of film noir in the forties and beyond. Check metrograph.com for showtimes.
OSSESSIONE
Luchino Visconto / 1943 35mm / 140 mins Rare imported archival print from Cinecittá! One of the most sensual films ever made, this earthy adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice was the groundbreaking film that introduced the world to Luchino Visconti. Massimo Girotti drips sex appeal as a handsome drifter who enters into an affair with a married woman (Clara Calamai); soon the two hatch a plan to murder her restaurant-owner husband. With the attention paid to its characters’ daily lives and the detailed depiction of the rural Italy landscape, Ossessione is considered an important precursor to the Italian neorealist movement that would change cinema forever.
DOUBLE INDEMNITY Billy Wilder / 1944 35mm / 107 mins
JAMES M. CAIN WEEKEND
Fred MacMurray is rotten, but Barbara Stanwyck is a little more rotten in Billy Wilder’s masterpiece of double entendres and crosses, the nasty number that all but kickstarted that thing called noir in America. Double Indemnity features a script cowritten by Wilder and Raymond Chandler from a novel by James M. Cain and more hard-boiled back-and-forth banter than you can shake a stick at, baby.
MILDRED PIERCE
MAY 29 & 30
Michael Curtiz / 1945 / 35mm / 111 mins Joan Crawford won an Oscar for her career-defining turn as a divorcee who tries to reconstruct her life by opening a restaurant, yet is saddled with the world’s worst daughter, Veda, played by a wicked Ann Blyth. Curtiz transformed James M. Cain’s character-driven, realist novel into a crime drama par excellence and an atypically domestic example of forties Hollywood noir.
22
Series
23
Three classic films adapted from books by the legendary author James M. Cain, the versatile writer mostly remembered for his hardboiled fiction, and whose writings inspired essential landmarks of film noir in the forties and beyond. Check metrograph.com for showtimes.
OSSESSIONE
Luchino Visconto / 1943 35mm / 140 mins Rare imported archival print from Cinecittá! One of the most sensual films ever made, this earthy adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice was the groundbreaking film that introduced the world to Luchino Visconti. Massimo Girotti drips sex appeal as a handsome drifter who enters into an affair with a married woman (Clara Calamai); soon the two hatch a plan to murder her restaurant-owner husband. With the attention paid to its characters’ daily lives and the detailed depiction of the rural Italy landscape, Ossessione is considered an important precursor to the Italian neorealist movement that would change cinema forever.
DOUBLE INDEMNITY Billy Wilder / 1944 35mm / 107 mins
JAMES M. CAIN WEEKEND
Fred MacMurray is rotten, but Barbara Stanwyck is a little more rotten in Billy Wilder’s masterpiece of double entendres and crosses, the nasty number that all but kickstarted that thing called noir in America. Double Indemnity features a script cowritten by Wilder and Raymond Chandler from a novel by James M. Cain and more hard-boiled back-and-forth banter than you can shake a stick at, baby.
MILDRED PIERCE
MAY 29 & 30
Michael Curtiz / 1945 / 35mm / 111 mins Joan Crawford won an Oscar for her career-defining turn as a divorcee who tries to reconstruct her life by opening a restaurant, yet is saddled with the world’s worst daughter, Veda, played by a wicked Ann Blyth. Curtiz transformed James M. Cain’s character-driven, realist novel into a crime drama par excellence and an atypically domestic example of forties Hollywood noir.
Series
24
25
Every Sunday, we’re pleased to present a recent or brand new restoration or preservation. In some cases, these screenings mark the first times these prints have been shown to the public.
ASHES AND EMBERS Haile Gerima / 1982 DCP / 120 mins
This searing drama by the crucial, brilliant Ethiopianborn filmmaker Haile Gerima (Bush Mama) concerns a disillusioned Vietnam veteran who leaves Washington and his politically committed girlfriend for Los Angeles, where he gets into trouble with the law. A landmark independent film of the 1980s, and a cornerstone work of the movement of UCLA filmmakers now known as the L.A. Rebellion. New restoration from Array. May 1
1:00 pm
DEAD RINGERS
David Cronenberg / 1988 35mm / 116 mins
OLD & IMPROVED MAY 1
to JUNE 26
In Cronenberg’s cold-to-thetouch tale of sexual perversion and paranoia, Jeremy Irons and Jeremy Irons creepily inhabit a pair of identical twin gynecologists whose perfectly chilling little existence is interrupted by the arrival of a new patient, played by Genevieve Bujold. Print courtesy TIFF Film Reference Library. May 8 May 9
1:00 pm 9:30 pm
Series
24
25
Every Sunday, we’re pleased to present a recent or brand new restoration or preservation. In some cases, these screenings mark the first times these prints have been shown to the public.
ASHES AND EMBERS Haile Gerima / 1982 DCP / 120 mins
This searing drama by the crucial, brilliant Ethiopianborn filmmaker Haile Gerima (Bush Mama) concerns a disillusioned Vietnam veteran who leaves Washington and his politically committed girlfriend for Los Angeles, where he gets into trouble with the law. A landmark independent film of the 1980s, and a cornerstone work of the movement of UCLA filmmakers now known as the L.A. Rebellion. New restoration from Array. May 1
1:00 pm
DEAD RINGERS
David Cronenberg / 1988 35mm / 116 mins
OLD & IMPROVED MAY 1
to JUNE 26
In Cronenberg’s cold-to-thetouch tale of sexual perversion and paranoia, Jeremy Irons and Jeremy Irons creepily inhabit a pair of identical twin gynecologists whose perfectly chilling little existence is interrupted by the arrival of a new patient, played by Genevieve Bujold. Print courtesy TIFF Film Reference Library. May 8 May 9
1:00 pm 9:30 pm
Series
26
JOYCE AT 34
Joyce Chopra / 1972 30 minutes / 16mm
SHORTS FROM NEW YORK’S YOUTH FILM DISTRIBUTION CENTER 1971 / 60 minutes / 16mm
In feminist filmmaker Chopra’s Joyce at 34 (a collaboration with Claudia Weill, who would direct the great Girlfriends), Chopra examines the demands of juggling a baby and a career. In this program we also present 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. All films have been preserved by the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation. Introduction by Elene RossiSnook, Archivist, Reserve Film and Video Collection, The New York Public Library. May 15
1:00 pm
ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN Charles Barton / 1948 / 35mm / 82 mins
The classic horror movie parody, this scarily side-splitting vehicle for Bud Abbott and Lou Costello casts the legendary comedy duo as baggage clerks who receive strange cargo bound for a Florida wax museum: boxes containing the bodies of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster. The Wolf Man and the Invisible Man also make guest appearances in this mega monster mash, which costars Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr., both very game. Preserved by the Library of Congress. May 22
1:00 pm
NOTES FOR AN AFRICAN ORESTEIA
Pier Paolo Pasolini / 1970 35mm / 65 mins Pasolini’s excitingly freeform documentary charts his ambitions to make a film of the Greek tragedy of Orestes in Tanzania and Uganda. In Euripedes’s classic cycle of plays, the director saw metaphorical parallels to African nations that were emerging into independence in the sixties. Restored by Cinetecca di Bologna. May 29
1:00 pm
Old & Improved
27
THE SHORT FILMS OF CHARLES AND RAY EAMES Known primarily for their midcentury modern architecture and furniture designs, the husband and wife team of Charles and Ray Eames were also prolific filmmakers, making 125 experimental, educational, and just plain entertaining shorts over the course of more than thirty years. This showcase offers a selection of their films, preserved by the Library of Congress, including Tocatta for Toy Trains, Information Machine, Day of the Dead, Powers of Ten, Eames Lounge Chair, Smithsonian Institution, and Two Baroque Churches. June 5
1:00 pm
KAPAUKU
Leonard Pospisil / 1955 / 16mm / 64 mins Filmmaker and anthropology professor Leonard Pospisil shot this important ethnographic documentary over the course of thirteen months living in the New Guinea highlands. Considered to be likely the first color film shot in that region, the film documents the first time the Kapauku Papuans ever came into contact with Westerners. Preserved by the Yale Film Archive. June 12
1:00 pm
PARTY HUSBAND
Clarence Badger / 1931 / 35mm / 74 mins This saucy pre-Code comedy pokes fun at the idea of “modern marriage,” following a husband and wife who open up their relationship a bit, only to find that they perhaps are not cut out for easy virtue. A little-known delight, the really, really well titled Party Husband was directed by Clarence Badger, the man behind the incendiary Clara Bow classic It. Preserved by the Library of Congress. June 19
1:00 pm
CORVETTE K-225
Richard Rosson / 1943 / 35mm / 98 mins This World War II–era war action yarn follows a Canadian crew—led by skipper Randolph Scott, still stinging after losing a ship to German U-boats—on convoy patrol to Russia. Rosson and cinematographer Tony Gaudio (Academy Award– nominated for his work here) went to sea for three months during the war to procure background footage. Preserved by the Library of Congress. June 26
1:00 pm
Series
26
JOYCE AT 34
Joyce Chopra / 1972 30 minutes / 16mm
SHORTS FROM NEW YORK’S YOUTH FILM DISTRIBUTION CENTER 1971 / 60 minutes / 16mm
In feminist filmmaker Chopra’s Joyce at 34 (a collaboration with Claudia Weill, who would direct the great Girlfriends), Chopra examines the demands of juggling a baby and a career. In this program we also present 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. All films have been preserved by the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation. Introduction by Elene RossiSnook, Archivist, Reserve Film and Video Collection, The New York Public Library. May 15
1:00 pm
ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN Charles Barton / 1948 / 35mm / 82 mins
The classic horror movie parody, this scarily side-splitting vehicle for Bud Abbott and Lou Costello casts the legendary comedy duo as baggage clerks who receive strange cargo bound for a Florida wax museum: boxes containing the bodies of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster. The Wolf Man and the Invisible Man also make guest appearances in this mega monster mash, which costars Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr., both very game. Preserved by the Library of Congress. May 22
1:00 pm
NOTES FOR AN AFRICAN ORESTEIA
Pier Paolo Pasolini / 1970 35mm / 65 mins Pasolini’s excitingly freeform documentary charts his ambitions to make a film of the Greek tragedy of Orestes in Tanzania and Uganda. In Euripedes’s classic cycle of plays, the director saw metaphorical parallels to African nations that were emerging into independence in the sixties. Restored by Cinetecca di Bologna. May 29
1:00 pm
Old & Improved
27
THE SHORT FILMS OF CHARLES AND RAY EAMES Known primarily for their midcentury modern architecture and furniture designs, the husband and wife team of Charles and Ray Eames were also prolific filmmakers, making 125 experimental, educational, and just plain entertaining shorts over the course of more than thirty years. This showcase offers a selection of their films, preserved by the Library of Congress, including Tocatta for Toy Trains, Information Machine, Day of the Dead, Powers of Ten, Eames Lounge Chair, Smithsonian Institution, and Two Baroque Churches. June 5
1:00 pm
KAPAUKU
Leonard Pospisil / 1955 / 16mm / 64 mins Filmmaker and anthropology professor Leonard Pospisil shot this important ethnographic documentary over the course of thirteen months living in the New Guinea highlands. Considered to be likely the first color film shot in that region, the film documents the first time the Kapauku Papuans ever came into contact with Westerners. Preserved by the Yale Film Archive. June 12
1:00 pm
PARTY HUSBAND
Clarence Badger / 1931 / 35mm / 74 mins This saucy pre-Code comedy pokes fun at the idea of “modern marriage,” following a husband and wife who open up their relationship a bit, only to find that they perhaps are not cut out for easy virtue. A little-known delight, the really, really well titled Party Husband was directed by Clarence Badger, the man behind the incendiary Clara Bow classic It. Preserved by the Library of Congress. June 19
1:00 pm
CORVETTE K-225
Richard Rosson / 1943 / 35mm / 98 mins This World War II–era war action yarn follows a Canadian crew—led by skipper Randolph Scott, still stinging after losing a ship to German U-boats—on convoy patrol to Russia. Rosson and cinematographer Tony Gaudio (Academy Award– nominated for his work here) went to sea for three months during the war to procure background footage. Preserved by the Library of Congress. June 26
1:00 pm
28
29
MAGIC MIKE & MAGIC MIKE XXL
MAGIC MIKE
One Day Only MAY 28
ON 35MM
Spend a day with the boys. Magic Mike, Steven Soderbergh’s cheeky yet sophisticated story of male strippers scraping by in Tampa, and Gregory Jacobs’s buoyantly comic sequel, Magic Mike XXL, are among the smartest studio films of recent years, tales from the working-class that offer no shortage of visual pleasure. Experience them as they ought to be seen: in a theater, with an audience, on glistening 35mm. As a special bonus we will also be featuring a 35mm screening of John G. Avildsen’s 1983 May-December male stripper romance A NIGHT IN HEAVEN , with Christopher Atkins (The Blue Lagoon!) and Lesley Ann Warren.
Steven Soderbergh / 2012 / 35mm / 110 minutes
Channing Tatum officially arrived thanks to Soderbergh’s tailor-made vehicle, loosely based on the actor’s experiences as a stripper in Florida. Rather than play the scenario for easy laughs, Soderbergh uses the actor’s incandescent charms and physical prowess to bring us into a tactile and relatable world of economic struggle, in which everyone is trying to work it out and everything is for sale. Supporting best-in-show honors go to a fearless Matthew McConaughey, mischievous and unpredictable as club owner Dallas.
MAGIC MIKE XXL
Gregory Jacobs / 2015 / 35mm / 115 minutes
Perhaps the closest a recent Hollywood film has come to the classical structure of the American musical, Magic Mike XXL trades in the original’s grittier themes and look for boundless cheerful humor, focusing on the enjoyment of male camaraderie and the importance of female pleasure. Hoping to get their mojo back, Mike and his buff brothers-in-arms hit the road for a trip to a stripper convention in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; along the way they work their magic on a succession of women of all stripes and, of course, on us. Highlights include a randy Andie MacDowell, an in-charge Jada Pinkett Smith, and Joe Manganiello’s impromptu convenience store striptease set to the Backstreet Boys.
28
29
MAGIC MIKE & MAGIC MIKE XXL
MAGIC MIKE
One Day Only MAY 28
ON 35MM
Spend a day with the boys. Magic Mike, Steven Soderbergh’s cheeky yet sophisticated story of male strippers scraping by in Tampa, and Gregory Jacobs’s buoyantly comic sequel, Magic Mike XXL, are among the smartest studio films of recent years, tales from the working-class that offer no shortage of visual pleasure. Experience them as they ought to be seen: in a theater, with an audience, on glistening 35mm. As a special bonus we will also be featuring a 35mm screening of John G. Avildsen’s 1983 May-December male stripper romance A NIGHT IN HEAVEN , with Christopher Atkins (The Blue Lagoon!) and Lesley Ann Warren.
Steven Soderbergh / 2012 / 35mm / 110 minutes
Channing Tatum officially arrived thanks to Soderbergh’s tailor-made vehicle, loosely based on the actor’s experiences as a stripper in Florida. Rather than play the scenario for easy laughs, Soderbergh uses the actor’s incandescent charms and physical prowess to bring us into a tactile and relatable world of economic struggle, in which everyone is trying to work it out and everything is for sale. Supporting best-in-show honors go to a fearless Matthew McConaughey, mischievous and unpredictable as club owner Dallas.
MAGIC MIKE XXL
Gregory Jacobs / 2015 / 35mm / 115 minutes
Perhaps the closest a recent Hollywood film has come to the classical structure of the American musical, Magic Mike XXL trades in the original’s grittier themes and look for boundless cheerful humor, focusing on the enjoyment of male camaraderie and the importance of female pleasure. Hoping to get their mojo back, Mike and his buff brothers-in-arms hit the road for a trip to a stripper convention in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; along the way they work their magic on a succession of women of all stripes and, of course, on us. Highlights include a randy Andie MacDowell, an in-charge Jada Pinkett Smith, and Joe Manganiello’s impromptu convenience store striptease set to the Backstreet Boys.
30
Series
31
THE WEDDING PARTY 1964 / VHS / 92 mins
Brian De Palma’s first feature, made for $100,000 (“a respectable sum for this kind of independent production—Columbia Daily Spectator), is a breezily comic affair with an improvisatory feel, following a nervous bridegroom during a madcap wedding weekend. This clear forerunner to his breakthrough, Greetings, is filled with ragged humor and proved the director had quite an eye for talent: the film stars a young Robert DeNiro (spelled Denero in the credits!), Jill Clayburgh, and William Finley, a future member of De Palma’s stock company.
GREETINGS
1968 / 35mm / 88 mins
BRIAN DE PALMA
“At 27, De Palma is probably the most important director today . . . Greetings is the most important American movie of the last few years” —Columbia Daily Spectator, April 28, 1969. Greetings was the film that first compelled people to start calling Brian De Palma the “American Godard,” a spontaneous, fresh, wildly irreverent take on contemporary culture starring Robert De Niro as one of a trio of rule-flouting nonconformists preoccupied with the Kennedy assassination, computer dating, Vietnam, and voyeuristic “peep art.” The then 27-year-old filmmaker won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for this breakout— initially rated X!
JUNE 1 to 30
“Brian De Palma, Master of the Macabre, invites you to a showing of the latest fashion . . . in murder!” No living American filmmaker grabs you from the first frame like Brian De Palma—and few can toy with viewers’ emotions as expertly. Loved and loathed with equal fervency over the course of his amazing five-decade career, this singular American artist is a revolutionary and a rascal, an intellectual disguised as a peddler of garish Hollywood entertainment. The eternal bad boy of the New American Cinema that started in the late sixties, he started out as an irreverent, Vietnam-era political filmmaker in a comic-Godard mold before crossing over into thriller and action territory, pushing Hitchcockian suspense and explosive violence to self-conscious extremes. Yet even when diving wholeheartedly into the pleasures of genre movies, De Palma is always investigating the image itself, each film a commentary on its own making and the act of watching. And even when his films are at their most terrifying, there’s always a sense of humor and an audacity that leaves you giddy. Check metrograph.com for dates and showtimes.
DIONYSUS IN ’69
1970 / 35mm / 85 mins
“Would you like to dance later on if you dig our women? Would you like to dance later on if you dig our men?” A crucial part of the late-sixties New York counterculture comes to big-screen life in De Palma’s documentary of Richard Schechner’s notorious, experimental, off-off-Broadway production of Euripides’s Dionysus, employing split-screen, a device De Palma would use and refine for his entire career. This celebration of pansexuality stars De Palma’s recurring leading man, William Finley, as the ecstatic title character. The interactive downtown audience is only occasionally made uncomfortable.
30
Series
31
THE WEDDING PARTY 1964 / VHS / 92 mins
Brian De Palma’s first feature, made for $100,000 (“a respectable sum for this kind of independent production—Columbia Daily Spectator), is a breezily comic affair with an improvisatory feel, following a nervous bridegroom during a madcap wedding weekend. This clear forerunner to his breakthrough, Greetings, is filled with ragged humor and proved the director had quite an eye for talent: the film stars a young Robert DeNiro (spelled Denero in the credits!), Jill Clayburgh, and William Finley, a future member of De Palma’s stock company.
GREETINGS
1968 / 35mm / 88 mins
BRIAN DE PALMA
“At 27, De Palma is probably the most important director today . . . Greetings is the most important American movie of the last few years” —Columbia Daily Spectator, April 28, 1969. Greetings was the film that first compelled people to start calling Brian De Palma the “American Godard,” a spontaneous, fresh, wildly irreverent take on contemporary culture starring Robert De Niro as one of a trio of rule-flouting nonconformists preoccupied with the Kennedy assassination, computer dating, Vietnam, and voyeuristic “peep art.” The then 27-year-old filmmaker won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for this breakout— initially rated X!
JUNE 1 to 30
“Brian De Palma, Master of the Macabre, invites you to a showing of the latest fashion . . . in murder!” No living American filmmaker grabs you from the first frame like Brian De Palma—and few can toy with viewers’ emotions as expertly. Loved and loathed with equal fervency over the course of his amazing five-decade career, this singular American artist is a revolutionary and a rascal, an intellectual disguised as a peddler of garish Hollywood entertainment. The eternal bad boy of the New American Cinema that started in the late sixties, he started out as an irreverent, Vietnam-era political filmmaker in a comic-Godard mold before crossing over into thriller and action territory, pushing Hitchcockian suspense and explosive violence to self-conscious extremes. Yet even when diving wholeheartedly into the pleasures of genre movies, De Palma is always investigating the image itself, each film a commentary on its own making and the act of watching. And even when his films are at their most terrifying, there’s always a sense of humor and an audacity that leaves you giddy. Check metrograph.com for dates and showtimes.
DIONYSUS IN ’69
1970 / 35mm / 85 mins
“Would you like to dance later on if you dig our women? Would you like to dance later on if you dig our men?” A crucial part of the late-sixties New York counterculture comes to big-screen life in De Palma’s documentary of Richard Schechner’s notorious, experimental, off-off-Broadway production of Euripides’s Dionysus, employing split-screen, a device De Palma would use and refine for his entire career. This celebration of pansexuality stars De Palma’s recurring leading man, William Finley, as the ecstatic title character. The interactive downtown audience is only occasionally made uncomfortable.
32
33
32
33
34
Series
Brian De Palma
35
HI, MOM!
PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE
Robert De Niro is a proto Travis Bickle in this dark comedy that brilliantly synthesizes the loose sociopolitical commentary of his lauded Greetings, the experimental theater aspects of Dionysus in ’69, and De Palma’s ever-present interest in voyeurism. An unhinged, peep-show-obsessed Vietnam vet looking—and we mean looking—for love and sex in New York, he also gets involved in a radical African-American theater group meant to jolt white bourgeois audiences from their complacency. The central black-and-white performance (“Be Black Baby!”) is De Palma’s first true sustained set piece, and a contained masterwork unto itself.
De Palma outdoes The Rocky Horror Picture Show in operatic, comic-horrormusical excess—a year before Rocky Horror was even made. This neat update of The Phantom of the Opera was initially overlooked upon release (save for Vancouver, where it was an immediate sensation—look it up!), but is now a universally recognized masterpiece of creative insanity. William Finley plays an idealistic singer-songwriter who takes elaborate revenge on a diabolical record executive—played by none other than Paul Williams, who wrote the film’s toe-tapping, Oscar-nominated song score. Highlights include Jessica Harper singing and lunge-dancing; De Palma’s first Psycho shower-scene homage, but with a toilet plunger; and a literally electrifying on-stage performance by a glam rock god named Beef (De Palma regular Gerrit Graham).
1970 / 35mm / 87 mins
GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT 1972 / 35mm / 92 mins
Brian De Palma directing Tommy Smothers and Orson Welles? Sure, why not? This bonkers Warner Bros. production was De Palma’s first studio effort after making a name for himself as a leading light of a newly ascendant American independent film. De Palma had an infamously terrible time directing the film, souring him on studio filmmaking for many years, but Get to Know Your Rabbit is nevertheless singularly funny and fascinating, a satire of the counterculture about a disillusioned suit (Smothers, whose greatness is underappreciated today) who leaves his job as a market analyst to becoming a tap-dancing magician.
SISTERS
1973 / 35mm / 92 mins “What the Devil hath joined together let no man cut asunder!” The film that answers the question: what’s better than one Margot Kidder? The future Lois Lane plays French Canadian twins, one murderously deranged, the other dangerously protective of her; Jennifer Salt is their neighbor, an intrepid reporter who sees a gruesome murder take place through the window of their Staten Island apartment. A perfect Hitchcockian thriller while also being a perfect essay on the Hitchcockian thriller, Sisters is complete visceral pleasure from the opening notes of Bernard Herrmann’s score. With this film, De Palma got his first real taste of blood and starting twisting the knife. There was no going back.
1974 / 35mm / 91 mins
OBSESSION
1976 / 35mm / 98 mins De Palma’s glossiest film up to this point is a very twisted twist on Hitchcock’s Vertigo, starring Cliff Robertson as a wealthy New Orleans businessman mourning the violent loss of his beloved wife (Dead Ringers’ Genevieve Bujold) and finding her exact double many years later while visiting Florence. With lusciously gauzy cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond and a haunting score by Hitchcock’s composer of choice, Bernard Herrmann, Obsession is an over-the-top hat tip to the master, based on an original script by Paul Schrader.
CARRIE
1976 / 35mm / 98 mins “If you’ve got a taste for terror . . . take Carrie to the prom.” This blood-soaked adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel about a mercilessly teased—and telekinetic—high schooler’s brutal prom night revenge on her classmates was De Palma’s first box-office behemoth and is one of the most iconic horror movies ever made. In the title role, Sissy Spacek is heartbreaking, the authentic human center of a Grand Guignol fantasy populated by crass monsters, including Piper Laurie as her religious freak mother; Nancy Allen and John Travolta as the nasty, bickering twits who orchestrate her public humiliation; and the always amazing P. J. Soles. But the real star is De Palma’s crazily elaborate camerawork, including one tracking crane shot at the prom that took days to get right and a wildly spinning camera dance that’ll make you throw up from joy.
34
Series
Brian De Palma
35
HI, MOM!
PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE
Robert De Niro is a proto Travis Bickle in this dark comedy that brilliantly synthesizes the loose sociopolitical commentary of his lauded Greetings, the experimental theater aspects of Dionysus in ’69, and De Palma’s ever-present interest in voyeurism. An unhinged, peep-show-obsessed Vietnam vet looking—and we mean looking—for love and sex in New York, he also gets involved in a radical African-American theater group meant to jolt white bourgeois audiences from their complacency. The central black-and-white performance (“Be Black Baby!”) is De Palma’s first true sustained set piece, and a contained masterwork unto itself.
De Palma outdoes The Rocky Horror Picture Show in operatic, comic-horrormusical excess—a year before Rocky Horror was even made. This neat update of The Phantom of the Opera was initially overlooked upon release (save for Vancouver, where it was an immediate sensation—look it up!), but is now a universally recognized masterpiece of creative insanity. William Finley plays an idealistic singer-songwriter who takes elaborate revenge on a diabolical record executive—played by none other than Paul Williams, who wrote the film’s toe-tapping, Oscar-nominated song score. Highlights include Jessica Harper singing and lunge-dancing; De Palma’s first Psycho shower-scene homage, but with a toilet plunger; and a literally electrifying on-stage performance by a glam rock god named Beef (De Palma regular Gerrit Graham).
1970 / 35mm / 87 mins
GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT 1972 / 35mm / 92 mins
Brian De Palma directing Tommy Smothers and Orson Welles? Sure, why not? This bonkers Warner Bros. production was De Palma’s first studio effort after making a name for himself as a leading light of a newly ascendant American independent film. De Palma had an infamously terrible time directing the film, souring him on studio filmmaking for many years, but Get to Know Your Rabbit is nevertheless singularly funny and fascinating, a satire of the counterculture about a disillusioned suit (Smothers, whose greatness is underappreciated today) who leaves his job as a market analyst to becoming a tap-dancing magician.
SISTERS
1973 / 35mm / 92 mins “What the Devil hath joined together let no man cut asunder!” The film that answers the question: what’s better than one Margot Kidder? The future Lois Lane plays French Canadian twins, one murderously deranged, the other dangerously protective of her; Jennifer Salt is their neighbor, an intrepid reporter who sees a gruesome murder take place through the window of their Staten Island apartment. A perfect Hitchcockian thriller while also being a perfect essay on the Hitchcockian thriller, Sisters is complete visceral pleasure from the opening notes of Bernard Herrmann’s score. With this film, De Palma got his first real taste of blood and starting twisting the knife. There was no going back.
1974 / 35mm / 91 mins
OBSESSION
1976 / 35mm / 98 mins De Palma’s glossiest film up to this point is a very twisted twist on Hitchcock’s Vertigo, starring Cliff Robertson as a wealthy New Orleans businessman mourning the violent loss of his beloved wife (Dead Ringers’ Genevieve Bujold) and finding her exact double many years later while visiting Florence. With lusciously gauzy cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond and a haunting score by Hitchcock’s composer of choice, Bernard Herrmann, Obsession is an over-the-top hat tip to the master, based on an original script by Paul Schrader.
CARRIE
1976 / 35mm / 98 mins “If you’ve got a taste for terror . . . take Carrie to the prom.” This blood-soaked adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel about a mercilessly teased—and telekinetic—high schooler’s brutal prom night revenge on her classmates was De Palma’s first box-office behemoth and is one of the most iconic horror movies ever made. In the title role, Sissy Spacek is heartbreaking, the authentic human center of a Grand Guignol fantasy populated by crass monsters, including Piper Laurie as her religious freak mother; Nancy Allen and John Travolta as the nasty, bickering twits who orchestrate her public humiliation; and the always amazing P. J. Soles. But the real star is De Palma’s crazily elaborate camerawork, including one tracking crane shot at the prom that took days to get right and a wildly spinning camera dance that’ll make you throw up from joy.
36
Series
Brian De Palma
37
THE FURY
BLOW OUT
Dear select few who love both John Cassavetes and seeing things blow up real good, have we got the film for you. Piggybacking on the success of Carrie, De Palma plunged into another tale of telekinesis, starring Kirk Douglas as an angry dad out to rescue his teen son from villainous government agent Cassavetes, who has kidnapped him to study and harness his supernatural gifts. The blood flows fast and free in this gripping adventure, in which the camera dazzles even during the most mundane action, and which features one of the most explosively satisfying endings in movie history.
Considered by many to be De Palma’s masterpiece, this gutwrenching thriller combines personal and political tragedy to make a nigh-perfect commentary on the power of the image. Opening with an extended sequence parodying both his own films and the slashers of the day, Blow Out stars John Travolta as a soundman on grade-Z horror movies who, while recording outdoor noises for his productions, captures the sound of a Chappaquiddick-like car crash and maybe a political assassination, and proceeds to piece it together frame by frame like the Zapruder film. Nancy Allen is the escort he fishes out of the water who becomes embroiled in his search for truth. A work of breathtaking fatalism, Blow Out offers excruciating suspense, remarkable Vilmos Zsigmond photography, a very creepy John Lithgow, and a genuinely tragic ending.
1978 / 35mm / 118 mins
HOME MOVIES
1980 / VHS / 90 mins In between two of De Palma’s most visually luxurious thrillers, The Fury and Dressed to Kill, De Palma made perhaps the unlikeliest film of his career. The fascinatingly makeshift 16mm comedy Home Movies is the result of a class project from a course in low-budget filmmaking De Palma taught during the winter-spring 1978 semester at Sarah Lawrence College. Though it was made along with his students, this is one of De Palma’s most autobiographical films, a stew of kooky familial dysfunction, sex jokes, and peeping tommery based on events from the director’s own childhood.
DRESSED TO KILL
1980 / 35mm / 104 mins A giallo in New York, this brilliantly conceived, technically astonishing Psycho riff brings Hitchcock’s simmering sex and violence to the foreground. Angie Dickinson is a lonely, bourgeois housewife who gets her groove back, only to meet a sticky end at the hands of a cross-dressing monster; Nancy Allen is the prostitute and witness forced to help solve the case to save her own neck. Sloooow-motion suspense, dastardly shocks, split-screen, an eerie-poetic score by Pino Donaggio, and the greatest museum scene in all of cinema (yes, we said it): Dressed to Kill is ultimate, undeniable De Palma, offering complete mastery from first image to last.
1981 / 35mm / 108 mins
SCARFACE
1983 / 35mm / 170 mins De Palma’s ultraviolent, ultraquotable, ultra-colorful, ultra everything remake of Howard Hawks’s gangster classic is the crass flipside to The Godfather, a massively deranged and gleefully disreputable tale of the rise and plunging downfall of a Cuban immigrant turned Miami drug kingpin. Al Pacino throws himself into the title role with the fury of an angry Rottweiler, while Michelle Pfeiffer glowers gorgeously in her breakthrough role as his trophy wife. Featuring cinema’s second most shocking shower scene, and a script by Oliver Stone, Scarface is the film of the Reagan eighties.
BODY DOUBLE
1984 / 35mm / 114 mins By 1984, De Palma was under attack for what some perceived as gratuitous images of violence against women and his insistent homages to Hitchcock. His response was the ultimate anti-apology: his nastiest, most intentionally vile thriller, a reworking of Vertigo and Rear Window set in the L.A. porn industry, featuring a murder by phallic drill-bit. It’s also one of his most brilliantly metacinematic works, a tawdry movie that never lets you forget you’re watching a tawdry movie, orchestrated with De Palma’s usual genius for labyrinthine set pieces and featuring a fearless Melanie Griffith in one of her first starring roles.
36
Series
Brian De Palma
37
THE FURY
BLOW OUT
Dear select few who love both John Cassavetes and seeing things blow up real good, have we got the film for you. Piggybacking on the success of Carrie, De Palma plunged into another tale of telekinesis, starring Kirk Douglas as an angry dad out to rescue his teen son from villainous government agent Cassavetes, who has kidnapped him to study and harness his supernatural gifts. The blood flows fast and free in this gripping adventure, in which the camera dazzles even during the most mundane action, and which features one of the most explosively satisfying endings in movie history.
Considered by many to be De Palma’s masterpiece, this gutwrenching thriller combines personal and political tragedy to make a nigh-perfect commentary on the power of the image. Opening with an extended sequence parodying both his own films and the slashers of the day, Blow Out stars John Travolta as a soundman on grade-Z horror movies who, while recording outdoor noises for his productions, captures the sound of a Chappaquiddick-like car crash and maybe a political assassination, and proceeds to piece it together frame by frame like the Zapruder film. Nancy Allen is the escort he fishes out of the water who becomes embroiled in his search for truth. A work of breathtaking fatalism, Blow Out offers excruciating suspense, remarkable Vilmos Zsigmond photography, a very creepy John Lithgow, and a genuinely tragic ending.
1978 / 35mm / 118 mins
HOME MOVIES
1980 / VHS / 90 mins In between two of De Palma’s most visually luxurious thrillers, The Fury and Dressed to Kill, De Palma made perhaps the unlikeliest film of his career. The fascinatingly makeshift 16mm comedy Home Movies is the result of a class project from a course in low-budget filmmaking De Palma taught during the winter-spring 1978 semester at Sarah Lawrence College. Though it was made along with his students, this is one of De Palma’s most autobiographical films, a stew of kooky familial dysfunction, sex jokes, and peeping tommery based on events from the director’s own childhood.
DRESSED TO KILL
1980 / 35mm / 104 mins A giallo in New York, this brilliantly conceived, technically astonishing Psycho riff brings Hitchcock’s simmering sex and violence to the foreground. Angie Dickinson is a lonely, bourgeois housewife who gets her groove back, only to meet a sticky end at the hands of a cross-dressing monster; Nancy Allen is the prostitute and witness forced to help solve the case to save her own neck. Sloooow-motion suspense, dastardly shocks, split-screen, an eerie-poetic score by Pino Donaggio, and the greatest museum scene in all of cinema (yes, we said it): Dressed to Kill is ultimate, undeniable De Palma, offering complete mastery from first image to last.
1981 / 35mm / 108 mins
SCARFACE
1983 / 35mm / 170 mins De Palma’s ultraviolent, ultraquotable, ultra-colorful, ultra everything remake of Howard Hawks’s gangster classic is the crass flipside to The Godfather, a massively deranged and gleefully disreputable tale of the rise and plunging downfall of a Cuban immigrant turned Miami drug kingpin. Al Pacino throws himself into the title role with the fury of an angry Rottweiler, while Michelle Pfeiffer glowers gorgeously in her breakthrough role as his trophy wife. Featuring cinema’s second most shocking shower scene, and a script by Oliver Stone, Scarface is the film of the Reagan eighties.
BODY DOUBLE
1984 / 35mm / 114 mins By 1984, De Palma was under attack for what some perceived as gratuitous images of violence against women and his insistent homages to Hitchcock. His response was the ultimate anti-apology: his nastiest, most intentionally vile thriller, a reworking of Vertigo and Rear Window set in the L.A. porn industry, featuring a murder by phallic drill-bit. It’s also one of his most brilliantly metacinematic works, a tawdry movie that never lets you forget you’re watching a tawdry movie, orchestrated with De Palma’s usual genius for labyrinthine set pieces and featuring a fearless Melanie Griffith in one of her first starring roles.
38
Series
Brian De Palma
39
WISE GUYS
THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES
And now for something completely different. De Palma casts Danny DeVito and SNL headliner Joe Piscopo as Harry and Moe, dim-bulb New Jersey stooges who steal a Cadillac and head for Vegas after losing a bundle of mob money at the racetrack. The most straightforwardly comic De Palma film, Wise Guys recalls the hijinks of the director’s early career, with an added sheen of big-studio slapstick. The supporting cast is chockablock with character-actor heavyweights—Dan Hedaya, Harvey Keitel, Ray Sharkey, Patti LuPone, and WWF’s “Captain” Lou Albano. “No, thank you, Mr. Acavano!”
Brian De Palma’s highly anticipated, big-budget adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s humungous best-seller turns the author’s respected social satire into irreverent broad comedy. An infamous flop, whose plagued production was the subject of another best-selling book (Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy), De Palma’s film, starring Tom Hanks as a Manhattan socialite involved in a Bronx hit-and-run that becomes a media sensation, offers a variety of pleasures—especially its bravura long takes.
1986 / 35mm / 100 mins
THE UNTOUCHABLES
1987 / 35mm / 119 mins Swinging the pendulum back to thriller territory, De Palma collaborates with De Niro for the first time in seventeen years, casting him as a terrifying, baseballbat wielding Al Capone in this masterful adaptation of the late fifties-early sixties TV series. Handsome young Kevin Costner plays Prohibition-era law enforcement agent Eliot Ness, who bands up with veteran Irish-American officer Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery, in an Oscar-winning role) to fight Capone’s widespread corruption. It’s beautiful classical filmmaking, punctuated by bursts of De Palma dazzle, including the towering, Potemkin– inspired Union Station staircase shoot-out, which De Palma dreamed up in a single day when a previously devised set piece was scuttled at the last moment. A complete blockbuster, an adult cartoon, violent and exhilarating.
CASUALTIES OF WAR
1989 / 35mm / 113 mins De Palma’s entry in the late-eighties canon of films about the Vietnam War is a devastating, uncompromising drama, and one of the director’s most sobering visions. Based on a New Yorker article and book about the shocking rape and murder of a young Vietnamese woman by an American patrol, the film pits a villainous Sean Penn, deranged by war, against a heroic Michael J. Fox, desperate to remain idealistic amidst the madness of battle. Said Pauline Kael in her famously ecstatic review: “When you leave the theater, you’ll probably find that you’re not ready to talk about it. You may also find it hard to talk lightly about anything.”
1990 / 35mm / 126 mins
RAISING CAIN
1992 / 35mm / 91 mins “DeMented. DeRanged. DeCeptive. De Palma.” Immensely entertaining, this anything-goes thriller returned De Palma to the gonzo, metacinematic suspense of his early eighties films and reunited him with his Blow Out villain John Lithgow. It’s a patently absurd mix of evil twins, multiple personalities, overheated adultery, intricate long takes, a beyond-hammy Lithgow, and flashbacks within flashbacks within dreams. The only appropriate responses are “What just happened?” and “I like this.”
CARLITO’S WAY
1993 / 35mm / 144 mins Al Pacino returns to the world of De Palma for this exquisitely crafted drama about a Puerto Rican gangster trying to go straight and those who won’t let him, including John Leguizamo’s Benny Blanco (“from the Bronx”) and, most dramatically, a bald-pated Sean Penn as the scuzziest lawyer in movie history. Down and dirty and luxurious all at once, featuring a climactic chase through New York’s labyrinthine subways and Grand Central Terminal that’s among De Palma’s great sequences, Carlito’s Way was voted the best movie of the nineties by Cahiers du cinéma.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 1995 / 35mm / 110 mins
Paramount had the good sense to entrust the first entry in its Mission: Impossible movie franchise to Brian De Palma, who turned in an intricate, ’scope-shot, supreme thrill ride and one of the great commercial blockbusters of the decade. Then-top-of-the-world Tom Cruise is government agent Ethan Hunt, trying to piece together why his team was betrayed by his superiors in an elaborately botched job in Prague. The virtuoso suspense scenes pile up, from the multiple-perspective opening sequence to Cruise’s breathless cable-suspension computer heist to the helicopter-meets-bullet-train climax. It hasn’t aged a day.
38
Series
Brian De Palma
39
WISE GUYS
THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES
And now for something completely different. De Palma casts Danny DeVito and SNL headliner Joe Piscopo as Harry and Moe, dim-bulb New Jersey stooges who steal a Cadillac and head for Vegas after losing a bundle of mob money at the racetrack. The most straightforwardly comic De Palma film, Wise Guys recalls the hijinks of the director’s early career, with an added sheen of big-studio slapstick. The supporting cast is chockablock with character-actor heavyweights—Dan Hedaya, Harvey Keitel, Ray Sharkey, Patti LuPone, and WWF’s “Captain” Lou Albano. “No, thank you, Mr. Acavano!”
Brian De Palma’s highly anticipated, big-budget adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s humungous best-seller turns the author’s respected social satire into irreverent broad comedy. An infamous flop, whose plagued production was the subject of another best-selling book (Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy), De Palma’s film, starring Tom Hanks as a Manhattan socialite involved in a Bronx hit-and-run that becomes a media sensation, offers a variety of pleasures—especially its bravura long takes.
1986 / 35mm / 100 mins
THE UNTOUCHABLES
1987 / 35mm / 119 mins Swinging the pendulum back to thriller territory, De Palma collaborates with De Niro for the first time in seventeen years, casting him as a terrifying, baseballbat wielding Al Capone in this masterful adaptation of the late fifties-early sixties TV series. Handsome young Kevin Costner plays Prohibition-era law enforcement agent Eliot Ness, who bands up with veteran Irish-American officer Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery, in an Oscar-winning role) to fight Capone’s widespread corruption. It’s beautiful classical filmmaking, punctuated by bursts of De Palma dazzle, including the towering, Potemkin– inspired Union Station staircase shoot-out, which De Palma dreamed up in a single day when a previously devised set piece was scuttled at the last moment. A complete blockbuster, an adult cartoon, violent and exhilarating.
CASUALTIES OF WAR
1989 / 35mm / 113 mins De Palma’s entry in the late-eighties canon of films about the Vietnam War is a devastating, uncompromising drama, and one of the director’s most sobering visions. Based on a New Yorker article and book about the shocking rape and murder of a young Vietnamese woman by an American patrol, the film pits a villainous Sean Penn, deranged by war, against a heroic Michael J. Fox, desperate to remain idealistic amidst the madness of battle. Said Pauline Kael in her famously ecstatic review: “When you leave the theater, you’ll probably find that you’re not ready to talk about it. You may also find it hard to talk lightly about anything.”
1990 / 35mm / 126 mins
RAISING CAIN
1992 / 35mm / 91 mins “DeMented. DeRanged. DeCeptive. De Palma.” Immensely entertaining, this anything-goes thriller returned De Palma to the gonzo, metacinematic suspense of his early eighties films and reunited him with his Blow Out villain John Lithgow. It’s a patently absurd mix of evil twins, multiple personalities, overheated adultery, intricate long takes, a beyond-hammy Lithgow, and flashbacks within flashbacks within dreams. The only appropriate responses are “What just happened?” and “I like this.”
CARLITO’S WAY
1993 / 35mm / 144 mins Al Pacino returns to the world of De Palma for this exquisitely crafted drama about a Puerto Rican gangster trying to go straight and those who won’t let him, including John Leguizamo’s Benny Blanco (“from the Bronx”) and, most dramatically, a bald-pated Sean Penn as the scuzziest lawyer in movie history. Down and dirty and luxurious all at once, featuring a climactic chase through New York’s labyrinthine subways and Grand Central Terminal that’s among De Palma’s great sequences, Carlito’s Way was voted the best movie of the nineties by Cahiers du cinéma.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 1995 / 35mm / 110 mins
Paramount had the good sense to entrust the first entry in its Mission: Impossible movie franchise to Brian De Palma, who turned in an intricate, ’scope-shot, supreme thrill ride and one of the great commercial blockbusters of the decade. Then-top-of-the-world Tom Cruise is government agent Ethan Hunt, trying to piece together why his team was betrayed by his superiors in an elaborately botched job in Prague. The virtuoso suspense scenes pile up, from the multiple-perspective opening sequence to Cruise’s breathless cable-suspension computer heist to the helicopter-meets-bullet-train climax. It hasn’t aged a day.
40
Series
Brian De Palma
41
SNAKE EYES
THE BLACK DAHLIA
Coasting on the erratic waves of leading man Nicolas Cage’s acting style, De Palma’s tight, totally terrific thriller is a model of efficiency and contained action. Set almost entirely in a boxing arena and casino complex in Atlantic City, this is a flamboyant, two-fisted conspiracy tale, told in prismatic fashion, from many different characters’ points of view. De Palma isn’t swinging for the fences here, turning in the kind of fun, typically dexterous thriller that we wish still came around with regularity. Don’t be late or you’ll miss a thirteen-minute opening shot!
De Palma goes full noir in this lurid and lush Vilmos Zsigmond–shot adaptation of the James Ellroy novel, a dramatization of the events surrounding the gruesome, unsolved real-life murder of a wannabe Hollywood starlet. A never-better Josh Hartnett dons a heck of a fedora as a detective on the case, while sultry scene-stealers include Hilary Swank, Scarlett Johansson, and . . . k.d. lang? The Black Dahlia features a particularly great example of a De Palma single-take set piece, involving the body’s discovery, and a self-referential sequence updating a similar one from Greetings in which a young woman is captured on camera while a creepy male voice—De Palma himself!—talks to her from off-screen.
1998 / 35mm / 98 mins
MISSION TO MARS
2000 / 35mm / 113 mins De Palma’s only science-fiction saga is a brightly colored, emotionally generous twist on Kubrick’s ultimate space trip, starring Connie Nielsen, Tim Robbins, and Gary Sinise as astronauts on a rescue mission to save the members of a spacecraft (headed by Don Cheadle) that had been sucked into a vortex on Mars. What they discover—the meaning of life??—is ultimately less important than De Palma’s elegant suspense sequences and marvelous camera work, whether during a spacewalk or a backyard picnic.
FEMME FATALE
2002 / 35mm / 114 mins 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.
2006 / 35mm / 120 mins
REDACTED
2007 / 35mm / 90 mins In response to George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion, De Palma fashioned this multimedia experiment, a howl of rage against an unjust war. Recalling both Casualties of War in its focus on a particularly disturbing true episode of rape and murder and, in its looser style, the director’s early political films, Redacted—winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival—incorporates a panoply of twenty-firstcentury modes of address: surveillance footage, Internet streaming videos, chat rooms, and even contemporary European art-film documentary.
PASSION
2012 / 35mm / 94 mins Advertising exec Rachel McAdams and her up-and-coming protégé Noomi Rapace enter into a game of corporate one-upmanship that turns literally cutthroat in De Palma’s silky-smooth, twisting-turning revenge thriller. A takedown of consumer fetish that’s a devious fetish object all its own, Passion is a delightful tease, sure to thrill true-church De Palma fans with its witty, absurd self-referentiality.
40
Series
Brian De Palma
41
SNAKE EYES
THE BLACK DAHLIA
Coasting on the erratic waves of leading man Nicolas Cage’s acting style, De Palma’s tight, totally terrific thriller is a model of efficiency and contained action. Set almost entirely in a boxing arena and casino complex in Atlantic City, this is a flamboyant, two-fisted conspiracy tale, told in prismatic fashion, from many different characters’ points of view. De Palma isn’t swinging for the fences here, turning in the kind of fun, typically dexterous thriller that we wish still came around with regularity. Don’t be late or you’ll miss a thirteen-minute opening shot!
De Palma goes full noir in this lurid and lush Vilmos Zsigmond–shot adaptation of the James Ellroy novel, a dramatization of the events surrounding the gruesome, unsolved real-life murder of a wannabe Hollywood starlet. A never-better Josh Hartnett dons a heck of a fedora as a detective on the case, while sultry scene-stealers include Hilary Swank, Scarlett Johansson, and . . . k.d. lang? The Black Dahlia features a particularly great example of a De Palma single-take set piece, involving the body’s discovery, and a self-referential sequence updating a similar one from Greetings in which a young woman is captured on camera while a creepy male voice—De Palma himself!—talks to her from off-screen.
1998 / 35mm / 98 mins
MISSION TO MARS
2000 / 35mm / 113 mins De Palma’s only science-fiction saga is a brightly colored, emotionally generous twist on Kubrick’s ultimate space trip, starring Connie Nielsen, Tim Robbins, and Gary Sinise as astronauts on a rescue mission to save the members of a spacecraft (headed by Don Cheadle) that had been sucked into a vortex on Mars. What they discover—the meaning of life??—is ultimately less important than De Palma’s elegant suspense sequences and marvelous camera work, whether during a spacewalk or a backyard picnic.
FEMME FATALE
2002 / 35mm / 114 mins 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.
2006 / 35mm / 120 mins
REDACTED
2007 / 35mm / 90 mins In response to George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion, De Palma fashioned this multimedia experiment, a howl of rage against an unjust war. Recalling both Casualties of War in its focus on a particularly disturbing true episode of rape and murder and, in its looser style, the director’s early political films, Redacted—winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival—incorporates a panoply of twenty-firstcentury modes of address: surveillance footage, Internet streaming videos, chat rooms, and even contemporary European art-film documentary.
PASSION
2012 / 35mm / 94 mins Advertising exec Rachel McAdams and her up-and-coming protégé Noomi Rapace enter into a game of corporate one-upmanship that turns literally cutthroat in De Palma’s silky-smooth, twisting-turning revenge thriller. A takedown of consumer fetish that’s a devious fetish object all its own, Passion is a delightful tease, sure to thrill true-church De Palma fans with its witty, absurd self-referentiality.
42
43
THE FITS
One Week Only JUNE 3 to 9
THE FITS
Anna Rose Holmer / 2016 / DCP / 72 mins
COSMOS
One Week Only JUNE 17 to 24
COSMOS
Andrzej Żuławski / 2015 / DCP / 103 mins
In Anna Rose Holmer’s dazzling, Cincinnati-set debut feature, eleven-year-old tomboy Toni (mesmerizing newcomer Royalty Hightower) spends her afternoons boxing at a gym with her older brother. Bewitched by the power and confidence of a tight-knit dance group also practicing there, Toni begins to eagerly absorb their routines, and even pierces her own ears in an effort to fit in. But when a mysterious outbreak of fainting spells plagues the team, Toni’s desire for acceptance becomes more complicated and perhaps dangerous. Gorgeously shot and with a hypnotic score, The Fits is a transformative experience and a singular portrait of adolescence.
After a fifteen-year absence from filmmaking, the legendary Polish director Andrzej Żuławski returns with the highly anticipated film Cosmos, which sadly became his final work. The film follows Witold, a failed law student who grows obsessed with the married daughter of the mysterious proprietor of the guesthouse he’s currently staying at; meanwhile he finds himself alarmed by a series of omens that increasingly portend doom. Shot through with the trademark stylish verve on display in such intense Żuławski classics as Possession and On the Silver Globe, Cosmos is an unpredictable exploration of the nature of desire, adapted from a novel by Witold Gombrowicz and costarring Sabine Azema. Żuławski won the Best Director prize at the 2015 Locarno Film Festival.
An Oscilloscope Laboratories release.
A Kino Lorber release.
42
43
THE FITS
One Week Only JUNE 3 to 9
THE FITS
Anna Rose Holmer / 2016 / DCP / 72 mins
COSMOS
One Week Only JUNE 17 to 24
COSMOS
Andrzej Żuławski / 2015 / DCP / 103 mins
In Anna Rose Holmer’s dazzling, Cincinnati-set debut feature, eleven-year-old tomboy Toni (mesmerizing newcomer Royalty Hightower) spends her afternoons boxing at a gym with her older brother. Bewitched by the power and confidence of a tight-knit dance group also practicing there, Toni begins to eagerly absorb their routines, and even pierces her own ears in an effort to fit in. But when a mysterious outbreak of fainting spells plagues the team, Toni’s desire for acceptance becomes more complicated and perhaps dangerous. Gorgeously shot and with a hypnotic score, The Fits is a transformative experience and a singular portrait of adolescence.
After a fifteen-year absence from filmmaking, the legendary Polish director Andrzej Żuławski returns with the highly anticipated film Cosmos, which sadly became his final work. The film follows Witold, a failed law student who grows obsessed with the married daughter of the mysterious proprietor of the guesthouse he’s currently staying at; meanwhile he finds himself alarmed by a series of omens that increasingly portend doom. Shot through with the trademark stylish verve on display in such intense Żuławski classics as Possession and On the Silver Globe, Cosmos is an unpredictable exploration of the nature of desire, adapted from a novel by Witold Gombrowicz and costarring Sabine Azema. Żuławski won the Best Director prize at the 2015 Locarno Film Festival.
An Oscilloscope Laboratories release.
A Kino Lorber release.
44
One Week Only
CALL HER APPLEBROOG PLUS THREE FILMS BY BETH B
JUNE 10 to 16
One Week Only
CALL HER APPLEBROOG
Beth B / 2016 / DCP / 70 mins Beth B’s seamlessly realized film is an intimate and complex portrait of her mother, acclaimed New York– based artist Ida Applebroog. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household in the Bronx, Applebroog, now in her 80s, shares the provocative, sexual, and deeply personal inner life that has been expressed over decades in her drawings, paintings, and private journals. With mischievous reverence, Beth B gradually peels back the layers of her subject’s extraordinary work. Call Her Applebroog offers a universal and touching story of filial bonds as well as a deeply rewarding portrait of two artists at the heights of their craft. Soundtrack by Jim Coleman. A Zeitgeist Films release.
BETH B RETROSPECTIVE
To accompany our release of Call Her Applebroog, we’re pleased to present a program of the dynamic, punkish earlier films directed by Beth B, a major figure of the New York No Wave underground filmmaking movement of the late seventies and early eighties. Check metrograph.com for dates and showtimes.
SALVATION!: HAVE YOU SAID YOUR PRAYERS TODAY? 1987 / 87 mins A satire of the eighties craze for televangelism, this comedy concerns a sex and money-obsessed celebrity reverend (Stephen McHattie), and features Viggo Mortensen in one of his earliest roles. Exene Cervenka (singer from the seminal band X) plays a houswife turned heavy-metal evangelist. Soundtrack by New Order. TWO SMALL BODIES 1993 / 90 mins Fred Ward and Suzy Amis star in Beth B’s Sundance-featured adaptation of the 1977 play by Neal Bell about a bar hostess suspected of killing her children, and the sexually charged relationship between the investigating cop and the mother. Soundtrack by Swans. EXPOSED
2013 / 78 mins Beth B’s taboo-shattering documentary follows eight nude performers—men and women—operating on the far edge of burlesque. Starring RoseWood, Mat Fraser, Julie Atlas Muz, and other downtown performers. Soundtrack by Jim Coleman and JG Thirlwell.
Beth B & Scott B
45
B MOVIES: THE FILMS OF BETH B & SCOTT B Within New York’s no-budget No Wave movement, Scott B and Beth B started the production company B Movies. They made dark, confrontational underground films that existed in a realm adjacent to the punk movement, and which frequently dealt with issues of violence, sexual power games, and societal control. Check metrograph.com for dates and showtimes.
G-MAN BLACK BOX LETTERS TO DAD
1978 / 28 mins 1979 / 21 mins 1979 / 11 mins Three of the duo’s most quintessential, assaultive short films in one program: G-Man, starring Bill Rice, concerns the relationship between an NYPD agent and a dominatrix; in Black Box, a Big Brother–like government group kidnaps and tortures an innocent civilian, starring Lydia Lunch and Kiki Smith; in Letters to Dad, a series of letters read directly to camera turn out to have been written to a particularly frightening father figure.
THE OFFENDERS
1979 / 90 mins First shown as a weekly serial at the NYC club Max’s Kansas City, this No Wave Super-8mm classic is a punk melodrama about a kidnapping, featuring such downtown figures as Adele Bertei, Lydia Lunch, and John Lurie.
THE TRAP DOOR
1981 / 70 mins Underground cinema pioneer Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures) makes a rare onscreen appearance as a demented shrink in this surreal tale following a man’s strange journey after being fired from his job. Starring John Ahearn, Jenny Holzer, and Gary Indiana.
VORTEX
1982 / 90 mins Beth B and Scott B’s largest budgeted movie—and their final collaboration— was this still modestly financed 16mm-shot noir melodrama about a private eye (Lydia Lunch) trying to unravel the truth connecting corporate business and governmental defense contracts. Also starring James Russo and Bill Rice.
44
One Week Only
CALL HER APPLEBROOG PLUS THREE FILMS BY BETH B
JUNE 10 to 16
One Week Only
CALL HER APPLEBROOG
Beth B / 2016 / DCP / 70 mins Beth B’s seamlessly realized film is an intimate and complex portrait of her mother, acclaimed New York– based artist Ida Applebroog. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household in the Bronx, Applebroog, now in her 80s, shares the provocative, sexual, and deeply personal inner life that has been expressed over decades in her drawings, paintings, and private journals. With mischievous reverence, Beth B gradually peels back the layers of her subject’s extraordinary work. Call Her Applebroog offers a universal and touching story of filial bonds as well as a deeply rewarding portrait of two artists at the heights of their craft. Soundtrack by Jim Coleman. A Zeitgeist Films release.
BETH B RETROSPECTIVE
To accompany our release of Call Her Applebroog, we’re pleased to present a program of the dynamic, punkish earlier films directed by Beth B, a major figure of the New York No Wave underground filmmaking movement of the late seventies and early eighties. Check metrograph.com for dates and showtimes.
SALVATION!: HAVE YOU SAID YOUR PRAYERS TODAY? 1987 / 87 mins A satire of the eighties craze for televangelism, this comedy concerns a sex and money-obsessed celebrity reverend (Stephen McHattie), and features Viggo Mortensen in one of his earliest roles. Exene Cervenka (singer from the seminal band X) plays a houswife turned heavy-metal evangelist. Soundtrack by New Order. TWO SMALL BODIES 1993 / 90 mins Fred Ward and Suzy Amis star in Beth B’s Sundance-featured adaptation of the 1977 play by Neal Bell about a bar hostess suspected of killing her children, and the sexually charged relationship between the investigating cop and the mother. Soundtrack by Swans. EXPOSED
2013 / 78 mins Beth B’s taboo-shattering documentary follows eight nude performers—men and women—operating on the far edge of burlesque. Starring RoseWood, Mat Fraser, Julie Atlas Muz, and other downtown performers. Soundtrack by Jim Coleman and JG Thirlwell.
Beth B & Scott B
45
B MOVIES: THE FILMS OF BETH B & SCOTT B Within New York’s no-budget No Wave movement, Scott B and Beth B started the production company B Movies. They made dark, confrontational underground films that existed in a realm adjacent to the punk movement, and which frequently dealt with issues of violence, sexual power games, and societal control. Check metrograph.com for dates and showtimes.
G-MAN BLACK BOX LETTERS TO DAD
1978 / 28 mins 1979 / 21 mins 1979 / 11 mins Three of the duo’s most quintessential, assaultive short films in one program: G-Man, starring Bill Rice, concerns the relationship between an NYPD agent and a dominatrix; in Black Box, a Big Brother–like government group kidnaps and tortures an innocent civilian, starring Lydia Lunch and Kiki Smith; in Letters to Dad, a series of letters read directly to camera turn out to have been written to a particularly frightening father figure.
THE OFFENDERS
1979 / 90 mins First shown as a weekly serial at the NYC club Max’s Kansas City, this No Wave Super-8mm classic is a punk melodrama about a kidnapping, featuring such downtown figures as Adele Bertei, Lydia Lunch, and John Lurie.
THE TRAP DOOR
1981 / 70 mins Underground cinema pioneer Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures) makes a rare onscreen appearance as a demented shrink in this surreal tale following a man’s strange journey after being fired from his job. Starring John Ahearn, Jenny Holzer, and Gary Indiana.
VORTEX
1982 / 90 mins Beth B and Scott B’s largest budgeted movie—and their final collaboration— was this still modestly financed 16mm-shot noir melodrama about a private eye (Lydia Lunch) trying to unravel the truth connecting corporate business and governmental defense contracts. Also starring James Russo and Bill Rice.
46
47
FAMILY MATINEES
STUDIO GHIBLI WEEKENDS
May 7 & 8
PRINCESS MONONOKE
Hayao Miyazaki / 1999 / 133 mins A gorgeously animated tale of a battle between humans and ancient forest spirits. May 14 & 15
PONYO
Hayao Miyazaki / 2008 / 103 mins A friendship blossoms between a young boy and a goldfish who dreams of dry land.
Let us spirit you away on Saturdays and Sundays with movies from the beloved Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli. Ghibli is best known for producing the gorgeous hand-drawn films of director Hayao Miyazaki, though we’re also happy to feature films from other directors in their stable, like Isao Takahata’s Pom Poko. Beloved by children and adults like, these are magical, moving tales of friendship and family, loss and love, featuring that inimitable, influential animation style. NOTE: We will be showing both English-subtitled 35mm prints and English-dubbed DCP versions—check metrograph.com for details.
May 21 & 22
PORCO ROSSO
Hayao Miyazaki / 1992 / 94 mins A former World War I flying ace is transformed into a pig by a supernatural curse. May 28 & 29
POM POKO
Isao Takahata / 1994 / 119 mins Shape-shifting raccoon dogs must survive despite humans bulldozing their habitat.
46
47
FAMILY MATINEES
STUDIO GHIBLI WEEKENDS
May 7 & 8
PRINCESS MONONOKE
Hayao Miyazaki / 1999 / 133 mins A gorgeously animated tale of a battle between humans and ancient forest spirits. May 14 & 15
PONYO
Hayao Miyazaki / 2008 / 103 mins A friendship blossoms between a young boy and a goldfish who dreams of dry land.
Let us spirit you away on Saturdays and Sundays with movies from the beloved Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli. Ghibli is best known for producing the gorgeous hand-drawn films of director Hayao Miyazaki, though we’re also happy to feature films from other directors in their stable, like Isao Takahata’s Pom Poko. Beloved by children and adults like, these are magical, moving tales of friendship and family, loss and love, featuring that inimitable, influential animation style. NOTE: We will be showing both English-subtitled 35mm prints and English-dubbed DCP versions—check metrograph.com for details.
May 21 & 22
PORCO ROSSO
Hayao Miyazaki / 1992 / 94 mins A former World War I flying ace is transformed into a pig by a supernatural curse. May 28 & 29
POM POKO
Isao Takahata / 1994 / 119 mins Shape-shifting raccoon dogs must survive despite humans bulldozing their habitat.
48
49
A SEPARATION
By
ANDREW CHAN
One of the default postures engendered by movie love is a sulking slouch. When I think back on the period when I was first becoming obsessed with the movies, I recall my awkward teenage body in this position, leaning against the base of the living room couch at an angle of surrender. What was on the TV screen could have been any of the canonical treasures I watched on TCM in the late nineties and early aughts, but I was especially drawn to the most brooding European masterpieces, films whose angst opened up the ecstasies of wallowing. If you happen to be a short, bespectacled, transparently gay Chinese American spending your childhood in the middle of the Bible Belt, you could do worse than seizing on Ingmar Bergman as a talisman for dark days. All those quivery-voiced confessions, the hand-wringing and the self-pity and the staring into space: even when I could barely wrap my little mind around them, his films seemed to channel my most unspeakable fears, chastening them to a state of exquisite refinement.
RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN
One Week Only JUNE 24 to 30
RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN
Hong Sang-soo / 2015 / DCP / 121 mins Prolific Korean master Hong Sang-soo’s latest soju-soaked comedy of manners is a hilariously twice-told tale. A director comes to a small town for a festival screening of his latest film, and finds himself smitten with a shy painter; the two spend a day getting to know each other, perhaps even falling in love. Then, quite unexpectedly, we start over again. Right Now, Wrong Then is the platonic ideal of a Hong Sangsoo film, featuring arrogant men, wise women, witty dialogue, lots of drinking, and sly takedowns of the film festival circuit, particularly the exquisite horror of the post-film Q&A session. A Grasshopper Film release.
Being in possession of such fears was almost like a privilege, proof that I shared at least some of what had inspired this master. In other words, my love of the movies, the imagined exchange of understandings between myself and the screen, had something fundamentally to do with vanity. The early onset of cinephilia made me feel wise beyond my years, high off the kind of delusion to which youthful narcissism clings. Like many delusions, it was nurtured in private. While my parents were out grocery shopping, I would pop in my copy of The Seventh Seal, recorded off of TCM, and luxuriate in a landscape governed by the laws of salvation and damnation. What would they think if they caught their eleven-year-old watching Ingrid Thulin smearing vaginal blood on her face in Cries and Whispers, or Bibi Andersson threatening Liv Ullmann with boiling water in Persona? Revealing such peculiar taste might have meant letting my already too haphazardly guarded closet door swing open. One of my favorite films at the time was King Vidor’s The Crowd (pictured on following page), which famously culminates with a father and son shaking the sorrows of poverty during a trip to the movies. The camera glides away from their faces until they’re just specks, lost in a sea of other laughing spectators. When I was old enough to drive to the only art house theater in Charlotte, North Carolina, and watch movies there alone, the paradox that Vidor romanticizes in this scene would echo in my mind: the idea that cinema offers the pleasures of community, even emotional intimacy, amid the comforts of anonymity. No matter how fearfully I protected the solitude of my film viewing at home, or how quickly I’d learn to duck in and out of theaters to prevent anyone from gawking at the lone Asian in the audience, my movie love was not merely a symptom of mousy introversion. Early on I’d found a companion, an accomplice, in my father, who had grown up Hollywood-besotted in small-town Malaysia in the 1950s and 1960s, when such fandom was a mark of colonial cultivation.
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A SEPARATION
By
ANDREW CHAN
One of the default postures engendered by movie love is a sulking slouch. When I think back on the period when I was first becoming obsessed with the movies, I recall my awkward teenage body in this position, leaning against the base of the living room couch at an angle of surrender. What was on the TV screen could have been any of the canonical treasures I watched on TCM in the late nineties and early aughts, but I was especially drawn to the most brooding European masterpieces, films whose angst opened up the ecstasies of wallowing. If you happen to be a short, bespectacled, transparently gay Chinese American spending your childhood in the middle of the Bible Belt, you could do worse than seizing on Ingmar Bergman as a talisman for dark days. All those quivery-voiced confessions, the hand-wringing and the self-pity and the staring into space: even when I could barely wrap my little mind around them, his films seemed to channel my most unspeakable fears, chastening them to a state of exquisite refinement.
RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN
One Week Only JUNE 24 to 30
RIGHT NOW, WRONG THEN
Hong Sang-soo / 2015 / DCP / 121 mins Prolific Korean master Hong Sang-soo’s latest soju-soaked comedy of manners is a hilariously twice-told tale. A director comes to a small town for a festival screening of his latest film, and finds himself smitten with a shy painter; the two spend a day getting to know each other, perhaps even falling in love. Then, quite unexpectedly, we start over again. Right Now, Wrong Then is the platonic ideal of a Hong Sangsoo film, featuring arrogant men, wise women, witty dialogue, lots of drinking, and sly takedowns of the film festival circuit, particularly the exquisite horror of the post-film Q&A session. A Grasshopper Film release.
Being in possession of such fears was almost like a privilege, proof that I shared at least some of what had inspired this master. In other words, my love of the movies, the imagined exchange of understandings between myself and the screen, had something fundamentally to do with vanity. The early onset of cinephilia made me feel wise beyond my years, high off the kind of delusion to which youthful narcissism clings. Like many delusions, it was nurtured in private. While my parents were out grocery shopping, I would pop in my copy of The Seventh Seal, recorded off of TCM, and luxuriate in a landscape governed by the laws of salvation and damnation. What would they think if they caught their eleven-year-old watching Ingrid Thulin smearing vaginal blood on her face in Cries and Whispers, or Bibi Andersson threatening Liv Ullmann with boiling water in Persona? Revealing such peculiar taste might have meant letting my already too haphazardly guarded closet door swing open. One of my favorite films at the time was King Vidor’s The Crowd (pictured on following page), which famously culminates with a father and son shaking the sorrows of poverty during a trip to the movies. The camera glides away from their faces until they’re just specks, lost in a sea of other laughing spectators. When I was old enough to drive to the only art house theater in Charlotte, North Carolina, and watch movies there alone, the paradox that Vidor romanticizes in this scene would echo in my mind: the idea that cinema offers the pleasures of community, even emotional intimacy, amid the comforts of anonymity. No matter how fearfully I protected the solitude of my film viewing at home, or how quickly I’d learn to duck in and out of theaters to prevent anyone from gawking at the lone Asian in the audience, my movie love was not merely a symptom of mousy introversion. Early on I’d found a companion, an accomplice, in my father, who had grown up Hollywood-besotted in small-town Malaysia in the 1950s and 1960s, when such fandom was a mark of colonial cultivation.
50
Essay
Andrew Chan
51
As a child I’d make-believe I was casting my own movie, and he’d humor me with a long roll call of possible stars: Ann-Margret, Annette Funicello, Sandra Dee. The sound of these names wafted glamorously through the air. More vividly than any of the films we watched together in those early days, I remember our weekly car rides to Blockbuster Video, just the two of us, and how I’d echo his delighted listing of those names by rattling off the titles of movies we might rent, like someone practicing elocution. The years went by, and much of our bonding time was spent sitting in the darkness of movie theaters in the various cities we moved to, both in the U.S. and abroad. My father didn’t often share my enthusiasms, especially as rebellious adolescence turned them more self-consciously esoteric, but he maintained the role of chauffeur with an unfussy selflessness. A few times I was cruel. He’d fall asleep, even snore, and I’d take offense at his indifference. On the ride home I’d fill him in on what he’d missed, in a tone thick with condescension. By freshman year of college I’d come out, a catastrophe so surreal I willed myself to perceive it as Sirkian melodrama—smothered in Technicolor, sequestered within the perimeter of some screen in my mind. As loved ones tenaciously endeavored to pray it all away, I had prayers of my own, to which the release of Brokeback Mountain seemed a partial response. I couldn’t believe my luck that this peak moment of gay acceptability had been directed by a model of Chinese immigrant achievement. I thought it would be a good idea to ask my dad if we could see the new Ang Lee movie together. Oh, the hubris. I was strategically crafting a Crowd-like moment of cinematic redemption. We went on opening night because I wanted him to see the line wrapping around the theater. If he could get a good look at all the white people busting down the doors for something a Chinese man had made, wouldn’t it be that much harder for him to turn away from the film itself, from the injustice it depicted? I had us sit up close, I wanted him to be engulfed. I didn’t dare look at him in the darkness. I knew I had him cornered, that his reliably placid temperament would never permit so histrionic a gesture as walking out. At the end, I made sure he heard my theatrically muffled cries. We rode home in silence. I had enlisted the power of cinema for utilitarian ends, only to find the movie was no more prepared to fix my life than my father was to acknowledge what he’d seen. But to know a love by its failures, its futilities, is not to know it less. We come to the movies with the little that we are, and for all their ability to immerse us in worlds beyond our comprehension, we are forever seeing them from our own solitary distances. It is this unrelenting separateness that makes them objects of our longing. When we gaze at the screen, we see the unknowable, impenetrable surface of everything worth holding dear.
Andrew Chan has been published in Film Comment, Reverse Shot, Slant, and elsewhere.
50
Essay
Andrew Chan
51
As a child I’d make-believe I was casting my own movie, and he’d humor me with a long roll call of possible stars: Ann-Margret, Annette Funicello, Sandra Dee. The sound of these names wafted glamorously through the air. More vividly than any of the films we watched together in those early days, I remember our weekly car rides to Blockbuster Video, just the two of us, and how I’d echo his delighted listing of those names by rattling off the titles of movies we might rent, like someone practicing elocution. The years went by, and much of our bonding time was spent sitting in the darkness of movie theaters in the various cities we moved to, both in the U.S. and abroad. My father didn’t often share my enthusiasms, especially as rebellious adolescence turned them more self-consciously esoteric, but he maintained the role of chauffeur with an unfussy selflessness. A few times I was cruel. He’d fall asleep, even snore, and I’d take offense at his indifference. On the ride home I’d fill him in on what he’d missed, in a tone thick with condescension. By freshman year of college I’d come out, a catastrophe so surreal I willed myself to perceive it as Sirkian melodrama—smothered in Technicolor, sequestered within the perimeter of some screen in my mind. As loved ones tenaciously endeavored to pray it all away, I had prayers of my own, to which the release of Brokeback Mountain seemed a partial response. I couldn’t believe my luck that this peak moment of gay acceptability had been directed by a model of Chinese immigrant achievement. I thought it would be a good idea to ask my dad if we could see the new Ang Lee movie together. Oh, the hubris. I was strategically crafting a Crowd-like moment of cinematic redemption. We went on opening night because I wanted him to see the line wrapping around the theater. If he could get a good look at all the white people busting down the doors for something a Chinese man had made, wouldn’t it be that much harder for him to turn away from the film itself, from the injustice it depicted? I had us sit up close, I wanted him to be engulfed. I didn’t dare look at him in the darkness. I knew I had him cornered, that his reliably placid temperament would never permit so histrionic a gesture as walking out. At the end, I made sure he heard my theatrically muffled cries. We rode home in silence. I had enlisted the power of cinema for utilitarian ends, only to find the movie was no more prepared to fix my life than my father was to acknowledge what he’d seen. But to know a love by its failures, its futilities, is not to know it less. We come to the movies with the little that we are, and for all their ability to immerse us in worlds beyond our comprehension, we are forever seeing them from our own solitary distances. It is this unrelenting separateness that makes them objects of our longing. When we gaze at the screen, we see the unknowable, impenetrable surface of everything worth holding dear.
Andrew Chan has been published in Film Comment, Reverse Shot, Slant, and elsewhere.
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Notes
METROGRAPH.COM
Notes
METROGRAPH.COM