Summer Calendar 2009

Edward F. Cline, 1932 • The quintessentially absurd W.C. Fields (presumed owner of the legs in question) maintains his position as president of the fictitious Klopstokia by besting Hugh Herbert at arm wrestling matches. Meanwhile, his country enters the Olympics to save itself from bankruptcy. Paramount timed the film's release to coincide with the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, which made much more sense than the film itself, which remains one of the great screwball comedies of the early thirties, and quite possibly Field's best film not featuring Mae West. With Jack Oakie, Andy Clyde, Lyda Roberti, and goats and nuts. 16mm, not available on DVD

Claude Chabrol, 1958 • Chabrol's directorial debut is regarded by some historians as the start of the French New Wave, and birth pangs are evident in the raw cinematography as well as the plot of the film. François (Jean-Claude Brialy) returns to his quiet hometown after ten years in Paris. He comes home to convalesce, but soon realizes that he is the one who must do the healing for the sake of his old friend Serge and the rest of the village. Like most of the other founders of the New Wave, Chabrol had little experience behind the camera before this film, but he conveys the lives and pains of his characters in a universally arresting fashion. 16mm, not available on DVD

Alfred Hitchcock, 1976 • In Family Plot, a phony psychic and her cabdriver boyfriend (Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern), are promised $10,000 if they can locate the missing nephew of an aging woman. The hapless amateur detectives cross paths with a couple of serial kidnappers (Karen Black and William Devane) as their investigation reveals the estranged nephew's sordid past. Alfred Hitchcock orchestrates the complex intertwining narratives of Family Plot with typical aplomb, but adopts a lighthearted comedic tone that eschews his typically acerbic quality. Thus, his final film finds the director bowing out with charm and, literally, a wink. 35mm

Douglas Sirk, 1958 • This adaptation of a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet On The Western Front, tells the story of a Nazi soldier named Ernst who returns home from the Russian front to find love with the daughter of a former school teacher. As bombs are visited upon their nation like retribution, the couple attempts to cultivate a hovel of solitude amid the debris of moral desolation and compromise. Sirk is perhaps at his most anguished with this film, especially in light of the fact that the director's son died at the front. The unadorned performances of John Gavin and Lilo Pulver reveal a pain too deep to probe fully. 35mm, not available on DVD

Film cancelled. Stay tuned for updates.

John Carpenter, 1974 • John Carpenter's first feature film is a metaphorical look at America's dependence on technology and our ever evolving interest in expanding our "property" and international status. Set in the near future, Dark Star tells the story of a space vessel sent to destroy dying planets so that the solar systems therein can be colonized. After a series of near fatal encounters, the crew and its AI computer, Mother, demand that the ship's AI explosive, Bomb, forfeit his mission and allow them to abandon their mission. But Bomb refuses the request, putting the lives of everyone on board at risk. 35mm

Doc is closed in honor of our forefathers.

George Romero, 1973 • George A. Romero's third horror feature centers on a mysterious virus which causes anyone infected to go permanently insane. As scientists work to find a cure, the military steps in to stop the onslaught of senseless violence that has arisen due to disease paranoia. Their methods, however, quickly become more diabolical than the crimes they are tasked to prevent. Romero's gleeful disdain for American social bodies and forced obedience to arbitrary laws is the object of this brutally violent and, at times, darkly comedic work which established him as one of horror's great subversives. Featuring cult star Lynn Lowery. 35mm

Curt McDowell, 1972 • This early, rarely-seen feature by gay underground filmmaker Curt McDowell, director of the hilarious "Thundercrack" and longtime friend of and collaborator with the Kuchar brothers, follows the exploits of a rock and roll star named Mick Terrific as he searches far and wide for "Mr. Wonderful," through a panoply of bizarre situations and exotic faces. The storyline is sometimes difficult to follow, but McDowell's raucous energy and trashy sensibility make the film irresistible, like an underground comic book. In the words of filmmaker Mike Kuchar, this movie is "a real gut-punch." 16mm, not available on DVD

NOTE: The Loves of Ondine, originally scheduled for a makeup screening after this film, will not be shown. Stay tuned for updates on the new date for this screening.

Fritz Lang, 1945 • Jean Renoir loathed this remake of his 1931 La Chienne, but for all intents and purposes Scarlet Street, grim, bleak, and more than occasionally beautiful, adds to Fritz Lang's reputation not only as one of America's great foreign directors, but as one of the most important masters of film noir and the atmosphere that comes with it. Featuring a royally bummed out Edward G. Robinson as Christopher Cross, a lonesome married man with an insufferable wife (Rosalind Ivan), and Joan Bennett as his enterprising adulteress who, mistaking Cross for a famous painter, sets out to make a living off of him. Archival 35mm

Orson Welles, 1965 • Orson Welles' most revered Shakespeare film emerged from an excruciatingly tight budget and limited resources. Viewing it today, however, it is hard to believe that any limitations could have posed a threat to the film's artistic prowess. Welles plays Falstaff, the melancholy prankster fixated and falling out of favor with Prince Hal (Keith Baxter), leaving behind a life of restless youth for a life of contrived royalty. Based upon the bulk of the two parts of Henry IV, the film was remade, to an extent, as Gus Van Sant's 1991 road movie My Own Private Idaho with River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves. 35mm, not available on DVD

Ron Rice, 1982 • This pinnacle of the underground movement in the early 1960s features the New American Cincma's two greatest performers, Taylor Mead and Jack Smith, in a madcap comic, lyrical masterpiece from director Ron Rice. A joyously anarchic celebration of spontaneity in the best Beat tradition, Rice's most ambitious project was left unfinished at the time of his death in 1964 and restored 15 years later following his notes. Alberto Moravia was moved to proclaim that "the film is a protest which is violent, childish and sincere - a protest against an industrial world based on the cycle of production and consumption." 16mm, not available on DVD

Joris Ivens, 1931 & 1934 and László Moholy-Nagy, 1926-1931 • Joris Ivens, best known for Rain, provides us two lucent documentaries of common occurrences laden with political consequences. The clarity Ivens brings his subjects does not describe as much as it shows. Hence, Ivens's pre-war Marxist leanings avoid burdening the farmer or factory worker with too much ideological baggage. Instead, we see what the issues are and are lightly cautioned, lest we forget the realities of everyday labor. These films are accompanied by films from László Moholy-Nagy, a prominent master of Bauhaus whose work displays the imaginary movement of basic geometric structures. 16mm, not available on DVD

Woody Allen, 1979 • Allen once described audiences' attachment to this film as "irrational." Some would say the same about the island for which it is named and the relationships depicted by the plot, but that's also the operative joke. In Allen's conception, the most irrational attachment, in the end, is the one that turns out to have the most resonance. Even if the object of affection doesn't match our own vision - "that's not the New York I know" - it may be the one we love, which is perhaps why this romantic comedy, tinged with the nostalgic frisson of Gordon Willis's (The Godfather) black and white imagery, still commands such popularity. 35mm

Anthony Mann, 1948 • One might want to add extra exclamation marks to the tagline for Mann's sublime film-noir: "Bullets! Women! -- Can't Hold a Man Like This!" Dennis O'Keefe plays the gritty Joe Sullivan, who is itching to get out of jail after taking a rap for his deadbeat pal Rick (Raymond Burr). The film features cinematography by the great John Alton, responsible for the grisly low angle shots of Mann's T-Men and He Walked By Night, and author of Painting With Light, one of the first published books on the art of cinematography. With Claire Trevor and Marsha hunt, love triangles, and guns! Guns! GUNS! Archival 35mm

Pál Fejös, 1927 • The first of only four films by Hungarian-American director Pál Fejös, and the last silent film for German actor Conrad Veidt (The Cabinet Of Dr. Calgari, Casablanca), who plays Erik the Great, a grisly stage magician who falls in love with the young, beautiful Mary Philbin, who falls in love with the magician's apprentice. Critics without a taste for melodrama were undecided as to whether director and actor were over doing it, but at its best The Last Performance is a film that, as The New York Times put it, "looks older than it really is" in all the best and most effective ways possible. 16mm, not available on DVD

Babette Mangolte, 1982 • Described by the filmmaker as "a description of the act of making photographs from the point of view of the still camera and therefore the point of view of the photographer," The Camera: I explores the power dynamics behind the process of photochemical image making. Using what Mangolte calls a "subjective" camera, the film follows loose narrative about a photographer's interactions with her models, and with her city. Mangolte's self-reflexive approach moved Constance Penley to rhapsodize: "It is as if we were watching ourselves being photographed, as if the screen we're watching is photographing us." 16mm, not available on DVD

William Friedkin, 1971 • To call this film a crime story with a car chase scene is akin to describing a Twinkie as a cake snack with some cream filling. The cake surround the gooey center might be nice in its own way, but everyone knows where the real action is. Likewise, Friedkin and his producer Philip D'Antoni have constructed a glorious, fantastic car chase that was so dangerous and absurd that it can't and shouldn't be tried again in film history under any circumstances. As a bonus, they managed to wrap that chase in a tight and gritty film that broke the doors open for a grittier, documentary-style crime fiction in American cinema. 35mm

Otto Preminger, 1959 • Jimmy Stewart stars in one of the greatest courtroom dramas of all time, which has also has served for years as a teaching tool for legal scholars regarding human error and witness reliability. This is only appropriate, given that the film is based on a novel written by Michigan Supreme Court Justice John D. Voelker, about the events of a trial for which he was the defense attorney. Stewart's impassioned performance, the authentic rhythm of court proceedings that Preminger replicates, and Duke Ellington's unprecedented, all-jazz scoring make this one worth another visit, even if you've already had the pleasure. 35mm

Martin Scorsese, 1974 • Scorsese's early documentary focuses on his parents Catherine and Charles and the lives they lead as Italian-American immigrants to New York. Their conversation with their son reveals the hardships of the immigrant experience as well as their own personal struggles. Afterwards, we go to the kitchen as Catherine demonstrates her tomato sauce ("gravy") recipe for the camera. The recipe is also included in the credits of the film, and underscores Scorsese's feat of creating a deeply personal, subdued film experience that also serves as a window into the more general world of Italian-American culture. 16mm, not available on DVD

Jonas Mekas, 1964 • This early work of the New American Cinema from the sainted Jonas Mekas, one of the movement's figureheads, was originally a controversial off-Broadway play confronting the maltreatment of soldiers. The actors and crew re-performed their production the night after its closing, so that Mekas could commit it to film. The result is a synthesis of documentary and fiction - a performance by actors on a stage, shot in the fly-on-the-wall style of direct cinema - that well illustrates the liminality of these early independent films, that at once embraced elements of the Beat, while laying the ground for the Counterculture. 16mm, not available on DVD

George Cukor, 1950 • Gangster Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford) has the money and underworld skills necessary to curry influence with a few Washington politicians, but is held back by his proletarian wife Billie's (Judy Holliday) lack of sophistication. After hiring journalist Paul Verrall (William Holden), a walking stereotype of intellectual men, to teach his wife a thing or two, hilarity ensues as Billie becomes educated enough to assert herself, while retaining her New York attitude. Had Harry taken the time to read Pygmalion, perhaps he may have been able to foresee just how much damage an educated woman can do. 35mm

Carl Dreyer, 1943 • A deeply disquieting fable of 17th century Denmark, Day Of Wrath revolves around a young girl named Anne who has married a much older widower, the pastor Absalon. At first acceptant of her loveless marriage, Anne is jolted out of submissiveness when Absalom's son, Martin, returns from university. Their secret intimacy develops under the menacing shadow of witch-hunts, which pull Anne and her household into a horrifying catastrophe. Often interpreted as an oblique condemnation of Nazi rule, Dreyer's film is a stunningly precise and wounding critique of the destructiveness of totalitarian ideology. 35mm

John Ford, 1953 • Kentucky, 1905: a drunken and cantankerous old judge teaches his community a series of lessons in tolerance and love. John Ford had long awaited a chance to remake his 1934 Judge Priest into this masterpiece, which restores a crucial anti-lynching scene to the scenario and features one of Ford's most magisterial sequences, a funeral procession for a town prostitute. Considered by some scholars to mark the emergence of the director's late style, this low-budget, 30-day production evidently pushed Ford to further hone his formidable poetic economy, which here achieves a kabuki-like clarity and simplicity. 16mm, not available on DVD

Joseph von Sternberg, 1931 • Josef von Sternberg's distinctive interpretation of Dreiser's novel, fiercely contested by the author himself, is arguably more compelling and more nuanced than both the written work and the latter Hollywood adaptation, A Place In The Sun. Von Sternberg presents a critical examination of Dreiser's story of an upwardly mobile young man, Clyde Griffiths (Phillips Holmes), whose ambitions force him to choose between his wealthy girlfriend and his working-class lover. Less narrowly deterministic than A Place In The Sun, An American Tragedy is a penetrating exploration of "the forces [that] are inside us" (Tag Gallagher). 35mm, not available on DVD

Satyajit Ray, 1955 • For his first film, Satyajit Ray depicted the early childhood of Apu, whose family struggles to survive after resettling in their ancestral village. A battered dwelling and its sun-splashed forest surroundings are the perennial setting for episodes of everyday hardship, from the family's lack of means, to the father's prolonged absences and the mother's sense of isolation. Alternately, in marvelously tactile, sensuous and immediate images, Ray documents the youthful discoveries of Apu and his sister Durga, as when Apu first sets eyes on a train, or when Durga revels in a monsoon rain, believing it a divine reflection. Archival 35mm

Charlie Chaplin, 1936 • Never has a scathing indictment of the ways in which industrial efficiency crushes the worker's soul been so hilarious and beautiful. Modern Times is Chaplin's last silent foray before entering the talkie era, though the end of the film memorably sheds the silent veneer with a rousing gibberish performance by Chaplin. Exactly why this scene is so important to the film is as hard to understand as the song itself is. Perhaps it's the transition to the world of sound, or the rejection of efficiency in favor of simple, joyful song? Whatever the reason, please come down and enjoy, so you can decide for yourself. 35mm