Summer Repertory
July 5–September 11, 2003
This exhibition of masterworks from The Museum
of Modern Art’s collection of more than twenty thousand films
and videos concludes with films by Jean Cocteau, Preston Sturges,
D. W. Griffith, Agnès Varda, and others.
Organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator,
in association with Charles Silver, Associate Curator, Research and
Collections; Barbara London, Associate Curator; Sally Berger, Assistant
Curator; Anne Morra, Assistant Curator; Joshua Siegel, Assistant
Curator; John Migliore, Intern; and William Phuan, Intern, Department
of Film and Media.
. 1936. France.
Directed by Jean Renoir. Screenplay by Renoir, Charles Spaak, based
on the play by
Maxim Gorky. With Jean Gabin, Louis Jouvet, Suzy Prim, Vladimir Sokoloff.
Renoir’s humanization of Gorky’s proletarian tract on
the debilitating effects of poverty. 91 min.
.
1932. France. Directed by Jean Renoir. Screenplay by Renoir, Albert
Valentine,
based on the play by René Fauchois. With Michel Simon, Charles
Granval, Marcelle Hainia. Renoir’s homage to Chaplin and to
untamed free spirits. A scruffy tramp is rescued from drowning himself
and is adopted by a wealthy bookseller. In French with English subtitles.
80 min.
. 1936. France. Directed
by Jean Renoir. Screenplay by Renoir, based on the story by Guy de
Maupassant. With Sylvia Bataille, Georges Darnoux, Jeanne Marken,
Jacques Borel, Renoir. An unfinished paean to nature and romance
that comes magically close to perfection. 40 min.
. 1937.
France. Directed by Jean Renoir. Screenplay by Renoir, Charles
Spaak. With Jean Gabin, Erich
von Stroheim, Pierre Fresnay, Marcel Dalio, Dita Parlo. Both a tribute
to Renoir’s hero—the director and actor Erich von Stroheim—and
possibly the greatest of antiwar films. 117 min.
. 1939. France. Directed
by Jean Renoir. Screenplay by Renoir, Camille François, Carl
Koch. With Marcel Dalio, Nora Gregor, Roland Toutain, Renoir. A scathing
satire on French society balanced with the pragmatic conclusion that “everyone
has his reasons.” Like Renoir’s Grand Illusion, this
is generally considered to be among the finest films ever made. 110
min.
. 1955. Sweden. Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. With
Gunnar Björnstrand, Eva
Dahlbeck, Ulla Jacobsson, Harriet Andersson. A film as much about
the passing of time and generations as about infidelity, passion
spent, and sophisticated manners, Smiles of a Summer Night still
inspires and captivates after almost fifty years. In Swedish with
English subtitles. 105 min.
. 1998. Great Britain/France/Germany/Ireland. Directed by
Mike Hodges. Screenplay by Paul Mayersberg. With Clive Owen, Kate
Hardie, Alex Kingston. Writer Jack Manfred wants nothing more to
do with the gaming life that is in his blood. At the insistence of
his father, however, and driven by the need for money and the desire
to finish his novel, he becomes a croupier, and a talented one at
that: He has an innate aptitude for casino work and can easily spot
the cheats, even the pretty ones. 94 min.
.
1965. Italy. Written and directed by Federico Fellini. With Giulietta
Masina, Sandra Milo,
Mario Pisu, Valeska Gert. Giulietta lives a comfortable, upper class
life, but is not fulfilled. In her quest for happiness, she consults
a sex expert, a guru, and a mystic. In this delirious confection,
Fellini’s first color feature film, the director creates a
world of spectacle that blurs the line between reality and fantasy.
In Italian with English subtitles. 138 min.
. 2000. Great Britain/France/Germany/USA. Directed
by Terence Davies. Screenplay by Davies, based on the novel by Edith
Wharton. With Gillian Anderson, Eric Stoltz, Laura Linney, Anthony
LaPaglia. Although guided by the rules of genteel society, young
socialite Lily Bart lives beyond her means. As her debts mount she
must scheme to make ends meet, and when her only option seems to
be to enter into a loveless marriage for financial stability, a desperate
Lily breaks with her social class. 140 min.
. 1999.
Japan. Written and directed by Isao Takahata. Based on a comic book
by Hisaichi Ishii, this animation feature chronicles the daily life
of the Yamada family. Living in a crowded suburban house in Japan,
the Yamadas struggle for privacy, affection, and cohesion. In Japanese
with English subtitles. 104 min.
. 1947. USA. Directed by Lewis Allen.
Screenplay by A. I. Bezzerides, Robert Rossen. With Lizabeth Scott,
Burt Lancaster, John Hodiak, Mary Astor. Fritzie, the proprietress
of the local saloon, doesn’t want her daughter Paula mixing
with the customers. Paula is attracted to Eddie, a dangerous type
who is in the constant company of his creepy shadow, Johnny. Car
chases on richly hued desert roads propel this narrative of a disturbing
love triangle. 95 min.
. 2002. USA. Directed
by Patricia Cardosa. Screenplay by Josefina Lopez, George LaVoo.
With America Ferrera,
Lupe Ontiveros, Ingrid Oliu, George Lopez. This exuberant feature
opened New Directors/New Films in 2002, heralding the arrival of
two very promising talents: Cardosa, the Colombian-born L.A. filmmaker,
and seventeen-year-old Ferrera, who plays Ana, a bright and strong-willed
first-generation Mexican-American who lives in East L.A. but goes
to school in Beverly Hills. Ana’s teacher helps her to get
a scholarship to Columbia University, but her overbearing mother
has other ideas. 90 min.
. 1965. USA. Directed by Andy Warhol, Chuck Wein. With
Paul America, Ed Hood, Joseph Campbell, Genevieve Charbon. This early
Warhol narrative describes a day at the beach. A hustler is brought
to Fire Island, and some men and women muse over him and vie for
his attention. There is much bitchy dialogue, a few long takes, and
some camera movement. The film appears artless, but is in fact canny,
casual, and affecting. 67 min.
. 1999. USA. Directed by David
O. Russell. Screenplay by Russell, John Ridley. With George Clooney,
Mark Wahlberg, Ice
Cube, Spike Jonze. Set in the desert toward the end of the Persian
Gulf War, the narrative of Three Kings—a timely, ferocious
black comedy about American soldiers who begin as looters and end
as liberators—is as daring as the film’s style is dazzling.
114 min.
. 1928. USA. Directed by Frank
Borzage. Screenplay by H. H. Caldwell, Katherine Hilliker, Philip
Klein. With Janet Gaynor,
Charles Farrell, Henry Armetta. Prison escapee Gaynor joins the circus
and falls in love with painter Farrell, but her secret threatens
their happiness. Borzage’s ultraromantic, dreamlike style reaches
its height here while remaining firmly grounded in a detailed urban
reality. 102 min.
. 1933. USA. Directed by George
Cukor. Screenplay by Frances Marion, Herman J. Mankiewicz, Donald
Ogden Stewart, based
on the play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber. With Jean Harlow,
John Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler. Putting the studio’s “more
stars than there are in heaven” credo to the test, this lavish
MGM comedy-drama centers on the preparations for a high-society dinner
party amid turmoil in the lives of the guests. One of the wittiest
scripts of the 1930s, given extra bite by Harlow as Beery’s
tart-tongued nouveau riche wife, and Dressler as an imperious actress
on the skids. 113 min.
. 1930. USA. Directed by Harry d’Abaddie d’Arrast.
Screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart, based on a story by d’Arrast
and Douglas Z. Doty. With Nancy Carroll, Fredric March, Frank Morgan.
Ex–Follies showgirl Carroll marries an elderly millionaire,
and soon finds she’s lost her ability to laugh and enjoy life
until old boyfriend March returns to offer escape. Often called the
first screwball comedy, Laughter blends satire and drama in innovative
ways, and remains startlingly modern. 85 min.
. 1921. USA. Directed
by D. W. Griffith. Screenplay by Griffith, based on the play The
Two Orphans by Adolphe d’ Ennery.
With Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Monte Blue, Joseph Schildkraut. The
French Revolution sets the stage for Griffith’s sensational
melodrama about two sisters—one blind—torn asunder by
the frenzy of 1790s Paris. A breathtaking spectacle replete with
kidnappings, murder, orgies, mobs, and last minute rescues, Orphans
of the Storm demonstrates Griffith’s narrative mastery, and
is being shown to mark Bastille Day. Silent with piano accompaniment
by Ben Model. 150 min.
. 1938. USA. Produced by Louis
de Rochemont. Narrated by Westbrook Van Voorhis. The March of
Time newsreels were seen from their inception in 1935 as superior to
the competition, focusing on one or two subjects at length and
taking strongly opinionated stands on issues of the day. This edition,
made in 1938 as the threat of worldwide war loomed, looks at the
history and failure of the League of Nations. 8 min.
. 1942. USA. Produced and directed
by Frank Capra. Written by Anthony Veiller, Eric Knight, Robert
Heller.
Narrated by Walter Huston and Veiller. According to Capra, this first,
Oscar-winning entry in his wartime documentary series was made to
provide American soldiers with “answers as to why they are
in uniform, and if the answers they get are worth fighting and dying
for.” Surveying the events leading up to the declaration of
World War II, the film examines both Axis aggression and the U.S.
policy of isolation. 53 min.
. 1944. USA. Directed by Stuart Heisler, Frank Capra.
Written by Carlton Moss. Praised at the time of its release for its
respectful treatment of the contributions and history of African
Americans, this portrait of one soldier’s experience now has
to be seen as a disturbing capsule of the racist attitudes that prevailed
during the war. 40 min.
Total running time 101 min.
. 1944. USA. Directed by Josef von Sternberg. Written by
George Milburn. Produced by the Office of War Information (which
cannily hired Continental expatriate von Sternberg to direct),
this idealistic look at Madison, Wisconsin, was meant to remind
foreign audiences of the continued influence of European traditions
and culture on the United States, as well as the importance of
fighting together for shared values. 15 min.
. 1945. USA. Produced by Frank
Capra. Directed by Capra, Anatole Litvak. Written by Anthony Veiller,
Litvak. Narrated by Walter Huston and Veiller. The final film in
the Why We Fight series emphasizes the variety and richness of American
life and culture, and celebrates the virtues of patriotism and the
democratic process by focusing on a representative cross section
of Americans devoted to the war effort. 67 min.
. 1946. Written and directed by John Huston. Narrated
by Walter Huston. Banned by the War Department for thirty-five years
following its release, Huston’s incisive portrait of the war’s
lingering psychological effects focuses on a group of soldiers recovering
in a psychiatric hospital. 58 min.
Total running time 140 min.
. 1943. Great Britain. Directed by Humphrey Jennings.
Designed to warn the British of the terrifying consequences of
failing to resist a possible German occupation, this somewhat expressionistic
film imagines the takeover of a Welsh mining town and the resistance
of its inhabitants. 33 min.
. 1943. Great Britain. Directed by David MacDonald.
Commentary by J. L. Hodson. This bracing, vivid record of Montgomery’s
campaign against Rommel’s feared Afrika Korps set a new standard
in combat documentary. The filmmakers were granted unprecedented
access to the battlefield, resulting in seventeen cameramen being
either captured, wounded, or killed. 60 min.
.
1924. USSR. Directed by Lev Kuleshov. Screenplay by Vsevolod I. Pudovkin,
Nikolai Aseyev. With Porfiri Podobed, Boris Barnet, Pudovkin. Arguably
Kuleshov’s most accomplished feature, this satiric comedy follows
an American dignitary and his cowboy bodyguard as they visit the
young Soviet Union for the first time. 94 min.
. 1987. USA. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Screenplay by
Eric Red, Bigelow. With Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright, Lance Henriksen,
Bill Paxton. As much a (Mid)Western road movie as it is a horror
film, this vampire flick refreshes the Gothic genre, playing its
blood-lust story over sun-dappled fields and familiar landscapes
that suddenly turn threatening. A farm boy, kissed by a strange and
lovely girl, finds himself part of her roving and ghoulish family.
95 min.
. 1946. Japan. Directed by
Kenji Mizoguchi. Screenplay by Yoshikata Yoda, based on the novel
by Kanji Kunieda. With Minosuke Bandô, Kôtarô
Bandô, Kinuyo Tanaka, Hiroko Kowasaki. Utamaro was
the first period film to be approved by the American occupation
forces in Japan after World War II. Although feudal Japan was not
to be romanticized, Mizoguchi found in the great eighteenth-century
woodblock print artist Utamaro a “democratic” spirit
who took common people as his subject and who fought the conservative
establishment. Both Utamaro and Mizoguchi worked in mediums considered
unrefined by their contemporaries, and both ran afoul of authority.
In Japanese with English subtitles. 95 min.
.
1953. Japan. Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Screenplay
by Yoshikata Yoda, Matsutaro
Kawaguchi, Mizoguchi, based on stories by Akinari Ueda. With Machiko
Kyô, Kinuyo Tanaka, Mitsuko Mito. Ugetsu is
a calm ghost story that haunts the memory—not
because of its literally fabulous nature but because
of its tranquil beauty. Set during the
sixteenth-century Japanese civil wars, the film tells of a village
potter and his vainglorious neighbor as they leave
home—the
former to sell his wares in Kyoto, the latter to become a soldier.
In Japanese with English subtitles. 95 min.
. 1952.
Japan. Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Screenplay by Yoshikata Yoda,
Mizoguchi, based on a novel by Saikaku Ihara. With Kinuyo Tanaka,
Toshirô Mifune, Ichirô Sugai. Mizoguchi considered this
film his masterpiece, the finest articulation of such abiding themes
as the bitterness of life, the corruption of feudal society, and
the social strangulation of women. Now an old nun, Oharu narrates
her touching biography of a young woman of modest means and high
standing who, through no fault of her own, is reduced to begging
at the end of her life. In Japanese with English subtitles. 135
min.
. 1993. USA. Directed
by Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by Jay Cocks and Scorsese.
With Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder.
In his achingly beautiful adaptation of Edith Wharton’s
novel, Scorsese skewers the hypocrisies of high society
in nineteenth-century New York. A superb Day-Lewis plays
an upstanding lawyer who pursues true love with an unconventional
countess, but chillingly finds himself trapped by his
class. 136 min.
. 1932. USA.
Directed by Edward F. Cline. Screenplay by Joseph L.
Mankiewicz, Nicholas T.
Barrows, Henry Myers. With W. C. Fields, Jack Oakie,
Lyda Roberti, Ben Turpin. This surreal, side-splittingly
funny hodgepodge of gags centers on the mythical country
of Klopstokia, a postage stamp–sized nation where
every member of the populace is graced with superior
athletic ability. When President Fields decides to send
a contingent to the Olympic Games, all goes well until
the arrival of the nefarious spy Mata Machree, “the
woman no man can resist.” 64 min.
. 1967–70. USA. Produced,
written, directed, photographed, and edited by Andy Warhol. With
Brigid Polk (Berlin), Ondine, Patrick Tilden, Nico, Taylor Mead,
Andrea Feldman. Warhol, who would have been seventy-five years old
this August, took as the inspiration for one of his last films the
devotional text Imitatione Christi, by the fifteenth-century
Dutch mystic Thomas à Kempis. In this comic melodrama (one
of John Waters’s favorite “religious” films),
Tilden plays a moody, beautiful young man oblivious to the complaints
of his parents (Ondine and Polk) and the attempted seductions of
his maid (Nico), his girlfriend (Feldman), and a hobo (Mead). 85
min.
. 1985.
USA. Written and directed by Woody Allen. With Mia
Farrow, Jeff Daniels, Danny
Aiello. Allen’s film-within-a-film is perhaps cinephilia
at its most romantic and bittersweet. Cecilia (Farrow),
a waitress with an abusive husband, finds sole comfort
in the haven of Hollywood movies during the Depression
years. Things take a turn for the phantasmagoric when
she is romanced by both a fictional character from a
movie and the real actor who plays him. 82 min.
. 1956. USA. Directed
by Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by Kubrick, Jim Thompson,
based on a novel
by Lionel White. With Sterling Hayden, Jay C. Flippen,
Marie Windsor. In this unusual heist-caper, Kubrick’s
third feature film, a motley gang of four tries to rob
a horseracing club. The Killing unfolds over eight days
in nonlinear fashion, as Kubrick advances his preoccupation
with themes of human fallibility, coincidence, and chance.
78 min.
. 1945. Great Britain.
Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil
Dearden, Robert Hamer.
Screenplay by John Baines, E. F. Benson, T. E. B., Clarke,
Angus MacPhail, H. G. Wells. With Michael Redgrave, Googie
Withers, Mervyn Johns, Sally Ann Howes. While visiting
a secluded country farm, overworked architect Walter
Craig (Johns) finds himself plagued by a horrific recurring
nightmare that never reaches its end. In solidarity,
his fellow weekend guests share their own tales of encounters
with the supernatural. This supremely eerie anthology
film set the tone for many to follow, and includes Redgrave’s
harrowing turn as a ventriloquist—a hair-raising
standout. 102 min.
. 1961. USA. Directed
by Shirley Clarke. Screenplay by Jack Gelber, based
on his play. With Warren
Finnerty, William Redfield, Barbara Winchester, Roscoe
Browne. Gelber, who died this past May, changed the course
of American theater in the late 1950s with his shockingly
raw play about the dead-end life of drug addicts. An
influence on contemporary playwrights Edward Albee and
Arthur Kopit, The Connection is Brechtian in its seeming
improvisation and interplay with the audience—aspects
that the author, director, and members of the original
Living Theater stage production brilliantly captured
in this Beat-inflected film adaptation. 110 min.
. 1962. Italy. Directed
by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Screenplay by Sergio Citti,
Pasolini. With Anna Magnani,
Ettore Garofolo, Franco Citti. Pasolini’s second
film is a potent mix of overt religiosity, Marxism, and
raw sexuality—all embodied in the passionate performance
of Magnani as Mamma Roma, a former prostitute who wants
a better life for her son but finds her efforts thwarted
by relentless poverty and the temptations of the city.
In Italian with English subtitles. 107 min.
. 1976. USA. Directed
by Vito Acconci. Acconci’s three-part epic weaves photographs, music,
and spoken word into a dense meditation on the self as
constructed through myth, culture, and history. The work
shifts abruptly between close-up and distanced perspectives,
exaggerating video’s shallow depth of field in
contrast to the deeper filmic space. Video. 146 min.
. 1985. USA. Directed by Matthew Geller.
Set in the atmospheric mangrove swamps of the Florida Everglades,
Geller’s contemporary fairy tale melds archetypal themes with
video aesthetics to portray a young woman escaping her small-town
identity to confront her alter ego, a half-human, half-bird creature.
Video. 91 min.
. 1982.
Poland. Written and directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski.
With Boguslaw Linda,
Tadeusz Lomnicki, Marzena Trybala. Kieslowski’s
rumination on fate and chance—recurring themes
in his oeuvre—unfolds in three vignettes involving
the same protagonist, each of which ends on a drastically
different note. When medical student Witek (Linda) rushes
to catch a train, the outcome affects his life profoundly.
In Polish with English subtitles. 122 min.
. 1999. Directed by David
Lynch. Screenplay by John Roach, Mary Sweeney. With Richard Farnsworth,
Sissy Spacek, Jane Galloway. A simple road movie, filled with a
seemingly un-Lynchian dose of warmth and charm. Farnsworth was nominated
for an Oscar for his performance as the real-life Alvin Straight,
a plainspoken seventy-five-year-old who drove his lawnmower across
three hundred miles of American heartland to see his sick brother.
111 min.
. 1984. USA.
Directed by Joan Jonas. Trapped in a spaceship that
drifts through a post-apocalyptic
landscape, Jonas’s characters attempt to recapture
memory and language through linguistic games and symbolic,
gestural performances. Video. 24 min.
. 1987. USA. Directed by Gary
Hill. Descending into a world where language consumes
the body, Hill layers labyrinthine scenarios and texts
in a synaesthetic convergence where reading becomes a
dream state. Video. 68 min.
. 1984. USA. Directed by Steve Fagin. Structured
around the elusive character of Lou Andreas-Salomé,
a fin de siècle intellectual and romantic, Fagin’s
video combines historical encounters with Freud and Nietzsche,
along with imagined objects and voices, to create a dense,
multilayered montage. In chess, “virtual play” refers
to a move that approaches checkmate without ever achieving
it—a metaphorical equivalent to this work’s
associative and unresolved aesthetics of representation
and storytelling. Video. 82 min.
.
1986. Taiwan. Directed by Edward Yang. Screenplay by
Xiao Ye, Yang. With Cora
Miao, Li Liqun, Jing Shijie. Yang masterfully interweaves
multiple narratives in this penetrating study of urban
alienation. The intersecting paths of a doctor, his writer
wife, a Eurasian girl, and a photographer culminate in
a shocking murder-suicide that may or may not be a figment
of the writer’s imagination. In Mandarin with English
subtitles. 109 min.
. 1982. West Germany.
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Screenplay by Petersen,
based on the novel by Lothar-Günther
Buchheim. With Jürgen Prochnow, Herbert Grönemeyer.
Das Boot follows a crew of young Nazi sailors aboard
a U-96 submarine as they enter the war against Great
Britain. The film’s nail-biting tension and claustrophobic
feel constitute a sublime exercise in editing and cinematography.
In German with English subtitles. 149 min.
. 1986.
USA. Directed by Bill Viola. Inspired by the Rig-Veda, a Sanskrit
text describing the journey of self knowledge from birth to transcendence,
Viola’s tape follows that journey through an imagistic allegory
of animal consciousness and poetic becoming. The camera shifts between
observing and being observed as it slowly closes in on the pupil
of an owl’s eye, reflecting the image of the artist. Video.
89 min.
. 1990. Hungary. Directed
by Peter Forgacs. Forgacs imagines the life of a Catholic
military engineer and his wife by intercutting the couple’s
home movies with documentary footage of the re-annexation
of upper northern Hungary after the Peace Treaty of Trianon
in 1920. The documentary depicts family life in the shadow
of violent social trauma. Video. 51 min.
. 1993. France. Directed by Chris
Marker. Encamped in a ruined army barracks in Slovenia,
a community of Bosnian refugees narrates its experience
of war and exile. Pirating signals from CNN, Radio Sarajevo,
and Sky News, the Bosnian production team critiques the
politics and abuses of media. Video. 28 min.
. 1987.
USA. Directed by Woody Vasulka. A haunting electronic
tapestry, in which images of war
are projected onto the grand landscape of the American
Southwest and become monumental relics, collapsing distinctions
between history, cultural memory, and individual conscience.
Video. 36 min.
Total running time 115 min.
. 1971. West Germany. Written
and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. With Günther Kaufmann, Hanna
Schygulla, Harry Baer, Ulli Lommel. Somewhere in the
American West, in 1878, in a large house that is more
like a mausoleum than a home, lives the Nicholson family:
Ben, the domineering patriarch; his second wife, a nymphomaniac;
and his two sons by his first wife, one of whom is gay
and the other mentally retarded. Serving and being abused
by the family is Whity, Ben’s third and illegitimate
son from his union with a slave, who wants to belong
yet whom, as Fassbinder observed, “the entire film
is pitted against [...] because he always hesitates and
fails to defend himself against injustice.” In
German with English subtitles. 95 min.
. 1947. France. Written and directed by René Clair.
With Maurice Chevalier, François Perier, Marcelle
Derrien. One of Clair’s most endearing sentimental
comedies, about the visionaries and the poseurs who made
silent movies in the early 1900s, when anything seemed
possible. Clair pays tribute to France’s earliest
cinematic magicians, Ferdinand Zecca and Georges Méliès,
whose adventurously experimental pictures entranced him
in childhood. Like François Truffaut’s Day
for Night, Le Silence est d’or is a celebration
of moviemaking, which Clair called “the invention
of the century: an hour of crazy laughter, an hour of
oblivion.” In French with English subtitles. 100
min.
. 1940. USA. Directed
by Howard Hawks. Screenplay by Charles Lederer, based
on the play The
Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. With Cary
Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy. One key sex change
(Russell’s role was male in the original stage
production and first film adaptation), a barrage of rapid-fire
dialogue, and some frenetic pacing made Hawks’s
screwball comedy an instant classic. Newspaper editor
Grant battles wit and deadlines to keep his ace reporter
(and ex-wife) on his staff—and in his life. 92
min.
. 1987. USA.
Directed by George Kuchar. In his idiosyncratic and
diarylike account of a melancholy
Thanksgiving spent in California, Kuchar records the
rain as a metaphoric reflection, observing that “the
rains come and a chill sets in as I explore the dark
and dank pockets of things best left in the closet. A
parade of faces pass or drop by to bring sunshine.” Video.
28 min.
. 1985. USA. Directed
by Leslie Thornton. Thornton’s narrative springs
from the ruins of archival cinematic footage and science
fiction catastrophe to follow two young children on their
journey through a post-apocalyptic landscape. 20 min.
.
1983. Japan. Directed by Mako Idemitsu. Sitting at the
kitchen table in a contemporary
Japanese home, a mother and father gaze at a television
constantly tuned to an image of their son, who has left
home. Idemitsu draws a parallel between the destructiveness
of media saturation and surveillance technology, and
familial relationships. Video. 26 min.
Total running
time 74 min.
. 1938. USA.
Directed by W. S. Van Dyke. Screenplay by Donald Ogden
Stewart, Ernest Vajda, Claudine
West, based on the biography by Stefan Zweig. With Norma
Shearer, Tyrone Power, Robert Morley, John Barrymore.
Stewart quipped that his main challenge in writing this
lavishly entertaining historical drama was to “explain
the French Revolution in terms that would not lose audience
sympathy for Norma Shearer.” Shearer’s sensitive
performance as the Queen of France and Barrymore’s
roguish portrayal of Louis XV anchor MGM’s take
on the lives and loves of the doomed monarchs, which
sticks relatively closely to the facts under the lightning-paced
direction of “One-Take Woody” Van Dyke. 152
min.
. 1941. USA. Written
and directed by Preston Sturges. With Barbara Stanwyck,
Henry Fonda, Charles
Coburn, Eugene Pallette. A roguish tale of con games
and false identities. Cynical cruise ship cardsharp Stanwyck
fleeces, then unexpectedly falls for, wealthy herpetologist
and Pike’s Pale Ale–heir Fonda, who’d
rather just be with his snake. Sturges’s sublimely
romantic comedy is the epitome of later screwball style.
97 min.
. 1930. USA. Directed
by D. W. Griffith. Screenplay by Stephen Vincent Benet.
With Walter Huston,
Una Merkel, Ian Keith. A respectful and poetic account
of Lincoln’s entry into politics, Griffith’s
first sound film still divides its viewers: some find
it simple and sublime, others find it stodgy and primitive.
Either way, Huston’s performance as the president
is infused with a quiet, moving passion. 97 min.
.
1996. USA. Written, produced, and directed by Jeanne
Jordan, Steven Ascher.
The plight of the family farm in America, imperiled by
agribusiness, overseas competition, and erratic weather
patterns, is made wrenchingly clear in Troublesome
Creek,
an Academy Award–nominated documentary about the
foreclosure of an Iowa farm that had belonged to Jordan’s
family since 1867. 88 min.
. 2001–02. USA.
Over the past two years, eight famous filmmakers have
each directed a short film
starring a BMW car and an actor, Clive Owen, who always
plays the driver. Produced by BMW of North America. Ambush.
John Frankenheimer; Chosen. Ang Lee; The Follow. Wong
Kar-Wai; Star. Guy Ritchie; Powder
Keg. Alejandro González Iñárritu
(all 2001); and Hostage. John Woo; Ticker. Joe Carnahan;
Beat the Devil. Tony Scott (all 2002). Digital projection.
62 min.
. 1966. France/Sweden. Written
and directed by Agnés Varda. With Catherine Deneuve, Michel
Piccoli, Eva Dahlbeck. A cool and enigmatic tale about a writer,
the beautiful woman with whom he shares his life, an island retreat,
and an artist’s ability to make manifest—but perhaps
not control—his imagination. In French with English subtitles.
92 min.
. 1950. France. Written and directed
by Jean Cocteau. With Jean Marais, François Périer,
Maria Casarès, Juliette Gréco. Cocteau
described Orpheus as “a detective film, bathed
on one side in myth, and on the other in the supernatural.” He
also said of his very modern reimagining of the Orpheus
myth (replete with motorcycles, black boots, and rubber
gloves) that it comes with no “symbols”;
audiences for over a half-century have thought otherwise.
In French with English subtitles. 112 min.
. 1960. France. Written and directed by Jean
Cocteau. With Cocteau, Claudine Auger, Charles Aznavour,
Yul Brynner. Cocteau’s last film is perhaps his
most personal, and may be experienced as a poet’s
journey into the deep, dank, and fabulous forest of primal
dreams. At his trial and as part of his testimony, Orpheus
claims that “the poet makes use of a language,
neither living or dead, which few people speak and few
understand.” A young François Truffaut helped
the older artist when he was having difficulty finding
financial backing for the film. In French with English
subtitles. 83 min.
In 1930, the Count of Noailles gave gifts of one million
francs each to Jean Cocteau and Luis Buñuel to
make films in “complete freedom.” Buñuel
collaborated with Salvador Dalí to complete L’Âge
d’Or, which almost got the Count excommunicated.
Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, although completed
in 1930, was not shown until 1932, and instantly became
a classic of the avant-garde.
.
1930 (released 1932). France. Written and directed by
Jean Cocteau. With Enrique Rivero, Elizabeth Lee Miller,
Pauline Carton. The poet finds inspiration behind doors
and under surfaces that are not as impermeable as they
first seem. In French with English subtitles. 55 min.
. 1930. France. Written and
directed by Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí.
With Lya Lys, Gaston Modot, Max Ernst. A surreal riot
in which church and state interfere with coupling—sort
of. French intertitles only. 65 min.
. 1941. USA. Written and directed
by Preston Sturges. With Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake,
Eric Blore, Franklin Pangborn. Sturges’s antic
portrait of the perils of filmmaking and Hollywood life
shifts subtly into moving and occasionally dark drama.
His tale of a hack director who yearns to make a serious
film and the girl who accompanies him on his quest to
discover how the poor and downtrodden live is ultimately
a meditation on the importance of laughter and the indomitability
of the human spirit. 90 min.
. 1947. France. Written and directed by Jean
Cocteau. With Edwidge Feuillère, Sylvia Monfort,
Jean Marais. Scholar René Gilson regards this “majestic,
formal, even stern work” as the “unknown,
forgotten film of Jean Cocteau.” Adapted by the
filmmaker from his own play, this tragedy tells of a
grieving queen who thinks grandeur lies in death, and
autocratically causes it. In French with English subtitles.
93 min.
. 1948. France. Written and directed
by Jean Cocteau. With Josette Day, Jean Marais, Yvonne
de Bray. Cocteau the conjurer jubilantly transfers his
comic melodrama about the dangers of domesticity from
stage to screen, acknowledging the confinement of family
life but somehow making claustrophobia seem airy by giving
breathing space to intimate relations. In French with
English subtitles. 105 min.
. 1972. USA.
Directed by Emile de Antonio. With appearances by Helen
Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns,
Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Andy Warhol. De
Antonio’s exuberant documentary about some of the
artists who made New York the center of the art world.
Henry Geldzahler, former curator at The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, wrote, “an intelligent film about
how artists think and work. I don’t see how it
would be possible ever again to teach a course in modern
painting without Painters Painting.” 116 min.
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