Thursdays II
Enter the Labyrinth
Programmed by Theodore Davis
A true labyrinth has no walls. It has no network of winding corridors, nor a half human abomination slumbering at its center. The labyrinth has no clear means of ingress or egress, so it can't be navigated with a thread. Yet while the labyrinth has no material attributes, it does have a traveler, a lone individual who moves towards a goal but finds his progress interrupted by obstacles set before him as if by the machinations of a malevolent system. But is there a system? Is there an invisible power arranging obstacles to bar the travelers path? Or is there just chaos and coincidence? Amidst the traveler's anxious journey, patterns emerge, but where do they come from? The labyrinth consists only of the suggestion of a maze, built of the hope and fear that there is a higher power, that life is not just a string of aleatory frustrations. This series explores the quasi-mystic conception of the labyrinth in which order and chaos hang suspended above the boundless and yet asphyxiating plane of experience. Featuring exploitation flicks, film noirs, horror movies, and art house fantasias, this series promises the late night crowd a season of vertigo and paranoia.
10/04/2018 @ 9:30 PM
The Trial
(Orson Welles, 1962) · One morning, Joseph K. (Anthony Perkins) wakes up to find his house full of police detectives. K. has been charged with a crime, but the police don't tell him what it is. Certain of his innocence, he worms himself into the legal system only to discover that nobody has any legal authority, or even knows what the law is. With sublimely austere set design, Orson Welles interprets Kafka's novel as an expressionist allegory in which the modern urban individual contends with an invisible and ubiquitous entity.
runtime: 119m format: DCP
10/11/2018 @ 9:30 PM
The Leopard Man
(Jacques Tourneur, 1943) · In a remote New Mexico town of dust and shadows, a sideshow leopard is killing pretty girls. But why hasn't anyone seen the leopard? Why only pretty girls? Concerned for the safety of his nightclub dancer girlfriend, Jerry Manning (Dennis O'Keefe) investigates the killings, but finds himself at the threshold of a greater mystery, something vast and ancient of which the leopard killings are only a symptom. Instead of presenting a bloody spectacle, Tourneur dwells suggestively on what the shadows might be hiding.
runtime: 66m format: 35mm
10/18/2018 @ 9:30 PM
The Chase
(Arthur Ripley, 1946) · A war veteran and drifter, Chuck Scott stumbles upon the wallet of gangster Eddie Roman. Enter the fatale, Roman's abused wife Lorna (Michele Morgan). You may think you know where this is going, but The Chase veers into strange territory with a plot rupture anticipating acclaimed fractured reality narratives like Mulholland Drive. 35mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation and the Franco-American Cultural Fund
runtime: 88m format: 35mm
10/25/2018 @ 9:30 PM
Carnival of Souls
(Herk Harvey, 1962) · "I don't belong in the world," says Mary Henry, and the young lady is correct. A drag race ends in an unexpected swim in the river with a totaled car. Three hours later, Mary emerges unharmed and drives to Utah where she is taking a job as a church organist--but it soon becomes apparent the neither she nor the world are quite the same. Mary sleepwalks through a twilight zone towards the Carnival of Souls, the somewhere and nowhere that may be a key to it all.
runtime: 84m format: DCP
11/01/2018 @ 9:30 PM
Inferno
(Dario Argento, 1980) · In 1977, Dario Argento directed the incomprehensible cult horror classic Suspiria. Just three years later, he came out with Inferno, a mind-melting, almost plotless phantasmagoria that makes Suspiria seem sane and conventional in comparison. In this milestone of inspired lunacy, Rose Elliot (Irene Miracle) moves into an art deco apartment building in Manhattan that's soon transformed by eldritch powers into a metamorphic funhouse of iridescent caverns and arcades of flame.
runtime: 120m format: 35mm
11/08/2018 @ 9:30 PM
Ministry of Fear
(Fritz Lang, 1944) · At a county fair in wartime Britain, Stephen Neal unwittingly intercepts a microfilm roll hidden in a cake, interrupting the plans of foreign agents. His accidental entry into this vortex of impostors and double meanings proves irreversible when the rightful recipients of the microfilm start hunting him down. Made in an era full of everyman-accidentally-embroiled thrillers, Ministry of Fear distinguishes itself in its portrayal of a society where there is encryption but no decryption.
runtime: 87m format: 35mm
11/15/2018 @ 9:30 PM
Venus in Furs
(Jesús Franco, 1969) · A jazz trumpeter finds himself in over his head in what might be all in his head. One night at a party for jet set creeps, he witnesses the torture of a woman. When he finds her corpse on the seashore the following morning, a sick strain of eros takes hold of him. He encounters an identical woman alive and well in Rio, but upon pursuing her, he discovers she may not be as alive as he thought. Featuring Klaus Kinski as a perverted millionaire, Venus in Furs is an arthouse fantasia disguised as a porno--a Godard with more chutzpah.
runtime: 86m format: 35mm
11/29/2018 @ 9:30 PM
L'immortelle
(Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1963) · A nameless man falls for a nameless woman while on vacation in Istanbul, and while he doesn't speak the language, he starts to pick up on signs that the woman is connected with some rich and terrible people. One day the woman vanishes, and of course, none of the locals remember ever seeing her. This thriller places the emphasis on dislocation and atmosphere rather than plot or character, alienating the viewer from the narrative so that each line of dialogue and gesture resonates with elusive but immense symbolism.
runtime: 101m format: Blu-ray
12/06/2018 @ 9:30 PM
Kiss Me Deadly
(Robert Aldrich, 1955) · In this essential film noir, gumshoe Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) picks up a beautiful hitchhiker (a young Cloris Leachman) wearing only a trench coat. Thugs hijack the car and murder the hitchhiker. At a police station, a detective is especially insistent that Mike forget about it, but Mike can't help but investigate, instigating a tour of a degenerate cartoon mirage of Los Angeles infested with idiots, assholes, and weirdos. 35mm collection print courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive
runtime: 106m format: 35mm
