Spring Calendar 2009

Pai Ching-Jui, 1968 • Pai Ching-Jui was one of the most important Taiwanese filmmakers of the sixties and seventies. So The Bride and I serves both as a fine exemplar of the romantic comedies popular at the time, and as a wonderfully self-conscious iteration of the same, as Pai tests the limitations of the genre. The narrative, which concerns a young couple's attempts to reconcile their arranged marriage, engages a theme that would develop into a central concern of New Taiwanese filmmakers, especially Edward Yang: the obstinacy of Confucian forms of social organization in a culture undergoing capitalist transformation. 16mm

Frank Hurley, 1918 • Already a world renowned explorer by 1914, Ernest Shackleton set out to be the first to cross Antarctica by way of the South Pole. Frank Hurley accompanied the crew to create a film of the explorer's hopeful milestone. Unfortunately, Shackleton's ship the Endurance became stuck in an ice flow, stranding the crew for months. Artfully photographed by Hurley, the film chronicles the day to day tasks of the crew as they persevere in this harsh environment. South is a great adventure story, but is most impressive when recording the minutiae of an explorer's existence. 35mm

Howard Hawks, 1938 • The screwball comedy reached delirium, and the limits of its logic, in this Howard Hawks masterpiece about a paleontologist who is subjected to a chain of hilarious identity crises by a freewheeling society gal. As surely as Grant embodies Hawks's configuration of the eternal male, a feckless geek seeking Nature's order, Katharine Hepburn is the eternal female, an impulsive feline capriciously performing Nature's will. While this deeply idiosyncratic film failed to resonate with audiences at the time, perhaps due to its near hermetic pessimism, today it is widely held as the quintessence of its genre. 16mm

Dennis Hopper, 1969 • Dennis Hopper's iconographic Easy Rider is the ultimate testament to everything that was a failure in every so-called revolution which occurred in the 1960s. Peter Fonda and Hopper have just finished a drug run and are now on their way to Mardi Gras, but their soul searching trip quickly becomes a moral reminder of everything that is still awry in the newly "liberated" United States. Nothing short of a masterpiece, Easy Rider is one of the crucial works of late 60s American cinema, sumptuously photographed by Laszlo Kovacs and featuring what is still considered one of Jack Nicholson's career performances. Archival 35mm

Ed Wood, 1953 • The legendary Ed Wood offers this bizarrely incompetent attempt to explain his own penchant for transvestitism—particularly for angora sweaters. A morphine-addled Bela Legosi, spewing out nonsense in an inexplicable role as a scientist "pulling the strings" of the action, is the best actor of the cast, which even includes Wood himself as the titular Glen/Glenda. There is no discernible structure, and stock footage makes up a good chunk of the actual screen time. Yet despite his lack of technical or narrative skill, Wood's obvious sincerity is what makes the film so endearing. 35mm

Danny Boyle, 2008 • Through cleverly bridged flashbacks, Slumdog Millionaire explores the Dickensian tale of Jamal Malik, the young underdog on the hot seat of India's Who Wants to be a Millionaire?. The film encourages us to identify with the charismatic hero and his many sidekicks, and to enjoy its smorgasbord of romance, suspense, comedy and drama. But beneath the Bollywood glamour and A.R. Rahman's lively score is an unflinching look at Mumbai's present-day street life, and Boyle does not let us ignore this stark reality. Recipient of 8 Oscars, including Best Picture. 35mm

Marc Forster, 2008 • In keeping with Casino Royale's aim to remodel the franchise, this latest Bond actually follows its antecedent as a direct sequel. Pursuing those responsible for his lover's death, 007 uncovers Quantum, an information age S.P.E.C.T.R.E., whose lead agent poses as an environmentalist! The film strikes a dour tone telegraphed by Daniel Craig's chiseled features and novel disinterest in his heroine. Gone is Pierce Brosnan's self-reflexive humor, which blithely acknowledged the character as a cultural anachronism. This Bond is contemporary, righteous and deathly serious. 35mm

Yasujiro Ozu, 1947 • When a young boy is apparently abandoned by his father, a tenement owner brings him home, and convinces one of his renters, an embittered old woman, to take the child temporarily. While at first resistant to the boy, and eager to rid herself of him, she contradicts what seems to be her character and quickly forms such a close relationship with him that she comes to consider him her own. Even while asserting the possibility for the renewal of human kindness, Record of a Tenement Gentleman presents a stark picture of the desolation and breakdown of traditional familial bonds in postwar Japan. 35mm

Chen Kun-Hou, 1983 • One of three films that ignited the New Taiwan Cinema, Growing Up, directed by Chen Kun-hou and written by Hou Hsiao-hsien, was a significant commercial and critical success, inspiring many to produce works in its vein. The narrative focuses on the defining events of a student's adolescence—his mother's remarriage, his high school shenanigans, and his first romance—while concomitantly the style emphasized understatement in its attentiveness to character psychology and restraint in its evocation of social issues, such as the relationship between Mainland Chinese and Native Taiwanese. Archival 16mm

Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Shoedsack, 1925 • Inspired by Robert Flatherty's Nanook of the North, Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, sought their own adventure to film and produced Grass, one of the earliest ethnographic documentaries. Grass follows the Bakhtiari tribe of Persia (now Iran), an estimated 50,000 people plus countless herds of livestock, as they travel across mountains and rivers to new pastures. In their first film together, Cooper and Shoedsack explore the narrative framing possibilities of the documentary, utilizing the structure of a journey to the past to discover the "Forgotten People" of the Bakhtiari. 35mm

Leo McCarey, 1937 • A landmark in Grant's career, this comedy of manners, thought to have been heavily improvised by Leo McCarey, is the film credited with creating the star's persona—bemused, elegant, and suave, but above all light as air. Grant and Irene Dunne play Jerry and Lucy Warriner, a high society couple who divorce under a cloud of mutual suspicion, only to discover they still love each other. What could easily have occasioned sentimental moralizing is redeemed in McCarey's commitment to illuminating a couple's attempt to regain the simplicity of romantic love within a sophisticated and modern society. Archival 35mm

Peter Bogdonovich, 1968 • Peter Bogdonivich's Targets is a psych-drama thriller which doubles as a biopic of the later life of actor Boris Karloff. Set in a lonely-looking Los Angeles, Targets moves back and forth between the mundane life of a once popular horror icon, Byron Orlock (a thinly veiled version of Karloff ) and that of a Vietnam vet sniper who happens to choose the drivein where Orlock's latest film is being premiered as his next target zone. Though comparable to the previous year's Point Blank in its cynical look at L.A., Targets is more a tome of hopelessness set against a violence-obsessed world. 35mm

Robert Woodburn, 1956 • Widely considered by Doc programmers to be the most amazing discovery we have ever made, this country-and-western musical about popcorn, produced as far as we can tell by a semiprofessional Kansas City television crew, has a screenplay by Robert Altman. Yes, that Robert Altman. The plot has something to do with a popcorn manufacturer named Thaddeus Pinwhistle, a crooked PR man named Waldo Crummit, a singer named Lillian Gravelguard, etc. There are delightful songs about balloons and traveling to Mars, sometimes performed while the singers are pelted with popcorn. Archival 35mm

Gus Van Sant, 2008 • As the nation's first openly gay elected official, Harvey Milk, like Rosa Parks, was the right person at the right time. Milk's success at spearheading the defeat of Proposition 6 is a historical rebuke to us, 30 years on with the passing of last year's Proposition "H8". Commencing at Milk's assassination, Van Sant's biopic proceeds in a non-linear narrative progression, anchored by a recording Milk made a few months before his death. The direction brilliantly evokes the seventies through its seamless incorporation of historical footage throughout the film. 35mm

Clint Eastwood, 2008 • Clint Eastwood's sprawling and complex period piece, based on the true case of a kidnapped Los Angeles boy, intricately and brilliantly weaves a murder mystery, an account of police corruption and brutality, and a fierce indictment of mental health institutions into an extremely fast paced two and a half hours. Distinguished by an outstanding Oscar nominated performance by Angelina Jolie and a fierce supporting cast, which includes Jeffrey Donovan in a career performance, Eastwood proves he is still one of the most important filmmakers in Hollywood today. 35mm

Yasujiro Ozu, 1949 • Setsuko Hara, with her inimitable charm and warmth, stars as Noriko, a young woman in her late twenties who is pressured by everyone in her life to settle down and get married. Noriko, however, has no interest in doing so. She prefers instead to stay single and care for her widowed father (Chishu Ryu). One of Ozu's most powerful family dramas, Late Spring explores poignantly and carefully conflicting notions of self-sacrifice, obligation, and personal desire in the shifting postwar social landscape, along with the sorrows and tensions that naturally arise from such notions. 35mm

Edward Yang, 1985 • Striking a fiercely different tone from the New Taiwan films that had preceded it, most of which depicted small town life and small time dramas, Edward Yang's second feature mounted a ruthless critique of urban culture during Taipei's economic boom. Simultaneously, the film inaugurated Yang's sustained interest in the metropolis as an impacted social landscape. With Hou Hsiao-hsien himself assuming the dramatic lead, and regular Hou collaborator Chu T'ien-wen penning the script, Taipei Story is emblematic of the collaborative, experimental spirit that briefly defined New Taiwan Cinema's early years. Archival 35mm

Alberto Cavalcanti, 1926 and Jean Vigo, 1930 • The city symphony was one of the first forms to become popular as conscious documentary filmmaking emerged in the 1920s. Via paradigms of Soviet montage and location photography these films explored the impacted urban environments that defined modernity. Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures, one of the earliest films in this genre, traces the relationship of Parisians to their city, while Vigo's À propos de Nice contrasts the material life of the working class and the wealthy. 16mm

George Cukor, 1938 • This comedy about an overconfident social climber (Grant) who becomes engaged to old money, only to fall head over heals for its socialite sibling (Katharine Hepburn), is imbued with a deliberately deceptive sheen of aplomb under Cukor's elegant, tonally balanced direction, all the better to articulate the protagonist's hypnotic sense of self-denial, verging on split personality. Like many of Cukor's leads, Grant faces the duality of his own way of life, and is forced to choose between the smothering stability of wealth and tradition, and the dizzying promiscuity of a nonconformist, high roller existence. Archival 35mm

Bob Rafelson, 1969 • Crazed loneliness was a common theme in American cinema of the late 60s and early 70s. Films centering on everyday loners-run-amok who intentionally separated themselves from the civilized world constantly filled half of a drive-in double feature. Bob Rafelson's first foray into "serious" filmmaking became one of the keynote studies of late 60s American life. Jack Nicholson plays Bobby, a drifter from a wealthy family who became disillusioned by his "daily routine." When he becomes equally bored with his carefree lower-class lifestyle, he decides to return to his family, but has anything in him changed? Archival 35mm

Norman McLeod, 1933 • Paramount's 1933 version takes Lewis Carroll's already strange tale even further with its bizarre all-star cast: W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty, Gary Cooper sporting a fake nose as the White Knight, Ned Sparks as the Caterpillar, Edward Everett Horton as the Mad Hatter, and Cary Grant wearing a turtleneck and, inexplicably, a horse's head as the Mock Turtle. The Fleischer studios provide an animated "The Walrus and the Carpenter" segment. Filled with special effect sequences that are both impressive and terrifying, this is a film surreal enough to please Charles Dodgson himself. 35mm

Tomas Alfredson, 2008 • This Swedish vampire film is an intelligent movie whose sweetness lingers long after the curtains close. One can't help but coo over undead Eli and Oskar, her prematurely downtrodden boy companion, as they deal with the tricky business of feeding a pre-teen vampire in a small, reserved town. Squeamish viewers may begrudge the authentic display of gore, but this is foremost a story about learning to trust others during our fragile prepubescent years. Don't judge Oskar's complicity too harshly. What wouldn't you have done for your middle school crush? 35mm

Stephen Daldry, 2008 • This adaptation of a 1995 novel by Bernhard Schlink constructs its story in flashback. A young boy and an older woman (Kate Winslet) engage in a passionate affair in post-War Germany. Decades later, the boy, now a lawyer (Ralph Fiennes), discovers his former lover was a concentration camp guard and is on trial for war crimes. Now, the young man must reconcile his lingering feelings with the horrible knowledge of his inamorata's past. Under Stephen Daldry's artful direction, the interweaving of an erotic affair with the Holocaust's brutalities appears natural and seamless. 35mm

Yasujiro Ozu, 1951 • Setsuko Hara stars again as a young woman named Noriko who is pressured by her family to marry, but Early Summer is more than a revision of Late Spring. This Noriko is a feistier incarnation, willing to go along with her family's wishes, but only on her own terms. Rather than accepting the matches presented to her, she makes her own decision. Early Summer engages all Ozu's classic postwar themes, particularly exploring the phenomenon of attitudinal change across generations, with the fast-paced transformation of Japan's 1950s economic boom serving as backdrop. 35mm

Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1986 • This film about provincial adolescents migrating to the city is the summation of the retrospective stylistics and autobiographical situations that dominate the first phase of Hou Hsiaohsien's oeuvre. If Yang's films consistently exploded the New Taiwan Cinema's formal parameters, as defined by Growing Up, Hou's refined and epitomized them. His work came to signify the movement entire, exerting an immediate influence on the next generation, including China's Jia Zhang-ke, whose distanced set-ups in Platform (2000), also autobiographical, are difficult to imagine without Dust in the Wind. 35mm

Karl Brown, 1927 • Although ostensibly a narrative film, director Karl Brown, a former cinematographer for D.W. Griffith, categorized Stark Love as part of the "actuality" genre: an attempt to create an authentic depiction of the lifestyle of the Appalachian people, a foreign culture to the film's urban audience. Brown shot on location in the Great Smoky Mountains and cast locals in every role to lend his film a greater air of realism. Stark Love effectively combines melodramatic storytelling with a realistic depiction of the Appalachian way of life and challenges notions of the documentary's objectivity towards its subject. Archival 35mm

Howard Hawks, 1939 • The sole proprietor of a backwater airmail station in Columbia, Geoff Carter (Grant) cultivates a male idyll, his own private kingdom where he enjoys the breezy camaraderie and companionship of his fellow pilots. But when Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur), an itinerant nightclub singer, invades this barroom scene, Carter's painstakingly preserved sense of fatalism faces dissolution, as he begins to understand love. Acclaimed for its muscularly staged flight sequences, in these moments of unadorned poetry Only Angels Have Wings may represent the purest expression of the Hawksian worldview. Archival 35mm

Paul Mazursky, 1969 • One of the many short- lived cultural fads of the late 60s was swinging. Paul Mazursky's cinematic capitalizing on the swinger lifestyle, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, is less a morality play than a sarcastic comment on the phoniness of such "liberating" movements. Bob and Carol are a happily married couple who, after attending an obligatory therapy session, are led to believe they will find satisfaction through sex with other couples. They enlist their friends Ted and Alice and soon embark on a journey of sexual awakening, only to realize that freeing their bodies is much easier than opening their minds. Archival 35mm

Cecil B. DeMille, 1933 • One of the earliest and rarest of DeMille's sound features, This Day and Age is a wild paean to vigilante justice and mob violence masquerading as an inspirational high school story. When a few teenage boys witness the murder of a Jewish tailor at the hands of the local mob, they vow to take revenge by creating a grand coalition of all the high school students to do unspeakable things to the criminals' leader. The jawdroppingly insane plan they enact, followed by their triumphant victory march, has led more than one reviewer to compare the film to Hitler Youth propaganda. 16mm

John Patrick Shanley, 2008 • In a powerful ensemble performance, Meryl Streep, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis (all Oscar-nominated) give poignancy and complexity to a story beyond that provided by its script. Less skilled hands could easily have rendered this drama about a priest who allegedly molests an African-American student, and the top nun who pursues him, into a facile, political sermon. Instead the hot-button issue serves as a catalyst for meditation on the broader metaphysical issues at work, and the fine line between political and personal morality. 35mm

David Fincher, 2008 • This Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) picture sounds like pure Hollywood sentiment, but considered viewing reveals a reinvigoration of American magic realism, worthy of Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter. Born an arthritic baby, Benjamin Button is destined to age backwards. Rather than milk this gimmick for dramatic effects, David Fincher wisely attends the subtle ways this condition defamiliarizes commonplace human experiences, making them wondrous and all the more apparently mortal. 35mm

Yasujiro Ozu, 1956 • Early Spring explores a familiar drudgery of postwar Japan—the day-to-day experience of the average office worker. In his 1952 Ikiru, Akira Kurosawa offered an alternative vision of the same, but one more sentimental and moralizing than what Ozu created here. The plot centers around an illicit love affair between two workers in a typically anonymous office, but story isn't all that important. Rather, the film becomes meaningful and relevant by its effective evocation of a tedious mode of being. A shining example of Ozu's subtlety, Early Spring is an interesting departure from his widely viewed family dramas. 35mm

Edward Yang, 1986 • The Terrorizer elaborated Yang's ambition to depart the structural limitations and narrowly domestic concerns of the New Taiwan Cinema. Via an intricate plot, interweaving the vectors of three couples tormented by an anonymous prank caller, and a poetic use of scenic framing, creating the sense of an oppressively circumscribed architectural whole, Yang envisions Taipei's violent interpersonal relationships as the emanations of greater global maladies and competing ideological discourses, a way of seeing that led Marxist scholar Fredric Jameson to call this work the essential postmodern film. Archival 35mm

John Grierson, 1929 • Following the daily life of herring fisherman in the North Sea, Drifters illustrates the escalating industrialization of that business and its effect on workers. Director John Grierson marshals a panoply of filmmaking techniques drawn from his contemporaries, such as Sergei Eisenstein and Robert Flaherty, while eschewing the inherently dramatic for the mundane details of fishermen's daily lives. Oft cited as the catalyst for Britain's documentary tradition, Drifters is a moving display of temperance and humanity in the face of capitalist expansion, virtues that Grierson defines as uniquely British. Archival 16mm

Howard Hawks, 1940 • In this comedy of remarriage, Grant plays the editor of a metropolitan daily who convinces his ex-wife and star reporter (Rosalind Russell) to forgo her impending remarriage and retirement to motherhood in order to cover one last story, all in an effort to prevent her from remarrying altogether. As with Bringing Up Baby, the dialogue crackles with wit and intelligence, but the real revelation is in Hawks'a use of overlapping sound to create the impression of people talking over each other simultaneously instead of in turn, a stylistic innovation well suited to the argumentative nature of the characters. Archival 35mm

Frank Perry, 1972 • Though director Frank Perry was best known for his play-like character studies, Play It As It Lays is a remarkable divergence from that style and remains one of the most thought-provoking avantgarde works to emerge from the studio system. A part structuralist, part stream-ofconsciousness depiction of the deterioration of actress Maria Lang, Lays is an account of the drug-infused egotism that plagued early 70s Hollywood. Perry and screenwriter Joan Didion are sympathetic toward the unstable Lang, but Lays frequently reminds the audience that only she is to blame for her own downfall. 35mm

Zelma Carroll, 1937 • Supposedly based on a true story, The Lash of the Penitentes is a lurid schockumentary about the murder of a newspaperman traveling to middle-of-nowhere New Mexico to investigate a strange sect of Catholics who engage in ritual self-flagellation. The film combines apparent documentary footage of the cult with fictionalized sequences, including a subplot about the reporter's guide's obsessive love for a local girl. It features depictions of brutal violence and frank sexuality, including scenes of nudity and crucifixions, that were shocking for its time and prevented the film from satisfying censors. Archival 35mm

Ron Howard, 2008 • It is somehow fittingly perverse that this prestige picture analogizes David Frost's Nixon Interviews to a battle of wits between Frank Langella, one of the great Draculas, and Michael Sheen, werewolf Lucian in the Underworld franchise. Hoping to salvage his reputation in the wake of public embarrassment, the satirist Frost confronts Nixon about his Watergate wrongdoings, as Nixon contrives to recoup his image for history's sake. Ron Howard deftly sets the conflict between the two men against the backdrop of America's exploding media culture. 35mm

Kelly Reichardt, 2008 • A twenty-something drifter from Indiana with only her retriever Lucy for company, Wendy heads to Alaska after the rumor of lucrative seasonal work in fisheries. Her ill-conceived plan falls apart when car trouble and a run-in with police strand her in a nondescript part of Oregon. In an intimate role, Michelle Williams is captivating, even at her bedraggled worst. Via her performance, Kelly Reichardt examines the lot of people who have slipped off the road of financial stability in an unassuming and timely depiction of life at the margins. 35mm

Yasujiro Ozu, 1957 • A critique of modernity's transformative effect on Japan that moves past melancholy toward vicious condemnation, Tokyo Twilight stands as a uniquely dark entry in Ozu's filmography, as Setsuko Hara finally assumes a role that is not completely lovable. With Hara's abandonment of her marriage, her younger sister running wild, and the return of a long-thought-dead mother, the film seems at first glance totally dominated by the modern crisis of the family's breakdown as a social institution, but the tense and necessary dichotomy found in Ozu's work between old and new values remains the film's backbone. 35mm

Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1987 • Hou's most obscure film, a transitional work that is rarely discussed and even more rarely screened, Daughter of the Nile nevertheless represents an exhilarating anticipation of the director's later masterpiece Millennium Mambo (2001). Both examine Taipei's youth culture, each elucidating the itinerant existence of a twenty-something party girl (here played by Taiwan's most renowned eighties pop singer). And similar to Hou's hypnotic exploration of Taipei clubs in the latter, Nile is punctuated with bewitching interludes, such as a nighttime motorcycle ride and beach bonfire. Archival 35mm

Albert Lamorisse, 1956 and Rose Lowder • In Albert Lamorisse's beloved The Red Balloon a young boy chases a balloon around the streets of Paris, affirming the wonder of childhood. Rose Lowder's film practice has been strongly influenced by her painting: the flashing, frame-by-frame images she employs in her filmsmake the celluloid a canvas for her idiosyncratic and utopian representations. 35mm 16mm

Accompanied live by Los Angeles-based experimental music group Lucky Dragons. Co-sponsored by Golden Age.

George Cukor, 1940 • The second collaboration between Cukor, Grant, and Hepburn following Holiday, this work inverts the plot of that film with Hepburn assuming the lead as a spoiled rich girl engaged to a nouveau riche, then adds a twist by giving her the pick of two idiosyncratic, fully realized men in addition to her fiancée. As the exhusband competing with a tabloid reporter (Jimmy Stewart) and the husband-to-be (John Howard), Grant is alternately irritated and enthralled by Hepburn, balancing his conflicted feelings with the same sense of composure that made him such a good fit for Cukor's nuanced direction. 35mm

Frank Perry, 1970 • Although most counterculture reactionary films of the late 60s and early 70s were centered on young men, Frank Perry's scathing look at a "liberated" woman in a man's world remains one of cinema's harshest critiques of gender inequality. Carrie Snodgrass stars as Tina, an upper-class New York housewife whose domineering husband has reduced her to being his personal servant and entertainer. While at a party, she meets and soon begins having an affair with a "free thinking" artist named George; however, her illusion of bliss is short-lived. Tina's search for freedom is simply another road to subjugation. 35mm

Dean Reisner & Zion Myers, 1948 and Jules White, 1930 • "Over 200 trained birds, complete with neckties, hats, etc., waddle around an anthropornithomorphic community called Chirpendale. By conservative estimate, the God-damnedest thing ever seen."—James Agee. Billed as "George Burton's Love Birds," the entire cast of Bill and Coo is made up of birds wearing costumes. When a raven (Curly Twiford's Jimmy the Crow) threatens the town, cabbie Bill Singer must save the day. The film won a special Oscar for its artistry and "patience." It screens with a musical starring dogs in costume, including a blackface Al Jolson dog. DVD

Darren Aronofsky, 2008 • For most of his life, "The Ram" (Mickey Rourke) has sold his body to men seeking a fantasy where the USA always beats the Ayatollah. Today, he circles between his mobile home, a demeaning job, sparsely attended fan conventions, and a strip club. Pained by his inability to reconcile with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), he sparks a relationship with Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) a stripper, and begins to build a new life. This sensitive film from Darren Aronofsky elegizes the eighties and its people without sentimentalizing their culture of wish-fulfillment. 35mm

Clint Eastwood, 2008 • Shunned at the Oscars, Clint Eastwood's latest film should not be ignored. After the death of his wife, Korean War vet Stanley Kowalski feels increasingly estranged from family and society. Spending the days downing beer on his porch, he watches broodingly as the old allAmerican neighborhood morphs into a community of Hmong immigrants. Nevertheless, his destiny soon converges inextricably with that of his new neighbors. Employing a cast of mostly local non-actors, Eastwood depicts the American psyche from many different cultural lenses. 35mm

Yasujiro Ozu, 1958 • Light fare relative to other work in this program, Equinox Flower tells of a middle-aged businessman whose advice is sought by family friends and co-workers in the arrangement of romantic affairs. Though thought reliable for his considered, consistent advice, matters turn complicated, and hilarious, when he has trouble applying similarly flexible standards to his own daughter, a young woman eager to express herself and determine her own destiny. Equinox Flower still hits a refreshing note, displaying Ozu's diverse and playful application of his talents in his first color film. 35mm

Henri de la Falaise, 1935 • "A garden of Eden with dozens of Eves!" In the 1930s, the island of Bali was an American cultural obsession, appearing as the setting of many films and becoming a popular tourist attraction. This exploitation film reflects that sentiment. French aristocrat Marquis Henry de la Falaise depicts Bali as an exotic paradise, revealing a personal connection to the island in his meticulous presentation of various Balinese dances and religious rituals. One of the last films recorded in two-color Technicolor, Legong is the ultimate demonstration of the documentary conceived as an arresting, escapist spectacle. Archival 35mm

Alfred Hitchcock, 1946 • Grant plays a deeply suspicious government agent who finds himself falling in love with the vulnerable daughter of a convicted Nazi (Ingrid Bergman), while at the same time trying to convince her to seduce one of her father's old associates in an effort to infiltrate a German spy ring in Brazil. Amidst a complex plot, Hitchcock never loses sight of his characters, employing his signature reversals of perspective to reveal the inherent complexities of human relationships. Keep an eye out for one of the most famous kisses in cinema, and, of course, a cameo by the director himself. 35mm

Melvin Van Peebles, 1970 • The Watermelon Man was only the second feature from a black filmmaker to be produced by a Hollywood studio. A brutal social farce, the film follows a middle class, married white man who, for reasons unknown, wakes up black one morning. Soon the slightly racist protagonist is faced with the harsh effects of his new skin color as he loses his job, his family, and his social standing. Though Peebles' subsequent film, Sweet Sweeback, gained him international acclaim, The Watermelon Man remains his most thought-provoking work, as well as a strong and sarcastic comment on our supposed era of tolerance. 35mm

Ron Ormond, 1971 • After surviving a plane crash, exploitation filmmaker Ron Ormond experienced a spiritual reawakening and devoted himself to making Christian-based films. Inspired by the preachings of the eccentric Reverend Estus W. Pirkle, this incredible piece of Cold War-paranoia shows us a glimpse of where America is heading, with all its rock `n' roll and immorality. It depicts a sample of the violent acts against Christians that Communists will inevitably perpetrate once they take over, including an infamous scene where a child is beheaded for refusing to blaspheme. 35mm

Sam Mendes, 2008 • Adapted from Richard Yates's acclaimed novel, this Oscar-nominee reunites Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in an on-screen tango of love and hate. As Frank and April Wheeler, a young suburban couple with children, they struggle to balance competing ambitions: to maintain a bourgeois life of responsibility and restraint, or to abandon convention and embark on bohemian adventures à Paris! Depicting the extreme loneliness of 50s American society and its "cult of domesticity", Sam Mendes (American Beauty) delivers one of the year's most thought-provoking films. 35mm

Laurent Cantet, 2008 • Not since Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (1995) has a film so politically relevant emerged from France. Originally titled Entre les murs (Between the Walls) and based on a novel by François Bégadeau, this verité drama recounts one year at a suburban public school in Paris. But these aren't your white picket fence 'burbs: the Parisian banlieue is an urban ghetto marked by casual crime and racial tensions. Teacher François Marin must at once educate, empower and discipline his class of underprivileged teens. Recipient of the Palme d'Or at Cannes. 35mm

Yasujiro Ozu, 1959 • Floating Weeds is a remake of Ozu's earlier, silent work, The Story of Floating Weeds (1934). A traveling Kabuki troupe provides the context for the director to explore the same complicated family dynamics he looked to so frequently. Though these theater folk are more boisterous and unreserved than the characters who populate Ozu's more typical family dramas, and its content somewhat racier and more lascivious (bribery-induced seductions, secret second mistresses, etc.), Floating Weeds returns us to that deep and beautiful sea of melancholy, transience, and loss that defines Ozu's greatest masterpieces. Archival 35mm

Tsai Ming-Liang, 1992 • With his first feature, Malaysian émigré Tsai Ming-Liang, the most prominent filmmaker associated with the "second phase" of the New Taiwan Cinema, heralded the movement's impending dissolution into esthetic hermeticism. The film's partial ethnography of a community of drifters, environed by urban decay, anticipated Hou's own languorous documents of youthful disaffection and Yang's zoological satires of a globalizing Taipei. Here, the spectacle of a truant stabbing a cockroach on his compass achieves cosmic resonance in a last ditch effort to articulate the folk amidst cultural congestion. Archival 35mm

Sergei Eisenstein, 1932 • Sergei Eisenstein had a difficult time filming and indeed never finished ¡Que viva México! Determining to create a film that traced Mexico's history from the present back to pre-colonial times in four parts, he abandoned the project due to lack of funds. In 1979, Grigori Aleksandrov, Eisenstein's friend and frequent collaborator, edited the existing footage with the aid of the director's own notes in an attempt to reproduce the intended vision as faithfully as possible. His reconstruction revealed that Eisenstein was creating a documentary with an historical scope, which would dwarf that of contemporaries. 35mm

Howard Hawks, 1949 • As implied by its title, this WWII comedy enacts a dementedly self-conscious play on male humiliation. Assuming the role of a Free French popinjay who marries an all American servicewoman (Ann Sheridan), Grant must earn the military's official "war bride" status to attain an emigration visa to the States. After a string of derisive mishaps and misidentifications, all typically screwball but endowed here with the same sense of discomfort and disillusionment that would define much postwar auteur cinema, the picture famously culminates with Grant donning an asinine blond wig to fool Navy bureaucracy. 16mm

Jack Nicholson, 1971 • Actor Jack Nicholson's directorial debut (although he worked on Roger Corman's The Terror) takes place in a small town in the Pacific Northwest and follows the social awakening of a college basketball star. In contrast to most anti-Vietnam films, Nicholson's look at the war and its effects on "everyday folks" is much less interested in the ethics of drafting or social activism, but rather functions as a poignant character-driven drama. Advertised as "the disenchantment of the All-American jock," Drive, He Said provides a glimpse into the lives of small-town America so often ignored in early 70s filmmaking. 35mm

Sam Newfield, 1938 • A typical 1930s musical western in many respects—except that the cast is made up entirely of dwarves. They ride Shetland ponies and walk UNDER saloon doors. The plot involves an evil gunslinger named Bat Haines trying to incite conflict between two rival ranchers so that he can move in and steal their precious cattle. It's up to the heroic Buck Lawson to save the tiny town. The stars of this terribly un-PC camp classic, credited as "Jed Buell's Midgets," would go on to greater fame the following year as the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. 16mm

Pat O'Neill, 2002 • Pat O'Neill's hallucinatory meditations on Hollywood take him to the abandoned Ambassador Hotel, site of Robert Kennedy's assassination and the first Oscar Ceremony. The narrative follows a year of violence and intrigue in the baroque, crumbling hotel. Part Sokurov, part Lynch, the film makes good on its title and unsettles the fictions that inflect the myth of Hollywood and its history. 35mm

Co-sponsored by the Open Practice Committee. Pat O'Neill will give a Q&A after the film, and will be introduced by Professor Tom Gunning.

James Benning, 2007 • A tribute to American freight infrastructure, an homage to the glorified visions of rail in the 20th century, and a nod to 21st century concerns about consumption, Benning's new feature consists of 43 long takes of trains passing through frames at varying speeds. Encompassing towns and cities, oceans and rivers, RR is a stunning portrait of America, which secures its creator's place as one of the country's preeminent filmmakers. 35mm

Director James Benning will introduce the film and give a Q&A afterwards.

Yasujiro Ozu, 1960 • Setsuko Hara graces the screen with her presence yet again, finally mature enough in years to play a widow rather than an unmarried daughter or devoted daughter-in-law. Sweetly comedic, Late Autumn is another beautiful meditation on changing human relationships and the tumults that rock small lives, even as tranquility and a passive acceptance of these define the film's aesthetic. As his career progresses into its final stage, the director's favorite themes have not grown tired. Rather, their staying power and boundless capacity to move audiences reaffirm the depth and complexity of Ozu's artistic project. 35mm

Wang Tung, 1992 • When a mining town endures a gold rush at the height of the Japanese Occupation in the 1920s, two miners seek riches, only to fall in love in the process, one with a shunned widow, the other with a sick prostitute. The third installment in a trilogy of historical comedies dubbed the "Nativist Series" and directed by the important, if relatively obscure Wang Tung, Hill of No Return is a whimsical account of Taiwan's native proletariat, in contrast to Yang and Hou's more sober pictures, which concern the lives of displaced mainlanders and Taiwanese literati. Archival 16mm

Pare Lorentz, 1936 and 1938 • The Resettlement Administration, a New Deal program designed to promote a positive image of the New Deal's success, funded these two documentaries from filmmaking newcomer Pare Lorentz. His first, The Plow That Broke the Plains, chronicles the causes of the Dust Bowl and its effect on the farmers of the Great Plains region. The River shows the importance of the Mississippi River to American business and agriculture. Both films offer a stirring portrait of perseverance during the Great Depression. Archival 16mm

Stanley Donen, 1963 • In this delightful last hurrah, Grant plays the least untrustworthy of a group of eccentric male stalkers pursuing Audrey Hepburn, all of whom claim to have been associates of her recentlydeceased husband and are convinced she has the gold he swindled out of them during the War. Shot in Technicolor on location in Paris, which Donen exploits beautifully, this farcical suspense thriller is Hitchcock-lite in the best sense, elegantly photographed, cleverly plotted, and exuding an atmosphere of impish mischief telegraphed in its stars' tongue-in-cheek repartee and Henry Mancini's playful score. 35mm

Richard Fleischer, 1972 • In an era where most films and filmmakers were quick to demonize American police forces as brutal and corrupt, Richard Fleischer's The New Centurions is a rare humanizing look at a group whose work is so often considered inhuman. Stacy Keach is a young rookie cop with ambitions of changing the corrupt LAPD, but who begins to realize, after being paired with a tired and aging veteran, George C. Scott, that his ideals of performing effective and honest police work are hopeless. Nevertheless, he perseveres, costing him his life and marriage. Archival 35mm

David Lynch, 1978 • Set against the nightmarish backdrop of a desolate industrial world, David Lynch's debut is an otherworldly masterpiece. Henry (Jack Nance) learns that he has impregnated his girlfriend Mary, who has given birth prematurely to a baby... of sorts. Eraserhead is both Lynch's strangest and his most accessible film: through the disturbing imagery lies a very real and personal expression of the dread of paternity. The incredible sound design by Lynch and Alan Splet is a character of its own—combining bizarre drones with Fats Waller organ music, and climaxing in the haunting song of the Lady in the Radiator. 35mm

Ari Folman, 2008 • When filmmaker Ari Folman realizes that he has no memory of his experiences as a young Israeli soldier in the 1982 Lebanon War, he embarks on a quest to track down and interview fellow veterans and piece together the truth about his involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacres. This profoundly haunting film skirts the boundary between documentary and fiction. It is also a simply stunning piece of cell animation and analog craftsmanship in a digital age where the once proud Walt Disney Corporation has declared such techniques obsolete. 35mm

George Tillman Jr., 2008 • "...this album is dedicated to all the teachers that told me I'd never amount to nothing, to all the people... that called the police on me when I was just tryin' to make some money to feed my daughter..." From Big Poppa's childhood in Brooklyn, to his cultivation as the savior of East Coast hip-hop, to his infamous feud with Tupac Shakur, and his tragic murder, this biopic offers a compelling portrayal of one of rap's most iconic and polarizing figures. Jamal Woolard is so convincing as The Notorious B.I.G. that Biggie's own mother reportedly swore she was watching her son. 35mm

Yasujiro Ozu, 1962 • Chishu Ryu returns for Ozu's final film, once again playing a widower who must sacrifice his own well-being for that of a loved one. The sense of loss evoked by this swan song's goodbyes runs particularly deep, as we experience not only the dissolution of a standard of relationships, or a particular cultural moment, but of Yasujiro Ozu himself, and his camera's meditative gaze. One is left yearning, not just for a bygone era and lost sense of constancy, but over whether we will again be able to accept loss as this artist's unique cinematic language has enabled us to do. 35mm

Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989 • The greatest film to emerge from the New Taiwan Cinema, this historical epic about the desolation visited upon a native Taiwanese clan over the course of the White Terror, when Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) imprisoned or executed some 140,000 Taiwanese for dissidence real and perceived, proceeds in half-defined spans of narration, allowing us only a tenuous grasp of history in its making. Similarly deprived of the agency to determine their fate, Hou's characters cannot but endure catastrophe, while fumbling to adequately articulate their experience of time. Archival 35mm

Note: This film was originally planned for 11 May; the delay was so Doc could get a shiny new print struck for its twentieth-anniversay screening.

Joris Ivens, 1937 • The effects of the Spanish Civil War on the land and people of Spain are beautifully rendered in this film by Joris Ivens, one of the greatest documentary filmmakers. Given an incredible amount of access to the fighting's front lines, Ivens was able to present the daily struggle of citizens and soldiers in and around the town of Fuenteduena. His imagery and didacticism are augmented by narration written and performed by Ernest Hemingway. The Spanish Earth sees Ivens continuing to experiment with his documentary aesthetics, which one critic described as "an improvised hybrid of many filmic modes." 16mm

Leo McCarey, 1957 • Doc closes its Cary Grant retrospective on a contrastingly delicate note of resignation and pathos with Leo McCarey's sumptuous color and cinemascope retake of his own 1939 Love Affair. On a cruise liner bound for New York, a playboy (Grant) and a nightclub singer (Deborah Kerr), both unhappily committed elsewhere, enjoy a fleeting tryst, after which they promise to meet at an obscure point in their futures. In this twilight masterpiece, both its star and its director sensibly refused to recycle old tricks, choosing instead to meet age, and their encroaching obsolescence, with sober reflection. 16mm

Bill Norton, 1972 • Made at the height of Kris Kristofferson's singing career, Bill L. Norton's Cisco Pike is a moral fable pitting well-intentioned country singer Cisco Pike (Kristofferson) against a self-hating violent cop (Gene Hackman) who is determined to bust Pike on drug charges. Director Norton captures the ambiance of early 70s urban drug culture with incredible lyricism, and Kristofferson's original score augments the film's outstanding depictions of lonely sprawl. Harry Dean Stanton co-stars as Cisco's ill-fated best friend, and both Karen Black and Warhol superstar Viva appear as the film's pseudo-femme fatales. Archival 35mm

Roland Emmerich, 1996 • Following the standing-room-only success of last year's Doc finale, Jurassic Park, we present a special screening of Jeff Goldblum's other great blockbuster. ID4 follows the multiple interweaving storylines of several characters who must come together to save the human race from a coordinated alien attack. It's like Robert Altman, only shitty! Bill Pullman, naturally cast as the President of the United States, leads an all-star cast that also includes Will Smith, Randy Quaid, Vivica A. Fox, the guy from Taxi, the brother from Mrs. Doubtfire, and Lt. Cmdr. Data. Plus, special pre-show entertainment! 35mm

Steven Soderbergh, 2008 • The first part of Steven Soderbergh's epic is triumphant, depicting Che Guevara (Benicio del Toro in a career performance) on his ascent to glory during the Cuban Revolution, and rise to prominence as an international icon. At Fidel Castro's right hand, Che becomes an inspirational guerrilla leader, caring for the wounded, training soldiers, and speaking before the United Nations. The treatment of the subject oscillates between electrifying reportage, carefully reenacting historical scenes, and lyrical contemplation, arresting the narrative to ponder the climate of Che's times. Che's second chapter finds the man leaving his family to lead a band of rebels in the Bolivian jungle in an effort to spark Marxist revolutions across South America. Tragically, Che fails to grasp the geopolitical dynamics of the region, and cannot convince the people of Bolivia of his sincerity. Sheer passion drives him to persevere, despite being outnumbered by both Bolivian and American forces. Soderbergh's hyperrealism plunges us into an asthmatic Guevara's dire final months as he and his tattered forces fight desperately for an already lost cause. 35mm