Summer Calendar 2008
Wednesday, June 25 • 8:00 PM • 71m
So Dark the Night
Joseph H. Lewis, 1946 • Described by one admirer as a ‘Simenonized La règle du jeu,’ So Dark the Night is the first major film by Joseph H. “Gun Crazy” Lewis, the great B-picture stylist who, like James Whale, infused his films with a pictorial virtuosity their scripts hardly demanded. Here Lewis brings schizophrenic terror to the French countryside, where famed detective Henri Cassin has ventured to seek curative repose. Instead he finds jealousy, class antagonism, scandal, and strangulation! Meanwhile Lewis finds threadbare excuses to formulate a wholly singular development in the film noir—the pastoral baroque. 16mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Thursday, June 26 • 8:00pm • 87min
Slattery’s Hurricane
Andre de Toth, 1949 • In this late forties potboiler, Richard Widmark plays Will Slattery, a military pilot turned private flier, who runs into an old war buddy, discovering he has married his ex-lover Aggie (Linda Darnell). Recklessly determining to pursue her in abandon of both his former compatriot and his own drug-addicted girlfriend Dolores (Veronica Lake), Slattery sets a web of deceit and betrayal that eventually consumes all four characters, a mode of thematic and stylistic progression that bears particular resonance in the emotionally stark cinema of Andre de Toth. 35mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Friday, June 27 • 7:00 & 9:30 PM • 110m 
The Master of the House
Carl Dreyer, 1925 • A failed and self-indulgent businessman’s tyrannical nature towards his dutiful wife causes their nurse to devise the wife’s abandonment from the household, in order to teach her master what it means to face life alone. This wonderful silent comedy from Carl Dreyer eloquently displays the master’s early command of mise-en-scène, and, for those used to the somber tone of his later masterpieces, offers a startlingly light-hearted treatment of his core theme: the liberation of an idealistic woman from the abuses of patriarchal hypocrisy. The film's commercial success led Dreyer to France, where he was commissioned to make his first large budget film, the widely regarded The Passion of Joan of Arc. 16mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Saturday, June 28 • 7:00 & 9:00 PM • 90 mins
Dillinger is Dead
Marco Ferreri, 1969 • Ferreri’s surreal portrayal of a bored man’s night at home received extreme criticism and praise upon its initial release. While many found its violence excessive, the Cahiers du Cinéma subsequently published an interview with Ferreri and helped launch the next phase of his career in Paris. The plot of the surreal film centers on Glauco (Michel Piccoli), an industrial designer who comes home from work to find an ill wife and a cold plate of food. He spends the evening trying to entertain himself: he prepares a gourmet meal, paints polka dots on an old revolver, seduces the maid, and repeatedly enacts suicide. Despite the film’s reputation as a masterpiece, it fell into oblivion in the 1980’s, and has been screened only a handful of times since. Italian with English subtitles. 35mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Wednesday, July 2 • 8:00 PM • 178m
Lost, Lost, Lost
Jonas Mekas, 1975 • Since arriving in Brooklyn in 1949, displaced Lithuanian poet Jonas Mekas had recorded fragments of his life with a Bolex camera as practice for a future feature. Lost, Lost, Lost collects the footage from 1949 to 1963 to weave together a diary-document of Mekas’s life: his anxieties as an immigrant, his contact with New York poets, his gradual salvation in cinema. “The period I am dealing with in these six reels was a period of desperation, of attempts to desperately grow roots into the new ground, to create new memories … I tried to indicate how it feels to be in exile, how I felt in those years.” 16mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Thursday, July 3 • 8:00 PM • 92m
The Bowery
Raoul Walsh, 1933 • Denounced by the left upon its release for spotlighting ballyhoo over poverty, The Bowery might be Walsh’s masterpiece. A tall tale of feuding beer barons (George Raft and Wallace Beery) the film embellishes Walsh’s ownmemories of growing up in Gay Nineties New York, freely mingling historical incidents (Carrie Nation’s saloon raids, the Spanish-American war) with sneering vulgarity and, per Bill Everson, “casual sadism, as witness the fire in the Chinese laundry, with tragedy played as pure slapstick.” Co-starring Fay Wray as a whore who bites Raft’s hand and Jackie Cooper as pint-sized terror “Swipes” McGurk. 35mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Saturday, July 5 • 7:00 • 170m
The Thin Red Line
Terrence Malick, 1998 • In this epic production, Terrence Malick brings together an ensemble of top actors to depict James Jones’ memoir of warfare in the South Pacific. The tale is no conventional war film; in the minds of critics and fans, The Thin Red Line brings substance to what may have been the turning point of WWII. As a call to remembrance of Guadalcanal (a battle earlier and in some ways larger in scale than Normandy) Malick’s film far outweighs the vapid flag-waving and violent spectacle of similar war films. Characters don’t pontificate or emote—they live in a world doused by historicity and conflict, and Malick, as put by Jonathan Rosenbaum, “mutes the drama periodically and turns it into reverie… about the meaning and consequences of war.” This should be an Independence Day classic, since through the course of the film, neither victory nor defeat are taken lightly. 35mm.
Wednesday, July 9 • 8:00 PM • 90m
Presents
Michael Snow, 1980-81 • This playful formalist experiment opens with a simulated ‘scratch’ in the celluloid, and seems to test the resistance of various medial boundaries between film and video, reality and artifice, and finally the world and perception itself. This operation takes a variety of different forms in progression. The film begins with a classical study of a female figure, proceeds as a light comedy, complete with sets moved atop forklifts. When the camera suddenly turns psychotic and bulldozes the entire set, the final movement resolves in a rapid, ecstatic montage. 16mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Thursday, July 10 • 8:00 PM • 90m
Sophie’s Place
Larry Jordan, 1986 • Consummation of five year’s work, Sophie’s Place is a collage animation conceived as “alchemical autobiography”, a contemplative exploration of the artist’s imaginary world in search of the elusive Sophia, Greek goddess of wisdom. Amid a trove of symbolic representations of exotic and classical places and things, most paradoxically the converted cathedral-mosque Hagia Sophia, Sophie presents herself in myriad forms, and yet always in a process of transformation. In this serene dreamwork, she guides us through a philosophical journey not to be missed. 16mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Friday, July 11 • 7:00 & 9:30pm • 120m
Millennium Mambo
Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001 • Narrating ten years from the future, a woman named Vicky (Taiwanese star Shu Qi) tells us a story of her youth as a hostess in Taipei: It is the year 2001. The world is greeting the 21st Century and celebrating the new millennium. Caught in an inescapable relationship with a drug-addicted trance artist, Vicky floats through the clubs and bars of Taipei searching for a way out. This first effort in Hou’s current, “global” period has disenchanted even many of his most ardent champions with its seemingly superficial depiction of Taipei’s contemporary youth culture and radical redefinition of the master’s style. But the closer the first decade of the new millennium comes to its end the more visionary this film seems. Its hypnotic opening shot, perhaps one of the greatest in the history of cinema, transports us into a past that is also the present. By this gesture, Hou seems to say, we need the cinema now more than ever. 35mm.
Saturday, July 12 • 7:00 & 9:30pm • 103m
Scanners
David Cronenberg, 1981 • One of Cronenberg’s most famous and accomplished works from his most fruitful period, Scanners depicts a near-future society in which Earth’s population is at war with the Scanners, an aberrant form of superhuman possessing fantastic telekinetic powers. When one young man is found to be in possession of these powers, he is taken under the wing of a doctor hoping to use him to ferret out the leader of the Scanners’ world domination movement. Cleverly combining his usual body horrors with trenchant political and social satire, Cronenberg delivers a memorable and unique sci-fi flick. 16mm.
Wednesday, July 16 • 8:00 PM • 60m
A Romance of Happy Valley
D.W. Griffith, 1919 • The late teens were a period of re-entrenchment for Griffith. He followed his bombastic World War I epic Hearts of the World with a series of ‘short story’ pictures that would emphasize ‘the sun on the corn and the wind.’ This charming entry is the most nostalgic of the lot, harking back to Griffith’s boyhood days in rural Kentucky. Lillian Gish stars as the faithful sweetheart of a brash young Bobby Harron, the son of a farmer who ventures north to make it big in New York City by designing a swimming toy frog! Many silent films are carelessly described as corny, but here is one film that deserves, seeks, and proudly wears that title. 16mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Thursday, July 17 • 8:00 PM • 90m
The Sorrows of Satan
D.W. Griffith, 1926 • “In freedom from all worry and with the resources of the world’s foremost film organization at his disposal, D. W. Griffith is now in the golden age of his art,” declared Paramount in the publicity run-up to Griffith’s first studio production. In truth, Griffith has been handed the reins of a disastrous production abandoned by no less than Cecil B. DeMille. A kind of flapper rendition of Faust with ridiculous, sublime pictorial effects, staggering sets, and a great vampish turn by Lya de Putti, The Sorrows of Satan was, like many Griffith efforts, a work that could perhaps only be appreciated in hindsight, through its affinities with Sternberg and Murnau. 16mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Friday, July 18 • 7:00 & 9:30 PM • 120m
Isn’t Life Wonderful?
D.W. Griffith, 1924 •Griffith’s last gasp of independence before a ruinous contract with Paramount came in the form of this, a harsh film shot largely on location in Köpenick, Germany. Characteristically Griffith chose his location not for its political implications but because the conditions there best demonstrated “the triumph of love over hardship” A slow, devastating film that documents the plight of Polish immigrants (played by Neil Hamilton and Griffith’s much-maligned mistress-sweetheart Carol Dempster) in the inflation-ridden Weimar Republic, Isn’t Life Wonderful? immediately influenced Pabst and anticipated Italian neo-realism by twenty years. 16mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Saturday, July 19 • 7:00 PM - (NOTE SCHEDULE CHANGE) • 87m
The Struggle
D.W. Griffith, 1931 • By 1931 Griffith was dismissed by the industry he had created. Critics denounced his final effort as Soviet propaganda on the basis of its title—a rather incredible rumor given that this anti-alcohol polemic is the last, wheezy flowering of a certain strain of Victorian moralizing hardly updated since Griffith’s 1909 Biograph one-reelers. Shot on location in the Bronx with a sophisticated sound design, The Struggle was nevertheless panned or ignored by the trade papers and withdrawn from circulation after a week. Difficult today for its ethnic stereotypes, The Struggle is nevertheless, per Andrew Sarris, ‘clearly the work of a giant even when that giant is thrashing about inarticulately.’ Archival 35mm.
Wednesday, July 23 • 8:00 PM • 80m
La Raison Avant la Passion (Reason Over Passion)
Joyce Wieland, 1969 •One of the most important experimental filmmakers of the 1960s and 70s, Joyce Wieland worked in a variety of different styles and media, including painting and quilt-making. “La Raison Avant la Passion”, her first feature film, is an essayistic journey across Canada that attempts to reconcile the vast North American landscape with 537 computer-generated permutations of the title quote by Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, at once occasioning a meditation on the tense political atmosphere of the late 1960s. For Hollis Frampton, this collision of expanse and ideology seemed “lucidly caught, bound as it were chemically, in the substance of film itself…” 16mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Thursday, July 24 • 8:00 PM • 95m
Bruce Baillie: 1960-1968
Mr. Hayashi •1961 • 3m
Have You Thought of Talking to the Director • 1963 • 16m
To Parsifal • 1962 • 15m
Mass For The Dakota Sioux • 1963-1964 • 20m
Tung • 1966 • 5m
Castro Street • 1966 • 10m
All My Life • 1966 • 3m
Valentin de Las Sierras • 1968 • 10m
The films of Bruce Baillie form an elaborate mesh of images of intense clarity and images of vague abstraction, while equally complex sound schemes create a kind of primal grounding for the viewer. In his search for reconciliation between the world of concrete things and the world of illusion, Baillie employs a panoply of filmic techniques, most notably superimposition, but these effects never seem mechanistic, rather always eerily natural. Hence, his films embody the equilibrium for which they strive. The work presented here gives a sense of Baillie’s development from a young to a mature artist. 16mm. These films do not exist on DVD.
Friday, July 25 • 7:00 & 9:30 PM • 110m
Pierrot le fou
Jean-Luc Godard, 1965 • Godard once famously claimed that all one needed to make a film was a girl and a gun. Gun Crazy notwithstanding, Godard disproved his own thesis with this extravagant folly: a simple story of a girl and a gun—or, if you prefer, ‘the last romantic couple’—all dolled up with restless allusions to Vietnam, Samuel Fuller, Auguste Renoir, and the unceasing dullness of bourgeois life. Godard’s longest and most successful narrative feature, Pierrot le fou finds the filmmaker in a perfect balance between homage, film historical tract, political commentary, and all-pistons-smoking entertainment. French with English Subtitles. 35mm.
Saturday, July 26 • 7:00 & 9:00 PM •
Camp
Andy Warhol, 1965 • A still-timely rejoinder to Susan Sontag's seminal essay 1964 'Notes on Camp,' Camp is a beguiling slice-of-life from the Factory, where campier-than-thou personalities (including Jack Smith and Mario Montez) recount adolescent summer camp experiences, perform routines, and cavort with abandon in one of Warhol's earliest, least somnambulistic 'talkies.' Warhol's film returns Sontag's wobbly concept to its source: not the momentary gawking provoked by the detritus of pop culture but the authentic expression of those for whom life is one extended countercultural performance. 16mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Wednesday, July 30 • 8:00 PM • 107m
Tragedy of the Street (Dirnentragödie)
Bruno Rahn, 1927 • Tragedy of the Street, a rarely screened gem, tells the melodramatic story of an aging prostitute’s desperate struggle for the affection of her young lover and her tragic downfall. One of the most significant sociocritical pictures of its time, the film is particularly noteworthy for Asta Nielsen’s bravura performance as the withered streetwalker. Contemporary film critic Willie Haas wrote about the film: “Film art in its entirety can offer no greater artistic pleasure than a mimic monologue by Asta Nielsen. 16mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Thursday, July 31 • 8:00 PM • 60m
Films of Peter Kubelka
Mosaik im Vertrauen • 1955 • 16.5m
Adebar • 1957 • 1.5m
Schwechater • 1958 • 1m
Arnulf Rainer • 1960 • 6.5m
Unsere Afrikareise • 1966 • 12.5m
Pause! • 1977 • 12m
“Peter Kubelka is the perfectionist of the film medium; and as I honor that quality above all others at this time (finding such a lack of it now elsewhere) I would simply like to say: Peter Kubelka is the world’s greatest film-maker — which is to say, simply: See his films!... by all means/above all else... etcetera.” (Stan Brakhage) 16mm. These films do not exist on DVD.
Friday, August 1 • 7:00 & 9:00 PM • 95m 
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
F.W. Murnau, 1927 • The culmination of a fashionable transnational film style and probably of the medium itself, Sunrise remains a mass of dazzling contradictions and dichotomies: a universal fable rendered in modernist style that contrasts the values of a Man (George O’Brien) and His Wife (Janet Gaynor) with those of the Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston), Sunrise was Hollywood’s greatest bid to produce prestigious attractions with the best foreign talent. Scripted and directed by a German but shot around Hollywood, this story ‘of every place and no place’ also bridged the gap between silence and sound with its atmospheric music and effects track. 35mm.
Saturday, August 2 • 7:00 & 9:00 PM • 84m
Tabu: A Story of the South Seas
F.W. Murnau, 1931 • Reeling from Fox’s butchery of his previous film, Murnau embarked on an expedition to the South Seas with Robert Flaherty. Murnau returned with this stunning independent production that Paramount distributed, but he died in a car crash before its premiere. For years the film’s considerable beauty was attributed to Flaherty, but now Tabu is acknowledged as thoroughly a Murnau achievement, his themes of doomed love and transcendence fully evident despite the semi-documentary framework that informs the flight of Reri and Matahi. Only Murnau could conjure this alluring ‘paradise lost’—-ethnography as the last flowering of German Romanticism. 35mm.
Wednesday, August 6 • 8:00 PM • 100m
Films of Sidney Peterson
The Cage • 1947 • 25m
The Lead Shoes • 1949 • 18m
Mr Frenhober and the Minotaur • 1949 • 21m
Man in a Bubble • 1981 • 15m
Sidney Peterson (1905-2000) was one of America’s most important avant-garde filmmakers. Peterson’s aesthetic focuses in a way his lens sometimes (deliberately) does not: he unflinchingly assesses his viewers’ and his own perception of the world using experimental camera and editing techniques. Yet none of narrative content of his films is lost on Peterson’s formulaic finesse. These four films represent some of Peterson’s best work. Presented in 16mm. All except The Cage are unavailable on DVD.
Thursday, August 7 • 8:00 PM • 94m
The Cavern
Edgar G. Ulmer, 1965 • When six soldiers and one woman become trapped in an underground munitions dump, the ensuing battle of wills against a cacophonous chamber of oblivion becomes the stuff of Edgar Ulmer’s swan song, if it can be called that exactly, announcing itself as it does, not with nostalgic melancholia, but with the same bitter, funereal finality that is found in the contemporary works of many an auteur in this period from Anthony Mann’s Man of the West and Andre de Toth’s Day of the Outlaw, to Orson Welles’s The Trial and John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Amid this formidable crowd, The Cavern stands as an unsung masterpiece. 35mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Friday, August 8 • 7:00 & 9:30 PM • 116m
The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice
Yasujiro Ozu, 1952 • This melancholy domestic comedy was one of Ozu’s most successful works for Shochiku. A wife finds herself unhappy in her arranged marriage to a mild-mannered executive. Meanwhile the wife’s niece protests her own imminent arranged marriage, escaping with her uncle to a pachinko parlor where they meet (who else?) Chishu Ryu. A wistful affirmation of the overriding value of shopworn institutions and provincial tastes (such as titular dish) that inspired gentle scorn from Kurosawa, this film nevertheless finds Ozu experimenting with cinematic tricks that would be eliminated in Tokyo Story, his mature masterwork of the next year. Japanese with English Subtitles. 35mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Saturday, August 9 • 7:00 & 9:30 PM • 124m
Charulata (The Lonely Wife)
Satyajit Ray, 1965 • After the international success of his Apu trilogy, Satyajit Ray moved towards more politically-engaged and aesthetically-elaborate features. Of the second group, Charulata is probably the high point—a feature-length adaptation of a Rabindranath Tagore novel that has a delicacy and economy of expression more often associated with the short story. The film follows the titular heroine, the bored wife of a rapidly westernized aristocrat, who gradually realizes the depth of her affection for her cousin. The film's style—a nouvelle vague approach to the melodrama with a hint of Robert Florey—is singular and unforgettable. Bengali with English Subtitles. 35mm.
Wednesday, August 13 • 8:00 PM • 106m
Utamaro and His Five Women
Kenji Mizoguchi, 1947 • As great as any picture Mizoguchi ever made, Utamaro and His Five Women is an unconventional account of the eighteenth century wood-block artist Kitagawa Utamaro. Neither a biopic nor a treatise on the artist’s work (which is not glimpsed until the final scene), the film concentrates instead on the milieu that inspired Utamaro’s work. This, Mizoguchi’s first post-war film, sketches a beguiling panorama of loosely related characters (models, students, courtesans, patrons) who grow and recede in importance throughout the casual narrative whose rhythms resemble the Ford of Steamboat ‘Round the Bend more readily than the Mizoguchi of Ugetsu. Japanese with English Subtitles. 35mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Thursday, August 14 • 8:00 PM • 90m
Kristina Talking Pictures
Yvonne Rainer, 1976 •From avant-gardist extraordinaire Yvonne Rainer comes the story of a Hungarian female lion tamer who arrives in New York to become a dance choreographer. Throughout her enquiry into gender and masquerade Rainer experiments with various ways of addressing the audience, segueing between fiction, documentary, autobiography, and feminist theory. Rainer herself began as a choreographer noted for her emphasis on everyday activities like walking, running, and sitting. But by the time she made Kristina Talking Pictures, she had perfected a kind of Brechtian filmmaking that smacks of political radicalism, Godard, and May ’68—a genre some critics call "Menippean satire”. 16mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Friday, August 15 • 7:00 & 9:30 PM • 116m
Frenzy
Alfred Hitchcock, 1972 •Hitchcock hit an artistic rut in his later years, but created a masterpiece with his penultimate film. The plot concerns the rampage through London of a serial rapist/killer known as the necktie murderer. In a return to the “wrongfully accused” theme of so many Hitchcock films, the protagonist (Jon Finch) becomes a prime suspect when his ex-wife is brutally slain. Frenzy contains several moments of cinematic brilliance, as well as glimpses of violence matched only by the “shower scene” from Psycho. The reliance on location shooting and public settings appears abnormal for a Hitchcock film, suggesting that at age seventy-three the director was prepared to comment on something like “humanity”. 35mm.
Saturday, August 16 • 7:00 & 9:00 PM • 83m
Flowers of St. Francis
Roberto Rossellini, 1950 • A hagiography staged in a series of vignettes drawn from the 14th Century florilegium Floretti di San Francesco (Little Flowers of St. Francis), this outstanding work from Roberto Rossellini’s middle period, with its photography designed to evoke medieval devotional painting and a cast of monks from the Nocera Inferiore Monastery, proposes to take the viewer back to the very moment in space-time when St. Francis was present in the world. The world here is a sensuous biosphere, and this sensuality is inspirational and Godly. Italian with English Subtitles. 35mm.
Wednesday, August 20 • 8:00 PM
All I Desire
Douglas Sirk • Naomi Murdoch (Barbara Stanwyck) left Riverside, Wyoming in 1900, fleeing the stifling social expectations of her small-town life and leaving behind her husband and three children to become an actress. Ten years later, she returns. Her reappearance is fraught with scandal as town, husband, daughters, son, and lover all react to who she was when she left them - and confront who she is upon her return. Sirk's staging plays men and women against the spaces they inhabit, powerfully evoking the tensions and contradictions between imperfect human longings and social facades. 35mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Thursday, August 21 • 8:00 PM • 101m
The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond
Budd Boetticher, 1960 •After a stint in jail, jewelry thief Legs Diamond goes afterhis boss despite the misgivings of his good-natured gal Alice. Better known for his Ranown Westerns, Boetticher’s lone gangster film portrays real dancer-turned-mobster Jack Diamond lightheartedly, in conscious objection to the violent cinema audiences had been accustomed to. Despite strong dislike for his protagonist, Boetticher adopted the style of the silents made during the real Diamond’s popular New York City reign. Simplistic compositions and morally-concerned lighting did not tamper his flair for the tragicomic, however, assuring directorial continuity in this underappreciated study in genre definition. 16mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Friday, August 22 • 7:00 & 9:30 PM • 110m
Toni
Jean Renoir, 1935 • Ignored by the French critical establishment then much enthralled with the hackwork of Marcel Pagnol, Renoir’s Toni can now be confidently cited—along with other Doc discoveries such as Isn’t Life Wonderful? and La mancha de sangre—as a fully-developed antecedent to the Italian neo-realism of the 1940s. Renoir began with a salacious newspaper story and took his crew (including assistant Luchino Visconti) to the Martingues region where the incidents had unfolded. The film, which centers on the bed-hopping, social-climbing habits of Italian immigrant Antonio Canova (Charles Blavette), is filled with authentic details of working class provincial life. French with English Subtitles. 16mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Saturday, August 23 • 7:00 & 9:00 PM • 89m
Rancho Notorious
Fritz Lang, 1952 • A Wyoming rancher seeks revenge on the man who savagely raped and murdered his fiancée. His suspenseful quest to unearth and trap the unknown killer is thrown off course when he meets alluring saloon queen Altar (Marlene Dietrich) at an infamous outlaw-hideaway named Chuck-a-Luck and begins to fall in love with her. Fritz Lang’s last western is a powerful tale of death, murder and revenge, featuring beautiful Technicolor cinematography by Hal Mohr and Marlene Dietrich in one of her most memorable roles. 16mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Wednesday, August 27 • 8:00 PM • 97m 
History is Made At Night
Frank Borzage, 1937 • Fleeing her sadistic, jealous ex-husband, Jean Arthur is swept off her feet by charming Parisian headwaiter Charles Boyer. But the couple's happiness is threatened by Arthur's ex, who is determined to tear them apart. Thanks to Arthur and Boyer's marvelous chemistry, this underappreciated gem is a highly unusual mix of comedy, romance, and intense melodrama. The film gains depth with Borzage's trademark romanticism, especially during the thrilling, Titanic-like shipboard climax. The elegant photography is by the great cinematographer Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane). 16mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Thursday, August 28 • 8:00 PM • 76m 
Broken Lullaby (a.k.a The Man I Killed)
Ernst Lubitsch, 1932 • “Departing from his usual métier of romantic comedies, Lubitsch made this rare foray into drama in the middle of what is effectively the invention of the American film musical, and in a way it is a reverse companion piece to the frothy greatness of his Chevalier films. Like The Student Prince of Old Heidelberg and Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, this film embraces the romantic couple as a hinge about which the anxieties of a society can be explored as here a French soldier begins an erotic relationship with the fiancée of a German soldier he killed. New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall claimed it was better than The Last Laugh. 16mm. This film does not exist on DVD.
Friday, August 29 • 7:00 & 9:30 PM • 111m
Ball of Fire
Howard Hawks, 1941 • Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck star in Howard Hawks’ hilarious take on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Eight mossy professors are living and working together to update an encyclopedia. At “S for Slang,” they undertake a field trip and encounter a gold mine of information: Nightclub singer and gangster moll Sugarpuss O'Shea (Barbara Stanwyck) promptly invades their sanctuary, stirring up everyone’s lives. Billy Wilder’s and Charles Brackett’s sassy screenwriting, Gregg Toland’s deep-focus photography and Barbara Stanwyck’s sparkling performance make this underrated screwball comedy a true windfall. 16mm.
Saturday, August 30 • 7:00 & 9:00 PM • 96m
Night of the Living Dead
George Romero, 1968 •George Romero’s 1968 horror masterpiece depicts a world gone awry when the dead start coming back to life and devouring the living. When a pair of young siblings is assaulted by a cadaver in a cemetery, the sister flees to a nearby farmhouse and takes refuge with a rag-tag band of socially-disparate individuals. Basically a single-handed founding of the Zombie Film as it is now known, as well as a trenchant and multi-faceted social satire, Romero’s film has, in the 40s years since its release, proved itself more than worthy of its canonical stature. 35mm.