a highly-opinionated selection of things happening around town, and sometimes out of town. this month's page here.
tue. feb. 1
cartoon noir 8 PM @ silent movie theatre
a brighter summer day FREE @ melnitz movies @ ucla james bridges
playtime FREE 1:30 PM @ skirball
wed. feb. 2
mystery of the leaping fish 8 PM, his majesty the american @ silent movie theatre
white fence @ the echo
groundhog day @ egyptian
thu. feb. 3
the umbrellas of cherbourg 8 PM, vintage musical scopitones @ silent movie theatre
contempt, shoot the piano player @ egyptian
fancy space people @ echoplex
ivans xtc 8 PM, candyman @ show cave
fri. feb. 4
citizen ruth, flirting with disaster @ silent movie theatre
giant drag @ satellite
sea lions @ the smell
henri-georges clouzot's inferno, diabolique @ new beverly
gone with the pope MIDNIGHT @ new beverly
payback 7 PM @ ucla film archive
les cousins @ lacma
les bonnes femmes 9:35 PM @ lacma
hausu MIDNIGHT @ nuart
the pink panther, a shot in the dark @ aero
sat. feb. 5
henri-georges clouzot's inferno 3:10 7:30 PM, diabolique 5:15 9:35 PM @ new beverly
beauty and the beast (1946) 8 PM @ silent movie theatre
acts of violence 10:30 PM @ silent movie theatre
salve @ ucla film archive
merci pour le chocolat 5 PM @ lacma
this man must die @ lacma
nels cline singers @ getty center
audacity FREE @ origami vinyl
kit @ dem passwords
the party, s.o.b. @ aero
sun. feb. 6
cat power @ music box
rachel fannan @ the smell
mr. haji the movie actor 7 PM, the lor girl @ ucla film archive
mon. feb. 7
rachel fannan @ the echo
tue. feb. 8
deadly prey 8 PM @ silent movie theatre
wed. feb. 9
the three musketeers (1921) 8 PM @ silent movie theatre
she is gone so is her voice, the white meadows @ ucla film archive
this gun for hire, the glass key @ new beverly
polls @ the echo
thu. feb. 10
this gun for hire, the glass key @ new beverly
harold and maude @ egyptian
cold weather FREE @ melnitz movies @ ucla james bridges
circles and spinning wheels 8 PM @ echo park film center
fri. feb. 11
in the soup, living in oblivion @ silent movie theatre
the china syndrome 9:20 PM @ lacma
sat. feb. 12
love in the afternoon 7 PM @ silent movie theatre
electric dreams 10 PM @ cinefama pajama party v @ silent movie theatre
the african queen, from here to eternity @ egyptian
let the right one in MIDNIGHT @ new beverly
qaisar, molf-e gand @ ucla film archive
loons, fairmounts @ soda bar (SD)
barbarella 5 PM @ lacma
the searchers 1:30 PM @ autry museum
sun. feb. 13
valentoons @ silent movie theatre
dr. zhivago 5 PM @ egyptian
casablanca, double indemnity @ aero
grass: a nation's battle for life 7 PM, the lover's wind @ ucla film archive
my bloody valentine nite @ part time punks @ the echo
new urban observations @ filmforum @ spielberg @ egyptian
sherlock jr 6:30 PM, the cabinet of dr caligari (both w/ live score by club foot orchestra) @ steve allen theater
mon. feb. 14
casablanca @ silent movie theatre
animating mayhem: collage and painted films by martha colburn 8:30 PM @ redcat
klute 8 PM @ lacma
tue. feb. 15
kasper toeplitz and myriam gourfink: breathing monster 8:30 PM @ redcat
wed. feb. 16
beach house @ music box
trmrs @ the echo
robin hood (1922) 8 PM @ silent movie theatre
tiny furniture, ghost world @ new beverly
back to the future the ride @ the smell
la font @ bordello
thu. feb. 17
in the cut: employing the art of editing (seminar) @ egyptian
beach house @ music box
dum dum girls @ skybar
boy meets girl 8 PM @ silent movie theatre
tiny furniture, ghost world @ new beverly
the cage we are tricked into 8 PM @ echo park film center
fri. feb. 18
poison, clean shaven @ silent movie theatre
dream home MIDNIGHT @ silent movie theatre
dum dum girls @ the casbah (SD)
scream of fear, the gorgon @ egyptian
sat. feb. 19
trmrs @ 5 star bar
the thief of bagdad (reimagined by shadoe stevens) (members only screening) 6:30 PM @ silent movie theatre
i am here....now 10:30 PM @ silent movie theatre
do you know mr. kiarostami?, close-up @ ucla film archive
mothra, mothra & king ghidorah: giant monster all out attack @ egyptian
joy house 5 PM @ lacma
dmtv 8 PM @ showcave
carlos 7 PM @ downtown independent
sun. feb. 20
heller keller @ the smell
gas food lodging, mi vida loca @ silent movie theatre
man or astroman @ the echo
tehran tehran 7 PM @ ucla film archive
the good the bad and the ugly 5 PM @ aero
heroes & heroines @ satellite
fred worden: illusions and altercations @ echo park film center
mon. feb. 21
gang of four @ music box
body and mind: the primordial cinema of fred worden 8:30 PM @ redcat
jean-luc godard & igor stravinsky by richard leacock 6 PM @ 7 dudley cinema
tue. feb. 22
...and god created woman 8 PM @ bardot a go go @ silent movie theatre
godspeed you black emperor!, om @ fox theater pomona
a day at the races 1 PM @ lacma
vivian girls @ the smell
thunder soul 6:30 PM @ pan african film fest @ culver plaza theatres
sparse gardens, girls on the run FREE 8 PM @ the wulf
wed. feb. 23
godspeed you black emperor! @ music box
dirty harry, cool hand luke @ egyptian
the black pirate 8 PM @ silent movie theatre
the mirror, ivan's childhood @ new beverly
thu. feb. 24
quasi @ troubadour
playtime (70mm) @ egyptian
best coast, wavves @ music box
the mother and the whore 8 PM @ silent movie theatre
the mirror, ivan's childhood @ new beverly
once upon a time in the west @ aero
emma & the ghosts, gibbons & the sluts @ the smell
fri. feb. 25
in the company of men, one false move @ silent movie theatre
quasi @ echoplex
jon brion @ largo
dirt dress @ pehrspace
harland williams @ the improv
the haunted, the unknown FREE @ ucla film archive
the african queen, the desperate hours @ new beverly
once upon a time in america @ aero
sic alps @ the smell
personal ethnographies 8 PM @ echo park film center
sat. feb. 26
invisible art visible artists (seminar) FREE 10 AM @ egyptian
rat scratch fever 10:30 PM @ silent movie theatre
death, rtx, sic alps @ echoplex
harland williams @ the improv
ugly beats @ haunted house au-go-go @ bordello
the african queen, the desperate hours @ new beverly
airplane!, the naked gun @ egyptian
sun. feb. 27
neil hamburger @ satellite
mon. feb. 28
the artist theater program: a group show of film and video work by visual artists 8:30 PM @ redcat
wed. mar. 2
the pride of pikeville 8 PM, the wedding march @ silent movie theatre
fri. mar. 4
elephant 6 holiday surprise tour @ the satellite
autolux @ echoplex
abe vigoda @ first fridays @ natural history museum
sat. mar. 5
mike watt & the missingmen @ redwood
autolux @ detroit bar
sun. mar. 6
elvira mistress of the dark @ an evening with cassandra peterson @ silent movie theatre
trmrs @ 5 star bar
heller keller, foot village @ the smell
tue. mar. 8
the birdwoman and her dreams: animated works by nancy andrews 8:30 PM @ redcat
thu. mar. 10
cointelpro 101 8:30 PM @ redcat
watts ensemble @ bootleg
fri. mar. 11
mike watt & the missingmen @ the echo
shesaw @ mr. t's bowl
sun. mar. 13
frank fairfield @ autry museum
fri. mar. 18
the ex @ the satellite
tue. mar. 22
strange boys, audacity @ the echo
thu. mar. 24
strange boys, white fence @ eagle rock center for the arts
fri. mar. 25
thee oh sees @ eagle rock center for the arts
sun. mar. 27
neil hamburger @ satellite
mon. mar. 28
victory over the sun: films and videos by michael robinson 8:30 PM @ redcat
sat. apr. 2
bill frisell trio plays selected works of buster keaton 2 PM @ ucla royce hall
mon. apr. 4
betzy bromberg's voluptuous sleep series 8:30 PM @ redcat
wed. apr. 6
thomas mao 8:30 PM @ redcat
thu. apr. 7
winter vacation 8:30 PM @ redcat
fri. apr. 8
oxhide ii 8:30 PM @ redcat
sat. apr. 9
single man 3 PM @ redcat
disorder 7 PM @ redcat
i wish i knew 9:30 PM @ redcat
tue. apr. 12
moon duo @ the echo
wed. apr. 13
moon duo @ casbah (SD)
mon. apr. 18
russ forster films 6 PM @ 7 dudley cinema
eija-liisa ahtila: where is where? 8:30 PM @ redcat
sun. may 15
black angels, sleepy sun @ el rey
WHAT IT IS:
Acts Of Violence
(director/writer/star Il Lim in person!)
The premise could not be any more familiar: a man seeks revenge on those who attacked his wife. But those who caught Acts Of Violence at their local multiplex last summer know that it is anything but predictable. It's not enough for Flyn (writer/director/fight choreographer Il Lim) to hunt down the culprits -- he must also challenge them, one by one, to a fight! Sequences of genuine brutality are interspersed with oddball humor, moments of grace and very arid scenes of Lynchian domesticity between Flyn and wife (Leelee Sobieski). Besides, what other action film showcases its hero killing random gang members en route to buying toilet paper? Did we mention Ron Perlman’s strange turn as a priest with whom Flyn gets both marriage and religious counseling? This clearly the work of someone who has carefully studied the sensibilities of Van Damme, Seagal and the Cannon canon -- but it also happens to be the most off-kilter, singularly cracked revenge film of 2010! Il Lim will be here at the Cinefamily for a Q&A after the film!
Dir. Il Lim, 2010, 35mm, 90 min.
...And God Created Woman
Bardot A Go Go (feat. ...And God Created Woman)
She was a pop icon to pop icons like Godard, The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol. She recorded songs with Serge Gainsbourg and starred in films by Jean-Luc Godard. Simone de Beauvoir declared her the first and most liberated woman of post-war France: “A locomotive of women’s history”. Her influence on fashion is indescribable; if she wore a checkered pink dress at her wedding, then checkered pink dresses would be suddenly be in vogue with every American girl who wanted to look sexy and French. Necklines, hairstyles -- even the very bikini was popularized by her. Her mere visit to a city could popularize it as a vacation spot! The Cinefamily bows down to B.B., the greatest sex symbol of the 20th century, with an in-house mix of Scopitones, music videos of her collaborating with Gainsbourg, film excerpts and other incredible rarities that’ll pop your eyes and arouse your souls. Then, we’ll watch a rare 35mm scope print of Roger Vadim’s original 1956 ...And God Created Woman, flown all the way in from France. This proto-French New Wave classic, featuring a scandalously semi-nude Bardot as an 18-year-old orphan whose breezy laissez-faire sexuality is at odds with the attitudes of a provincial French small town in which she lives, launched Bardot to global superstardom. Zut alors! Dir. Roger Vadim, 1956, 35mm, 95 min.
ANIMATING MAYHEM: COLLAGE AND PAINTED FILMS BY MARTHA COLBURN
“Painting, collage, found footage, music and research slug it out frame-by-frame . . . The films resemble 24-frames-per-second tornados.” —Cinema Scope
Martha Colburn’s handcrafted animations explode with an energy, concentration and a rapid-fire torrent of ideas that push the medium to its very edges. Colburn’s past works have savagely lampooned pop culture, consumerism, and middle-class attitudes to delirious fantasies, but her most recent films bring more tragic dimensions to bear by focusing on war and icons of American history. Always startling in her use of disparate techniques and free association, Colburn creates films unlike any other, and the screening spans 16 years of filmmaking with 16 films, including Dolls vs. Dictators (2010), Join the Freedom Force (2009), Myth Labs (2008), Triumph of the Wild (2008), Skelehellavision (2001), Spiders In Love: An Arachnogasmic Musical (2000), and Evil of Dracula (1997), among others. Her work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou, The Kitchen, the Whitney Museum, PS 1, MoMA, and numerous major international film festivals.
In person: Martha Colburn
THE ARTIST THEATER PROGRAM: A GROUP SHOW OF FILM AND VIDEO WORK BY VISUAL ARTISTS
“In Adam Putman’s work, reflections, distortions and image manipulations take us far from the concrete world . . . seductive, forbidding and erotically charged.” —The New Yorker
Film/video/installation artist Erika Vogt curates this group screening, inviting visual artists who make use of film and video to present their work within the context of a theatrical exhibition venue. In contradistinction to the conditions offered in traditional art spaces—such as the loop, indefinite time, and the itinerant and indeterminate audience—the program opens a dialogue between divergent communities of active makers that have historically overlapped. In doing so, it seeks to foster a heterogeneous debate about artistic concepts and practices, and to challenge some common assumptions, such as “Experimental filmmakers want to be marginal,” “Artists make a lot of money,” “Experimental filmmakers have a subject when they start and an end in mind,” “Artists blissfully ignore film history,” and “These works have no form!” The screening includes works by artists such as Math Bass, Shannon Ebner, Alice Konitz, Adam Putnam, Lucy Raven, among others, and by the activist group W.A.G.E (Working Artists and the Greater Economy).
In person: Erika Vogt and Lucy Raven
Betzy Bromberg’s Voluptuous Sleep Series
“Images that, once seen, will stay with you forever.” —LA Weekly
Betzy Bromberg returns to REDCAT with Voluptuous Sleep Series (2011), her first film in five years and a mesmerizing two-part 16mm meditation on the nuances of light, sound and feeling evoked through the poetic artifices of cinema. Bromberg’s close-up lens becomes a tool of infinite discovery that reveals as much about our bodily sensations as it does the natural world. Paired with two intricately composed soundtracks created in collaboration with Dane A. Davis, Zack Settel, Jean-Pierre Bedoyan, Pam Aronoff, James Rees and Robert Allaire, Voluptuous Sleep is an emotional tour de force that serves as a rapturous antidote to the fragmentation of modern life and a new experience of cinematic time and memory. An active filmmaker since 1976, Bromberg has presented work at the Museum of Modern Art, Harvard Film Archives, Anthology Film Archives, London’s National Film Theatre, and the Centre Pompidou, as well as numerous international film festivals. In person: Betzy Bromberg
BILL FRISELL TRIO PLAYS SELECTED WORKS OF BUSTER KEATON
Incomparable guitarist Bill Frisell along with his bandmates Tony Scherr and Kenny Wollesen will create a live score to the Buster Keaton classics Go West, The High Sign and One Week. Rediscover the timeless charm of Keaton’s magic reimagined with live music in an afternoon of film and music the whole family can enjoy.
The Birdwoman and Her Dreams: Animated Works by Nancy Andrews
“Like its main character, Behind the Eyes are the Ears embraces the full scope of the unknown—from the sinister to the rhapsodic.” —Colin Capers
With characters and stories synthesized from sources including history and autobiography, Nancy Andrews works in a hybrid form that combines research with storytelling, documentary, puppetry, and vaudeville. The program presents a selection of shorts along with two of her latest animated works. Inspired by classic "mad scientist" horror films and research into the physiology of insects, Behind the Eyes are the Ears (2010, 26 min.) features a soundtrack by Andrews and Zach Soares and mixes animation, live action and found footage to follow the revolutionary attempts of Dr. Sheri Myes to expand human perception and consciousness. On a Phantom Limb (2009, 35 min.), with music by John Cooper, invokes the realm of the invisible and takes as its starting point the filmmaker’s near-death experience during a harrowing surgical procedure. Andrews is the recipient of awards and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. In person: Nancy Andrews
The Black Pirate
Photographed in early two-strip Technicolor, The Black Pirate is, by design, nothing but pure entertainment, as it’s crammed to the gills with swordfights, gallivanting about, pretty maidens, underwater chases and sweet revenge! Fairbanks had been itching to do a pirate picture for years, after being beaten to the punch by the big smashes of both The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood -- and this film tops them both with its tale of a shipwrecked young man who finds that the pirate enemies who killed his father are also on the same island, burying the treasure which they stole from him. Going undercover, Doug infiltrates their ranks, in an attempt to explode them from within! With exteriors shot on location at sea, this is one of Fairbanks’ most satisfying efforts, blending whimsical comedy, startling nautical realism, romance and violence into a rollicking ball that will leave you grinnin’ from ear to ear, arrrrrgh!
Dir. Albert Parker, 1926, 35mm, 94 min.
BODY AND MIND: THE PRIMORDIAL CINEMA OF FRED WORDEN
“Worden drops depth-charges into the psyche. These are images not so much for the eyes but to pass through the eyes to spread havoc along nerve paths.” —Ken Jacobs
During the past twenty years New York-based Fred Worden has redefined cinema with his film and digital works, creating concentrated and transcendent experiences for both body and mind. Worden describes his work as a “cinema of pure energy that bypasses the discursive mind and goes right at the body, in through the eyes, pulsing, to jigger directly the brain’s electro-chemical neural flows, seedbed of every single thought or feeling.” In her essay "The Cinema," Virgina Woolf asked, “Is there . . . some secret language which we feel and see but never speak, and, if so, could this be made visible to the eye?” Many filmmakers have approached this question and few have succeeded so powerfully as Worden. His films have been shown at the Whitney Museum, MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, Pacific Film Archive and dozens of film festivals throughout the world. Films include The Or Cloud (2001), Here Amongst the Persuaded (2004), 1859 (2008), Possessed (2010), and others.
In person: Fred Worden
Boy Meets Girl
The definitive document of ‘80s underground French cinema, Boy Meets Girl was the exhilarating and tumultuously romantic debut by Leos Carax, a precocious and passionate 23-year-old cineaste soon to become his homeland’s leading bête noire and monstre sacré. Pairing the laconic, monochrome slapstick of Jim Jarmusch with a larger-than-life stylistic panache, Carax's experimental melodrama stars Denis Lavant as a compulsive loafer whose post-breakup meanderings through nocturnal Paris draw him into the orbit of depressive beauty Mireille, whom he meets at a surreal house party, among astronauts and actresses, while she hides on the verge of suicide in the bathroom. In sequences both absurdly comic and profoundly romantic, these two unstable outcasts share Alex's last moments of freedom together on the eve of his Army conscription. Culminating in a cataclysmic, violently poetic grand guignol finale, Boy Meets Girl is an essential page from the book of doomed French love; whether you're tracing backwards from Desplechin or forwards from Godard, no history of cinematic amour fou is complete without it.
Dir. Leos Carax, 1984, 35mm, 100 min.
A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY
Gangsters, musicians, lovers, and street punks populate the gorgeous frames of Edward Yang’s portrait of coming of age—or trying to—in the politically charged Taiwan of the 1960s. While the streets of Taipei were still rocked by conflicts between Mainlanders and Islanders, for young Xiao Si’r (Zhang Zhen, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Red Cliff) they also resonate with the sounds of Elvis Presley and rock-and-roll, and with the promise of love and escape. Giving as much detail to the quiet, languid interludes of a teenager’s life as to its more hectic moments, Yang creates a powerful, novelistic vision of a generation’s lives, loves, and dreams, dizzying in detail and scope, yet as ethereal and moving as a poem. (Jason Sanders, BAM/PFA)
Director: Edward Yang, Starring: Zhang Zhen, Lisa Yang, Hongming Lin, Screenwriters: Hung Hung, Mingtang Lai, Alex Yang, Edward Yang, Cinematographers: Huigoing Li, Longyu Zhang. Print provided by Cineteca di Bologna. In Mandarin with English subtitles. DigiBeta, 237 minutes
THE CAGE WE ARE TRICKED INTO
Collaborators for fifteen years, experimental filmmakers Tony Gault and Elizabeth Henry screen a body of work that examines the human impulse toward dualism and narcissistic command of the planet Earth. Their films create "a cinematic poetry of paranoia as a higher state of consciousness"- Film Threat, and "illustrate the perverse means by which narrative shapes our consciousness" - Slant Magazine. Inching ever closer to some resolution, these experimental and documentary films reflect an ongoing investigation of how we might cultivate a new approach to physical, mental and environmental equilibrium. FILMMAKERS IN ATTENDANCE!
Cartoon Noir
Hardboiled animation for private dicks and their femme fatales! Cartoon historian Jerry Beck (CartoonBrew.com) hosts an evening of animated tough guys -- and by “guys” we mean Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird and Goofy -- in parodies of classic Film Noir, made during the golden age of the genre. Rare 35mm and 16mm film prints of some of the funniest (not to mention the most violent, and even sexy) animated cartoons ever made. Private eyes, plainclothes cops, hapless grifters and starving putty tats all figure into the murder and mayhem. Don’t miss this rare compilation of animation from out of the shadows!
CIRCLES AND SPINNING WHEELS
Artist Melody Owen has spent the last few years traveling in Paris, Quebec, Iceland, and the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. As she roamed, she collected video works from artists she met along the way. Owen has organized these works into two distinct screenings. The first, circles and spinning wheels, is a compilation of animations, mini-documentaries, music videos, and experimental films that feature the curves and planes of circles. This simple shape of Euclidean geometry remains constant despite the artists' different styles and methodologies. The second, If I Could Crowd All My Souls into That mountain, features videos by an international cast of characters who have stepped from behind the camera and transformed into both subject and performer as they document their actions in the world. Artists featured include Boris Achour, Guler Ates, Barak Bar-am, Jean Charles Blanc, E*rock, Ben Fino-Radin, Liz Haley, John Hey, Gretchen Hogue, Cassandra C. Jones, Alexandra Lakin, Chris Lael Larson, Zak Margolis, Alicia McDaid, Ma Qiusha, Daragh Reeves, Michael Shamberg, Sigtryggur Sigmarsson, Catarina Simoes, Matt Underwood, and Ola Vasiljeva. Melody Owen is an artist and curator, and is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon.
Citizen Ruth
Of all the many talents to emerge from the ‘90s film scene, one of the funniest, warmest, most all-around excellent filmmakers is Alexander Payne. In an era of jazzy formality and post-modern referencing, his films harkened back the subtle craftsmanship of the classic masters of 50’s arthouse films or great novels. Defying easy genre classifications, his work is farcical yet moving, satirical yet humane, often with cutting-edge subject matter elucidated through classical storytelling. All of these qualities, including his manner of creating identification and empathy for the what ostensibly could be dislikable, or even reprehensible characters, is already at work in his first film, Citizen Ruth. A provocative ensemble comedy about abortion of all things, made at the height of the “family values” wars, the film gently mocks the entire zoo that populates both the pro-life and pro-choice sides of the debate, saving its best jabs for the holiest of holies -- the pregnant mother herself, played to the hilt by Laura Dern. Schedule permitting, Alexander Payne will be here at the Cinefamily for a discussion with Flirting With Disaster director David O. Russell after the film!
Dir. Alexander Payne, 1996, 35mm, 102 min.
CLOSE-UP
(1990) Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
Abbas Kiarostami documents a real-life case in which a blue-collar impostor pretending to be famed director Mohsen Makhmalbaf conned a family into believing they would star in his next film. Both the case and this film demonstrate Iranian’s profound love of cinema and the respect they have for their art-house film directors, such as Makhmalbaf and Kiarostami. The figure of the “famous director” looms large in this strange and touching tale, as the protagonist seems not to have been motivated by profit. Those involved in the original story re-enact their roles in this unique and moving documentary.
Producer: Ali Reza Zarin. Screenwriter: Abbas Kiarostami. Cinematographer: Alireza Zarrindast. Cast: Hossain Sabzian, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Abolfazl Ahankhah. 35mm, 98 min.
COLD WEATHER
After abandoning a promising academic career in forensic science, a self-styled Sherlock Holmes, Doug (Cris Lankenau), returns to Portland to live with his more responsible big sister Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn). He lands a dead-end job working in an ice factory, but soon finds an opportunity to use his passion and skill in detective work when his ex-girlfriend, Rachel (Robyn Rikoon) goes missing. Enlisting a team of ramshackle slacker-sleuths, Doug leads his team down a complex trail of clues and increasingly close to the discovering the mysterious truth about Rachel.
COLD WEATHER is a charming mystery -- simultaneously a rich detective story and an affecting tale of siblings uniting after years apart. With it's own idiosyncratic spin on familiar genre conventions, the film features the lyrical style, lush camera work and naturalistic performances that have established director Aaron Katz (DANCE PARTY USA, QUIET CITY) as a major talent to watch. Director/Screenwriter: Aaron Katz, Starring: Cris Lankenau, Trieste Kelly Dunn, Robyn Rikoon, Cinematography: Andrew Reed, An IFC Films release. Blu-ray, 96 minutes. Director Aaron Katz in person!
COINTELPRO 101
“The government’s COINTELPRO program was nothing short of an assault and that assault, Cointelpro 101 makes clear.“ —Black Commentator
CalArts faculty member Sam Durant introduces a screening and discussion of COINTELPRO 101, a film that exposes illegal surveillance, disruption, and outright murder committed by the U.S. government in the 1950s to the 1970s. COINTELPRO refers to the official FBI Counter Intelligence Program carried out to surveil, imprison and eliminate leaders of social justice movements, and to disrupt, divide and destroy the movements as well. Through interviews with activists who experienced these abuses first-hand and rare historical footage, the film provides an educational introduction to a period of intense repression and draws relevant lessons for the present and future.
Following the screening, Martín Plot moderates a discussion with COINTELPRO 101 filmmaker Claude Marks of the Freedom Archives, SF8 defendant and organizer Hank Jones, and legendary author and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.
Deadly Prey
It's hard to describe a movie like this without putting on denim short-shorts, oiling yourself up, and serving everyone within a mile radius a knuckle sandwich. Deadly Prey is so hilariously manly, so bonafide badass, so chock-full of fists that we had to punch ourselves to be sure it wasn't a dream. At a remote training camp (that looks a lot like twenty minutes north of L.A.), a rogue colonel lets his mercenary soldiers kidnap civilian dorks, release them in the wild, and hunt them down for sport. Everything goes great until they nab mulleted everyman Mike Danton -- the best damn soldier ever trained by Hogan himself! Up against an army of hundreds, Danton must creatively kill every last one of 'em if he wants to get out alive. It all gets more and more insane as it all unfolds, including one of the most memorable murders in cinema history that involves a man being beaten to death with his own severed arm!!! This silly, silly movie -- it's the Casablanca of punching! Before the feature, it’s time for another round of Found Crap, hosted and curated by Rob Schrab (behind-the-scenes wizard of “The Sarah Silverman Program”) and Dan Harmon (co-creator of NBC’s “Community”)!
Deadly Prey Dir. David A. Prior, 1987, video presentation, 88 min.
DISORDER (XIAN ZAI SHI GUO QU DE WEI LAI)
Los Angeles premiere | 2009, 58 min., DVCAM
A splendid, original experiment on how to translate urban texture on the screen. Huang Weikai collected more than 1,000 hours of footage shot by amateurs and journalists in the streets of Guangzhou. He then selected 20-odd incidents, reworked the images into quasi-surreal grainy black-and-white and montaged them to create a kaleidoscopic view of the great southern metropolis, in all her vibrant, loud and mean chaos.
DMTV
Films by: Barry Doupe, Michael Robinson, James Mercer, Eurico Coelho, Jacob Ciocci, Milton Croissant, David O’Reilly, Dash Shaw, Dalibor Baric, Kihachiro Kawamoto, Max Hattler, Jesus Rivera.
Floating World Animation Fest returns with a new name and trippier mission. We’ve dug even deeper into the vaults of psychedelic animation to curate a heroic dose of visionary video art for this year’s animation fest.
For our fourth annual animation fest it was time to focus on what we liked best from previous shows and continue to seek out films that really embrace the infinite mysteries that resonate with us. The result is DMTV, a program that goes further into experimental realms of video art and abstract visuals.
Highlights of this year’s program include:
Travel, aka The Trip (1973) – Kihachiro Kawamoto studied puppet animation in Prague in 1963 before going on to create his own haunting puppet and cut-out animations drawing from his own Japanese heritage. Travel depicts the journey of a young girl into the Dali-esque landscape of her own psyche.
Apeiron (1996) – Eurico Coelho depicts a modern technological labyrinth where society has surrendered to the cold lamps of their computer screens. The entirety of this ten minute film was animated on a Commodore Amiga 4000, giving the film a completely fresh aesthetic that has outlived the technology with which it was created.
The Peace Tape (2008) – With a title hearkening back to the analog era, The Peace Tape is a frenetic remix of old and new “found” video. Culling his sources from thrift stores (countless straight-to-VHS childrens’ programs), the Internet (a single YouTube clip featuring “dog in a dog costume”), and his own designs (flash animation of eyes and mouths, subliminal flickers of text), Ciocci concentrates hours of light entertainment into a dense, four-minute block. Saved from total sensory overload by the musical logic of Extreme Animals’ “A Better Way,” The Peace Tape is cryptic, hypnotic (and above all), empathetic. “Culture is out of control,” Ciocci explains, “but it is ok.”
The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D (2009) – This original animated web series is based on graphic novelist and comic book artist Dash Shaw’s latest book of the same title. Shaw’s animation has been widely praised for its eclectic style, innovative design and emotional depth.
DO YOU KNOW MR. KIAROSTAMI?
(1998) Directed by Reza Haeri
With humor and precision, the filmmaker tries to gauge the sentiments of ordinary people on the streets of Tehran about the famed director Abbas Kiarostami.
DV, 30 min.
Dream Home
The brand-new frightshow Dream Home leaps upon a serious issue, and grinds it in a delicious way: buying an apartment in majorly overcrowded Hong Kong ain’t cheap or easy, and when a young, upwardly mobile woman is denied ownership of her dream pad in a oceanfront high rise, she does what any of us would do -- she offs its tenants in an orgiastic bloodbath! Thankfully, director Ho-Cheung Pang keeps the social commentary to a minimum and concentrates on what really matters: gonzo gore, bouncing boobs and heaping fistfuls of crazy, over-the-top kills. That rare gem that gives you the genre standards you crave while still managing to be fresh, imaginative and wildly entertaining, Dream Home is a dream for fans of Asian genre cinema and horror fans alike. Don’t miss your chance to sign the lease -- IN BLOOD!
Dir. Ho-Cheung Pang, 2010, 96 min.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Where is Where?
“Truly pushes forward the possibilities of split-screen cinema.” —Time Out New York
Los Angeles premiere | Finland, 2009, 55 min., 35mm
In her critically lauded experimental narrative Where is Where? (Missä on missä?), Finnish multimedia artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila has designed a visually mesmerizing four-image split-screen to evoke and deconstruct the murder of a young French boy by two Algerian playmates during the Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s. Ahtila’s fragmented mise en scène interweaves the elements of the tragedy originally recounted in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth—moribund colonialism, the arid seduction of the Algerian landscape—with a postmodern sense of moral ambiguity as it comes to haunt a European poet, embodied with mystery and flair by Aki Kaurismäki’s muse, actress Kati Outinen. The evening also includes earlier shorts by Ahtila, whose installations and film works have been presented internationally at venues such as The Museum of Modern Art, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Sundance Film Festival, and the Marian Goodman Gallery.
In person: Eija-Liisa Ahtila
Electric Dreams
BLEEP BLORP BLOOP BOOP I LOVE YOU!! It’s almost Valentine’s Day, ladies, and you know what that means -- time to start making sweetheart cards for your main squeeze, best friend, “roommate”, or lover. We’re firming up the rules this time around -- which means that for this PJ party, NO BOYS ALLOWED!!! We might make exceptions for gents in drag or dudes in their sleep duds, but this night is all about the girls getting together to watch a movie, dance, make valentines and get digital!
You know how hard it is for a girl to come between a boy and his computer? Then how about a movie where the boy and the electronic device are finally vying for the girl? Edgar the Computer is big, chunky, beige and sentient -- just the way you ladies like ‘em, plus he’s voiced by weirdo Harold and Maude dreamboat Bud Cort! Twin Peaks’ Lenny Von Dohlen is the hot nerd who owns him, and Virginia Madsen is his va-va-voom musician neighbor whose hand they both clamor for, in this hyper-stylishly directed by Steve Barron (responsible for some of the Eighties’ most iconic music videos, like “Billie Jean”, “Money For Nothing” and a-Ha’s “Take On Me”.) Featuring wall to wall synth-pop by Giorgio Moroder and an unforgettable sugary theme song by The Human League, Electric Dreams is the super-fun MTV-influenced image of the future-past you’ll madly fall for!
Dir. Steve Barron, 1984, 35mm, 95 min.
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark
An Evening With Cassandra Peterson (feat. 1988's "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark"!)
NOTE: Ms. Peterson will not be appearing in character as “Elvira” during the show. Boobs, “B” movies, being a brassy broad -- all of those things played their part in making horror hostess Elvira first a local L.A. heroine, and then a national sensation. But there’s one more “B” we shouldn’t forget, and that’s brains: not the kind in a jar, but the ample lobes of Cassandra Peterson, the Groundlings graduate (Class of Pee Wee Herman!) who brought her to life. Holder of the Guinness World Record for “youngest Vegas showgirl,” Cassandra dated Elvis, lost her virginity to Tom Jones, and ran off to Italy to become frontwoman for a rock band, which led to her casting in Fellini’s Roma -- all before Elvira’s creation! Ms. Peterson will be with us tonight to watch her frighteningly fun 1988 feature film debut Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (which she co-wrote with fellow Groundling alum John Paragon, who also played “Jambi” of “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse”), as well as rare, favorite, and new episodes/segments of Elvira’s "Movie Macabre"! Bring your Q’s, and get ready for what will undoubtedly be some A’s (and T’s) to remember! Dir. James Signorelli, 1988, 35mm, 96 min.
FRED WORDEN: ILLUSIONS AND ALTERCATIONS
Los Angeles is proud to welcome one-time Angeleno Fred Worden with the first of two programs of his work in film and digital video, spanning four decades of moving image making. Fred Worden has been making experimental film since the mid 1970s. His films have been shown in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, The Museum of Modern Art , The Centre Pompidou, The Pacific Film Archive, The New York Film Festival, The London Film Festival, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Toronto Film Festival, The Hong Kong International Film Festival and numerous other experimental film venues. Fred Worden is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at UMBC.
THE HAUNTED
(a.k.a. The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre)
(1965) Directed by Joseph Stefano
Martin Landau stars as a Los Angeles-based architect-cum-paranormal investigator who specializes in assessing and exorcising old homes. Stefano here weaves together vengeance, hallucinogens and a “bleeding ghost” in a gothic telefilm that was deemed too frightening to air by network executives. Stefano's only directorial effort, this extremely rare pilot never aired in the U.S.
Producer: Joseph Stefano. Screenplay: Joseph Stefano. Cinematographer: William A. Fraker, Conrad Hall. Editor: Anthony DiMarco. Cast: Martin Landau, Judith Anderson, Diane Baker, Nellie Burt, Tom Simcox. 16mm, b/w, 52 min.
HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT'S INFERNO
Film director Henri-Georges Clouzot nearly lost his mind, as well as his career and even his life, obsessing over the Austrian-born multilingual actress Romy Schneider. In 1963, Clouzot, then one of France’s most acclaimed filmmakers, began work on “L’Enfer,” a tale of male jealousy and madness. A blank check from Columbia Pictures burning in his pocket, the 54-year-old Clouzot meticulously prepared his film. His journey of compulsion — dragging along colleagues — was rare for an artist of his caliber. At 26, Schneider, a fulsome, vixen-like actress was the object of Clouzot’s desire. Clouzot’s preparation included detailed storyboards, a color-coded notation system indicating changes in the protagonist’s mood, and a set of obsessively precise sound-design instructions. Once shooting began, he swapped between b&w and color, turning lake water blood-red and altering the actors’ skin tones. Clouzot’s “L’Enfer” is one of cinema’s most notorious films gone wrong. After weeks of all-night prepping, and days of shooting scenes that led nowhere, the production began to crumble. Soon after driving leading man Serge Reggiani off the set, Clouzot suffered a heart attack (not fatal) while shooting footage on a small boat. How much worse can it get?
“Henri-Georges Clouzot has been called “the French Alfred Hitchcock,” writes Joel Bellman. “This serves to diminish both filmmakers.” He continues, “Hitchcock and Clouzot shared a facility for taut thrillers, but there the resemblance largely ends. If Hitch’s crowd-pleasing romps showcased his “murderous gaze,” as one critic put it, they invariably included a mischievous wink. Clouzot’s perspective might better be described as the cold stare of pitiless cruelty, conceding nothing. The most memorable sequences in his two best-known films, “Le Salaire de la Peur” (“The Wages of Fear”) and “Diabolique,” plunge into the heart of darkness where characters don’t just die; they suffer excruciatingly first, their inescapable fate not always deserved. Only once did Hitchcock approach Clouzot’s level of obsession and personal torment – in “Vertigo,” which not coincidentally also flowed from the pen of Boileau-Narcejac, the writing team behind “Diabolique.” Unlike Hitchcock, Clouzot’s murderous gaze never blinked.”
Serge Bromberg’s documentary tells the saga of Clouzot’s L’Enfer.
Legacy Award, L.A. Film Critics Assoc.; 2010 César winner, Best Documentary.
Directed by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea; featuring Romy Schneider, Serge Reggiani, Bérénice Bejo, Jacques Gamblin, Catherine Allegret; in French with English subtitles
His Majesty The American
Silent superstar Douglas Fairbanks’ greatest asset was his boundless energy, his ability to bounce off the walls with an unlimited supply of daring-do -- and the frothy 1919 romantic comedy/actioner His Majesty The American is one of the greatest showcases of this charismatic gift! Setting the stage for his slate of famous swashbuckling pictures to come in the ‘20s, His Majesty finds Fairbanks as an independently wealthy and bored young man in Manhattan; after putting in time as an amateur firefighter for kicks and heading off to Mexico to upstage Pancho Villa(!), he travels to a fictional European kingdom with an amazingly manic exuberance to single-handedly restore order to a riot-ridden landscape. The first feature produced under the United Artists banner (a company jointly formed by titans Fairbanks, Chaplin, Pickford and Griffith), His Majesty is one of the most rip-roaring romps ever created for our beloved “fire-eating, speed-loving, space- annihilating, excitement-hunting thrillhound!” Dir. Joseph Henabery, 1919, 16mm. (Archival 16mm print courtesy of The Douris Corporation)
I Am Here....Now
(director/writer/star Neil Breen in person!)
Official semi-finalist at the Moondance Film Festival!
Many of Cinefamily’s HFS connisseurers have crashed up on the rocks trying to describe Las Vegas real estate agent cum visionary independent filmmaker Neil Breen. Inevitably, words and high-concept references fail, and one is reducing to just pressing a copy of actor/director/writer/producer/caterer Breen’s first feature Double Down into the confused hands of a future Breen-iac. The only way to understand Breen’s work is to just see it. Here...now...he’s graced us with another full-length excursion into his completely unique universe. This time around, Breen plays a messianic alien Being angered at the greed and corruption of the human species, particularly our lack of renewable energy and environmental consciousness -- oh, and business-man crucifixions and time-stopped gang wars..and...well, as Neil put it himself, “This thought-provoking supernatural film is filled with surprising mystical metaphors, exciting twists....and a stunning dramatic conclusion.” Come join The Man Who Four-Walled The Earth for a Q&A after the film!
Dir. Neil Breen, 2010, digital presentation, 87 min.
In The Soup
At the height of the indie boom, Alexander Rockwell won the Grand Jury prize at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival with this fantastic deadpan farce about the foibles and struggles of an aspiring filmmaker. Making ridiculously good use of indie poster boy Steve Buscemi as the young NY wannabee auteur and old-school Cassavetes favorite Seymour Cassel as the charismatic shyster/criminal who promises to finance Buscemi’s unfilmable behemoth dream project. Buscemi and Cassel are an absolute delight as the befuddled youngster and the “wise” scoundrel, whose magnetic comic chemistry cries out for future re-pairings -- and right down to the bit parts, everyone performs at the peak of their craft, with juicy roles also going to Sam Rockwell, Stanley Tucci, Elizabeth Bracco, Debi Mazar, and in one scene-stealing bit, Jim Jarmusch and Carol Kane offering Buscemi a demeaning stint for a bit of quick cash. Lively fun and a potent time capsule, In The Soup wonderfully captures a bohemian New York and a view of independent cinema soon to be replaced by a soulless doppelganger. Alexandre Rockwell wil be here at the Cinefamily for a Q&A after the film!
Dir. Alexandre Rockwell, 1992, 35mm, 93 min.
IVANS XTC
ivansxtc is based on Leo Tolstoy’s short story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Co-written, directed & shot by Rose himself it was one of the first features to use HD allowing a tiny crew to shoot with available light & in an extremely intimate way on a very low budget. Inspired performances by Danny Huston, as über Hollywood agent Ivan Beckman, and Peter Weller, who portrays mad hedonistic movie star Don West - a character rumored to be motivated by Jack Nicholson (whom ironically Huston’s sister, Angelica, was married to). Rose was compelled to write the screenplay after his huge budget Anna Karenina movie was taken out of his control by Universal & by the treatment of star agent Jay Maloney by CAA. In the 3 years after being officially fired for cocaine abuse Maloney had all but disappeared. On the first day of screening news came that Maloney had hung himself. Seeing Rose’s blatant interpretation of actual Hollywood events CAA attempted to bury the release. Even to this day, even on DVD, it is difficult to get.
I WISH I KNEW (HAI SHANG CHUAN QI)
Los Angeles premiere | 2010, 138 min., HDCAM
China’s most significant filmmaker of the decade has done it again, with another alluring hybrid of documentary and fiction. Here Jia weaves a dense texture between amorously shot footage of contemporary Shanghai and the films the city created or inspired. Peeking through the gaps of an architecture menaced by permanent urban renewal, he finds the traces of a romantic or brutal past, and echoes the voices of survivors or those who went into exile.
JEAN-LUC GODARD & IGOR STRAVINSKY BY RICHARD LEACOCK - 6-10pm Ishan Shapiro & Marija Coneva of Not This Body (in person) screen rare films by Leacock, who spawned the Direct Cinema movement in the US along with Robert Drew, D.A. Pennybaker and the Maysles brothers. 6pm: A STRAVINSKY PORTRAIT ('66, 55m) Stravinsky at home in California discussing his work with Rolf Liebermann, conducting an orchestra rehearsal in Hamburg, holding a press conference in London, and talking about creativity with old friend Balanchine. "Not constantly asking Stravinsky to do unnatural things, not filming the whole time, but building a friendship that would last a lifetime--his! Stravinsky had been filmed by CBS and didn't like it; then he was filmed by CBC from Canada and hated it... Stravinsky loved this film and it was shown everywhere except in America. 7:15pm: ONE P.M ('72, 90m) Godard’s collaboration with filmmakers Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker on the 1968 film 1 AM (One American Movie) fell apart when Godard became disillusioned with the project. After Godard's abrupt departure, Pennebaker and Leacock edited the resulting footage into One Parallel Movie. A reflexive piece that marks the unceremonious end of the decade. With Eldridge Cleaver, Amiri Baraka, Grace Slick. 9pm: L'ATELIER(S) DF LUC SIMON (2009, 15m) and EMOGRAPHIC CENSUS (2010, 25m) Shapiro & Coneva's experimental documentaries: One, made under the mentorship of Richard Leacock and Valerie Lalonde, has strong influences of Cinema Direct while at the same time planting a stake of realization in the ground about the temporality of memory - the other is a transit through perspectives, memories and experiences as we travel with four young media creators through Macedonia in search of "the light".
Joy House
1964/b&w/97 min./Scope | Scr: René Clément, Pascal Jardin; dir: René Clément; w/ Jane Fonda, Alain Delon, Lola Albright
Two mysterious American blondes alone in a rambling house, a handsome con artist on the run from gangsters, and an ex-chauffeur in the attic are the ingredients for this cat-and-mouse thriller played out on a dazzling black-and-white French Riviera by three of cinema's sexiest stars. Director Clement reunites with two collaborators from his hit film Purple Noon: Alain Delon, 5 years older and just as feline (the film's French title is Les felins); and cinematographer Henri Decaë whose credits include Les enfants terribles, Le samouraï, Bob le flambeur, The 400 Blows, Les cousins and The Lovers. "It's the kind of American pulp French filmmakers have always loved in which not one character has an iota of honesty or morality to them. What you get is Alain Delon in his best persona—a ne'er-do-well playboy flitting around the Mediterranean looking for cash and ass who escapes into the opulent Riviera clutches of icy widow Lola Albright and her dewy, bubbly cousin-cum-maid, played by a pristine 26-year-old Jane Fonda at the onset of her French phase. Delon is hired as a chauffeur but both the chateau-owning widow and the adorable but possibly unhinged kewpie doll have other plans for the wandering hunk, and it's got to do with murder, swapped identities, set-ups, and so on…This is my idea of escapism (and) Joy House is graceful, relaxed, fun-loving, and unpretentious."—Michael Atkinson, IFC.com
Kasper Toeplitz and Myriam Gourfink: Breathing Monster
Polish-French composer and electric bass player Kasper Toeplitz has developed a body of work in the no-man’s-land between “academic,” electronic composition and sheer noise. Known for collaborating with such unclassifiable musicians as Zbigniew Karkowski, Dror Feiler, Art Zoyd, Éliane Radigue, Phill Niblock and Ulrich Krieger, Toeplitz makes use of the computer both as a real instrument and as a tool for reflecting on music differently, transforming the musical parameters of pitch data and temporality. Now he teams with dancer and choreographer Myriam Gourfink to create an evening of abstracted, hypnotic movement and sound. Performing live, Toeplitz hybridizes his electronic theorbed bass and explores the frontiers between pitch, noise, oscillations and stillness while Gourfink uses meticulous internal visualizations to manifest an evolving, interconnected series of micro-movements.
Les bonnes femmes
1960/b&w/100 min. | Scr: Paul Gégauff, Claude Chabrol; dir: Claude Chabrol; w/ Bernadette Lafont, Stephane Audran, Lucile Saint-Simon, Clotilde Joano. Claude Berri
Four young Parisian women who work in an electric appliance store and are bored with their humdrum working day, seek glamour, happiness, and love during their free evenings. "One of the landmarks of the nouvelle vague, Les bonnes femmes—which takes place mostly at night in Paris's streets and clubs—turns a pitiless eye on male-female relationships in an increasingly fractured world. The 'good women' of the title pursue a variety of ultimately unsatisfying, and in one case lethal, dreams. Free spirit Jane (Lafont) gets involved with a boorish married businessman, while Ginette (Audran). who hopes to become a great singer, spends her time impersonating a tacky Italian street chanteuse in a seedy club. Rita (Saint-Simon) masochistically accepts the put-downs of her pompous bourgeois boyfriend, who allows her to be degraded by his parents; but her friend Jacqueline (Joano) the innocent romantic rejects a 'good man' in favor of an ominous biker…The film fleshes out this creepy world of used and user with a gallery of mostly male grotesques who function less as 'real' people than as embodiments of the women's barely sublimated fears and delusions. Chabrol's camera records these events with an impersonality that makes them all the more real and disturbing, and his treatment of the characters as giddy children on the edge of a precipice gives the film a gravitas that will keep it fresh in the viewer's mind."—Gary Morris, Bright Lights Film Journal.
Les cousins
1959/b&w/112 min. | Scr: Claude Chabrol, Paul Gégauff; dir: Claude Chabrol; w/ Gérard Blain, Jean-Claude Brialy, Stéphane Audran
Les cousins is the story of the country mouse and the city rat: Charles (Blain), a wholesome, virginal country lad, comes to Paris to live with his sophisticated city cousin, Paul (Brialy) who pursues a debauched student life in the Latin Quarter. As in Le beau Serge, their relationship becomes a power struggle between between two opposing moralities, a theme re-enforced by Chabrol's use of the actors from his previous film. Pauline Kael, one of the few American critics to appreciate the film and its moral ambiguities, noted that Chabrol who "particularly admires Strangers on a Train… suggests a peculiar role-transference between two men and deals with a particularly corrupt social climate of extreme wealth and extreme perversity." "While his New Wave peers made films that were intrinsically romantic (Truffaut), classically analytical (Rohmer) or self-consciously modernist (Godard, Rivette, Resnais, Varda), Chabrol's were a combination of social derision and black humor-an almost 'scientific' examination of characters whom he was not afraid to make unsympathetic. The critical jury is still out about whether the cynicism of the Parisian cousin in Les cousins is just the nature of the character or the position of the film-maker, or whether the vacuousness of the women in Les bonnes femmes should be seen as sociological observation or misogynist portrayal. What is undeniable in each of these films, though, is the novelty and freshness of Chabrol's study of his chosen milieu of disaffected youth."—Ginette Vincendeau, Sight and Sound
THE LOR GIRL
(1933) Directed by Ardeshir Irani
The first Iranian talking picture, shot in India with an Indian cast trained to act as Iranians, The Lor Girl tells the story of Golonar (“Pomegranate Blossom”), who dances in tea-houses and inns on the Lorestan-Khuzistan road, heroically surviving on her own in the world. The film captured the public imagination and was shown simultaneously in two theaters in Tehran for nearly seven months. . Sepenta went on to direct four more Persian talkies in India for the Iranian market.
Producer: Ardeshir Irani, Abdohossein Sepenta. Screenwriter: Abdohossein Sepenta. Cinematographer: Rostam Irani. Cast: Sohrab Poori, Roohangiz Sami-Nejad, Abdohossein Sepenta. 35mm, B/W, 90 min.
Love In The Afternoon
“In its way, just about perfect.” -- Pauline Kael
Love in the Afternoon, aka Chloe in the Afternoon, the last of Eric Rohmer’s six “Moral Tales”, is a film of sublime beauty. It is beautiful literally, in cinematographer Nestor Alemendros’s gorgeous natural lighting of the hustling, bustling afternoons of Paris, and the parade of alluring gamines that are keenly observed in all their attractive particulars of personality and personal grace; a parade led by that lead temptress Chloe herself, incarnated by French supermodel, mod club-girl, and real-life lover of men from Brian Jones Jones to Jack Nicholson -- the insouciant and unstoppable Zouzou. It is beautiful cinematically: in its invisibly perfect editing rhythms; in its thoughtful framings, details and visual motifs; and in its justly famous natural dialogue that is at once thoughtful, evealing, deceptive, and most of all, believable. And it is even beautiful in its spirit. For Rohmer, in making a film about the real struggles of monogamy and fidelity, the decisions that matter, the trials we all submit to, and the underlying emotional heft of our relationships, has made a triumphantly moving film about real lasting love that, in its own way, is more supremely romantic than a hundred Love Affairs, or a thousand Brief Encounters.
Dir. Eric Rohmer, 1972, 35mm, 97 min.
THE LOVERS’ WIND
(1978, France) Directed by Albert Lamorisse
Commissioned by the pre-revolutionary government of Iran, this film was entrusted to famed French director Albert Lamorisse (The Red Balloon) who fashioned it as a valentine to a magnificent ancient land, featuring flyover shots of breathtaking natural wonders and architectural patterns—all from the point of view of the various winds that inhabit the land. Lamorisse tragically died in a helicopter crash over the Karaj Dam in the late 1970s while filming scenes demanded by the Shah (privileging modern urban and industrial sites), and the film was not finished and released until 1978… in the last days before the Islamic revolution.
Producer: Albert Lamorisse. Cinematographer: Guy Tabary. Editor: Denise de Casablanca, Claude Lamorisse. DV, 71 min.
Merci pour le chocolat
2000/color/99 min. | Scr: Claude Chabrol, Caroline Eliacheff; dir: Claude Chabrol; w/ Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc, Anna Mouglalis
The fascinating actress Isabelle Huppert, who embodies the kind of barely concealed perversity Hitchcock salivated over, is the couture-attired, hard nut inside this creamy cinematic confection that focuses on a Lausanne couple—André (Dutronc), a concert pianist whose first wife died in a mysterious auto accident, and Mika (Huppert) the imperious, scheming heiress of a Swiss chocolate empire. When beautiful young Jeanne, who may or may not be André's daughter, enters the home, tensions mount and alliances shift; yet each evening, the implacable Mika goes on serving hot chocolate made with her "special" recipe. Tracking through the elegant rooms to the strains of Rachmaninoff and Debussy—"smooth as a ride in a DS Citroën" writes Guardian critic Peter Lennon—Chabrol catches his characters in private moments, peeling back the layers of duplicity that cloak this well-heeled family. As this impeccably directed film draws to a close the camera slowly circles Huppert as she reclines with an impassive expression on her face: it is one of the most memorable culminating images in Chabrol's entire oeuvre. "Chabrol has always enjoyed puncturing the balloon of bourgeois complacency… and working from a 1948 recipe by a sometime scriptwriter for 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents', Chabrol knocks off a witty, psychological confection-more gothic than noir-with tasty Isabelle Huppert at its center. Self-contained, enigmatic, illuminated from within, Huppert banks a performance that pays dividends throughout the film."—J. Hoberman, The Village Voice.
MR. HAJI, THE MOVIE ACTOR
(1932) Directed by Avanes Ohanian
Traditional Mr. Haji objects to the cinema on moral grounds. But when his daughter, her fiance, and Haji’s manservant conspire with a film director to secretly make a film with Haji as the subject, movie star Haji’s resolve is sorely tested in the last analysis. This rare cinematic jewel is a delight to watch both as a historical work that represents the old Tehran in the throes of modernization and as a prescient work of art that defines the inherent tensions between modernity and tradition still at work in the Iranian society and cinema of today.
Live musical accompaniment by Michael Mortilla.
Producer: Avanes Ohanian. Screenwriter: Avanes Ohanian. Cinematographer: Ebrahim Moradi, Paolo Potemkin. Cast: Habiollah Morad, Asia Qostanian, Abbasqoli Edalatpur. Digital Projection, silent, B/W, 100 min.
The Mother And The Whore
One of the greatest films of the French New Wave was actually made years after the movement’s “golden years” -- in 1973 by Jean Eustache, a figure on the fringes of the Cahiers group. One of only two narrative features Eustache left behind before his suicide in 1981, The Mother And The Whore is a stone cold masterpiece, and the epitome of a certain kind of French cinema: an epic four hours of young Parisians sitting in cafes or in bed, smoking, listening to records, talking about sex and relationships, all filmed in B&W (of course). Nouvelle vague icon Jean-Pierre Léaud plays opposite doe-eyed and lost Françoise Lebrun and gorgeous, knowing Bernadette Lafont in an emotionally scarring, unmoored post-May ‘68 love triangle, flanked by a panoply of Eusatche’s deep cinematic references; all three are brilliantly committed to their roles, and Eustache directs with supremely assured discretion. The literate, naturalistic dialogue was rigorously scripted from real-life conversations, and the ménage à trois drawn from Eustache's own relationships with Lebrun and his girlfriend -- who tragically committed suicide upon on seeing a rough cut. Totally absorbing, totally affecting and totally unmissable. A major film experience.
Dir. Jean Eustache, 1973, 35mm, 217 min.
MYSTERY OF THE LEAPING FISH
Showing before the feature is Fairbanks’ notorious 1916 drug comedy/detective spoof The Mystery Of The Leaping Fish -- and author/historian Jeffrey Vance will provide opening remarks on Fairbanks’ wild ‘n woolly career! Dirs. Christy Cabanne & John Emerson, 1916, 35mm, 25 min. (Archival 35mm print courtesy of The Douris Corporation)
New Urban Observations
Thom Andersen, Laura Kraning, and Steven O’Day in person!
These extraordinary films continue the rich tradition of the city symphony and the experimental and experiential films of the city, dating back to the earliest days of film. The city itself – its people and spaces, rhythms and hustle, and the life cycles of buildings and places – are viewed and made personal through the superb craft and perceptive gaze of tonight’s filmmakers. London, San Francisco, Detroit, Tokyo, and Los Angeles, all seen in their uniqueness, while all give insight into the arcs and possibilities of all cities.
The program includes two Los Angeles premieres: Jack Cronin’s ravishing look at the empty spaces of Detroit, and Laura Kraning’s immersive look at the reflections and images found at a drive-in in the City of Industry. Also, it includes another opportunity to see Thom Andersen’s latest 16mm film, of billboards and spaces of a lost Los Angeles, with its history still suffusing the present, after its two sold-out screenings thus far in Los Angeles. Steven O’Day finds the exhilarating possibilities of modern transportation in Tokyo; Tomonari Nishikawa masterfully distills Market Street, and film, to its essential lines; and Eva Weber allows us an intimate view of London from on high.
One False Move
Before he became an internationally known star, Billy Bob Thornton was a top notch screenwriter whose work dealt with complicated issues of race and life in the South. One False Move was his crowning achievement, telling the story of three very bad low-rent criminals on a collision course with a small town Southern sheriff played brilliantly by Bill Paxton. Billy Bob himself shows up as one of the slimeball killers! Carl Franklin had already directed a handful of movies before this, but One False Move feels like a first time effort in all the right ways; dark and knowing, the film oozes atmosphere and tension. When they talk about the early Nineties as Hollywood’s last Golden Age, they’re talking about movies like One False Move. Bill Paxton will be here before the film for introductory remarks!
Dir. Carl Franklin, 1992, 35mm, 105 min.
OXHIDE II (NIUPI II)
Los Angeles premiere | 2009, 133 min., DigiBeta
In 2004, at 23, Liu Jiayin stunned the world by shooting Oxhide in CinemaScope in her parents’ 50-square-meter apartment. She is back at REDCAT with an even bolder “sequel.” More tightly constructed—nine shots that go around a kitchen/workshop/dining table in 45-degree increments, performing a complete 180-degree match—Oxhide II is also dryly humorous, intelligent and insightful, deconstructing the dynamics of a family in crisis.
PAYBACK
(2010) Directed by Tahmineh Milani
Recently released from prison, Ziba, Maryam, Leila and Sara embark on a new life mission: to get revenge against all men for ruining their lives. Feigning streetwalking as a lure, they kidnap a number of womanizers and hypocrites, deriding them and taking their money. But they also discover a more complicated picture of the battle between the sexes than they originally expected.
Producer: Mohammad Nikbin. Screenwriter: Tahmineh Milani. Cinematographer: Alireza Zarrindast. Cast: Ladan Mostofi, Mahnaz Afshar, Elsa Firouz Azar. 35mm, 103 min.
PERSONAL ETHNOGRAPHIES
An evening of short video portraits, live music, and libations. Personal Ethnographies are an assembly of up-close depictions of friends and colleagues, both homemade and collected. Many of the subjects happen to be figures from the world of independent cinema, including portraits of or by Wendy and Shirley Clarke, Andy Lampert, Jonas Mekas, Sid Laverents, and the cast of Killer of Sheep. Also peppered in are informal glimpses and rare documents of LA's cultural landscape, including the subCacophony Society, Nora Keyes, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Listing Ship, and Monotrona. Filmforum's Adam Hyman will join the night's festivities in presenting his own recent portraits of the LA film scene in glorious Kodachrome. The evening will then morph into a music party with live performances by the illustrious Laura Steenberge and the Here and Now (aka the Echo Park Film Center's own Paolo Davanzo and Lisa Marr)! PRESENTED BY FILMMAKER/ARCHIVIST ROSS LIPMAN with special guests ADAM HYMAN, LAURA STEENBERGE, JAMES FLETCHER and THE HERE AND NOW
Poison
Todd Haynes (Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven) first exploded onto the post-Soderbergh ‘90s Sundance landscape with this controversial debut feature, a dizzying, perverse mix of kitschy drive-in fare, docudrama and lyrical poeticism. Sprinkled with quotes and situations from the literature of writer/thief/convict Jean Genet, and with a dose of vivid queer sexuality, Poison posits a triptych of stories relentlessly intercut with each other to produce an escalating sense of unease: a procedural pseudo-doc in which family and friends discuss a disappeared magical, murderous child; a ‘50s sci-fi parody featuring a mad doctor who chemically isolates the human sex drive; and, the aching tale of an inveterate thief whose prison life is disrupted by the object of his affection from their old reformatory days. Elegantly assembled and often disturbing, operating through dense subliminal suggestions that take hold long after the closing credits roll, Poison both nabbed the 1991 Sundance Grand Jury Prize, and ignited a firestorm of debate when its partial funding by the NEA became a target of the religious right. Come luxuriate in Poison’s visual fantasia, presented in a brand-new 20th anniversary 35mm print!
Dir. Todd Haynes, 1991, 35mm, 85 min. (Archival 35mm print courtesy of the Sundance Collection at the UCLA Film And Television Archive)
THE PRIDE OF PIKEVILLE
The evening starts with the riotous short The Pride of Pikeville, starring our favorite silent cross-eyed clown, Ben Turpin! Dir. Alfred J. Goulding, 1927, 35mm. (Archival 35mm print courtesy of the Library of Congress Motion Picture Collection)
QAISAR
(Caesar)
(1969) Directed by Masud Kimiai
Fati, sister of neighborhood tough guys Farman and Qaisar, is raped and impregnated by a rival tough. She commits suicide from shame. When Farman takes on the culprits, he is knifed to death, causing Qaisar to go on a tragic revenge spree. A seminal and popular film that was compared with Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, it ignited the Iranian New Film movement before the revolution.
Producer: Abbas Shabaviz. Screenwriter: Masud Kimiai. Cinematographer: Maziar Partow. Cast: Behrouz Vossoughi, Naser Malekmotii, Bahman Mofid. 35mm, B/W, 105 min.
Rat Scratch Fever
(World Premiere, director Jeff Leroy & cast in person!)
“This is just so stupendously silly and whacked.” - Andrew Mack, Twitch.com
Jeff Leroy's schlock masterpiece Rat Scratch Fever is one the greatest feats of cinematic ingenuity thus far this century. Made on a budget of cheeseburgers and good intentions, this phantasmagoria of puppets, miniature sets, greenscreens and live Food Of The Gods-style enlarged rodents rat-chets the Dark Star homemade aesthetic to a new glorious extreme, reaching beyond sci-fi and horror conventions to become something truly transcendent, psychedelic and wow-inducing -- and that barely rat-scratches the surface of this madcap ride! A veteran in the world of low-budget horror and softcore skin flicks, Leroy throws everything in his resourceful arsenal (and garage) at the screen for this staggering entertaining tale of astronauts that bring back humungoid mutant rats to a Los Angeles just waiting to be demolished by their feverish claws -- resulting in a mash-up of alien invasion, animal disaster and mega-action that boggles the mind, hammers the senses and fulfills all expectations. Leroy’s incredible trailer has been circulating geek blogs since 2009 -- and we can assure you the final product is every bit as mind-shatteringly inventive and crazed as you want it to be. Schedules permitting, Jeff Leroy and members of the cast will be here in person at the Cinefamily for a Q&A after the film!
Dir. Jeff Leroy, 2010, digital presentation, 90 min.
Robin Hood
After the successive successes of the spectacular The Mark of Zorro and The Three Musketeers, Fairbanks’ ambition became as bottomless as his physical prowess -- and so naturally, the production of 1922’s Robin Hood was destined to become a staggeringly opulent action extravaganza! Rather than covering the usual time-honored origin story touchstones, Fairbanks’ version instead gives us an opening act where he plays the chivalrous Earl of Huntington, who is a participant in the sword-heavy Crusades. Only upon returning back to England does he find that Prince John has turned a once-idyllic empire into a Dante-esque sty of corruption. Executed on a herculean scale, the film’s sets were erected by an army of five hundred carpenters and towered ninety feet in the air, covering ten acres of land -- historically accurate to the smallest detail. Add to that Fairbanks’ trademark gravity-defying stuntwork, and you’ve got one of the most joyous tellings of the beloved Robin Hood myth!
Dir. Allan Dwan, 1922, 35mm, 127 min.
RUSS FORSTER FILMS: TRIBUTARY ('01, 72m) at 6pm. Forster's (in person) engaging “tribute” bands documentary -- bar bands that imitate famous groups down to the costumes and stage sets. Featuring interviews and live footage of GIANT BUG VILLAGE (evangelizing for GUIDED BY VOICES), MORONIC REDUCER (raping the memory of the DEAD BOYS), MONGOLOID (preaching the gospel of DEVO) & more. TRIBUTARY is a study of pop music as an art form in flux, looking back to where it has gone before to seek clues about where it should go next. "Compulsively watchable" -- The Stranger, Seattle. Plus: SLUMBER PARTY VIDEO ('99, 3m) marks Forster's sole foray into the murky waters of music video to create a lovingly off-kilter portrait of Detroit, MI. SPRINGTIME FOR EVA ('04, 4m) finds director Forster obsessively matching the teutonic talents of gymnast EVA BRAUN and chanteuse NICO with unpredictable results. SO WRONG THEY'RE RIGHT ('95, 92m) at 8:00. FORSTER and DAN SUTHERLAND encapsulate a 10,000 mile journey around the U.S. in search of a group of 8-track tape fanatics that netted over 20 interviews delving into reminiscences, rants, political diatribes, fantasies, fix-it tips, sales pitches, and everything else that defined the skeptical yet inquisitive mind of the ’90s 8-track enthusiast. Plus: HOME EXORCISE ('10, 3m) pits the video workout talents of SUSAN POWTER, TONY LITTLE, and SID CAESAR against the relentless satanic skronk of THE FLYING LUTTENBACHERS, and represents director RUSS FORSTER’s latest ridiculous obsessions.
SALVE
(2010) Directed by Alireza Davoodnejad
Elderly Aziz is weighed down with concern for her drug-addicted granddaughter Maryam, but supportively tries to understand the young woman’s addiction and protect her from the worst excesses of her sad life. The eighteenth feature by Alireza Davoodnejad (who began his career as a screenwriter in Tehran at age seventeen), Salve is a poignant picture of both the distance, and the connections, between generations.
Producer: Alireza Davoodnejad. Screenwriter: Alireza Davoodnejad. Cinematographer: Reza Sheikhi. Editor: Masoumeh Shah Nazari. Cast: Alireza Davoodnejad, Ehteram Habibian, Tanaz Tabatabaei. 35mm, 95 min.
SCREAM OF FEAR, 1961, Sony Repertory, 81 min. Director Seth Holt’s first Hammer Studios effort tracks wheelchair-bound Penny (Susan Strasberg), who returns to her family’s French Riviera estate after her mother’s untimely death. Handsome chauffeur Bob (Ronald Lewis) and sinister Dr. Gerrard (Christopher Lee) enter the mix, and someone seems bent on driving Penny over the edge into madness or, worse, death!
SINGLE MAN (GUANGYUN)
U.S. premiere | 2010, 95 min., HDCAM
“This is a strange and delightful thing from China: a sex comedy, bawdy and a little raunchy, about four elderly farmers . . . all non-professional actors playing fictionalized versions of themselves. New director Hao Jie, with a bit of Boccaccio and a dollop of Rabelais, reveals a side of rural China you’ve probably never seen before . . . Chinese indie cinema at its most wryly entertaining.” —Vancouver International Film Festival
S.O.B., 1981, Warner Bros., 122 min. Dir. Blake Edwards. When director Richard Mulligan's expensive musical turns out to be a flop, he decides to recut it as an erotic epic that will exploit the squeaky-clean image of star Julie Andrews. This hilarious and trenchant satire has echoes of Edwards' own experiences making DARLING LILI, but its comedy reaches beyond mere score-settling to present a mercilessly funny - and at times surprisingly sweet - poison-pen love letter to the American cinema. The great supporting cast includes William Holden, Robert Webber, Robert Vaughn, Larry Hagman (J.R. of "Dallas") and a very young Rosanna Arquette.
Sparse Gardens (2010). Performance for 35 mm Kodachrome slides and cassette tape. Two types of gardened spaces common in Phoenix are compared visually and sonically: the fussily landscaped strips and islands of parking lots and driveways, and vacant lots, bulldozed clear of buildings or natural desert that have been re-inhabited by weeds or rogue/remnant landscaping plants.
TEHRAN TEHRAN
(2010) Directed by Dariush Mehrjui and Mehdi Karampour
This anthology film in two parts opens with “The Days of Acquaintance,” directed by Dariush Mehrjui, in which an ordinary family takes a zany, whirlwind tour of Tehran’s famous sites to pass the time after their house caves in. In director Mehdi Karampour’s “The Last String”, members of a rock group struggle amongst themselves to find a way forward after their upcoming public performance is cancelled by government authorities.
Producer: M.A. Hossein-Nejad. Screenwriter: Vahide Mohammadafar, Mehdi Karampour, Khosro Naquibi. Cast: Reza Yazdani, Raana Azadivar, Borzou Arjomand, Katayoun Amir Ebrahimi, Pantea Bahram, Rahman Hosseini. 35mm, 101 min.
The Thief of Bagdad
("re-imagined" by Shadoe Stevens, w/ score feat. the music of ELO, world premiere!)
One of the most rousing, lavish and extraordinary film adventures of the 1920s comes to the Cinefamily in a version never before heard! Over the past 30 years, broadcasting legend Shadoe Stevens (the Federated Group’s “Fred Rated”; television shows like “Hollywood Squares and “Dave’s World”; the voice of “The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson” and so much more) has been obsessed with Douglas Fairbanks’s masterful fantasy The Thief Of Bagdad -- and throughout the years, has been privately perfecting the ultimate lush, dreamlike soundtrack to accompany this favored silent. Tonight, we proudly present the world premiere of Shadoe’s “re-imagined” Thief of Bagdad, scored entirely to the legendary music of the Electric Light Orchestra, which inexplicably complements and enhances the action! It’s an exceptional experience, as if the music was written for the movie.
This eye-popping odyssey features Fairbanks as a street thief who, in order to prove his worth to a princess paramour, transforms himself and is whisked away through a variety of storybook scenarios. Leapfrogging from undersea kingdoms to cloud cities and lunar outposts. With a winged horse, magic crystals and flying carpets, it’s a film of breathtaking innovation and magic. Gorgeous art deco larger-than-life setpieces, thousands of extras, the best SFX of its era and Fairbanks’s physical mastery all meld with the timeless music of Jeff Lynne and the Electric Light Orchestra to produce a once-in-a-lifetime viewing experience!
Dir. Raoul Walsh, 1924, digital presentation, 140 min.
This Man Must Die
1969/color/110 min. | Scr: Claude Chabrol, Paul Gégauff; dir: Claude Chabrol; w/ Michel Duchaussoy, Caroline Cellier Jean Yanne, Anouk Ferjac
This seminal film from Chabrol's middle period, adapted by Paul Gégauff from a novel by Nicholas Blake, pseudonym of the poet Cecil Day-Lewis (Britain's Poet Laureate and father of Daniel Day-Lewis) tells of a widowed father's implacable pursuit of the hit-and-run driver who killed his young son on the deserted main street of a Breton village. His investigation leads to an affair with television actress who introduces him to the culprit—her brother-in-law Paul, the owner of an auto repair shop, and a brutish monster that everyone including his own son would like to see dead. As the "beast," Jean Yanne, a former radio comedian making his first film, gives an idiomatic performance, as hateful as any monster in Chabrol's zoo yet perversely charming."In the Chabrolian world revenge is never simple, or without its own interdependencies and moral ambiguities… and in its preoccupations, its surprises, its dislocations, its glorious excesses and the precise disclosures of its camera, This Man Must Die resembles earlier Chabrol. There are the usual great eating sequences, the usual unequaled ability visually to orchestrate a range of behavior among several people in any given scene, and the usual superb capacity to implicate an entire countryside in the movements of his drama. This alone places Chabrol among the best directors of thrillers, and in This Man Must Die the sea and the Atlantic coast of France collaborate in a quest that is also an expression of universal doom."—Roger Greenspun, The New York Times
THOMAS MAO (XIAO DONGXI)
Los Angeles premiere | 2010, 80 min., DigiBeta
One of the most original voices of post-socialist China, novelist/filmmaker Zhu Wen has crafted, for his third feature, a droll, surreal and ironic tale in which East meets West . . . or does it? Thomas is a painter trekking through the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, and Mao the scruffy “innkeeper” who lodges him. Gradually, what appears to be “reality” shifts. Who is the butterfly, who is the philosopher?
The Three Musketeers
“When Alexandre Dumas...said to himself ‘Well, I guess I might as well write a book called The Three Musketeers, he doubtless had one object in view: to provide a suitable story for Douglas Fairbanks to act in the movies.” - LIFE Magazine
1920’s The Mark Of Zorro established Douglas Fairbanks as the biggest action star of his day, and truly set the tone for the rest of his career -- but it was in The Three Musketeers that he pulled off, with consummate ease, possibly his most fantastic stuntwork. Even though he was 38 years old at the time, Douglas Fairbanks makes for all-time the role of D’Artagnan (the hot-headed young turk who joins the titular troika of rapier-wielding 17th-century soldiers), and employs a tongue-in-cheek style that has remained a constant in the swashbuckling genre, all the way up through today’s Pirates of the Carribbean. Watch for one of the most stunning stunts in early film, as Fairbanks does a one-handed handspring while reaching for a sword!
Dir. Fred Niblo, 1921, 16mm, 120 min.
THUNDER SOUL
Told with style and pizzazz, the rousing documentary Thunder Soul celebrates the Kashmere Stage Band, a worldwide sensation in the 1970s that will forever change the way you think about high school bands. When Conrad O. Johnson, a music teacher at a predominantly black high school in Houston, replaced the staid stage band standards with contemporary funk, jazz, and original compositions, he changed the lives of his students forever. Not only did they become one of the best bands, professional or amateur, around, but they learned lessons that stayed with them long after graduation, as evidenced thirty-five years later, when the band reunited to pay tribute to the man who made it all possible.
THE UNKNOWN
(1964) Directed by Gerd Oswald
With nods to Psycho and Clouzot’s Diabolique, The Unknown unleashes sadism and madness when a wealthy playboy lures two unsuspecting women into a house of horrors. With its nightmarish tone and art-film cinematography, The Unknown pilot was considered too off-beat by ABC and was retooled as an episode of Outer Limits. The original pilot is being screened tonight from a rare 35mm print.
Producer: Joseph Stefano. Screenplay: Joseph Stefano. Cinematographer: Conrad Hall. Editor: Anthony DiMarco. Cast: Vera Miles, Barbara Rush, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Scott Marlowe, David McCallum. 35mm, B/W, 45 min.
IN PERSON: Marilyn Stefano
Valentoons!
In the egalitarian cartoon world, marriage is not exclusively for one man and one woman. It can be between two mice, two wabbits -- even a skunk and a pussycat! Animation historian Jerry Beck (CartoonBrew.com) opens the film vault and presents a collection of love-obsessed cartoon classics starring all your favorites, from the sex-starved Pepe LePew to Tex Avery’s luscious Red Riding Hood. As usual, the program features rare 35mm and 16mm Technicolor film prints, as well as cartoons suitable for cartoon lovers of all ages! Bring a date -- and don’t be late!
Victory Over The Sun: Films and Videos by Michael Robinson
“Robinson parses familiarity down to its component parts then summarily turns them inside out.“ —Idiom
Over the past decade, Michael Robinson has created a singular body of work in film and video that explores the poetics of loss and the dangers of mediated experience. His idea of “narrative” and “experimental” film often includes among its strange and beautiful effects the emotive power of a pop ballad or the crusty images yielded by thrift store VHS tapes. Robinson was recently listed as one of the top ten avant-garde filmmakers of the 2000s by Film Comment, and his work has been screened in venues such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Film Festival, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Anthology Film Archives, and the Tate Modern, among others. He is currently a Visiting Professor of Cinema at Binghamton University. The program includes Victory Over the Sun, Hold Me Now, If There Be Thorns, and the West Coast premiere of These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us, among others. In person: Michael Robinson
The Wedding March
“The public claim that they were sickened by the stark reality of Greed...They want fairy tales...This time I am going to give them illusion with all the pretty trimmings, a fragile play of love.”-- Erich von Stroheim
In an art form celebrated for its larger-than-life personalities, the iron-willed Eric von Stroheim still remains one of filmmaking’s most mythical iconoclasts. Even though almost every one of his features was recut or otherwise mangled by the powers that be, his filmography is still more wildly vibrant and emotionally gripping than almost any of his contemporaries. 1928’s The Wedding March finds Fay Wray and von Stroheim as a commoner and an Austrian prince who fall madly in love after meeting by chance. The couple’s path to happiness is (of course) destined to become a deeply pothole-ridden road, however, if their respective arranged fiancé and fiancée have anything to say about it! Taken out of von Stroheim’s hands and reduced from an epic nearly-five-hour two-parter into a single two-hour film, The Wedding March magically still retains every bit of both the lyrical beauty and biting cultural critique its creator originally intended. Tonight’s presentation is screened from a restored Library of Congress 35mm print, which includes the film’s original Technicolor sequences! Dir. Erich von Stroheim, 1928, 35mm, 113 min. (Archival 35mm print courtesy of the Library of Congress Motion Picture Collection)
THE WHITE MEADOWS
(2010) Directed by Mohammad Rasoulof
This enigmatic feature tells the story of Rahmat, an elderly man who collects the tears of souls in pain. Traveling by boat to scenes of sorrow through a seascape dotted with salty white islands and cliffs, he encounters a woman consigned to the sea for rejecting an unwanted marriage, an artist punished for his choice of colors and other unfortunates. An allegory of persecution, Rasoulof’s elegant feature is both timely and timeless.
Producer: Mohammad Rasoulof. Screenwriter: Mohammad Rasoulof. Cinematographer: Ebrahim Ghafouri. Editor: Jafar Panahi. Cast: Hasan Pourshirazi, Younes Ghazali, Mohammad Rabbani. DigiBeta, 93 min.
WINTER VACATION (HANJIA)
Los Angeles premiere | 2010, 91 min., HDCAM
Slackers in Inner Mongolia meet the poetry of the absurd. In a dreary little northern town, kids have nothing to do . . . while the adults are wily or apathetic. For his third feature, poet/filmmaker Li Hongqi effortlessly leads the viewer through a series of breathtaking tableaux in which tension accumulates and then releases in unexpected, and often wickedly funny, ways.