Metrograph No. 3

AUG Y-

US

16

T

JUL

No.3

Cover and Cassavetes/Rowlands production photographs by Sam Shaw Š Sam Shaw Inc., courtesy of Shaw Archive Ltd

CONTENTS

Summer in the City Stephen Chow The Mermaid in 3D James Toback & Bennett Miller Present Each Other Cassavetes/Rowlands The Seventh Fire

Native to America This Is PG?!

Smithereens—new 35mm print!

Seven Samurai presented by Helen DeWitt Will You Dance With Me?

Dim All the Lights: Disco and the Movies The Lost Arcade

Shall We Play a Game?

Welcome to Metrograph A to Z Spa Night Madonna: Truth or Dare

Madonna: A Body Of Work Old and Improved: New Preservations and Restorations The Metrograph Commissary The Metrograph Bookstore

For Ticket Reservations Visit www.metrograph.com

OR

B

F X O FIC E

O

No.7 Ludlow Street

Calendar program by Jacob Perlin & Aliza Ma

Founded by Alexander Olch

Design by Studio of annakarlin.com

2 4 6 8 10 17 18 22 26 27 28 29 34 35 40 47 48 49 52 56 58

Cover and Cassavetes/Rowlands production photographs by Sam Shaw Š Sam Shaw Inc., courtesy of Shaw Archive Ltd

CONTENTS

Summer in the City Stephen Chow The Mermaid in 3D James Toback & Bennett Miller Present Each Other Cassavetes/Rowlands The Seventh Fire

Native to America This Is PG?!

Smithereens—new 35mm print!

Seven Samurai presented by Helen DeWitt Will You Dance With Me?

Dim All the Lights: Disco and the Movies The Lost Arcade

Shall We Play a Game?

Welcome to Metrograph A to Z Spa Night Madonna: Truth or Dare

Madonna: A Body Of Work Old and Improved: New Preservations and Restorations The Metrograph Commissary The Metrograph Bookstore

For Ticket Reservations Visit www.metrograph.com

OR

B

F X O FIC E

O

No.7 Ludlow Street

Calendar program by Jacob Perlin & Aliza Ma

Founded by Alexander Olch

Design by Studio of annakarlin.com

2 4 6 8 10 17 18 22 26 27 28 29 34 35 40 47 48 49 52 56 58

Series

5

DO THE RIGHT THING Spike Lee / 1989 35mm / 120 min

SUMMER IN THE CITY Walking down empty blocks on a summer holiday weekend or trying to catch a breeze while sleeping by a window, it is clear that there is a reason the old song has it that “I like New York in June”, and not July or August. Those with the money and mobility head out of town when the mercury rises during the hot garbage months, and a different city with a looser energy emerges. Whether hanging out on a stoop or posted in an apartment with a broken leg and a telescope, things become a little stickier, a little sexier, and a bit more unhinged. So take a break from the heat, our theater is cooled by refrigeration.

DOG DAY AFTERNOON

Sidney Lumet / 1975 / 35mm / 125min Al Pacino, in as close as he gets to a career-defining role, is volcanic and splenetic, playing Sonny Wortzik, a small-time crook who makes big-time headlines while maintaining a volatile hostage situation with partner John Cazale at First Brooklyn Saving Bank—the locations are Windsor Terrace. As the standoff drags on, Wortzik’s personal life becomes property of police and reporters, while the public adopt him as an unlikely brigand-hero, to cheers of “Attica! Attica!” The opening montage of New York - traffic, dogs poking at garbage, a rooftop pool - set to Elton John’s “Amoreena,” is a mini-city symphony, and one-half of the soundtrack to this series.

SUMMER OF SAM

Spike Lee / 1999 / 35mm / 142 min

It’s another summer and another wave of urban hysteria in Spike Lee’s lookback-in-delirium at the summer of ’77 in the neurotic, hot-pants Italian-American Bronx, where Vinny (John Leguizamo) hits Plato’s Retreat, his old buddy Ritchie (Adrien Brody) imports the new punker style from downtown, a psycho calling himself “Son of Sam” is corresponding with Jimmy Breslin and unloading a .44 (World Series hero Reggie Jackson’s uniform number) on unsuspecting couples caught necking, and then the lights go out city-wide.

Has any movie done a better job of capturing those days when you can actually feel the weight of the atmosphere?

Production designer Wynn Thomas splashed Lexington Ave. with red-hot high-lights and Spike Lee and cinematographer Ernest Dickerson maintained a sense of the suffocating heat that melts pavement in this undisputed masterpiece of the ‘80s, which looks at the pressure cooker effects of a NYC heatwave on a few blocks in Bed-Stuy, bringing simmering racial toxicity to a boil. The opening of Rosie Perez shadowboxing to Public Enemy’s anthem “Fight the Power” would be, along with Dog Day, the other single on the double A-side of classic title sequences.

DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE

John McTiernan / 1995 / 35mm / 128 min New York City is in the grips of a mad bomber with a penchant for riddles and a definite grudge against now-drunkard Lt. John McClane (Bruce Willis), saved from inciting a Do the Right Thing flare-up in Harlem by electrician Zeus Carver (Samuel L. Jackson, hilarious), who finds himself in the role of McClane’s unwitting partner. By taxi, subway, truck, and tanker, action maestro John McTiernan—returning to the franchise he originated—swings for the fences with his set-pieces, and hits some tape measure dingers.

REAR WINDOW

Alfred Hitchcock / 1954 35mm / 112 min Jimmy Stewart’s he-man, globe-trotting photographer is laid up for the summer with a broken leg, and enlists the help of Grace Kelly (ordering snacks from 21) when he becomes convinced that neighbor Raymond Burr has murdered his wife. One of the ultimate refinements of Hitchcock’s voyeuristic play with the audience, the fanciful soundstage evocation of Greenwich Village real estate allows for an unchained, free-floating camera. “Then you get to looking out the window. Seeing things you shouldn’t see.

Trouble.”

Series

5

DO THE RIGHT THING Spike Lee / 1989 35mm / 120 min

SUMMER IN THE CITY Walking down empty blocks on a summer holiday weekend or trying to catch a breeze while sleeping by a window, it is clear that there is a reason the old song has it that “I like New York in June”, and not July or August. Those with the money and mobility head out of town when the mercury rises during the hot garbage months, and a different city with a looser energy emerges. Whether hanging out on a stoop or posted in an apartment with a broken leg and a telescope, things become a little stickier, a little sexier, and a bit more unhinged. So take a break from the heat, our theater is cooled by refrigeration.

DOG DAY AFTERNOON

Sidney Lumet / 1975 / 35mm / 125min Al Pacino, in as close as he gets to a career-defining role, is volcanic and splenetic, playing Sonny Wortzik, a small-time crook who makes big-time headlines while maintaining a volatile hostage situation with partner John Cazale at First Brooklyn Saving Bank—the locations are Windsor Terrace. As the standoff drags on, Wortzik’s personal life becomes property of police and reporters, while the public adopt him as an unlikely brigand-hero, to cheers of “Attica! Attica!” The opening montage of New York - traffic, dogs poking at garbage, a rooftop pool - set to Elton John’s “Amoreena,” is a mini-city symphony, and one-half of the soundtrack to this series.

SUMMER OF SAM

Spike Lee / 1999 / 35mm / 142 min

It’s another summer and another wave of urban hysteria in Spike Lee’s lookback-in-delirium at the summer of ’77 in the neurotic, hot-pants Italian-American Bronx, where Vinny (John Leguizamo) hits Plato’s Retreat, his old buddy Ritchie (Adrien Brody) imports the new punker style from downtown, a psycho calling himself “Son of Sam” is corresponding with Jimmy Breslin and unloading a .44 (World Series hero Reggie Jackson’s uniform number) on unsuspecting couples caught necking, and then the lights go out city-wide.

Has any movie done a better job of capturing those days when you can actually feel the weight of the atmosphere?

Production designer Wynn Thomas splashed Lexington Ave. with red-hot high-lights and Spike Lee and cinematographer Ernest Dickerson maintained a sense of the suffocating heat that melts pavement in this undisputed masterpiece of the ‘80s, which looks at the pressure cooker effects of a NYC heatwave on a few blocks in Bed-Stuy, bringing simmering racial toxicity to a boil. The opening of Rosie Perez shadowboxing to Public Enemy’s anthem “Fight the Power” would be, along with Dog Day, the other single on the double A-side of classic title sequences.

DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE

John McTiernan / 1995 / 35mm / 128 min New York City is in the grips of a mad bomber with a penchant for riddles and a definite grudge against now-drunkard Lt. John McClane (Bruce Willis), saved from inciting a Do the Right Thing flare-up in Harlem by electrician Zeus Carver (Samuel L. Jackson, hilarious), who finds himself in the role of McClane’s unwitting partner. By taxi, subway, truck, and tanker, action maestro John McTiernan—returning to the franchise he originated—swings for the fences with his set-pieces, and hits some tape measure dingers.

REAR WINDOW

Alfred Hitchcock / 1954 35mm / 112 min Jimmy Stewart’s he-man, globe-trotting photographer is laid up for the summer with a broken leg, and enlists the help of Grace Kelly (ordering snacks from 21) when he becomes convinced that neighbor Raymond Burr has murdered his wife. One of the ultimate refinements of Hitchcock’s voyeuristic play with the audience, the fanciful soundstage evocation of Greenwich Village real estate allows for an unchained, free-floating camera. “Then you get to looking out the window. Seeing things you shouldn’t see.

Trouble.”

Series

7

THE TRICKY MASTER

Wong Jing / 1999 / 35mm / 91 mins Before a much-publicized falling out, Chow and director Wong Jing worked together on a series of surefire crowd-pleasers (Tricky Brains, the Royal Tramp and God of Gamblers films) that kept lines around the block at Hong Kong cinemas.

In The Tricky Master, a reunion film which appeared when Chow’s own directorial career had taken off, Wong plays a crime kingpin targeted by undercover cop Nick Cheung, who enlists the help of Chow’s gambling expert Master Wong to make the bust.

STEPHEN CHOW

JULY 1 to 5

Artist-athlete, burlesque surrealist, spoof virtuoso, suicidal stuntman, the man who marries CGI kitsch to Dickensian sentiment, a satirist of modern materialism and torch-bearer for irreverent Hong Kong hoopla in an age when uptight Mainland sets the tone—Stephen Chow is at least twenty different kinds of filmmaker, all of them working overtime in his gag-studded extravaganzas. While knocking his brains out to keep audiences (and bad guys) in stitches, Chow always leaves room on the stage for his comedienne co-stars to shine, their numbers including Karen Mok, Yuen Qui, Zhao Wei, and Cecelia Cheung. On the occasion of Metrograph’s command performance of Chow’s blockbuster The Mermaid, we offer a chance to see the films with which this showman supreme conquered the world.

JUSTICE, MY FOOT!

Johnnie To / 1992 / 35mm / 102 mins While best known for his physical comedy, Chow shows off his verbal dexterity playing a brilliant and unprincipled Qing Dynasty lawyer living in fear of bad karma and his kung fu-fighting wife, played by the legendary Canto-pop star Anita Mui, who threatens to steal the show out from under him. A socko period comedy from legendary filmmaker Johnnie To, this monster hit at the Hong Kong box office helped to cement Chow’s superstar status.

GOD OF COOKERY

Stephen Chow / 1996/ 35mm / 95 mins Chow was already Hong Kong’s favorite young action-comedy star when the release of the frenetic, hysterical God of Cookery revealed his entire bursting buffet of talents. In this riotous send-up of television’s Iron Chef and the God of Gamblers series, Chow stars as a talentless, crooked celebrity chef forced to rebuild his brand and empire from the ground up. Zesty flavor is added by an array of bizarre characters, including street vendor Sister Turkey (a peerless, selfdeprecating Karen Mok).

KING OF COMEDY

Stephen Chow / 1999 / 35mm / 89 mins Pathos and antic plot twists abound in Chow’s King of Comedy, which finds him looking down into the depths of failure from the height of his fame. Playing a hapless movie extra unlucky in love and at auditions, Chow recollects his early days as a struggling actor, and creates a head-spinning network of on-set intrigues where all the world’s a stage, and all men and women (here Karen Mok and Cecilia Cheung, excellent) are mere buffoons.

SHAOLIN SOCCER

Stephen Chow / 2001 35mm / 87 mins Ex-monk Sing (Chow) achieves his dream of bringing Shaolin Kung Fu to the masses by assembling a soccer club for cup competition with his superhuman brothers, and when they face their ultimate test against the aptly-named Team Evil, it’s corporate cheats against spiritual strength. Access to new F/X technology—used in the spirit of camp rather than overawing oppressiveness—brings Chow closer than ever to the realm of the liveaction cartoon, but the spirit is classic show biz chutzpah.

KUNG FU HUSTLE

Stephen Chow / 2004 / 35mm / 99 mins Golden Harvest wuxia meets Looney Tunes lunacy meets Chaplinesque underdog fantasy in Chow’s anything-goes, over-the-over-the-top masterpiece, in which he stars as a would-be gangster caught between sparring rival factions in Pig Sty Alley, a corner of a stylized soundstage in 1930s Shanghai watched over by Yuen Qui’s slatternly, superpowered landlady. With a little Hollywood money and a boundless imagination, Chow creates nothing short of a contemporary classic— you can’t knock the Hustle.

Series

7

THE TRICKY MASTER

Wong Jing / 1999 / 35mm / 91 mins Before a much-publicized falling out, Chow and director Wong Jing worked together on a series of surefire crowd-pleasers (Tricky Brains, the Royal Tramp and God of Gamblers films) that kept lines around the block at Hong Kong cinemas.

In The Tricky Master, a reunion film which appeared when Chow’s own directorial career had taken off, Wong plays a crime kingpin targeted by undercover cop Nick Cheung, who enlists the help of Chow’s gambling expert Master Wong to make the bust.

STEPHEN CHOW

JULY 1 to 5

Artist-athlete, burlesque surrealist, spoof virtuoso, suicidal stuntman, the man who marries CGI kitsch to Dickensian sentiment, a satirist of modern materialism and torch-bearer for irreverent Hong Kong hoopla in an age when uptight Mainland sets the tone—Stephen Chow is at least twenty different kinds of filmmaker, all of them working overtime in his gag-studded extravaganzas. While knocking his brains out to keep audiences (and bad guys) in stitches, Chow always leaves room on the stage for his comedienne co-stars to shine, their numbers including Karen Mok, Yuen Qui, Zhao Wei, and Cecelia Cheung. On the occasion of Metrograph’s command performance of Chow’s blockbuster The Mermaid, we offer a chance to see the films with which this showman supreme conquered the world.

JUSTICE, MY FOOT!

Johnnie To / 1992 / 35mm / 102 mins While best known for his physical comedy, Chow shows off his verbal dexterity playing a brilliant and unprincipled Qing Dynasty lawyer living in fear of bad karma and his kung fu-fighting wife, played by the legendary Canto-pop star Anita Mui, who threatens to steal the show out from under him. A socko period comedy from legendary filmmaker Johnnie To, this monster hit at the Hong Kong box office helped to cement Chow’s superstar status.

GOD OF COOKERY

Stephen Chow / 1996/ 35mm / 95 mins Chow was already Hong Kong’s favorite young action-comedy star when the release of the frenetic, hysterical God of Cookery revealed his entire bursting buffet of talents. In this riotous send-up of television’s Iron Chef and the God of Gamblers series, Chow stars as a talentless, crooked celebrity chef forced to rebuild his brand and empire from the ground up. Zesty flavor is added by an array of bizarre characters, including street vendor Sister Turkey (a peerless, selfdeprecating Karen Mok).

KING OF COMEDY

Stephen Chow / 1999 / 35mm / 89 mins Pathos and antic plot twists abound in Chow’s King of Comedy, which finds him looking down into the depths of failure from the height of his fame. Playing a hapless movie extra unlucky in love and at auditions, Chow recollects his early days as a struggling actor, and creates a head-spinning network of on-set intrigues where all the world’s a stage, and all men and women (here Karen Mok and Cecilia Cheung, excellent) are mere buffoons.

SHAOLIN SOCCER

Stephen Chow / 2001 35mm / 87 mins Ex-monk Sing (Chow) achieves his dream of bringing Shaolin Kung Fu to the masses by assembling a soccer club for cup competition with his superhuman brothers, and when they face their ultimate test against the aptly-named Team Evil, it’s corporate cheats against spiritual strength. Access to new F/X technology—used in the spirit of camp rather than overawing oppressiveness—brings Chow closer than ever to the realm of the liveaction cartoon, but the spirit is classic show biz chutzpah.

KUNG FU HUSTLE

Stephen Chow / 2004 / 35mm / 99 mins Golden Harvest wuxia meets Looney Tunes lunacy meets Chaplinesque underdog fantasy in Chow’s anything-goes, over-the-over-the-top masterpiece, in which he stars as a would-be gangster caught between sparring rival factions in Pig Sty Alley, a corner of a stylized soundstage in 1930s Shanghai watched over by Yuen Qui’s slatternly, superpowered landlady. With a little Hollywood money and a boundless imagination, Chow creates nothing short of a contemporary classic— you can’t knock the Hustle.

8

9

THE MERMAID IN 3D One Week Only JULY 8 to 14

THE MERMAID

Stephen Chow / 2016 / DCP / 90 mins A plea for ecological responsibility that also happens to be relentlessly funny and bristling with inventive visual humor, The Mermaid’s huge international boxoffice was only a surprise if you didn’t know Hong Kong director Stephen Chow’s extraordinary, long-standing rapport with his fans. A playboy developer (Deng Chao) falls in love with a mysterious stranger (newcomer Lin Yun) who in fact is a mermaid in disguise, sent to prevent his company’s destruction of Green Gulf, the traditional home of the mer-people. Metrograph is thrilled to respond to popular demand by providing a command performance for Chow’s eccentric blockbuster, full of riveting romance, baroque production design, savage slapstick, and bonkers gags, one of which might put you off of grilled octopus for a while.

A Sony Pictures release.

8

9

THE MERMAID IN 3D One Week Only JULY 8 to 14

THE MERMAID

Stephen Chow / 2016 / DCP / 90 mins A plea for ecological responsibility that also happens to be relentlessly funny and bristling with inventive visual humor, The Mermaid’s huge international boxoffice was only a surprise if you didn’t know Hong Kong director Stephen Chow’s extraordinary, long-standing rapport with his fans. A playboy developer (Deng Chao) falls in love with a mysterious stranger (newcomer Lin Yun) who in fact is a mermaid in disguise, sent to prevent his company’s destruction of Green Gulf, the traditional home of the mer-people. Metrograph is thrilled to respond to popular demand by providing a command performance for Chow’s eccentric blockbuster, full of riveting romance, baroque production design, savage slapstick, and bonkers gags, one of which might put you off of grilled octopus for a while.

A Sony Pictures release.

10

11

JAMES TOBACK & BENNETT MILLER PRESENT EACH OTHER One Night Only

JULY 9

After sparking a quiet revolution in documentary practice with The Cruise, Bennett Miller began his ongoing inquiry into the interrelation of money and power (and the lack of both) on the American scene in his fiction features Capote, Moneyball, and Foxcatcher. Little wonder he should have a formed a mutual appreciation society with maverick director James Toback, a fellow doc-fiction double-dipper, who has spent his career chronicling society’s obessions with status and influence.

Metrograph is happy to give the stage to these raconteurs, as well as screen two of their keen, rabble-rousing, and very current films.

MONEYBALL

Bennett Miller / 2011 / 35mm / 133 min Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), a onetime five-tool prospect and player who never reached full potential, has to find a way to win with a puny budget, and finds an unlikely solution through a young economics student (Jonah Hill) who introduces him to the magical number-crunching system of sabermetrics. A pastoral 19th century game meets dead-tech 21st century efficiency in this adaptation of Michael Lewis’s best-seller, with Chris Pratt superb as a rehabbing Scott Hatteberg.

BLACK AND WHITE

James Toback / 1999 / 35mm / 98 min Totally unlike anything at the multiplex when it appeared in the late ‘90s, Toback’s largely-improvised jumping live-wire of a movie touches on sometimestense, often-satirical incidents involving two documentary filmmakers (Robert Downey, Jr. and Brooke Shields), a gaggle of white Manhattan teenagers, and uptown hip-hop personalities whose paths cross at the apartment of mogul Rich Bower (Wu-Tang mastermind Oli “Power” Grant). With Raekwon, Ben Stiller, and Mike Tyson as himself, nearly taking Downey, Jr.’s head clean off.

10

11

JAMES TOBACK & BENNETT MILLER PRESENT EACH OTHER One Night Only

JULY 9

After sparking a quiet revolution in documentary practice with The Cruise, Bennett Miller began his ongoing inquiry into the interrelation of money and power (and the lack of both) on the American scene in his fiction features Capote, Moneyball, and Foxcatcher. Little wonder he should have a formed a mutual appreciation society with maverick director James Toback, a fellow doc-fiction double-dipper, who has spent his career chronicling society’s obessions with status and influence.

Metrograph is happy to give the stage to these raconteurs, as well as screen two of their keen, rabble-rousing, and very current films.

MONEYBALL

Bennett Miller / 2011 / 35mm / 133 min Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), a onetime five-tool prospect and player who never reached full potential, has to find a way to win with a puny budget, and finds an unlikely solution through a young economics student (Jonah Hill) who introduces him to the magical number-crunching system of sabermetrics. A pastoral 19th century game meets dead-tech 21st century efficiency in this adaptation of Michael Lewis’s best-seller, with Chris Pratt superb as a rehabbing Scott Hatteberg.

BLACK AND WHITE

James Toback / 1999 / 35mm / 98 min Totally unlike anything at the multiplex when it appeared in the late ‘90s, Toback’s largely-improvised jumping live-wire of a movie touches on sometimestense, often-satirical incidents involving two documentary filmmakers (Robert Downey, Jr. and Brooke Shields), a gaggle of white Manhattan teenagers, and uptown hip-hop personalities whose paths cross at the apartment of mogul Rich Bower (Wu-Tang mastermind Oli “Power” Grant). With Raekwon, Ben Stiller, and Mike Tyson as himself, nearly taking Downey, Jr.’s head clean off.

12

Series

13

SHADOWS

John Cassavetes / 1959 / 35mm / 87 mins Filmed in inky black and white, Shadows follows three African American siblings through a multi-racial New York bohemia. It’s a world that, by the end, is a paradise lost to each of them in one way or another. A jazz score trips along after them– through coffee shops, nightclubs, Times Square, the Port Authority, and Central Park on a cold March day. Cassavetes cast students from his acting workshop in the main roles; Lelia Goldini as the little sister beams a strange purity. On a shortlist of the most important debut films in American cinema.

FACES

John Cassavetes / 1968 35mm / 130 mins

CASSAVETES/ROWLANDS JULY 15 to 24 Gena Rowlands in person on July 15th for Opening Night, July 16th for A Woman Under The Influence, and throughout the series

Husband and wife John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, rightfully considered the patron saints of American independent cinema, created art with their own money, in their own home, surrounded by friends and family. They are now an aspirational image so frequently conjured and misapplied to anything “indie” that the depth and scope of their achievements have become somewhat obscured and misunderstood. Their legacy encompasses roles as writer and director, producer and actor, mentors, collaborators and distributors, in a creative universe where everything was new, tried and pushed. Yet the myths, emulated by many, of these great films and how they were created – that trial and sacrifice yield masterpieces, that struggle and chaos birth brilliance – leave out the crucial fact that one has to be extraordinary to begin with, and thus leads to a simple conclusion: In the history of cinema there is Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes, and there is everybody else.

Richard (John Marley) and Maria (an Oscar-nominated Lynn Carlin), their marriage exhausted, each look for a transfusion of youth from members of the hustling class. Cassavetes’ return to independence after a sojourn with the studios is a “second first film” that forms the nucleus of cast (Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel), crew (Al Ruban) and locations (the Cassavetes/Rowlands household) of the productions to follow.

Each long scene is a kinetic mix of anger, libido, and (oddly) fun. Every bid for connection in canceled out by an impulse to keep it at bay. Richard, in love, asks the sweet, goofy escort (Rowlands) to be serious for a minute. In love, she answers, “Definition of serious: blah blah blah.”

35mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE

John Cassavetes / 1974 35mm / 155 mins As Mabel and Nick, a mentally ill woman and her husband, Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk deliver performances of breathtaking generosity.

Mabel’s spontaneity and warmth are inextricable from her illness. Nick’s drive to protect her morphs believably into violence and back to tenderness. Cassavetes and his cast don’t shave off any of the burrs of family life; it is beautiful and harrowing. Another of Gena Rowland’s career-defining performances, and another masterpiece from Cassavetes and company. “Good times from now on,” Nick says. “That’s what we’re gonna have,” and we desperately want to believe him.

35mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation and GUCCI.

12

Series

13

SHADOWS

John Cassavetes / 1959 / 35mm / 87 mins Filmed in inky black and white, Shadows follows three African American siblings through a multi-racial New York bohemia. It’s a world that, by the end, is a paradise lost to each of them in one way or another. A jazz score trips along after them– through coffee shops, nightclubs, Times Square, the Port Authority, and Central Park on a cold March day. Cassavetes cast students from his acting workshop in the main roles; Lelia Goldini as the little sister beams a strange purity. On a shortlist of the most important debut films in American cinema.

FACES

John Cassavetes / 1968 35mm / 130 mins

CASSAVETES/ROWLANDS JULY 15 to 24 Gena Rowlands in person on July 15th for Opening Night, July 16th for A Woman Under The Influence, and throughout the series

Husband and wife John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, rightfully considered the patron saints of American independent cinema, created art with their own money, in their own home, surrounded by friends and family. They are now an aspirational image so frequently conjured and misapplied to anything “indie” that the depth and scope of their achievements have become somewhat obscured and misunderstood. Their legacy encompasses roles as writer and director, producer and actor, mentors, collaborators and distributors, in a creative universe where everything was new, tried and pushed. Yet the myths, emulated by many, of these great films and how they were created – that trial and sacrifice yield masterpieces, that struggle and chaos birth brilliance – leave out the crucial fact that one has to be extraordinary to begin with, and thus leads to a simple conclusion: In the history of cinema there is Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes, and there is everybody else.

Richard (John Marley) and Maria (an Oscar-nominated Lynn Carlin), their marriage exhausted, each look for a transfusion of youth from members of the hustling class. Cassavetes’ return to independence after a sojourn with the studios is a “second first film” that forms the nucleus of cast (Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel), crew (Al Ruban) and locations (the Cassavetes/Rowlands household) of the productions to follow.

Each long scene is a kinetic mix of anger, libido, and (oddly) fun. Every bid for connection in canceled out by an impulse to keep it at bay. Richard, in love, asks the sweet, goofy escort (Rowlands) to be serious for a minute. In love, she answers, “Definition of serious: blah blah blah.”

35mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE

John Cassavetes / 1974 35mm / 155 mins As Mabel and Nick, a mentally ill woman and her husband, Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk deliver performances of breathtaking generosity.

Mabel’s spontaneity and warmth are inextricable from her illness. Nick’s drive to protect her morphs believably into violence and back to tenderness. Cassavetes and his cast don’t shave off any of the burrs of family life; it is beautiful and harrowing. Another of Gena Rowland’s career-defining performances, and another masterpiece from Cassavetes and company. “Good times from now on,” Nick says. “That’s what we’re gonna have,” and we desperately want to believe him.

35mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation and GUCCI.

14

15

14

15

16

Series

Cassavetes/Rowlands

17

OPENING NIGHT

MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ

Myrtle Gordon (Rowlands), an actress entering her Grand Dame years, is in final rehearsals for a play when a disturbed young fan is killed in front of her. She becomes unhinged, making war with the director, her costar, and the play itself. “I’ll do anything to make my characters more authentic,” she says. “I always have.” The playwright (Joan Blondell) insists she need only read her lines “with some feeling.”

Are Myrtle’s disruptions a star trip?

Has she gone mad? Or is she opening up a vein to salvage a terrible play?

Staged and filmed by Cassavetes in front of a live audience, Opening Night is a cinematic representation of actors’ lives on-stage and off.

Minnie and Moskowitz features a number of fascinating loudmouths, starting with Timothy Carey as a loquacious weirdo who buttonholes Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel) in a coffee shop. Val Avery is an insult comic wrapped in a sucking wound as Minnie’s blind date, the wonderfully named Zelmo Swift. (“What is it with you blondes? You all have some Swedish suicide impulse?”) Cassavetes’s mother is priceless as the mother of Moskowitz (Cassel)—himself a world-class screamer who seems impossible as a love interest for the beautiful Minnie (Rowlands). Still, in timeless screwball fashion, they fall upstairs and into love.

John Cassavetes / 1977 35mm/144 mins

THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE

John Cassavetes / 1976 35mm / 135 mins Swamped with gambling debts, nightclub impresario Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara) get conscripted as a hit man. This is California noir, but it’s not. Cosmo, lunching at The Source, oversees his nightclub business, banters with showgirls and motivates employees, croons “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” into a gas station phone booth, and gets boxed in by Timothy Carey and crew. Both a gangster film and a film using gangsters to portray the desperation and urgency of what one must do to survive.

A CHILD IS WAITING

John Cassavetes / 1963 / 35mm / 102 mins Cassavetes was disillusioned by his experience trying to work inside the hidebound Hollywood machine with producer Stanley Kramer and disowned the result. Yet Child affords the first sustained collaboration with Gena Rowlands, and still fascinates with its flashes of brilliance and palpable sense of a promethean genius struggling with his chains. Once unbound, five years later Cassavetes would be back with his follow-up feature, the independent Faces. The rest, as they say, is history.

John Cassavetes / 1971 35mm / 114 mins

LOVE STREAMS

John Cassavetes / 1984 35mm / 141 mins Cassavetes and Rowlands are Robert and Sarah—middleaged siblings who can’t get love right. “Love is a stream,” she says. “It’s continuous. It doesn’t stop.” “Love is everything,” he says as he tears off a check for a pair of prostitutes. “Is love an art?” she asks. Her psychiatrist says, “Your love is too strong for your family.” Sarah and Robert’s love for each other is the exception. It’s effortless, antic, forgiving, and pure.

GLORIA

John Cassavetes / 1980 35mm / 123 mins A thriller with an elegiac mood.

Gloria Swenson (Rowlands) finds herself on the run with a young Puerto Rican boy after his family is killed in a mob hit in her apartment building.

She’s a reluctant guardian— tough and unsentimental, with mob connections of her own—but instinct takes over. Once she’s fired her gun into a car full of gangsters, the lives they knew are gone, and with each turn of the plot it becomes clearer that they are everything to each other. Shot on location in the Bronx, Harlem, and Washington Heights.

16

Series

Cassavetes/Rowlands

17

OPENING NIGHT

MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ

Myrtle Gordon (Rowlands), an actress entering her Grand Dame years, is in final rehearsals for a play when a disturbed young fan is killed in front of her. She becomes unhinged, making war with the director, her costar, and the play itself. “I’ll do anything to make my characters more authentic,” she says. “I always have.” The playwright (Joan Blondell) insists she need only read her lines “with some feeling.”

Are Myrtle’s disruptions a star trip?

Has she gone mad? Or is she opening up a vein to salvage a terrible play?

Staged and filmed by Cassavetes in front of a live audience, Opening Night is a cinematic representation of actors’ lives on-stage and off.

Minnie and Moskowitz features a number of fascinating loudmouths, starting with Timothy Carey as a loquacious weirdo who buttonholes Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel) in a coffee shop. Val Avery is an insult comic wrapped in a sucking wound as Minnie’s blind date, the wonderfully named Zelmo Swift. (“What is it with you blondes? You all have some Swedish suicide impulse?”) Cassavetes’s mother is priceless as the mother of Moskowitz (Cassel)—himself a world-class screamer who seems impossible as a love interest for the beautiful Minnie (Rowlands). Still, in timeless screwball fashion, they fall upstairs and into love.

John Cassavetes / 1977 35mm/144 mins

THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE

John Cassavetes / 1976 35mm / 135 mins Swamped with gambling debts, nightclub impresario Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara) get conscripted as a hit man. This is California noir, but it’s not. Cosmo, lunching at The Source, oversees his nightclub business, banters with showgirls and motivates employees, croons “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” into a gas station phone booth, and gets boxed in by Timothy Carey and crew. Both a gangster film and a film using gangsters to portray the desperation and urgency of what one must do to survive.

A CHILD IS WAITING

John Cassavetes / 1963 / 35mm / 102 mins Cassavetes was disillusioned by his experience trying to work inside the hidebound Hollywood machine with producer Stanley Kramer and disowned the result. Yet Child affords the first sustained collaboration with Gena Rowlands, and still fascinates with its flashes of brilliance and palpable sense of a promethean genius struggling with his chains. Once unbound, five years later Cassavetes would be back with his follow-up feature, the independent Faces. The rest, as they say, is history.

John Cassavetes / 1971 35mm / 114 mins

LOVE STREAMS

John Cassavetes / 1984 35mm / 141 mins Cassavetes and Rowlands are Robert and Sarah—middleaged siblings who can’t get love right. “Love is a stream,” she says. “It’s continuous. It doesn’t stop.” “Love is everything,” he says as he tears off a check for a pair of prostitutes. “Is love an art?” she asks. Her psychiatrist says, “Your love is too strong for your family.” Sarah and Robert’s love for each other is the exception. It’s effortless, antic, forgiving, and pure.

GLORIA

John Cassavetes / 1980 35mm / 123 mins A thriller with an elegiac mood.

Gloria Swenson (Rowlands) finds herself on the run with a young Puerto Rican boy after his family is killed in a mob hit in her apartment building.

She’s a reluctant guardian— tough and unsentimental, with mob connections of her own—but instinct takes over. Once she’s fired her gun into a car full of gangsters, the lives they knew are gone, and with each turn of the plot it becomes clearer that they are everything to each other. Shot on location in the Bronx, Harlem, and Washington Heights.

18

Series

19

BIG TROUBLE

John Cassavetes / 1986 / 35mm / 93 mins Cassavetes’s final film, which he stepped in to direct, is a black comic riff on Double Indemnity starring Alan Arkin as a Los Angeles insurance agent who, faced with an imposing tuition bill for his triplets, is drawn into a plot hatched by knockout femme fatale Beverly D’Angelo, conspiring to bump off her ailing husband, played

by Peter Falk, and features cinema’s ultimate spit-take. In hindsight, the film is a bittersweet sign-off from Cassavetes, and a reminder of the pleasures even a minor work can offer.

TOO LATE BLUES

John Cassavetes / 1961 / 35mm / 103 mins Bobby Darin stars as jazz musician “Ghost” Wakefield, trying to keep it together between band politics and a romance with the new singer, played by Stella Stevens. After the success of Shadows, Cassavetes went west with the intention of revolutionizing Hollywood. Though he’d eventually give this up for a lost cause, it was not before he fired some of the first shots of an American New Wave, and was soon influencing a generation that succeeded within the system. The film’s story, that of an artist struggling with the demands of commerce, also happens to describe its director’s lifelong battle.

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.

THE SEVENTH FIRE

One Week Only JULY 22 to 28

THE SEVENTH FIRE

Jack Pettibone Riccobono / 2015 / DCP / 78 mins “I haven’t been law-abiding lately,” says Rob Brown, a drug dealer headed for his fifth stint in jail. Rob must reckon with his culpability as an Ojibwe Native American who has brought drug and gang culture to his own White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. This powerful, unflinching film is a deep dive into the lives of Rob and his young protégé Kevin, and a criminal justice system that continues the centuries-long oppression of American Indians. The story is told in images: teenagers riding on the hood of a car, a dream catcher sprayed on the side of a shack, a car set ablaze under the Midwestern sky.

A Film Movement release.

18

Series

19

BIG TROUBLE

John Cassavetes / 1986 / 35mm / 93 mins Cassavetes’s final film, which he stepped in to direct, is a black comic riff on Double Indemnity starring Alan Arkin as a Los Angeles insurance agent who, faced with an imposing tuition bill for his triplets, is drawn into a plot hatched by knockout femme fatale Beverly D’Angelo, conspiring to bump off her ailing husband, played

by Peter Falk, and features cinema’s ultimate spit-take. In hindsight, the film is a bittersweet sign-off from Cassavetes, and a reminder of the pleasures even a minor work can offer.

TOO LATE BLUES

John Cassavetes / 1961 / 35mm / 103 mins Bobby Darin stars as jazz musician “Ghost” Wakefield, trying to keep it together between band politics and a romance with the new singer, played by Stella Stevens. After the success of Shadows, Cassavetes went west with the intention of revolutionizing Hollywood. Though he’d eventually give this up for a lost cause, it was not before he fired some of the first shots of an American New Wave, and was soon influencing a generation that succeeded within the system. The film’s story, that of an artist struggling with the demands of commerce, also happens to describe its director’s lifelong battle.

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.

THE SEVENTH FIRE

One Week Only JULY 22 to 28

THE SEVENTH FIRE

Jack Pettibone Riccobono / 2015 / DCP / 78 mins “I haven’t been law-abiding lately,” says Rob Brown, a drug dealer headed for his fifth stint in jail. Rob must reckon with his culpability as an Ojibwe Native American who has brought drug and gang culture to his own White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. This powerful, unflinching film is a deep dive into the lives of Rob and his young protégé Kevin, and a criminal justice system that continues the centuries-long oppression of American Indians. The story is told in images: teenagers riding on the hood of a car, a dream catcher sprayed on the side of a shack, a car set ablaze under the Midwestern sky.

A Film Movement release.

20

Series

21

NATIVE TO AMERICA JULY 22 to 28

Jack Pettibone Riccobono’s new film The Seventh Fire depicts the brutal endemic reality of contemporary reservation life for many Native Americans, with longstanding issues of poverty and substance abuse compounded by gang violence and an overly judicious legal system that favors imprisonment over rehabilitation for addicts. The price paid for mass incarceration by families and communities is felt across the country, but has been mercilessly harsh on the indigenous, minority and poor. While this mistreatment is hidden in plain site for many Americans, it is eternally familiar to many other ethnic and political groups who suffer similarly.

This concise series, inspired by The Seventh Fire and co-programmed with Chris Eyre, explores depictions of Native American life, documentaries on resistance movements, and glimpses of solidarity struggles.

DEAD MAN

Jim Jarmusch / 1995 / 35mm / 121 mins Robby Müller’s crisp, surreally lucid black-and-white photography and Neil Young’s dropped-and-stomped-on electric guitar score are but two of the standout elements that make up Jim Jarmusch’s sui generis, visionary western, in which timid accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) comes west for work only to be killed, resurrected, and led by a cryptic Native American guide named Nobody (Gary Farmer) on a spiritual journey through a landscape peopled with eccentrics and grotesques.

SMOKE SIGNALS

Chris Eyre / 1998 / 35mm / 89 mins Sherman Alexie’s screenplay adapts one of his own short stories for the screen, a warm, deeply human tale of life on Idaho’s Coeur D’Alene Indian Reservation as experienced by two very different young men, hothead Victor (Adam Beach) and starry-eyed Thomas (Evan Adams), both struggling to find a way to balance longing towards a traditional culture and the demands of the modern world. A Sundance Film Festival award winner and a landmark work of 90’s indie cinema.

20

Series

21

NATIVE TO AMERICA JULY 22 to 28

Jack Pettibone Riccobono’s new film The Seventh Fire depicts the brutal endemic reality of contemporary reservation life for many Native Americans, with longstanding issues of poverty and substance abuse compounded by gang violence and an overly judicious legal system that favors imprisonment over rehabilitation for addicts. The price paid for mass incarceration by families and communities is felt across the country, but has been mercilessly harsh on the indigenous, minority and poor. While this mistreatment is hidden in plain site for many Americans, it is eternally familiar to many other ethnic and political groups who suffer similarly.

This concise series, inspired by The Seventh Fire and co-programmed with Chris Eyre, explores depictions of Native American life, documentaries on resistance movements, and glimpses of solidarity struggles.

DEAD MAN

Jim Jarmusch / 1995 / 35mm / 121 mins Robby Müller’s crisp, surreally lucid black-and-white photography and Neil Young’s dropped-and-stomped-on electric guitar score are but two of the standout elements that make up Jim Jarmusch’s sui generis, visionary western, in which timid accountant William Blake (Johnny Depp) comes west for work only to be killed, resurrected, and led by a cryptic Native American guide named Nobody (Gary Farmer) on a spiritual journey through a landscape peopled with eccentrics and grotesques.

SMOKE SIGNALS

Chris Eyre / 1998 / 35mm / 89 mins Sherman Alexie’s screenplay adapts one of his own short stories for the screen, a warm, deeply human tale of life on Idaho’s Coeur D’Alene Indian Reservation as experienced by two very different young men, hothead Victor (Adam Beach) and starry-eyed Thomas (Evan Adams), both struggling to find a way to balance longing towards a traditional culture and the demands of the modern world. A Sundance Film Festival award winner and a landmark work of 90’s indie cinema.

22

Series

KANESATAKE: 270 YEARS OF RESISTANCE Alanis Obomsawin / 1993 Digital / 119 mins

In 1990, a land dispute between the town of Oka, Quebec and a neighboring Mohawk Nations community turned ugly, as bullets flew and lives were shattered. Alanis Obomsawin’s lauded, fearless investigative documentary examines the open conflict between the First Nations activists and the Canadian government and circumstances leading up to it, tracing root causes to the very earliest years of the New World, so-called.

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW Larry Clark / 1973 Digital / 52 mins

A too-rarely-seen key work of the L.A. Rebellion movement which brought true, life-scaled stories of the black American experience to the screen, the angry, coruscatingly brilliant As Above, So Below moves effortlessly between a street corner and a global perspective, following its protagonist’s political awakening from his boyhood in postwar Chicago to his return to the neighborhood after a stint with the Marines that opens his eyes to America’s imperial ambitions abroad.

MY CRASY LIFE

Jean-Pierre Gorin 1992 Digital / 95 mins Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard’s Dziga Vertov Group comrade turned documentary chronicler of obscure, weird Americana, throws light on yet another little-seen aspect of life in his adopted country with a ridealong with the Samoan street gangs of Long Beach, Los Angeles, a funny, curious work of empathetic urban ethnography that respectfully sets down its subjects’ rites and rituals.

Native To America

23

INCIDENT AT OGLALA

Michael Apted / 1992 / Digital / 89 mins Who killed the two FBI agents shot down while investigating the case of a stolen pair of cowboy boots at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota on June 26, 1975? American Indian Movement member Leonard Peltier is still doing time for the crime today, but Michael Apted’s muckracking documentary reopened the case and opened a lot of eyes to both the abysmal conditions on the reservation and the dubious claims that Peltier’s snow job trial had served the cause of justice.

LOCK-UP: THE PRISONERS OF RIKERS ISLAND

Jon Alpert & Nina Rosenblum / 1994 / Digital / 75 mins Riker’s Island, poised between Queens and the Bronx on the East River, is a city within a city, a hidden landmark that doesn’t show up on tourist itineraries. Jon Alpert and Nina Rosenblum’s gritty, unblinking documentary takes you inside the place where nobody should want to wind up, soliciting the perspectives of both inmates and their jailers, going behind bars to expose the workings (and the sometimes-violent dysfunctions) of one of the country’s largest prisons.

Free Screening

LITTLE BIG MAN

Arthur Penn / 1970 / 35mm / 139 mins In one of his greatest roles, Dustin Hoffman is Jack “Little Big Man” Crabb, a white boy raised by Cheyenne and the lone paleface survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn. Hoffman plays Crabb from the ages of 16 to 121, when he’s an ancient dying in hospice and recounting his impossible life story to an incredulous historian, as Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn’s bounding historical burlesque shuttles between the worlds of the Indian and the hypocritical whites, along the way touching on many of the quintessential experiences of the 19th century west.

HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. Barbara Kopple / 1976 35mm / 103 mins

When nearly 200 coal miners and their wives stood up against the collected might of the Eastover Coal Company in southeastern Kentucky, documentarian Barbara Kopple was on the ground and right in the thick of the pickets, recording the Brookside Strike in this rough-andready boots-on-the-ground classic which lets the working people tell their own story, and asks in no uncertain terms: Which side are you on?

22

Series

KANESATAKE: 270 YEARS OF RESISTANCE Alanis Obomsawin / 1993 Digital / 119 mins

In 1990, a land dispute between the town of Oka, Quebec and a neighboring Mohawk Nations community turned ugly, as bullets flew and lives were shattered. Alanis Obomsawin’s lauded, fearless investigative documentary examines the open conflict between the First Nations activists and the Canadian government and circumstances leading up to it, tracing root causes to the very earliest years of the New World, so-called.

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW Larry Clark / 1973 Digital / 52 mins

A too-rarely-seen key work of the L.A. Rebellion movement which brought true, life-scaled stories of the black American experience to the screen, the angry, coruscatingly brilliant As Above, So Below moves effortlessly between a street corner and a global perspective, following its protagonist’s political awakening from his boyhood in postwar Chicago to his return to the neighborhood after a stint with the Marines that opens his eyes to America’s imperial ambitions abroad.

MY CRASY LIFE

Jean-Pierre Gorin 1992 Digital / 95 mins Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard’s Dziga Vertov Group comrade turned documentary chronicler of obscure, weird Americana, throws light on yet another little-seen aspect of life in his adopted country with a ridealong with the Samoan street gangs of Long Beach, Los Angeles, a funny, curious work of empathetic urban ethnography that respectfully sets down its subjects’ rites and rituals.

Native To America

23

INCIDENT AT OGLALA

Michael Apted / 1992 / Digital / 89 mins Who killed the two FBI agents shot down while investigating the case of a stolen pair of cowboy boots at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota on June 26, 1975? American Indian Movement member Leonard Peltier is still doing time for the crime today, but Michael Apted’s muckracking documentary reopened the case and opened a lot of eyes to both the abysmal conditions on the reservation and the dubious claims that Peltier’s snow job trial had served the cause of justice.

LOCK-UP: THE PRISONERS OF RIKERS ISLAND

Jon Alpert & Nina Rosenblum / 1994 / Digital / 75 mins Riker’s Island, poised between Queens and the Bronx on the East River, is a city within a city, a hidden landmark that doesn’t show up on tourist itineraries. Jon Alpert and Nina Rosenblum’s gritty, unblinking documentary takes you inside the place where nobody should want to wind up, soliciting the perspectives of both inmates and their jailers, going behind bars to expose the workings (and the sometimes-violent dysfunctions) of one of the country’s largest prisons.

Free Screening

LITTLE BIG MAN

Arthur Penn / 1970 / 35mm / 139 mins In one of his greatest roles, Dustin Hoffman is Jack “Little Big Man” Crabb, a white boy raised by Cheyenne and the lone paleface survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn. Hoffman plays Crabb from the ages of 16 to 121, when he’s an ancient dying in hospice and recounting his impossible life story to an incredulous historian, as Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn’s bounding historical burlesque shuttles between the worlds of the Indian and the hypocritical whites, along the way touching on many of the quintessential experiences of the 19th century west.

HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A. Barbara Kopple / 1976 35mm / 103 mins

When nearly 200 coal miners and their wives stood up against the collected might of the Eastover Coal Company in southeastern Kentucky, documentarian Barbara Kopple was on the ground and right in the thick of the pickets, recording the Brookside Strike in this rough-andready boots-on-the-ground classic which lets the working people tell their own story, and asks in no uncertain terms: Which side are you on?

Series

24

25

JAWS

Steven Spielberg / 1975 35mm / 123 mins A beautiful skinny-dipper screams for help as a shark hidden beneath the ocean’s dark waves tears her apart and drags her underwater in the opening scene of Spielberg’s horror masterpiece, a film that changed the lives of anyone who saw it before the first five minutes were even up.

Perfect in every way, Jaws is an especially overwhelming experience on the big screen, where it plays its audience like a piano.

GREMLINS

Joe Dante / 1984 35mm / 106 mins

THIS IS PG?!

JULY 27 to AUGUST 4

Those of us of a certain age remember the feeling: going into a movie with the gentle PG rating and emerging pleasantly traumatized. This was the lost paradise of the pre–PG-13 era, when the gulf between the ratings of PG (Parental Guidance suggested) and R (Restricted)—imposed by the Motion Picture Association of America in 1968—was as massive as the gaping wounds in, well, the PG-rated Jaws. That wouldn’t be the last Spielberg film to terrorize tots and piss off parents: the Hollywood titan’s cartoonish gorefests Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Gremlins were directly responsible for the creation of the PG-13 rating in 1984. But such measures couldn’t repair the damage done. All the titles in this series were and forever will be PG, despite explicitly violent or sexual content.

Each one has at least one moment that will make you exclaim to your seatmate or yourself: “This Is PG?!” Special thanks to Michael Koresky.

It’s Christmastime in Capraesque Kingston Falls! A middleaged couple is run down by a snowplow that comes crashing through their living room. A nasty lady is jettisoned to her death from an out-ofcontrol motorized stair climber. A science teacher is chomped on, killed, and stabbed with a hypodermic needle. It’s all the handiwork of a flock of multiplying malevolent creatures, one of whom a sweet housewife bakes in a microwave until it explodes into brown goo. Sound terrible? It’s nothing compared to Phoebe Cates’s monologue about Santa Claus, surely the most traumatic moment for many an ’80s kid.

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM Steven Spielberg / 1984 35mm / 118 mins

New York Times, May 21, 1984: “Some parents who brought young children to preview screenings of the movie said they were upset by scenes that show the tearing of a heart from the chest of a living man, the ghoulish remains of previous victims, the flogging of children, and the death of a caged man by immersion into a pit of boiling lava . . . Mr. Spielberg added that he would favor creating a new classification that he called PG-2.”

Series

24

25

JAWS

Steven Spielberg / 1975 35mm / 123 mins A beautiful skinny-dipper screams for help as a shark hidden beneath the ocean’s dark waves tears her apart and drags her underwater in the opening scene of Spielberg’s horror masterpiece, a film that changed the lives of anyone who saw it before the first five minutes were even up.

Perfect in every way, Jaws is an especially overwhelming experience on the big screen, where it plays its audience like a piano.

GREMLINS

Joe Dante / 1984 35mm / 106 mins

THIS IS PG?!

JULY 27 to AUGUST 4

Those of us of a certain age remember the feeling: going into a movie with the gentle PG rating and emerging pleasantly traumatized. This was the lost paradise of the pre–PG-13 era, when the gulf between the ratings of PG (Parental Guidance suggested) and R (Restricted)—imposed by the Motion Picture Association of America in 1968—was as massive as the gaping wounds in, well, the PG-rated Jaws. That wouldn’t be the last Spielberg film to terrorize tots and piss off parents: the Hollywood titan’s cartoonish gorefests Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Gremlins were directly responsible for the creation of the PG-13 rating in 1984. But such measures couldn’t repair the damage done. All the titles in this series were and forever will be PG, despite explicitly violent or sexual content.

Each one has at least one moment that will make you exclaim to your seatmate or yourself: “This Is PG?!” Special thanks to Michael Koresky.

It’s Christmastime in Capraesque Kingston Falls! A middleaged couple is run down by a snowplow that comes crashing through their living room. A nasty lady is jettisoned to her death from an out-ofcontrol motorized stair climber. A science teacher is chomped on, killed, and stabbed with a hypodermic needle. It’s all the handiwork of a flock of multiplying malevolent creatures, one of whom a sweet housewife bakes in a microwave until it explodes into brown goo. Sound terrible? It’s nothing compared to Phoebe Cates’s monologue about Santa Claus, surely the most traumatic moment for many an ’80s kid.

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM Steven Spielberg / 1984 35mm / 118 mins

New York Times, May 21, 1984: “Some parents who brought young children to preview screenings of the movie said they were upset by scenes that show the tearing of a heart from the chest of a living man, the ghoulish remains of previous victims, the flogging of children, and the death of a caged man by immersion into a pit of boiling lava . . . Mr. Spielberg added that he would favor creating a new classification that he called PG-2.”

26

Series

This Is PG?!

27

POLTERGEIST

TOURIST TRAP

The directors of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Jaws

Perhaps the most bafflingly mis-rated title of any in this series, Tourist Trap concerns a group of nubile teens from the big city who fall prey to the evils of a twisted backwoods mannequin manufacturer (professional athlete cum TV star Chuck Connors!) while on a road trip. Extremely disturbing deaths and a gallery of grotesque, nightmare-inducing dummy faces didn’t stop this straight-up slasher in the Texas Chainsaw/House of Wax vein from somehow getting a PG. The only possible excuse is that the ratings board literally fell asleep at the switch.

Tobe Hooper / 1982 35mm / 114 mins

teamed up for this allegedly family-friendly haunted-house saga, utilizing cutting-edge, Oscar-nominated special effects for the tale of a middleclass California family trying to rescue its cherubic five-year-old (“Carol Anne!

Carol Anne!”), who has been whisked away to another dimension by meanspirited apparitions. Any of us who saw it young will never forget it—especially the scene in which a man rips his own face off in front of a mirror. Though Poltergeist was initially given an R rating, producer Steven Spielberg sweet-talked the MPAA down to a PG, resulting in sleepless nights for children for years to come.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

Philip Kaufman / 1978 / 35mm / 115 mins In his book Danse Macabre, Stephen King wrote of Kaufman’s superlative, terrifying San Francisco-set remake of the Don Siegel classic: “There is a moment in that film which is repulsively horrible. It comes when Donald Sutherland uses a rake to smash in the face of a mostly formed pod. This ‘person’s’ face breaks in with sickening ease, like a rotted piece of fruit, and lets out an explosion of the most realistic stage blood that I have ever seen in a color film. When that moment came, I winced, I clapped a hand over my mouth . . . and wondered how in the hell the movie had ever gotten its PG rating.”

BURNT OFFERINGS Dan Curtis / 1976 35mm / 116 mins

A married couple—eternal creepers Oliver Reed and Karen Black—move with their twelve-year-old son and sickly old aunt (Bette Davis!) into a malevolent old house in rural California and become a little too attached to their new home. From dad’s haunted dreams of a grinning, skeletal chauffeur, to its violent scenes of bodily possession, to its shocking climactic death, Burnt Offerings is a supremely scary cornerstone of seventies horror— from the same year that brought us (the aptly R-rated) Carrie, The Omen, The Tenant, and The Town That Dreaded Sundown—which ought to have been deemed unsuitable for youngsters.

David Schmoeller / 1979 35mm / 90 mins

SIXTEEN CANDLES John Hughes / 1984 35mm / 93 min

Ribald jokes, racist humor, and one memorable close-up of bare breasts didn’t stop John Hughes’s breakthrough debut from scoring a kidfriendly rating. Another entry from the summer of ‘84, this quintessential teen comedy, in which Molly Ringwald’s Samantha lusts after a handsome jock (Michael Schoeffling), avoids a lusty geek (Anthony Michael Hall), and angrily deals with her family forgetting her sweet sixteen, taught an entire generation of movie-lovers the ins and outs of the high school sex comedy.

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES Jack Clayton / 1983 / 35mm / 95 mins

Disney gets dark! Step right up, Mr. Dark’s Pandemonium Carnival is coming to town! Jonathan Pryce plays the show’s mysterious, seductive impresario, who arrives in an Illinois backwater with a promise to grant wishes and a collection of sinister attractions, including the Mirror Maze and an accursed carousel. Only two local boys and one of their fathers (Jason Robards) see the truth behind Mr. Dark’s masquerade, their mission to stop him accompanied by threatening atmospherics courtesy of director Jack Clayton (The Innocents), working from Ray Bradbury’s adaptation of his own novel.

26

Series

This Is PG?!

27

POLTERGEIST

TOURIST TRAP

The directors of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Jaws

Perhaps the most bafflingly mis-rated title of any in this series, Tourist Trap concerns a group of nubile teens from the big city who fall prey to the evils of a twisted backwoods mannequin manufacturer (professional athlete cum TV star Chuck Connors!) while on a road trip. Extremely disturbing deaths and a gallery of grotesque, nightmare-inducing dummy faces didn’t stop this straight-up slasher in the Texas Chainsaw/House of Wax vein from somehow getting a PG. The only possible excuse is that the ratings board literally fell asleep at the switch.

Tobe Hooper / 1982 35mm / 114 mins

teamed up for this allegedly family-friendly haunted-house saga, utilizing cutting-edge, Oscar-nominated special effects for the tale of a middleclass California family trying to rescue its cherubic five-year-old (“Carol Anne!

Carol Anne!”), who has been whisked away to another dimension by meanspirited apparitions. Any of us who saw it young will never forget it—especially the scene in which a man rips his own face off in front of a mirror. Though Poltergeist was initially given an R rating, producer Steven Spielberg sweet-talked the MPAA down to a PG, resulting in sleepless nights for children for years to come.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

Philip Kaufman / 1978 / 35mm / 115 mins In his book Danse Macabre, Stephen King wrote of Kaufman’s superlative, terrifying San Francisco-set remake of the Don Siegel classic: “There is a moment in that film which is repulsively horrible. It comes when Donald Sutherland uses a rake to smash in the face of a mostly formed pod. This ‘person’s’ face breaks in with sickening ease, like a rotted piece of fruit, and lets out an explosion of the most realistic stage blood that I have ever seen in a color film. When that moment came, I winced, I clapped a hand over my mouth . . . and wondered how in the hell the movie had ever gotten its PG rating.”

BURNT OFFERINGS Dan Curtis / 1976 35mm / 116 mins

A married couple—eternal creepers Oliver Reed and Karen Black—move with their twelve-year-old son and sickly old aunt (Bette Davis!) into a malevolent old house in rural California and become a little too attached to their new home. From dad’s haunted dreams of a grinning, skeletal chauffeur, to its violent scenes of bodily possession, to its shocking climactic death, Burnt Offerings is a supremely scary cornerstone of seventies horror— from the same year that brought us (the aptly R-rated) Carrie, The Omen, The Tenant, and The Town That Dreaded Sundown—which ought to have been deemed unsuitable for youngsters.

David Schmoeller / 1979 35mm / 90 mins

SIXTEEN CANDLES John Hughes / 1984 35mm / 93 min

Ribald jokes, racist humor, and one memorable close-up of bare breasts didn’t stop John Hughes’s breakthrough debut from scoring a kidfriendly rating. Another entry from the summer of ‘84, this quintessential teen comedy, in which Molly Ringwald’s Samantha lusts after a handsome jock (Michael Schoeffling), avoids a lusty geek (Anthony Michael Hall), and angrily deals with her family forgetting her sweet sixteen, taught an entire generation of movie-lovers the ins and outs of the high school sex comedy.

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES Jack Clayton / 1983 / 35mm / 95 mins

Disney gets dark! Step right up, Mr. Dark’s Pandemonium Carnival is coming to town! Jonathan Pryce plays the show’s mysterious, seductive impresario, who arrives in an Illinois backwater with a promise to grant wishes and a collection of sinister attractions, including the Mirror Maze and an accursed carousel. Only two local boys and one of their fathers (Jason Robards) see the truth behind Mr. Dark’s masquerade, their mission to stop him accompanied by threatening atmospherics courtesy of director Jack Clayton (The Innocents), working from Ray Bradbury’s adaptation of his own novel.

28

Series

SMITHEREENS NEW 35MM PRINT! JULY 29

to

One Week Only

29

SEVEN SAMURAI

PRESENTED BY HELEN DEWITT

AUGUST 4

One Night Only JULY 31

SMITHEREENS

Susan Seidelman / 1982 / 35mm / 89 mins “I just wanna be in a swimming pool, eating tacos and signing autographs – that’s all.” Wren wants to be famous. At least she wants her personhood recognized.

She goes around the Lower East Side in torn fishnets and a plastic houndstooth miniskirt, jumping turnstiles and wheat-pasting up her own “missing” posters. The ransom-note letters across her face ask, WHO IS THIS? Susan Berman plays her like the pissed-off older sister of Molly Ringwald, and Smithereens has the feel of a fallen John Hughes movie: Beefaroni, Pac Man, and youthful angst in a hustler’s world. Seidelman’s downtown feels at once stylized and (thanks to the 16mm cinematography) documentary-real; the ubiquitous presence of prostitutes lends an ominous undertone to Wren’s desperation to keep a toehold in Manhattan.

With Richard Hell, Cookie Mueller, and a score by The Feelies.

SEVEN SAMURAI

Akira Kurosawa / 1954 / 35mm / 208 mins On the occasion of legendary publisher New Directions’ 80th anniversary and their reissue of author Helen DeWitt’s cult-classic The Last Samurai, Metrograph presents Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai. DeWitt’s novel is the story of a precocious eleven year old who sets out on a quest, inspired by countless viewings of the Kurosawa epic, to find his lost father. Helen DeWitt will introduce the screening, followed by a signing in The Metrograph Bookstore.

28

Series

SMITHEREENS NEW 35MM PRINT! JULY 29

to

One Week Only

29

SEVEN SAMURAI

PRESENTED BY HELEN DEWITT

AUGUST 4

One Night Only JULY 31

SMITHEREENS

Susan Seidelman / 1982 / 35mm / 89 mins “I just wanna be in a swimming pool, eating tacos and signing autographs – that’s all.” Wren wants to be famous. At least she wants her personhood recognized.

She goes around the Lower East Side in torn fishnets and a plastic houndstooth miniskirt, jumping turnstiles and wheat-pasting up her own “missing” posters. The ransom-note letters across her face ask, WHO IS THIS? Susan Berman plays her like the pissed-off older sister of Molly Ringwald, and Smithereens has the feel of a fallen John Hughes movie: Beefaroni, Pac Man, and youthful angst in a hustler’s world. Seidelman’s downtown feels at once stylized and (thanks to the 16mm cinematography) documentary-real; the ubiquitous presence of prostitutes lends an ominous undertone to Wren’s desperation to keep a toehold in Manhattan.

With Richard Hell, Cookie Mueller, and a score by The Feelies.

SEVEN SAMURAI

Akira Kurosawa / 1954 / 35mm / 208 mins On the occasion of legendary publisher New Directions’ 80th anniversary and their reissue of author Helen DeWitt’s cult-classic The Last Samurai, Metrograph presents Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai. DeWitt’s novel is the story of a precocious eleven year old who sets out on a quest, inspired by countless viewings of the Kurosawa epic, to find his lost father. Helen DeWitt will introduce the screening, followed by a signing in The Metrograph Bookstore.

30

Series

31

DIM ALL THE LIGHTS: DISCO AND THE MOVIES AUGUST 5 to 11

WILL YOU DANCE WITH ME?

One Week Only AUGUST 5 to 11

Metrograph’s week-long run, the first in the U.S., of Derek Jarman’s Will You Dance with Me? occasions this series, a wide assortment of features and shorts that are about disco, some more explicitly than others. Though the musical idioms heard in Jarman’s 1984 documentary are technically post-disco, the film highlights the key motif in the retrospective: the joys of the dance floor, especially during the 1970s, a decade that saw advancements—and retreats—for feminism, civil rights, and LGBT liberation. Disco, as Alice Echols persuasively argues in her 2010 book, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, provided the soundtrack to this vital, vibrant era; the music not only integrated nightlife but fostered the new relationship gay men had to public space, now that they were no longer prohibited from dancing together. The titles in this by no means exhaustive program largely celebrate disco’s utopian promise, though a few call attention to its dysphoric possibilities.

Curated by Melissa Anderson and Amélie Garin-Davet. Special thanks to Colin Beckett, Leah Gilliam, and Ed Halter.

WILL YOU DANCE WITH ME?

Derek Jarman / 1984 / DCP / 78 mins Derek Jarman’s Will You Dance with Me? is an essential document of LGBTQ London that was unseen until 2014, 30 years after it was originally shot. In September 1984, Jarman was invited by director Ron Peck and writer Mark Ayres to record improvisations at Benjy’s, a gay club in East London’s Mile End district, as part of the early experimental work for their feature film Empire State, a neo-noir that would be released in 1987. The coed, racially diverse crowd of roughly 100 people at Benjiy’s that night included club regulars, bar staff, and potential players in Empire State. Every single detail captured in Jarman’s on-location assignment abounds with era-specific riches: from the New Romantic cutie journaling while nestled in a corner booth to the DJ’s cheerful exhortations and the songs he spins (“Let the Music Play,” “Planet Rock,” “Relax”). As Jarman flits from bar to banquette to dance floor and back again with his Olympus VHS camcorder, it soon becomes clear that he’s deeply in tune with the rhythm of the night.

THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO Whit Stillman / 35mm 1998 / 113 mins

“Before disco, this country was a dancing wasteland,” recent Hampshire grad Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) declares to her club-loving, creative-class coterie in Whit Stillman’s early’80s-set comedy of manners.

When not undermining one another, the voluble 20-somethings cut loose in a Studio 54–inspired nightspot, their professional and romantic woes suspended, if only for the length of a Sister Sledge track.

30

Series

31

DIM ALL THE LIGHTS: DISCO AND THE MOVIES AUGUST 5 to 11

WILL YOU DANCE WITH ME?

One Week Only AUGUST 5 to 11

Metrograph’s week-long run, the first in the U.S., of Derek Jarman’s Will You Dance with Me? occasions this series, a wide assortment of features and shorts that are about disco, some more explicitly than others. Though the musical idioms heard in Jarman’s 1984 documentary are technically post-disco, the film highlights the key motif in the retrospective: the joys of the dance floor, especially during the 1970s, a decade that saw advancements—and retreats—for feminism, civil rights, and LGBT liberation. Disco, as Alice Echols persuasively argues in her 2010 book, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, provided the soundtrack to this vital, vibrant era; the music not only integrated nightlife but fostered the new relationship gay men had to public space, now that they were no longer prohibited from dancing together. The titles in this by no means exhaustive program largely celebrate disco’s utopian promise, though a few call attention to its dysphoric possibilities.

Curated by Melissa Anderson and Amélie Garin-Davet. Special thanks to Colin Beckett, Leah Gilliam, and Ed Halter.

WILL YOU DANCE WITH ME?

Derek Jarman / 1984 / DCP / 78 mins Derek Jarman’s Will You Dance with Me? is an essential document of LGBTQ London that was unseen until 2014, 30 years after it was originally shot. In September 1984, Jarman was invited by director Ron Peck and writer Mark Ayres to record improvisations at Benjy’s, a gay club in East London’s Mile End district, as part of the early experimental work for their feature film Empire State, a neo-noir that would be released in 1987. The coed, racially diverse crowd of roughly 100 people at Benjiy’s that night included club regulars, bar staff, and potential players in Empire State. Every single detail captured in Jarman’s on-location assignment abounds with era-specific riches: from the New Romantic cutie journaling while nestled in a corner booth to the DJ’s cheerful exhortations and the songs he spins (“Let the Music Play,” “Planet Rock,” “Relax”). As Jarman flits from bar to banquette to dance floor and back again with his Olympus VHS camcorder, it soon becomes clear that he’s deeply in tune with the rhythm of the night.

THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO Whit Stillman / 35mm 1998 / 113 mins

“Before disco, this country was a dancing wasteland,” recent Hampshire grad Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) declares to her club-loving, creative-class coterie in Whit Stillman’s early’80s-set comedy of manners.

When not undermining one another, the voluble 20-somethings cut loose in a Studio 54–inspired nightspot, their professional and romantic woes suspended, if only for the length of a Sister Sledge track.

Dim All The Lights: Disco And The Movies

33

CAN’T STOP THE MUSIC Nancy Walker / 35mm 1980 / 124 mins

The ultimate in disco disasters or a rarely screened relic due for reappraisal? A sanitized retelling of the formation of the Village People— the Casablanca Records concoction once referred to by The Advocate as “the Osmond Brothers from Oz”—this musical proves just how much unhinged homosexuality could circulate undetected. CStM also marks the screen debut of Caitlyn Jenner.

GAY SEX IN THE 70S Joseph Lovett Digital / 2005 67 mins

The libidinous freedom that defined New York City in the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS years is vividly recalled by those who experienced it in Joseph Lovett’s eros-fueled documentary. Punctuating these stirring first-person recollections—of the West Side piers, the baths, the legendary dance spots the Loft and Paradise Garage— is an astounding assortment of disco deep cuts.

Screening with FUNK LESSONS Adrian Piper / Digital / 1983 / 15 mins Conceptual artist and philosopher Adrian Piper’s drolly pedagogical and buoyant short video piece dismantles stereotypes about who has “innate” rhythm and who doesn’t. Instructing a racially diverse, though largely white, group of men and women, Piper demonstrates various moves, underscoring the democracy of the dance floor with this aperçu: “Nobody cares how good or bad anybody else looks because everyone is too busy enjoying themselves.”

KLUTE

Alan J. Pakula / 35mm / 1971 / 114 mins Though Alan J. Pakula’s paragon of paranoia was released a few years before disco’s ascendance, Klute includes a pivotal scene shot in the Sanctuary, a Hell’s Kitchen dance club that was one of the first where gay men could safely congregate. It is here that Jane Fonda’s boho-chic prostitute Bree Daniels spots and gyrates with Candy Darling, two revelers among the chic throng.

Dim All The Lights: Disco And The Movies

33

CAN’T STOP THE MUSIC Nancy Walker / 35mm 1980 / 124 mins

The ultimate in disco disasters or a rarely screened relic due for reappraisal? A sanitized retelling of the formation of the Village People— the Casablanca Records concoction once referred to by The Advocate as “the Osmond Brothers from Oz”—this musical proves just how much unhinged homosexuality could circulate undetected. CStM also marks the screen debut of Caitlyn Jenner.

GAY SEX IN THE 70S Joseph Lovett Digital / 2005 67 mins

The libidinous freedom that defined New York City in the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS years is vividly recalled by those who experienced it in Joseph Lovett’s eros-fueled documentary. Punctuating these stirring first-person recollections—of the West Side piers, the baths, the legendary dance spots the Loft and Paradise Garage— is an astounding assortment of disco deep cuts.

Screening with FUNK LESSONS Adrian Piper / Digital / 1983 / 15 mins Conceptual artist and philosopher Adrian Piper’s drolly pedagogical and buoyant short video piece dismantles stereotypes about who has “innate” rhythm and who doesn’t. Instructing a racially diverse, though largely white, group of men and women, Piper demonstrates various moves, underscoring the democracy of the dance floor with this aperçu: “Nobody cares how good or bad anybody else looks because everyone is too busy enjoying themselves.”

KLUTE

Alan J. Pakula / 35mm / 1971 / 114 mins Though Alan J. Pakula’s paragon of paranoia was released a few years before disco’s ascendance, Klute includes a pivotal scene shot in the Sanctuary, a Hell’s Kitchen dance club that was one of the first where gay men could safely congregate. It is here that Jane Fonda’s boho-chic prostitute Bree Daniels spots and gyrates with Candy Darling, two revelers among the chic throng.

34

Series

LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR

Richard Brooks / 35mm / 1977 / 136 mins Richard Brooks’s fascinatingly ambivalent take on women’s sexual freedom tracks Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton), whose virtuous job instructing deaf kids is presented as wholly incompatible with her habit of picking up men in bars and clubs. That the film is scored, often diegetically, to some of the most succulent disco tracks of the mid-’70s further highlights the odd tension generated by the simultaneous celebration and condemnation of Theresa’s hedonism.

MAESTRO

Josell Ramos / Digital / 2003 / 89 mins An impassioned tribute to Larry Levan, David Mancuso, and other New York– based DJ deities in the ’70s and ’80s, Josell Ramos’s documentary equally salutes the habitués of the storied disco dens the Loft and Paradise Garage. These devoted patrons remember nights of sweaty bliss, their dance-floor reveries illustrated with archival footage.

NIGHTHAWKS

Ron Peck / 35mm 1978 / 113 mins This quietly revolutionary film gives us one of cinema’s first complex, fully realized gay protagonists: Jim (Ken Robertson), an out geography teacher and compulsive clubgoer. As Jim hits the bars, where he cruises, moves to the beat, and keeps up his end of desultory conversations, the dance floor becomes a space of both lusty liberation and dispiriting ritual.

ROLL BOUNCE

Malcolm D. Lee / 35mm 2005 / 112 mins Set in Chicago in 1978, Malcolm D. Lee’s effervescent look back at the glories of jam skating centers on a rollerrink showdown between South Side and North Side teens. The rival crews glide and twirl to a bounty of funk and disco classics and rarities, their feats on wheels consistently dazzling.

Dim All The Lights: Disco And The Movies

35

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER John Badham / 35mm 1977 / 118 mins

The film that brought disco to the masses—and, to some purists, sounded its death knell—has in the four decades since its release been both reviled as casually misogynist, racist, and homophobic and extolled as a trenchant critique of masculinity. As the peacocking prince of Bay Ridge’s 2001 Odyssey, John Travolta’s Tony Manero endures as an intriguingly irreconcilable icon.

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

Robert Klane / 35mm / 1978 / 89 mins One of the few films released during disco’s height to take place in Los Angeles, TGIF is largely set in Osko’s (here renamed “the Zoo”), a magical dance emporium on La Cienega Boulevard. DJ Bobby Speed (Ray Vitte) keeps the end-of-the-week partiers (including Debra Winger) in a state of rapture, euphoria that peaks with Donna Summer’s performance of “Last Dance.”

WILD COMBINATION: A PORTRAIT OF ARTHUR RUSSELL Matt Wolf / 35mm / 2008 / 71 mins

Celebrating the Iowa-born musical genius’s prodigious genre-tweaking during his time in New York, where he lived from 1973 until his death from AIDS in 1992.

Among his wide-ranging output, and under many different noms de disco, Russell produced some of the greatest dance music of the era.

Screening with (TELL ME WHY): THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF DISCO John Di Stefano / Digital / 1991 / 24 mins At once cheeky and sober, this short video essay riffs on the codes, costuming, and rituals of gay nightlife. Levi’s 501 jeans are subject to intense semiotic scrutiny, the waggish gloss on the garment typifying John Di Stefano’s inspired academic riffs. The cerebral tone may be tongue-in-cheek, but (tell me why) is ultimately a heartfelt paean to gay-club camaraderie.

THE WIZ

Sidney Lumet / 1978 / 134 mins Though its relationship to disco may be oblique, The Wiz is rich with signifiers of the genre. The elaborate “Emerald City Sequence” transforms a makeshift World Trade Center plaza into an empyrean dance floor. And the film marks the first collaboration between music supervisor Quincy Jones and co-star Michael Jackson—a partnership that, less than a year later, resulted in the disco masterwork Off the Wall.

34

Series

LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR

Richard Brooks / 35mm / 1977 / 136 mins Richard Brooks’s fascinatingly ambivalent take on women’s sexual freedom tracks Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton), whose virtuous job instructing deaf kids is presented as wholly incompatible with her habit of picking up men in bars and clubs. That the film is scored, often diegetically, to some of the most succulent disco tracks of the mid-’70s further highlights the odd tension generated by the simultaneous celebration and condemnation of Theresa’s hedonism.

MAESTRO

Josell Ramos / Digital / 2003 / 89 mins An impassioned tribute to Larry Levan, David Mancuso, and other New York– based DJ deities in the ’70s and ’80s, Josell Ramos’s documentary equally salutes the habitués of the storied disco dens the Loft and Paradise Garage. These devoted patrons remember nights of sweaty bliss, their dance-floor reveries illustrated with archival footage.

NIGHTHAWKS

Ron Peck / 35mm 1978 / 113 mins This quietly revolutionary film gives us one of cinema’s first complex, fully realized gay protagonists: Jim (Ken Robertson), an out geography teacher and compulsive clubgoer. As Jim hits the bars, where he cruises, moves to the beat, and keeps up his end of desultory conversations, the dance floor becomes a space of both lusty liberation and dispiriting ritual.

ROLL BOUNCE

Malcolm D. Lee / 35mm 2005 / 112 mins Set in Chicago in 1978, Malcolm D. Lee’s effervescent look back at the glories of jam skating centers on a rollerrink showdown between South Side and North Side teens. The rival crews glide and twirl to a bounty of funk and disco classics and rarities, their feats on wheels consistently dazzling.

Dim All The Lights: Disco And The Movies

35

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER John Badham / 35mm 1977 / 118 mins

The film that brought disco to the masses—and, to some purists, sounded its death knell—has in the four decades since its release been both reviled as casually misogynist, racist, and homophobic and extolled as a trenchant critique of masculinity. As the peacocking prince of Bay Ridge’s 2001 Odyssey, John Travolta’s Tony Manero endures as an intriguingly irreconcilable icon.

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

Robert Klane / 35mm / 1978 / 89 mins One of the few films released during disco’s height to take place in Los Angeles, TGIF is largely set in Osko’s (here renamed “the Zoo”), a magical dance emporium on La Cienega Boulevard. DJ Bobby Speed (Ray Vitte) keeps the end-of-the-week partiers (including Debra Winger) in a state of rapture, euphoria that peaks with Donna Summer’s performance of “Last Dance.”

WILD COMBINATION: A PORTRAIT OF ARTHUR RUSSELL Matt Wolf / 35mm / 2008 / 71 mins

Celebrating the Iowa-born musical genius’s prodigious genre-tweaking during his time in New York, where he lived from 1973 until his death from AIDS in 1992.

Among his wide-ranging output, and under many different noms de disco, Russell produced some of the greatest dance music of the era.

Screening with (TELL ME WHY): THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF DISCO John Di Stefano / Digital / 1991 / 24 mins At once cheeky and sober, this short video essay riffs on the codes, costuming, and rituals of gay nightlife. Levi’s 501 jeans are subject to intense semiotic scrutiny, the waggish gloss on the garment typifying John Di Stefano’s inspired academic riffs. The cerebral tone may be tongue-in-cheek, but (tell me why) is ultimately a heartfelt paean to gay-club camaraderie.

THE WIZ

Sidney Lumet / 1978 / 134 mins Though its relationship to disco may be oblique, The Wiz is rich with signifiers of the genre. The elaborate “Emerald City Sequence” transforms a makeshift World Trade Center plaza into an empyrean dance floor. And the film marks the first collaboration between music supervisor Quincy Jones and co-star Michael Jackson—a partnership that, less than a year later, resulted in the disco masterwork Off the Wall.

36

37

THE LOST ARCADE

One Week Only AUGUST 12 to 18

SHALL WE PLAY A GAME? AUGUST 12 to 18

THE LOST ARCADE

Kurt Vincent & Irene Chin / 2015 / DCP / 79 mins Blinking, beaming, and ringing, The Lost Arcade intimately memorializes the end of video arcades in New York City, while celebrating the camaraderie and history of a pop culture phenomenon. The film is an exceptional directorial debut that focuses on the Chinatown Fair, the Mott Street landmark where generations honed their craft, made friends and lost at tic-tac-toe to a chicken. Masterfully presenting the sights and sounds of a changing scene, wistful yet hopeful, and full of the faces and characters that radiate fun and innovation, The Lost Arcade is a dazzling portrait of technostalgia and a timely commentary on the corporate era’s incineration of modest businesses, and the resiliency of the dedicated enthusiasts.

There is a traditional, binary view that tends to treat movies and video games as natural enemies, like cobra and mongoose, or Mario and Bowser—but why can’t they be friends? In over thirty-some years of film and gaming history, the two mediums—one upstart, one established—inform and enrich one another in innovative and unexpected ways. In conjunction with Metrograph’s run of Kurt Vincent and Irene Chin’s The Lost Arcade, a paean to the Chinatown Fair, we present a series located at the intersection of pixels and celluloid grain. So put your quarters down, because it’s on like Donkey Kong.

36

37

THE LOST ARCADE

One Week Only AUGUST 12 to 18

SHALL WE PLAY A GAME? AUGUST 12 to 18

THE LOST ARCADE

Kurt Vincent & Irene Chin / 2015 / DCP / 79 mins Blinking, beaming, and ringing, The Lost Arcade intimately memorializes the end of video arcades in New York City, while celebrating the camaraderie and history of a pop culture phenomenon. The film is an exceptional directorial debut that focuses on the Chinatown Fair, the Mott Street landmark where generations honed their craft, made friends and lost at tic-tac-toe to a chicken. Masterfully presenting the sights and sounds of a changing scene, wistful yet hopeful, and full of the faces and characters that radiate fun and innovation, The Lost Arcade is a dazzling portrait of technostalgia and a timely commentary on the corporate era’s incineration of modest businesses, and the resiliency of the dedicated enthusiasts.

There is a traditional, binary view that tends to treat movies and video games as natural enemies, like cobra and mongoose, or Mario and Bowser—but why can’t they be friends? In over thirty-some years of film and gaming history, the two mediums—one upstart, one established—inform and enrich one another in innovative and unexpected ways. In conjunction with Metrograph’s run of Kurt Vincent and Irene Chin’s The Lost Arcade, a paean to the Chinatown Fair, we present a series located at the intersection of pixels and celluloid grain. So put your quarters down, because it’s on like Donkey Kong.

38

Series

Shall We Play A Game?

39

THE WIZARD

TRON

A feature length advertisement for Super Mario Bros.

3, the apotheosis of Fred Savage, and a love letter to the Cabazon Dinosaurs, The Wizard is the film that taught a generation the phrase “Just keep your Power Gloves off her, pal.” Savage checks his traumatized gaming prodigy brother Jimmy out of an institution and the unaccompanied minors hit the open road, hustling suckers en route to the “Video Armaggedon” tournament in fabulous Reno.

Computer programmer Jeff Bridges is lost inside a mainframe of his own making in the movie that spawned a cult, a 2010 sequel, and a quarter-muncher arcade tie-in.

A box-office underperformer when it first appeared, history has proven TRON one of the most groundbreaking films of the ‘80s, the big-budget coming out for computer-generated special effect technology which in time would revolutionize the way that multiplex movies were made.

WRECK-IT RALPH

THE LAST STARFIGHTER

Todd Holland / 1989 35mm / 100 mins

Rich Moore / 2012 35mm / 101 mins

Using state-of-the-art CGI technology to render obsolescent, ‘80s-vintage 8-bit graphics may seem counterintuitive, but this combination contributes to the considerable visual charm of Wreck-It Ralph, a big-hearted fable that shows the necessity of antagonists in the video game ecosystem—and, by extension, in life itself. With the talents of Sarah Silverman, John C. Reilly voicing the eponymous arcade game baddie, and several gigabytes of sly in-jokes for gaming buffs.

BRAINSCAN

John Flynn / 1994 35mm / 96 mins Pallid, heavy-lidded Eddie Furlong was the very vision of the teenager who’d stayed up all night jacked on Mountain Dew doing unwholesome things, and he never had a better vehicle for his particular screen presence than this psych-out-packed virtual reality thriller by genre stalwart John Flynn (Rolling Thunder, The Outfit), in which Furlong plays a Fangoria-addicted gorehound geek haunted by the titular CD-ROM game’s villain, Trickster, played by Academy Award nominee Frank Langella.

Steven Lisberger / 1982 35mm / 96 mins

Nick Castle / 1984 / 35mm / 101 mins In the same year that Red Dawn depicted renegade jocks saving America, The Last Starfighter countered with nerd joystick jockeys as the last line of defense in warfare on an intergalactic scale. Teenager Lance Guest discovers that his hours at the arcade were all an audition when he’s recruited to protect the Rylan Star League from invasion by the Ko-Dan Empire in far-flung space. With TRON, a crucial film in rolling out nascent CGI technology.

SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD

Edgar Wright / 2010 / 35mm / 112 mins Edgar Wright’s loving adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel series stars Michael Cera as Scott Pilgrim, a Torontonian slacker whose life takes on the form of a beat ‘em up game as he’s charged with defeating his girlfriend’s seven evil exes (among them Chris Evans and Jason Schwartzman), like so many stage bosses. A modern cult classic, as is the Ubisoft tie-in.

MORTAL KOMBAT

Paul W. S. Anderson / 1995 / 35mm / 101 mins Paul W. S. Anderson is to big-screen video game adaptations what John Ford is to Westerns, and it all began with this cinematic treatment of Midway Games’s five-button classic—which itself borrowed heavily from Enter the Dragon and Big Trouble in Little China. Thailand doubles for the otherworldly Outland, providing the backdrop to the requisite use of the “Finish him!” catchphrase and one stonecold banger of a title track.

38

Series

Shall We Play A Game?

39

THE WIZARD

TRON

A feature length advertisement for Super Mario Bros.

3, the apotheosis of Fred Savage, and a love letter to the Cabazon Dinosaurs, The Wizard is the film that taught a generation the phrase “Just keep your Power Gloves off her, pal.” Savage checks his traumatized gaming prodigy brother Jimmy out of an institution and the unaccompanied minors hit the open road, hustling suckers en route to the “Video Armaggedon” tournament in fabulous Reno.

Computer programmer Jeff Bridges is lost inside a mainframe of his own making in the movie that spawned a cult, a 2010 sequel, and a quarter-muncher arcade tie-in.

A box-office underperformer when it first appeared, history has proven TRON one of the most groundbreaking films of the ‘80s, the big-budget coming out for computer-generated special effect technology which in time would revolutionize the way that multiplex movies were made.

WRECK-IT RALPH

THE LAST STARFIGHTER

Todd Holland / 1989 35mm / 100 mins

Rich Moore / 2012 35mm / 101 mins

Using state-of-the-art CGI technology to render obsolescent, ‘80s-vintage 8-bit graphics may seem counterintuitive, but this combination contributes to the considerable visual charm of Wreck-It Ralph, a big-hearted fable that shows the necessity of antagonists in the video game ecosystem—and, by extension, in life itself. With the talents of Sarah Silverman, John C. Reilly voicing the eponymous arcade game baddie, and several gigabytes of sly in-jokes for gaming buffs.

BRAINSCAN

John Flynn / 1994 35mm / 96 mins Pallid, heavy-lidded Eddie Furlong was the very vision of the teenager who’d stayed up all night jacked on Mountain Dew doing unwholesome things, and he never had a better vehicle for his particular screen presence than this psych-out-packed virtual reality thriller by genre stalwart John Flynn (Rolling Thunder, The Outfit), in which Furlong plays a Fangoria-addicted gorehound geek haunted by the titular CD-ROM game’s villain, Trickster, played by Academy Award nominee Frank Langella.

Steven Lisberger / 1982 35mm / 96 mins

Nick Castle / 1984 / 35mm / 101 mins In the same year that Red Dawn depicted renegade jocks saving America, The Last Starfighter countered with nerd joystick jockeys as the last line of defense in warfare on an intergalactic scale. Teenager Lance Guest discovers that his hours at the arcade were all an audition when he’s recruited to protect the Rylan Star League from invasion by the Ko-Dan Empire in far-flung space. With TRON, a crucial film in rolling out nascent CGI technology.

SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD

Edgar Wright / 2010 / 35mm / 112 mins Edgar Wright’s loving adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel series stars Michael Cera as Scott Pilgrim, a Torontonian slacker whose life takes on the form of a beat ‘em up game as he’s charged with defeating his girlfriend’s seven evil exes (among them Chris Evans and Jason Schwartzman), like so many stage bosses. A modern cult classic, as is the Ubisoft tie-in.

MORTAL KOMBAT

Paul W. S. Anderson / 1995 / 35mm / 101 mins Paul W. S. Anderson is to big-screen video game adaptations what John Ford is to Westerns, and it all began with this cinematic treatment of Midway Games’s five-button classic—which itself borrowed heavily from Enter the Dragon and Big Trouble in Little China. Thailand doubles for the otherworldly Outland, providing the backdrop to the requisite use of the “Finish him!” catchphrase and one stonecold banger of a title track.

40

Series

JOYSTICKS

Greydon Clark / 1983 35mm / 88 mins When a conservative local businessman (the brilliant Joe Don Baker) wants to shut down the den of sin arcade managed by Scott McGinnis, he and his clientele must band together to fight for their right to waste time. With stock villain punk rockers, valley girls, noxious nerds, jiggling hedonism, and plenty of Pac-Man, the vulgar, empty-headed, crazy giddy Joysticks has absolutely everything you want in an ‘80s sex comedy, and absolutely no redeeming social value.

RESIDENT EVIL

Paul W. S. Anderson / 2002 35mm / 100 mins The film with which Paul W. S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich launched the greatest franchise of the 21st century (according to some).

Anderson’s genius in video game adaptations comes in his delineating the “map screen” to a cinematic narrative, providing a clear sense of the terrain to be crossed and the challenges ahead which, when married to crisp and concise action staging, makes this master-builder the unlikeliest of classicists.

WARGAMES

John Badham / 1983 35mm / 114 mins Long before hacktivism and computer counterintelligence were routine news items, there was WarGames. Matthew Broderick’s teen hacker accesses what he believes is a new game called “Global Thermonuclear War” and unwittingly triggers World War III, in a twisty, tightlyplotted suspenser briskly handled by director John Badham (Saturday Night Fever) which paved the way for dozens of inferior cyberthrillers.

Shall We Play A Game?

41

EXISTENZ

David Cronenberg / 1999 / 35mm / 97 mins David Cronenberg has never exactly worked in the register of naturalism, and his just-off, uncanny valley style fits this immersive virtual reality thriller like an UmbyCord in a bio-port. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law co-star in a mindbending sort-of sequel to Cronenberg’s classic Videodrome updated for the dawn of the virtual reality era, exploring Ballardian themes of flesh yielding to new technology while whipping the viewer around countless hairpin turns.

Print courtesy of the TIFF Film Reference Library.

SUPER MARIO BROS.

Annabel Jankel & Rocky Morton 1993 / 35mm / 104 mins A box-office catastrophe panned by biscuit-head critics in its day, maybe the time has come for Super Mario Bros. to be recognized as a film maudit—or at least a one-of-a-kind train wreck extravaganza. An early, nutsoid stab at the video game adaptation brings you Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as Nintendo’s billion-dollar Brooklyn plumbers, and Dennis Hopper in his best villain role this side of Blue Velvet as King Koopa.

40

Series

JOYSTICKS

Greydon Clark / 1983 35mm / 88 mins When a conservative local businessman (the brilliant Joe Don Baker) wants to shut down the den of sin arcade managed by Scott McGinnis, he and his clientele must band together to fight for their right to waste time. With stock villain punk rockers, valley girls, noxious nerds, jiggling hedonism, and plenty of Pac-Man, the vulgar, empty-headed, crazy giddy Joysticks has absolutely everything you want in an ‘80s sex comedy, and absolutely no redeeming social value.

RESIDENT EVIL

Paul W. S. Anderson / 2002 35mm / 100 mins The film with which Paul W. S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich launched the greatest franchise of the 21st century (according to some).

Anderson’s genius in video game adaptations comes in his delineating the “map screen” to a cinematic narrative, providing a clear sense of the terrain to be crossed and the challenges ahead which, when married to crisp and concise action staging, makes this master-builder the unlikeliest of classicists.

WARGAMES

John Badham / 1983 35mm / 114 mins Long before hacktivism and computer counterintelligence were routine news items, there was WarGames. Matthew Broderick’s teen hacker accesses what he believes is a new game called “Global Thermonuclear War” and unwittingly triggers World War III, in a twisty, tightlyplotted suspenser briskly handled by director John Badham (Saturday Night Fever) which paved the way for dozens of inferior cyberthrillers.

Shall We Play A Game?

41

EXISTENZ

David Cronenberg / 1999 / 35mm / 97 mins David Cronenberg has never exactly worked in the register of naturalism, and his just-off, uncanny valley style fits this immersive virtual reality thriller like an UmbyCord in a bio-port. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law co-star in a mindbending sort-of sequel to Cronenberg’s classic Videodrome updated for the dawn of the virtual reality era, exploring Ballardian themes of flesh yielding to new technology while whipping the viewer around countless hairpin turns.

Print courtesy of the TIFF Film Reference Library.

SUPER MARIO BROS.

Annabel Jankel & Rocky Morton 1993 / 35mm / 104 mins A box-office catastrophe panned by biscuit-head critics in its day, maybe the time has come for Super Mario Bros. to be recognized as a film maudit—or at least a one-of-a-kind train wreck extravaganza. An early, nutsoid stab at the video game adaptation brings you Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as Nintendo’s billion-dollar Brooklyn plumbers, and Dennis Hopper in his best villain role this side of Blue Velvet as King Koopa.

Series

43

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

This is the first installment in a year-long, alphabetically ordered series that offers films we consider must-sees; a pinnacle of a filmmaker’s career or an overlooked, demands-reconsideration masterpiece. These are the films we couldn’t wait to show, so we had to create a series to justify it.

FAR FROM VIETNAM (LOIN DU VIETNAM)

Year Long Series WELCOME TO METROGRAPH A-Z TO

JULY 2

to

AUGUST 25

Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker 1967 / DCP / 115 mins Seven filmmakers, primarily members of the unofficial “Left Bank” group, collaborated on this omnibus film under the editorship of Chris Marker, who also provided the sardonic, cutting voiceover. The result was this essential document of artistic outcry, combining footage of New York protests shot by Klein, personal essay by Godard, and narrative experiments by Resnais.

JACKASS NUMBER TWO Jeff Tremaine / 2006 35mm / 92 mins

Slapstick’s not dead! Johnny Knoxville and the best ensemble in American movies since Sam Peckinpah died engineer devious and deviant hidden camera pranks and run a gauntlet of potentiallydevastating nutsoid stunts, somehow surviving the ordeal with both testicles intact, though maybe short a few brain cells.

JACKIE BROWN

Quentin Tarantino / 1997 / 35mm / 154 mins Quentin Tarantino’s adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch is a showcase for towering performances by Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, and Robert Forster (to name but a few), and the film where QT tapped heretofore unexpected depths of grown-up emotion. Even if you know the plot twists by heart, there’s no “spoiling” the movie’s pure laidback pleasures.

Series

43

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

This is the first installment in a year-long, alphabetically ordered series that offers films we consider must-sees; a pinnacle of a filmmaker’s career or an overlooked, demands-reconsideration masterpiece. These are the films we couldn’t wait to show, so we had to create a series to justify it.

FAR FROM VIETNAM (LOIN DU VIETNAM)

Year Long Series WELCOME TO METROGRAPH A-Z TO

JULY 2

to

AUGUST 25

Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker 1967 / DCP / 115 mins Seven filmmakers, primarily members of the unofficial “Left Bank” group, collaborated on this omnibus film under the editorship of Chris Marker, who also provided the sardonic, cutting voiceover. The result was this essential document of artistic outcry, combining footage of New York protests shot by Klein, personal essay by Godard, and narrative experiments by Resnais.

JACKASS NUMBER TWO Jeff Tremaine / 2006 35mm / 92 mins

Slapstick’s not dead! Johnny Knoxville and the best ensemble in American movies since Sam Peckinpah died engineer devious and deviant hidden camera pranks and run a gauntlet of potentiallydevastating nutsoid stunts, somehow surviving the ordeal with both testicles intact, though maybe short a few brain cells.

JACKIE BROWN

Quentin Tarantino / 1997 / 35mm / 154 mins Quentin Tarantino’s adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch is a showcase for towering performances by Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, and Robert Forster (to name but a few), and the film where QT tapped heretofore unexpected depths of grown-up emotion. Even if you know the plot twists by heart, there’s no “spoiling” the movie’s pure laidback pleasures.

44

Series

JE T’AIME JE T’AIME

Alain Resnais / 1968 / 35mm / 91 mins “A failed suicide agrees to become a guinea pig for scientists exploring time travel and is caught, not just in a given moment, but in an infinite variety of given moments, all variations on one another. And time’s winged chariot will never come to his rescue. Resnais is obsessed with time, and perhaps with a profoundly Marxist sense of history as the nightmare from which man is trying to awaken...

People weren’t then ready for this quiet mixture of science fiction with a love story as subtle as anything in Rohmer or Rivette.” – Raymond Durgnat

KING KONG

Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack / 1933 / 35mm / 100 mins The spectacle to end all spectacles featuring special effects that are actually special, it took the visionary brilliance of stop-motion animation pioneer Willis O’Brien to bring the mighty Kong to life, and top-of-the-line military technology to peel him off the top of the Empire State Building. All aboard for Skull Island!

Screening dedicated to the memory of Elliott Stein.

KING OF NEW YORK

Abel Ferrara/ 1990/ 35mm/ 103 mins “Come see me at the Plaza Hotel” is the indelible invitation extended by ice-cold ‘hood Machiavelli and crime kingpin Frank White (Christopher Walken) in the gangster classic that provided Notorious B.I.G. his backup alias. Abel Ferrara’s pulp blowout combines hungry hip-hop street spirit with sumptuous Old Master visuals, making optimal usage of Wesley Snipes, Laurence Fishburne, David Caruso, Schooly D’s “Am I Black Enough For You?”, and the Queensboro Bridge.

THE LANDLORD

Hal Ashby / 1970 / 35mm 112 mins The ultimate New York gentrification movie, the bittersweet, coolly outraged, and deeply compassionate The Landlord stars Beau Bridges as a WASP ofay collecting rent in c. 1970 Park Slope. A oncein-a-generation confluence of talent both in front of the camera (Diana Sands, Marki Bey, Louis Gossett, Jr., and Pearl Bailey), and behind, including DP Gordon Willis, director Ashby, and screenwriter Bill Gunn.

Welcome to Metrograph: J to L

45

KURONEKO

Kaneto Shindo / 1968 35mm / 99 mins Hell hath no fury like women senselessly butchered by warring samurai in this stylish spine-tingler, the greatest Japanese feline ghost story ever set to film, which follows the cold-blooded seduce-anddestroy revenge of a wronged mother/daughter duo in stark, chillingly beautiful black-and-white widescreen.

KING OF THE CHILDREN

Chen Kaige / 1987 / 35mm / 106 mins Director Chen Kaige uses the awestriking landscapes of southwestern China to underscore the very human-scaled story of a young teacher trying to handle a class of rural peasants in Yunnan Province. A film of considerable philosophical depth and political fearlessness, King of the Children addresses the real cost of the Cultural Revolution.

LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN Max Ophüls / 1948 35mm / 86 mins

In a deliciously artificial finde-siecle Vienna concocted on a studio backlot, Max Ophüls conducts a veritable symphony of moving camerawork, turning Stefan Zweig’s short story of consuming romantic delusion into a voluptuous tragedy begun when a young woman (Joan Fontaine) develops a consuming fascination with her concert pianist neighbor (Louis Jourdan).

35mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

LION HAS SEVEN HEADS

Glauber Rocha / 1970 / 35mm / 103 mins Cinema Novo pioneer Glauber Rocha (Black God, White Devil, Antonio das Mortes) was in exile from his native Brazil, then under a military dictatorship, when he shot this coruscating anti-colonial drama in the Congo, pitting a white preacher of apocalypse against a Latin American revolutionary supporting African liberation.

44

Series

JE T’AIME JE T’AIME

Alain Resnais / 1968 / 35mm / 91 mins “A failed suicide agrees to become a guinea pig for scientists exploring time travel and is caught, not just in a given moment, but in an infinite variety of given moments, all variations on one another. And time’s winged chariot will never come to his rescue. Resnais is obsessed with time, and perhaps with a profoundly Marxist sense of history as the nightmare from which man is trying to awaken...

People weren’t then ready for this quiet mixture of science fiction with a love story as subtle as anything in Rohmer or Rivette.” – Raymond Durgnat

KING KONG

Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack / 1933 / 35mm / 100 mins The spectacle to end all spectacles featuring special effects that are actually special, it took the visionary brilliance of stop-motion animation pioneer Willis O’Brien to bring the mighty Kong to life, and top-of-the-line military technology to peel him off the top of the Empire State Building. All aboard for Skull Island!

Screening dedicated to the memory of Elliott Stein.

KING OF NEW YORK

Abel Ferrara/ 1990/ 35mm/ 103 mins “Come see me at the Plaza Hotel” is the indelible invitation extended by ice-cold ‘hood Machiavelli and crime kingpin Frank White (Christopher Walken) in the gangster classic that provided Notorious B.I.G. his backup alias. Abel Ferrara’s pulp blowout combines hungry hip-hop street spirit with sumptuous Old Master visuals, making optimal usage of Wesley Snipes, Laurence Fishburne, David Caruso, Schooly D’s “Am I Black Enough For You?”, and the Queensboro Bridge.

THE LANDLORD

Hal Ashby / 1970 / 35mm 112 mins The ultimate New York gentrification movie, the bittersweet, coolly outraged, and deeply compassionate The Landlord stars Beau Bridges as a WASP ofay collecting rent in c. 1970 Park Slope. A oncein-a-generation confluence of talent both in front of the camera (Diana Sands, Marki Bey, Louis Gossett, Jr., and Pearl Bailey), and behind, including DP Gordon Willis, director Ashby, and screenwriter Bill Gunn.

Welcome to Metrograph: J to L

45

KURONEKO

Kaneto Shindo / 1968 35mm / 99 mins Hell hath no fury like women senselessly butchered by warring samurai in this stylish spine-tingler, the greatest Japanese feline ghost story ever set to film, which follows the cold-blooded seduce-anddestroy revenge of a wronged mother/daughter duo in stark, chillingly beautiful black-and-white widescreen.

KING OF THE CHILDREN

Chen Kaige / 1987 / 35mm / 106 mins Director Chen Kaige uses the awestriking landscapes of southwestern China to underscore the very human-scaled story of a young teacher trying to handle a class of rural peasants in Yunnan Province. A film of considerable philosophical depth and political fearlessness, King of the Children addresses the real cost of the Cultural Revolution.

LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN Max Ophüls / 1948 35mm / 86 mins

In a deliciously artificial finde-siecle Vienna concocted on a studio backlot, Max Ophüls conducts a veritable symphony of moving camerawork, turning Stefan Zweig’s short story of consuming romantic delusion into a voluptuous tragedy begun when a young woman (Joan Fontaine) develops a consuming fascination with her concert pianist neighbor (Louis Jourdan).

35mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

LION HAS SEVEN HEADS

Glauber Rocha / 1970 / 35mm / 103 mins Cinema Novo pioneer Glauber Rocha (Black God, White Devil, Antonio das Mortes) was in exile from his native Brazil, then under a military dictatorship, when he shot this coruscating anti-colonial drama in the Congo, pitting a white preacher of apocalypse against a Latin American revolutionary supporting African liberation.

46

Welcome to Metrograph: J to L

LION’S LOVE (…AND LIES) Agnès Varda / 1969 DCP / 110 mins

A unique outside perspective on the end of the ‘60s in Southern California and American industrial filmmaking, Varda’s utterly original documentaryfiction hybrid follows various counterculture-affiliated outsiders on the fringes of Hollywood—Warhol starlet Viva, the composers of Hair, and filmmaker Shirley Clarke, playing a fictionalized version of herself.

LITTLE FUGITIVE

Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin, & Ray Ashley / 1953 35mm / 80 mins A living, breathing, Fudgsiclesticky document of New York City in the 1950s, this wistful, sweet-spirited independent drama about a 7-year-old on his own at Coney Island managed to simultaneously influence the French New Wave, American cinema verite, and just about every independent production for decades to come.

Preceeded by LITTLE GIRLS HAVE PRETTY CURLS Morris Engel / 1962 / 35mm / 1 min Preservation print courtesy of Cinema Conservancy.

LITTLE MURDERS

Alan Arkin / 1971 / 35mm 110 mins A morose, brooding Elliott Gould anchors this surreal, nightmare vision of Mayor Lindsay-era New York adapted from a stage play by Jules Feiffer. Plenty of movies are called “One of a kind,” but precious few deserve the designation quite like this wildly original, genuinely unsettling black comedy.

Welcome to Metrograph: J to L

47

46

Welcome to Metrograph: J to L

LION’S LOVE (…AND LIES) Agnès Varda / 1969 DCP / 110 mins

A unique outside perspective on the end of the ‘60s in Southern California and American industrial filmmaking, Varda’s utterly original documentaryfiction hybrid follows various counterculture-affiliated outsiders on the fringes of Hollywood—Warhol starlet Viva, the composers of Hair, and filmmaker Shirley Clarke, playing a fictionalized version of herself.

LITTLE FUGITIVE

Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin, & Ray Ashley / 1953 35mm / 80 mins A living, breathing, Fudgsiclesticky document of New York City in the 1950s, this wistful, sweet-spirited independent drama about a 7-year-old on his own at Coney Island managed to simultaneously influence the French New Wave, American cinema verite, and just about every independent production for decades to come.

Preceeded by LITTLE GIRLS HAVE PRETTY CURLS Morris Engel / 1962 / 35mm / 1 min Preservation print courtesy of Cinema Conservancy.

LITTLE MURDERS

Alan Arkin / 1971 / 35mm 110 mins A morose, brooding Elliott Gould anchors this surreal, nightmare vision of Mayor Lindsay-era New York adapted from a stage play by Jules Feiffer. Plenty of movies are called “One of a kind,” but precious few deserve the designation quite like this wildly original, genuinely unsettling black comedy.

Welcome to Metrograph: J to L

47

48

Welcome to Metrograph: J to L

49

LOST IN AMERICA

Albert Brooks / 1985 / 35mm / 91 mins Albert Brooks and Julie Hagerty are two thirtysomething Los Angeles yuppies fed up with the rat race who set out in a Winnebago to discover the real America, and are terrified when they actually discover it. The quintessence of Brooks’s astringent comic style, and one of the defining comedies of the Reagan Era.

THE LOVED ONE

Tony Richardson / 1965 35mm / 122 mins Owing as much to Jessica Mitford’s muckraking masterpiece The American Way of Death as Evelyn Waugh’s source novella, The Loved One is a banana-peel under the feet of mid-60’s Los Angeles.

Almost too much to consume at once (with a notorious consumption scene that sets a high bar for bad taste), and featuring about half the working actors of the day (Robert Morse, John Gielgud, Rode Steiger, Jonathan Winters, Dana Andrews, James Coburn, Roddy McDowell and Liberace), it is a film that will leave you, like Mr. Joyboy’s mother, gasping for air.

SPA NIGHT

THE LUSTY MEN

Nicholas Ray / 1952 / 35mm / 113 mins

One Week Only

Nicholas Ray’s tender, rueful macho melodrama stars Robert Mitchum as brokendown bronco-buster Jeff McCloud, teaching the rodeo ropes to wannabe Arthur Kennedy while not failing to notice his young wife (Susan Hayward). Beautifully shot in dust-caked black-and-white by Lee Garmes, and featuring the most heartbreaking homecoming in all of cinema.

AUGUST 19 to 25

THE HOLE

Tsai Ming-Liang / 1998 35mm / 95 mins

SPA NIGHT

It’s the close of the millennium and Taipei has emptied out with the onset of a mysterious virus, but Lee Kang-Sheng and Yang Kuei-Mei lag behind among the ruins, where it doesn’t seem like there’s really much world to end, but maybe a last chance at communication through a breach between their apartments that slowly widens in this downbeat, glum-funny dystopian masterpiece.

Andrew Ahn’s remarkably assured debut feature is a portrait of forbidden sexual awakening set in the nocturnal world of spas and karaoke bars in Los Angeles’ Koreatown. David Cho (Joe Seo, who won the Special Jury Award at Sundance for his breakthrough performance), a timid 18-year-old living with his financiallystruggling immigrant parents, chances upon a secret spot for cruising when he takes a part-time job at an all-male spa and begins to realize hidden inner desires that threaten his life as a dutiful son and student. Effervescent and atmospheric, this coming-of-age story makes the steamy spa a liminal place between dream and reality, desire and disillusionment.

Andrew Ahn / 2016 / DCP / 97 mins

48

Welcome to Metrograph: J to L

49

LOST IN AMERICA

Albert Brooks / 1985 / 35mm / 91 mins Albert Brooks and Julie Hagerty are two thirtysomething Los Angeles yuppies fed up with the rat race who set out in a Winnebago to discover the real America, and are terrified when they actually discover it. The quintessence of Brooks’s astringent comic style, and one of the defining comedies of the Reagan Era.

THE LOVED ONE

Tony Richardson / 1965 35mm / 122 mins Owing as much to Jessica Mitford’s muckraking masterpiece The American Way of Death as Evelyn Waugh’s source novella, The Loved One is a banana-peel under the feet of mid-60’s Los Angeles.

Almost too much to consume at once (with a notorious consumption scene that sets a high bar for bad taste), and featuring about half the working actors of the day (Robert Morse, John Gielgud, Rode Steiger, Jonathan Winters, Dana Andrews, James Coburn, Roddy McDowell and Liberace), it is a film that will leave you, like Mr. Joyboy’s mother, gasping for air.

SPA NIGHT

THE LUSTY MEN

Nicholas Ray / 1952 / 35mm / 113 mins

One Week Only

Nicholas Ray’s tender, rueful macho melodrama stars Robert Mitchum as brokendown bronco-buster Jeff McCloud, teaching the rodeo ropes to wannabe Arthur Kennedy while not failing to notice his young wife (Susan Hayward). Beautifully shot in dust-caked black-and-white by Lee Garmes, and featuring the most heartbreaking homecoming in all of cinema.

AUGUST 19 to 25

THE HOLE

Tsai Ming-Liang / 1998 35mm / 95 mins

SPA NIGHT

It’s the close of the millennium and Taipei has emptied out with the onset of a mysterious virus, but Lee Kang-Sheng and Yang Kuei-Mei lag behind among the ruins, where it doesn’t seem like there’s really much world to end, but maybe a last chance at communication through a breach between their apartments that slowly widens in this downbeat, glum-funny dystopian masterpiece.

Andrew Ahn’s remarkably assured debut feature is a portrait of forbidden sexual awakening set in the nocturnal world of spas and karaoke bars in Los Angeles’ Koreatown. David Cho (Joe Seo, who won the Special Jury Award at Sundance for his breakthrough performance), a timid 18-year-old living with his financiallystruggling immigrant parents, chances upon a secret spot for cruising when he takes a part-time job at an all-male spa and begins to realize hidden inner desires that threaten his life as a dutiful son and student. Effervescent and atmospheric, this coming-of-age story makes the steamy spa a liminal place between dream and reality, desire and disillusionment.

Andrew Ahn / 2016 / DCP / 97 mins

50

51

MADONNA: TRUTH OR DARE One Week Only AUGUST 26 to SEPTEMBER 1 TRUTH OR DARE

BODY OF WORK A MadonnaRetrospective AUGUST 27 to SEPTEMBER 1

Alek Keshishian / 1991 / DCP / 115 mins Weaving grainy black-and-white behind-the-scenes footage with sumptuous fullcolor concert sequences, Madonna: Truth or Dare juxtaposes Madonna’s highly stylized and meticulously executed stage performances with the dizzying chaos of her life on the road. The highest grossing feature-length documentary of all time upon its release, Madonna: Truth or Dare is a crucial film for generations of the LGBTQ community, exhibiting a degree of honesty and non-judgment toward sexuality rarely seen in mass-market entertainment of the time.

Special thanks to Joe Berger.

Iconoclast, provocateur, pop-priestess, showgirl, Madonna’s film roles are extensions of her self-perpetuating, highly-stylized brand: street savvy disco punk, comic book gangster’s moll, and revered/vilified political idol. She is the auteur of her singular oeuvre, both the Svengali and muse of her enigmatic persona.

Her calculated, cohesive canon embodies a 20th Century Narcissus who elicits adoration and antipathy equally. Ultimately, the most captivating role she ever plays is Madonna. All titles will be paired with select Madonna music videos.

50

51

MADONNA: TRUTH OR DARE One Week Only AUGUST 26 to SEPTEMBER 1 TRUTH OR DARE

BODY OF WORK A MadonnaRetrospective AUGUST 27 to SEPTEMBER 1

Alek Keshishian / 1991 / DCP / 115 mins Weaving grainy black-and-white behind-the-scenes footage with sumptuous fullcolor concert sequences, Madonna: Truth or Dare juxtaposes Madonna’s highly stylized and meticulously executed stage performances with the dizzying chaos of her life on the road. The highest grossing feature-length documentary of all time upon its release, Madonna: Truth or Dare is a crucial film for generations of the LGBTQ community, exhibiting a degree of honesty and non-judgment toward sexuality rarely seen in mass-market entertainment of the time.

Special thanks to Joe Berger.

Iconoclast, provocateur, pop-priestess, showgirl, Madonna’s film roles are extensions of her self-perpetuating, highly-stylized brand: street savvy disco punk, comic book gangster’s moll, and revered/vilified political idol. She is the auteur of her singular oeuvre, both the Svengali and muse of her enigmatic persona.

Her calculated, cohesive canon embodies a 20th Century Narcissus who elicits adoration and antipathy equally. Ultimately, the most captivating role she ever plays is Madonna. All titles will be paired with select Madonna music videos.

52

Series

DICK TRACY

Warren Beatty / 1990 35mm / 105 mins Amidst the triumph of “Vogue” and The Blond Ambition Tour, Dick Tracy was released, featuring the paramount role of Madonna’s career. Platinum highlights atop the curve of a midnight-black silhouette: Madonna’s shape is pasted perfectly into the vibrant hues and sharp angles of this 1990 noir blockbuster, Beatty’s gangster marriage of Robert Siodmak, Saturday morning serials, and IB Technicolor. Dick Tracy is Madonna’s most Warholian moment, blurring the line between the dream world of Movieland and her very public personal affairs.

SHADOWS AND FOG

Woody Allen / 1991 / 35mm / 85 mins Madonna said working on a Woody Allen film “was like going to the psychiatrist – not necessarily fun, but certainly educational and enlightening.” Her teeny-bit performance as a tightrope walker in his expressionist, sideshow murder-mystery, is, according to Allen, “first-rate.” Here, Madonna is the zeitgeist star who the auteur seems to always find a part for.

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN

Penny Marshall / 1992 / 35mm / 128 mins Capitalizing on a new and very public friendship with up-and-coming comic Rosie O’Donnell, ‘Mo and Ro’ team up with Geena Davis and Lori Petty (plus Tom Hanks as their misogynistic manager) in Penny Marshall’s feel-good chick-flick of summer 1992. As “All the Way” Mae Mordabito, Madonna affects her occasional ‘tough city-broad’ persona, with a thick Westchesta accent and zesty line readings. A July Fourth weekend home run, the critically adored comedy about an all-girls baseball team during World War II remained in theaters all summer.

WHO’S THAT GIRL

James Foley / 1987 / 35mm / 92 mins Loosely based on Bringing Up Baby (no disrespect to the Hawks classic intended) Madonna’s second starring role has her channeling Pre-code naughty à la Jean Harlow and Alice White. Although Vincent Canby found that “Madonna, left to her own devices and her own canny pace, is a very engaging comedian,” Who’s That Girl was a box office failure. Hard to view as other than an ostentatious promotional vehicle for the soundtrack album and 1987 world tour, both of the same name, the film does, however, feature a large wild cat.

Madonna: Body Of Work

53

BODY OF EVIDENCE

Uli Edel / 1993 / 35mm / 99 mins Madonna goes Skinimax in this overheated courtroom thriller by Uli Edel (Christiane F, Last Exit to Brooklyn), co-starring Willem Dafoe. Slightly far-reaching in its commercial agenda, Body of Evidence’s release was timed around Madonna’s Erotica album, and the bestselling (1.5 million copies worldwide in three days), fantasy-cum-photography folio Sex. A critical misfire (to put it kindly).

DANGEROUS GAME

Abel Ferrara / 1993 35mm / 108 mins

The most daring role of Madonna’s film career and the first movie produced by her production company Maverick, Ferrara’s underrated masterpiece was pulled after only one week at the Art Greenwich Twin, despite Janet Maslin’s compliment that “Madonna submits impressively to the emotions raging furiously around her.” Revealingly autobiographical for both Ferrara and Madonna, two public figures consistently caught in controversies of their own making, Dangerous Game features astonishing performances by Harvey Keitel and Ferrara’s real life wife Nancy. Norman Mailer on character Sarah Jennings: “For an actress, the role bore resemblance to going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.” Only Madonna would take such a risk.

DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN

Susan Seidelman / 1985 35mm / 104 mins According to director Susan Seidelman, when shooting began on Madonna’s debut feature, bystanders of the film’s downtown NYC locations whispered to one another, “That’s Cyndi Lauper, she’s making a screwball comedy.” By shooting’s end, after sophomore album Like a Virgin was released, security was required full-time, and Madonna hysteria had commenced, introducing America to a fashion icon and inspiring teenage mall rats across the country to don lacy cut-off gloves, frosted highlights, and oversized crucifixes.

52

Series

DICK TRACY

Warren Beatty / 1990 35mm / 105 mins Amidst the triumph of “Vogue” and The Blond Ambition Tour, Dick Tracy was released, featuring the paramount role of Madonna’s career. Platinum highlights atop the curve of a midnight-black silhouette: Madonna’s shape is pasted perfectly into the vibrant hues and sharp angles of this 1990 noir blockbuster, Beatty’s gangster marriage of Robert Siodmak, Saturday morning serials, and IB Technicolor. Dick Tracy is Madonna’s most Warholian moment, blurring the line between the dream world of Movieland and her very public personal affairs.

SHADOWS AND FOG

Woody Allen / 1991 / 35mm / 85 mins Madonna said working on a Woody Allen film “was like going to the psychiatrist – not necessarily fun, but certainly educational and enlightening.” Her teeny-bit performance as a tightrope walker in his expressionist, sideshow murder-mystery, is, according to Allen, “first-rate.” Here, Madonna is the zeitgeist star who the auteur seems to always find a part for.

A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN

Penny Marshall / 1992 / 35mm / 128 mins Capitalizing on a new and very public friendship with up-and-coming comic Rosie O’Donnell, ‘Mo and Ro’ team up with Geena Davis and Lori Petty (plus Tom Hanks as their misogynistic manager) in Penny Marshall’s feel-good chick-flick of summer 1992. As “All the Way” Mae Mordabito, Madonna affects her occasional ‘tough city-broad’ persona, with a thick Westchesta accent and zesty line readings. A July Fourth weekend home run, the critically adored comedy about an all-girls baseball team during World War II remained in theaters all summer.

WHO’S THAT GIRL

James Foley / 1987 / 35mm / 92 mins Loosely based on Bringing Up Baby (no disrespect to the Hawks classic intended) Madonna’s second starring role has her channeling Pre-code naughty à la Jean Harlow and Alice White. Although Vincent Canby found that “Madonna, left to her own devices and her own canny pace, is a very engaging comedian,” Who’s That Girl was a box office failure. Hard to view as other than an ostentatious promotional vehicle for the soundtrack album and 1987 world tour, both of the same name, the film does, however, feature a large wild cat.

Madonna: Body Of Work

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BODY OF EVIDENCE

Uli Edel / 1993 / 35mm / 99 mins Madonna goes Skinimax in this overheated courtroom thriller by Uli Edel (Christiane F, Last Exit to Brooklyn), co-starring Willem Dafoe. Slightly far-reaching in its commercial agenda, Body of Evidence’s release was timed around Madonna’s Erotica album, and the bestselling (1.5 million copies worldwide in three days), fantasy-cum-photography folio Sex. A critical misfire (to put it kindly).

DANGEROUS GAME

Abel Ferrara / 1993 35mm / 108 mins

The most daring role of Madonna’s film career and the first movie produced by her production company Maverick, Ferrara’s underrated masterpiece was pulled after only one week at the Art Greenwich Twin, despite Janet Maslin’s compliment that “Madonna submits impressively to the emotions raging furiously around her.” Revealingly autobiographical for both Ferrara and Madonna, two public figures consistently caught in controversies of their own making, Dangerous Game features astonishing performances by Harvey Keitel and Ferrara’s real life wife Nancy. Norman Mailer on character Sarah Jennings: “For an actress, the role bore resemblance to going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.” Only Madonna would take such a risk.

DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN

Susan Seidelman / 1985 35mm / 104 mins According to director Susan Seidelman, when shooting began on Madonna’s debut feature, bystanders of the film’s downtown NYC locations whispered to one another, “That’s Cyndi Lauper, she’s making a screwball comedy.” By shooting’s end, after sophomore album Like a Virgin was released, security was required full-time, and Madonna hysteria had commenced, introducing America to a fashion icon and inspiring teenage mall rats across the country to don lacy cut-off gloves, frosted highlights, and oversized crucifixes.

Series

OLD & IMPROVED

55

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

DRAGONFLY SQUADRON IN 3D Lesley Selander / 1954 DCP / 82 mins

“The bomb-blasting story of an Airforce fighter wing that explodes in 3 dimensions!” the posters screamed. However, when this Korean War tale hit New York screens in September of 1954, it was missing one of the promised dimensions. We are pleased to present the New York premiere of the 3D Film Archives’ meticulous, shot for shot 4K restoration from original left/right elements of Dragonfly Squadon, in its intended full stereoscopic glory!

Screening introduced by Bob Furmenek, President and Founder of the 3D Film Archives.

RAID INTO TIBET

Adrian Cowell / DCP / 1966 / 25 mins A vivid, firsthand account of the Tibetan struggle against Chinese occupation filmed in 1964 in the isolated Mustang region, Raid into Tibet was accomplished through the stubborn efforts of British journalist George Patterson, filmmaker Adrian Cowell, and cameraman Chris Menges, who accompanied guerrilla fighters to witness an attack on a Chinese military convoy and smuggled the resulting footage past a CIA cordon.

Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project at Cineric Inc. laboratory in association with Tibet Film Archive.

Special thanks to the Cowell family.

Screening with

TIBETAN BUDDHISM Adrian Cowell / DCP 1966 / 25 mins

NEW PRESERVATIONS & RESTORATIONS

A television documentary that explores Mahayana Bodhisattva Buddhism among Tibetan refugees in Nepal. This film provided the cover story, permits and budget that made the filming of Raid into Tibet possible. Screening introduced by Tenzin Phuntsog, founder of the Tibet Film Archive Work in Progress Restoration Screening.

Series

OLD & IMPROVED

55

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

DRAGONFLY SQUADRON IN 3D Lesley Selander / 1954 DCP / 82 mins

“The bomb-blasting story of an Airforce fighter wing that explodes in 3 dimensions!” the posters screamed. However, when this Korean War tale hit New York screens in September of 1954, it was missing one of the promised dimensions. We are pleased to present the New York premiere of the 3D Film Archives’ meticulous, shot for shot 4K restoration from original left/right elements of Dragonfly Squadon, in its intended full stereoscopic glory!

Screening introduced by Bob Furmenek, President and Founder of the 3D Film Archives.

RAID INTO TIBET

Adrian Cowell / DCP / 1966 / 25 mins A vivid, firsthand account of the Tibetan struggle against Chinese occupation filmed in 1964 in the isolated Mustang region, Raid into Tibet was accomplished through the stubborn efforts of British journalist George Patterson, filmmaker Adrian Cowell, and cameraman Chris Menges, who accompanied guerrilla fighters to witness an attack on a Chinese military convoy and smuggled the resulting footage past a CIA cordon.

Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project at Cineric Inc. laboratory in association with Tibet Film Archive.

Special thanks to the Cowell family.

Screening with

TIBETAN BUDDHISM Adrian Cowell / DCP 1966 / 25 mins

NEW PRESERVATIONS & RESTORATIONS

A television documentary that explores Mahayana Bodhisattva Buddhism among Tibetan refugees in Nepal. This film provided the cover story, permits and budget that made the filming of Raid into Tibet possible. Screening introduced by Tenzin Phuntsog, founder of the Tibet Film Archive Work in Progress Restoration Screening.

56

Series

Old & Improved

57

THE FLYING ACE

A CAT IN THE BRAIN

A rural crime drama revolving around a pair of rival aviators, The Flying Ace is a popular entertainment in the traditional Hollywood style and a unique aviation melodrama in that no airplanes actually leave the ground (the spectacular flight scenes being performed on terra firma, in front of neutral backdrops). The film is divided into chapters so that exhibitors could show it as a feature or as a six-episode serial and is buoyed by the presence of Norman Studios regular Steve “Peg” Reynolds, who in one memorable scene rides a bicycle while firing a rifle built into the shaft of his crutch.

Try to imagine horror maestro and “Godfather of Gore” Lucio Fulci’s version of 8 1/2 and you’ll have some idea of his feverish A Cat in the Brain, in which Fulci plays himself, a film director being slowly driven mad when the violent fantasies that are his stock in trade refuse to stay behind on the Cinecittà soundstage and begin to sear into his subconscious. Fulci’s last fully-realized film and a victory lap for a splatter-decorated life.

Richard E. Norman / 1926 DCP / 65 mins

Mastered from 35mm film elements from the Norman Studios Collection, preserved by the Library of Congress. Musical score compiled from historic photoplay music by The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

TEN MINUTES TO LIVE Oscar Micheaux / 1932 DCP / 58 mins

Frustrated by the stagebound atmosphere of his first talkie feature (1931’s The Exile), Micheaux looked for ways to shoot this gangster musical on location, without cumbersome and expensive audio recording equipment. He did this by making one of his characters (Morvis, the Killer) deaf, and having what little dialogue there is spoken offscreen and post-dubbed. Though clumsily executed, these scenes give the film a pleasurable off-kilter quality, while proving Micheaux had a more canny understanding of the medium than he is often given credit for. Featuring a surprisingly provocative dance performance of Duke Ellington’s “Diga Diga Doo” by a bevy of feathered Cotton Club chorines.

Mastered in 2K from 35mm film elements preserved by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

EXISTENZ

David Cronenberg / 1999 / 35mm / 97 mins David Cronenberg has never exactly worked in the register of naturalism, and his just-off, uncanny valley style fits this immersive virtual reality thriller like an UmbyCord in a bio-port. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law co-star in a mindbending sort-of sequel to Cronenberg’s classic Videodrome updated for the dawn of the virtual reality era, exploring Ballardian themes of flesh yielding to new technology while whipping the viewer around countless hairpin turns.

Print courtesy of the TIFF Film Reference Library.

Lucio Fulci / 1990 DCP / 93 mins

56

Series

Old & Improved

57

THE FLYING ACE

A CAT IN THE BRAIN

A rural crime drama revolving around a pair of rival aviators, The Flying Ace is a popular entertainment in the traditional Hollywood style and a unique aviation melodrama in that no airplanes actually leave the ground (the spectacular flight scenes being performed on terra firma, in front of neutral backdrops). The film is divided into chapters so that exhibitors could show it as a feature or as a six-episode serial and is buoyed by the presence of Norman Studios regular Steve “Peg” Reynolds, who in one memorable scene rides a bicycle while firing a rifle built into the shaft of his crutch.

Try to imagine horror maestro and “Godfather of Gore” Lucio Fulci’s version of 8 1/2 and you’ll have some idea of his feverish A Cat in the Brain, in which Fulci plays himself, a film director being slowly driven mad when the violent fantasies that are his stock in trade refuse to stay behind on the Cinecittà soundstage and begin to sear into his subconscious. Fulci’s last fully-realized film and a victory lap for a splatter-decorated life.

Richard E. Norman / 1926 DCP / 65 mins

Mastered from 35mm film elements from the Norman Studios Collection, preserved by the Library of Congress. Musical score compiled from historic photoplay music by The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

TEN MINUTES TO LIVE Oscar Micheaux / 1932 DCP / 58 mins

Frustrated by the stagebound atmosphere of his first talkie feature (1931’s The Exile), Micheaux looked for ways to shoot this gangster musical on location, without cumbersome and expensive audio recording equipment. He did this by making one of his characters (Morvis, the Killer) deaf, and having what little dialogue there is spoken offscreen and post-dubbed. Though clumsily executed, these scenes give the film a pleasurable off-kilter quality, while proving Micheaux had a more canny understanding of the medium than he is often given credit for. Featuring a surprisingly provocative dance performance of Duke Ellington’s “Diga Diga Doo” by a bevy of feathered Cotton Club chorines.

Mastered in 2K from 35mm film elements preserved by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

EXISTENZ

David Cronenberg / 1999 / 35mm / 97 mins David Cronenberg has never exactly worked in the register of naturalism, and his just-off, uncanny valley style fits this immersive virtual reality thriller like an UmbyCord in a bio-port. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law co-star in a mindbending sort-of sequel to Cronenberg’s classic Videodrome updated for the dawn of the virtual reality era, exploring Ballardian themes of flesh yielding to new technology while whipping the viewer around countless hairpin turns.

Print courtesy of the TIFF Film Reference Library.

Lucio Fulci / 1990 DCP / 93 mins

R

S E R VAT

I S

Brunch Saturday & Sunday 11am-4pm

RE

ON

Dinner 5:30pm-midnight 7 Nights Per Week Late Night Food Menu 12am-2am Thursday-Saturday

Inspired by the Studio eateries from Hollywood’s golden age, where stars would enjoy their meals alongside their producers, crews, and stagehands, The Metrograph Commissary is a welcoming place for New York’s thriving community of filmmakers and moviegoers, and a new destination for our neighborhood. The Metrograph Commissary is comprised of a lobby bar, restaurant, restaurant bar, and private dining room.

FO

METROGRAPH COMMISSARY

+1 347 348 0617

www.metrograph.com

R

S E R VAT

I S

Brunch Saturday & Sunday 11am-4pm

RE

ON

Dinner 5:30pm-midnight 7 Nights Per Week Late Night Food Menu 12am-2am Thursday-Saturday

Inspired by the Studio eateries from Hollywood’s golden age, where stars would enjoy their meals alongside their producers, crews, and stagehands, The Metrograph Commissary is a welcoming place for New York’s thriving community of filmmakers and moviegoers, and a new destination for our neighborhood. The Metrograph Commissary is comprised of a lobby bar, restaurant, restaurant bar, and private dining room.

FO

METROGRAPH COMMISSARY

+1 347 348 0617

www.metrograph.com

METROGRAPH BOOKSTORE Now Open The Metrograph Bookstore stocks an ever-changing selection of new, out-of-print and special edition journals on cinema, many of which cannot be found anywhere else in New York City. Selections include Film Culture’s 1967 Warhol issue and Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe’s brand-new Eric Rohmer biography, as well as signed copies of Breixo Viejo’s 2016 limited-edition Film Books: A Visual History. Located upstairs by the Metrograph Commissary, open every day.

For inquiries: bookstore@metrograph.com

Private Events Metrograph is available for select private parties, events, and premieres.

Contact +1 212 660 0312 events@metrograph.com

METROGRAPH BOOKSTORE Now Open The Metrograph Bookstore stocks an ever-changing selection of new, out-of-print and special edition journals on cinema, many of which cannot be found anywhere else in New York City. Selections include Film Culture’s 1967 Warhol issue and Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe’s brand-new Eric Rohmer biography, as well as signed copies of Breixo Viejo’s 2016 limited-edition Film Books: A Visual History. Located upstairs by the Metrograph Commissary, open every day.

For inquiries: bookstore@metrograph.com

Private Events Metrograph is available for select private parties, events, and premieres.

Contact +1 212 660 0312 events@metrograph.com

Notes

METROGRAPH.COM

No.7 Ludlow Street New York NY 10002

+1 212 660 0312

Notes

METROGRAPH.COM

No.7 Ludlow Street New York NY 10002

+1 212 660 0312