a highly-opinionated selection of things happening around town, and sometimes out of town. this month's page here.
thu. mar. 8 one million b.c. (1940) FREE @ ucla james bridges white fence, thee oh sees @ pappy & harriet's shame, hunger @ new beverly a day at the races, the big store @ egyptian better than something: jay reatard 7:30 9:45 PM @ spielberg @ egyptian wild strawberries, persona @ aero the raid FREE (RSVP) 8 PM @ silent movie theatre life without principle FREE @ melnitz movies @ ucla james bridges the american friend, chambre 666 @ lacma fri. mar. 9 brenda holloway, the gaylads @ echoplex whirr @ the smell kino-week nos. 31-35, the eleventh year @ ucla film archive breakfast at tiffany's, roman holiday @ new beverly better than something: jay reatard 7:30 9:45 PM @ spielberg @ egyptian a night at the opera, room service @ egyptian raging bull, requiem for a heavyweight @ aero the third part of the night @ the unbelievable genius of andrzej zulawski @ silent movie theatre sound of noise 10 PM @ silent movie theatre the rules of the game, casque d'or @ lacma white magic @ dem passwords gibbons and the sluts @ tribal cafe dunes (8:00) FREE @ vacation vinyl sat. mar. 10 tillie's punctured romance 8 PM @ royce hall organ and silent film @ ucla royce hall luckman jazz orchestra: tribute to j.j. johnson @ luckman fine arts kino-pravda nos. 18 & 20-22 @ ucla film archive crocodiles, dunes @ echoplex white magic, lucky dragons @ the smell breakfast at tiffany's, roman holiday @ new beverly better than something: jay reatard 7:30 9:30 PM @ spielberg @ egyptian duck soup, animal crackers @ egyptian barry lyndon @ aero the devil 7 PM @ the unbelievable genius of andrzej zulawski @ silent movie theatre sound of noise 9:50 PM @ silent movie theatre confined madness in film: bunker 731 & titicut follies 8 PM @ epfc sun. mar. 11 bell gardens @ echoplex the good the bad and the ugly 3:30 7:30 PM @ new beverly better than something: jay reatard 4 PM @ spielberg @ egyptian monkey business, the cocoanuts @ egyptian the long day closes @ aero sound of noise 3:45 10:15 PM @ silent movie theatre on the silver globe 6:30 PM @ the unbelievable genius of andrzej zulawski @ silent movie theatre the l.a. rebellion: boundary-breaking shorts @ spielberg @ egyptian mon. mar. 12 the good the bad and the ugly 8 PM @ new beverly the terence davies trilogy @ aero sound of noise 7:45 10:15 PM @ silent movie theatre frank fairfield @ redwood clueless 8 PM @ unique la movie night @ echoplex tue. mar. 13 grass widow, the raincoats @ echoplex sarah vowell & jeff garlin 8 PM @ largo the good the bad and the ugly 8 PM @ new beverly sound of noise 7:45 10:15 PM @ silent movie theatre double indemnity 1 PM @ lacma wed. mar. 14 gentlemen prefer blondes, bus stop @ million dollar theater jeanne dielman 23 quai du commerce 1080 bruxelles 8 PM @ new beverly the lady from shanghai, mr. arkadin @ egyptian the lady vanishes (1938) @ aero sound of noise 4:45 10:00 PM @ silent movie theatre modern times @ silent movie theatre pig 8 PM @ downtown independent thu. mar. 15 jeanne dielman 23 quai du commerce 1080 bruxelles 8 PM @ new beverly the snowtown murders 7:30 9:30 PM @ spielberg @ egyptian miracle mile, cherry 2000 @ egyptian the night of the hunter @ aero sound of noise 7:45 10:15 PM @ silent movie theatre kren / lowder / schaller 8 PM @ epfc wizards @ lacma fri. mar. 16 alien MIDNIGHT @ nuart mingus dynasty 8 PM @ ucla royce hall dead meadow, the loons @ casbah (SD) ezra buchla, amps for christ @ handbag factory anatomy of a murder 8 PM @ new beverly the snowtown murders 7:30 9:30 PM @ spielberg @ egyptian a clockwork orange, time after time @ egyptian silent comedy shorts program @ aero la femme publique @ the unbelievable genius of andrzej zulawski @ silent movie theatre klown 10:15 @ silent movie theatre jon jost's chameleon 8 PM @ epfc brent weinbach (8:00) @ the improv sat. mar. 17 three songs of lenin, lullaby @ ucla film archive anatomy of a murder 4:30 8:00 PM @ new beverly the snowtown murders 7:30 9:30 PM @ spielberg @ egyptian tron (70mm) @ egyptian if..., evilenko @ aero angel city 5 PM @ an afternoon with jon jost @ silent movie theatre klown 9:45 PM @ silent movie theatre yhomeless? 7 PM @ downtown independent sun. mar. 18 the seventh cross 7 PM, bad day at black rock @ ucla film archive sir richard bishop @ museum of jurassic technology the snowtown murders 4 PM @ spielberg @ egyptian swimming in nebraska @ spielberg @ egyptian baraka (70mm) @ egyptian o lucky man! @ aero damsels in distress (sneak preview) FREE (RSVP) 8 PM @ silent movie theatre the blue note 5 PM @ the unbelievable genius of andrzej zulawski @ silent movie theatre thee cormans, thee tee pees 1 PM @ rock n' roll bbq @ 3560 opal st. los angeles mon. mar. 19 david hockney: a bigger picture 7 PM @ lacma tue. mar. 20 burning ambition, operation pink squad ii @ grindhouse film fest @ new beverly julia holter FREE 7 PM @ amoeba driftwood singers @ satellite la strada FREE (RSVP) 7 PM @ usc ray stark the sting 1 PM @ lacma wed. mar. 21 the last hurrah @ ucla film archive taxi driver @ million dollar theater eternity and a day 8 PM @ new beverly germaine @ aero city lights @ silent movie theatre detachment FREE (RSVP) 7 PM @ usc ray stark exit through the gift shop, catfish FREE 7 PM @ ampas linwood dunn thu. mar. 22 daniel eisenberg: the unstable object 8:30 PM @ redcat eternity and a day 8 PM @ new beverly birdman of alcatraz @ egyptian the seven-per-cent solution, hamlet (1969) @ aero new works salon 8 PM @ epfc the raid FREE @ melnitz movies @ ucla james bridges artists and models, easy living @ lacma fri. mar. 23 the big lebowski MIDNIGHT @ nuart thee tee pees, thee cormans @ mr. t's bowl burger boogaloo @ thee parkside (SF) strange boys FREE (w/ RSVP) @ los globos the shop around the corner, design for living @ new beverly moonstruck, 9 to 5 @ aero last days here 8 PM @ silent movie theatre creepers MIDNIGHT @ silent movie theatre maya deren on film, in the mirror of maya deren @ lacma breathless @ ampas samuel goldwyn hot coffee @ the broad white fence @ center for the arts eagle rock sat. mar. 24 morton subotnick & california e.a.r. unit 8:30 PM @ redcat strange boys, white fence, king tuff, audacity, cosmonauts, dirt dress, pangea, ty segall, etc @ burgerama @ the observatory (santa ana) three heroines, for you front! @ ucla film archive the clock FREE (noon 3/24 to noon 3/25) @ lacma burger boogaloo @ thee parkside (SF) the shop around the corner 3:30 7:30 PM, design for living 5:30 9:30 PM @ new beverly child's play MIDNIGHT @ new beverly sunset boulevard, mulholland drive @ aero my nights are more beautiful than your days 7 PM @ the unbelievable genius of andrzej zulawski @ silent movie theatre last days here 9:45 PM @ silent movie theatre 5 days in denver 12:05 PM @ la film + music weekend @ downtown independent uprising: hip hop and the l.a. riots 8:45 PM @ la film + music weekend @ downtown independent dead meadow @ alex's bar sun. mar. 25 the living end: remixed and remastered 7 PM @ ucla film archive krautrock nite @ part time punks @ the echo burger boogaloo @ thee parkside (SF) la dolce vita 3:30 7:30 PM @ new beverly the italian connection, il boss @ egyptian mean streets, across 110th street @ aero la fidelite 6:30 PM @ the unbelievable genius of andrzej zulawski @ silent movie theatre last days here 4:10 10:30 PM @ silent movie theatre mon. mar. 26 la dolce vita 8 PM @ new beverly last days here 11 PM @ silent movie theatre shoah (first era) FREE 7 PM @ hammer tue. mar. 27 la dolce vita 8 PM @ new beverly last days here 7:45 PM @ silent movie theatre dune FREE (RSVP) 7 PM @ usc ray stark the killers 1 PM @ lacma shoah (second era) FREE 7 PM @ hammer if a tree falls: the story of the earth liberation front FREE 7 PM @ mandrake wed. mar. 28 fast times at ridgemont high, rock'n'roll high school @ million dollar theater the makioka sisters, an autumn afternoon @ new beverly touch of evil, the trial @ egyptian foreign correspondent @ aero the circus @ silent movie theatre last days here 10:15 PM @ silent movie theatre thu. mar. 29 the makioka sisters, an autumn afternoon @ new beverly bullitt, the hunter @ egyptian the manchurian candidate (1962) @ aero l'amour braque @ the unbelievable genius of andrzej zulawski @ silent movie theatre last days here 10:15 PM @ silent movie theatre la air: margie schnibbe 8 PM @ epfc attenberg FREE @ melnitz movies @ ucla james bridges we are legion: the story of the hacktivists FREE (RSVP) @ crawford family forum sherlock jr. @ inside the booth: a journey through projection @ ampas linwood dunn white magic @ del monte speakeasy fri. mar. 30 guess who's coming to dinner @ ucla film archive we need to talk about kevin, orlando @ new beverly papillon, soldier in the rain @ egyptian annie hall, radio days @ aero the important thing is to love 7:45 PM @ the unbelievable genius of andrzej zulawski @ silent movie theatre barbarella FREE (RSVP) 7 PM @ usc norris mapcap modernism: mid-century cartoons from upa and beyond @ lacma jon brion @ largo gibbons and the sluts @ the smell sat. mar. 31 kino-eye, kino-pravda no. 23 @ ucla film archive l'aura moire @ decadance super soiree @ mr. t's god equals genocide @ 5676 york we need to talk about kevin 3:15 7:30 PM, orlando 5:30 9:45 PM @ new beverly the great escape @ egyptian cinema paradiso @ aero szamanka 9:15 PM @ the unbelievable genius of andrzej zulawski @ silent movie theatre the great war FREE (RSVP) 12:30 PM @ usc norris serpico FREE (RSVP) 3 PM @ usc norris death wish FREE (RSVP) 5:15 PM @ usc norris king kong (1976) FREE (RSVP) 7 PM @ usc norris army of darkness FREE (RSVP) 9:30 PM @ usc norris dunes, abe vigoda, infinite body @ bootleg saccharine trust @ 2nd st. jazz sun. apr. 1 the thomas crown affair (1968), the getaway (1972) @ egyptian bugs bunny cartoon classics 4 PM @ aero the life and death of colonel blimp @ aero boris godounov 5 PM @ the unbelievable genius of andrzej zulawski @ silent movie theatre blue velvet FREE (RSVP) 12:15 PM @ usc norris manhunter FREE (RSVP) 2:30 PM @ usc norris julia holter FREE @ atwater crossing suicide tribute show @ part time punks @ echo mon. apr. 2 narrative bodies: films and videos by abigail child 8:30 PM @ redcat peter kolovos @ dem passwords neonates, chain & the gang @ the smell on the silver globe @ silent movie theatre possession 10:45 PM @ silent movie theatre tue. apr. 3 eagleheart: season 2 sneak preview 10:15 PM @ silent movie theatre the seventh cross 7 PM @ getty center chain and the gang @ satellite possession @ silent movie theatre wed. apr. 4 for heaven's sake, why worry? @ silent movie theatre pariah, my summer of love @ new beverly mccabe & mrs miller @ aero possession 10:20 PM @ silent movie theatre thu. apr. 5 rod bradley films FREE 7 PM @ 7 dudley cinema @ beyond baroque carre blanc FREE @ melnitz movies @ ucla james bridges fri. apr. 6 hausu MIDNIGHT @ nuart mazzy star @ mcnear's mystic theatre (petaluma) alice, valerie and her week of wonders @ lacma sat. apr. 7 mazzy star @ harlows (sacramento) julia holter (7:00) FREE @ origami vinyl alice in wonderland (1933) 5 PM @ lacma mon. apr. 9 sharon lockhart: double tide 8:30 PM @ redcat tue. apr. 10 mazzy star @ cocoanut grove historic ballroom (santa cruz) bad fever FREE @ melnitz movies @ ucla james bridges the search 7 PM @ getty center exploding flowers @ silverlake lounge wed. apr. 11 mazzy star @ regency ballroom (SF) fri. apr. 13 the melvins @ troubadour white fence, sandwitches @ satellite sun. apr. 15 godspeed! you black emperor @ fernwood campground (big sur) mon. apr. 16 seeing and awakening: new films by nathaniel dorsky 8:30 PM @ redcat ararat FREE 7 PM @ hammer tue. apr. 17 the man who knew too much 1 PM @ lacma high noon 7 PM @ getty center wed. apr. 18 hit so hard: the life and near-death story of drummer patty schemel FREE (RSVP) 7 PM @ usc ray stark moon duo, black angels @ music box guitar wolf @ satellite thu. apr. 19 wild flag @ el rey frankie rose @ satellite sat. apr. 21 heroes and heroines @ pehrspace mon. apr. 23 bill morrison: miners bridges lost love and other retrieved treasures 8:30 PM @ redcat jeff mangum @ orpheum tue. apr. 24 julia 7 PM @ getty center fri. apr. 27 jon brion @ largo sat. apr. 28 the birds 2:00 8:00 PM @ alex theatre pandora's box 7 PM @ getty center the legend of billie jean 8 PM @ devil's night drive-in white magic, lavender diamond @ hm157 grilled cheese invitational @ rose bowl sun. apr. 29 gilda 3 PM @ getty center mon. apr. 30 the imaginary voyages of maureen selwood 8:30 PM @ redcat tue. may 1 MAY 1ST GENERAL STRIKE - http://www.occupymay1st.org/ wed. may 2 dublab presents a labrat matinee 10: the light bends FREE (RSVP) 7 PM @ usc ray stark sat. may 5 a streetcar named desire 3 PM @ getty center and god created woman 7 PM @ getty center mon. may 7 cine povera: mexican experiments in 16mm 8:30 PM @ redcat sat. may 12 faster pussycat! kill!... kill! 8 PM @ devil's night drive-in wed. may 16 cooked FREE 7 PM @ hammer fri. may 18 dum dum girls @ echoplex sat. may 19 luckman jazz orchestra: tribute to charlie parker @ luckman fine arts sun. may 20 l.a. filmworks: the state of the art in los angeles 1980 @ spielberg @ egyptian mon. may 21 new day at 40: a community's celebration 8:30 PM @ redcat tue. may 22 spiritualized @ wiltern thu. may 24 beck @ santa barbara bowl fri. may 25 jon brion @ largo sat. may 26 silver lake jubilee sun. may 27 silver lake jubilee wed. may 30 paper moon 8 PM @ last remaining seats @ los angeles theatre wed. june 6 tootsie 8 PM @ last remaining seats @ orpheum theatre wed. june 13 the big sleep 8 PM @ last remaining seats @ los angeles theatre sat. june 23 l'inferno 3 PM @ getty center dante's inferno (2007) 7 PM @ getty center sun. june 24 moonbeams @ the echo dante's inferno (1924) 3 PM @ getty center wed. june 27 robin hood (1922) @ last reminaing seats @ orpheum theatre sat. june 30 the wizard of oz (1939) 2:00 8:00 PM @ last remaining seats @ saban theatre WHAT IT IS: ALICE 1988/color/86 min. Scr/dir: Jan Svankmajer; w/ Kristýna Kohoutová. After twenty-five years creating some of cinema’s most indelible stop-motion shorts, “militant surrealist” Jan Svankmajer took the leap into feature filmmaking with this most fitting adaptation. Blending live-action with puppets, Svankmajer transforms Lewis Carroll’s episodic fantasy into a saga of sinister, voluptuous whimsy. A flesh-and-blood Alice is both narrator and protagonist, addressing the audience at the film’s start to say, “Alice thought to herself, ‘Now you will see a film for children . . . perhaps.” Svankmajer’s basement “wonderland” of taxidermied creatures and sundry everyday items evokes a Joseph Cornell bricolage crossed with a butcher’s display case. "Disney + Buñuel = Svankmajer's Alice."—Milos Forman. ALICE IN WONDERLAND 1933/b&w/76 min. Scr: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, William Cameron Menzies; dir: Norman Z. McLeod; w/ Charlotte Henry, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, W.C. Fields, Edward Everett Horton, Charles Ruggles, Mae Marsh, Roscoe Karns, Jack Okie, Baby LeRoy, Edna May Oliver, May Robson, Louise Fazenda The sound era’s first major adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” story, Norman McLeod’s Alice in Wonderland boasts an all-star cast of Paramount players: from Cary Grant and Gary Cooper to W.C. Fields and Lubitsch regulars Edward Everett Horton and Charles Ruggles, as well as Griffith supporting star, Mae Marsh. Interweaving episodes from both of Carroll’s Alice books, the film is both madcap and mordant. Though directed by MCleod, the film’s expressionistic and claustrophobic tone is largely due to its co-screenwriter/art director William Cameron Menzies. Having worked on both the Fairbanks and Powell/Korda versions of Thief of Bagdad, Menzies’s career after Alice veered from Hollywood spectacles, such as Gone with the Wind and Duel in the Sun, to dark, atomic-age fantasies such as Things to Come and Invaders from Mars. “As dazzling as today’s digital effects can be, we remain all too aware of how they are accomplished (computers!) for them to possess the seductive sense of mystification that Menzies and McLeod achieved here, using practical techniques derived from Victorian stage magic.”—Dave Kehr, New York Times. THE AMERICAN FRIEND 1977/color/125 min. Scr/dir: Wim Wenders; w/ Bruno Ganz, Dennis Hopper, Gerard Blain,Lisa Kreuzer, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Jean Eustache, Lou Castel. Wim Wenders folds his love of cinema neatly into his international break-out The American Friend, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel Ripley’s Game. In Wender’s version, all of the hoods floating around terminally ill picture framer Jonathan (Bruno Ganz) are played by film directors Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray, Gérard Blain, and Jean Eustache. In the title role is Dennis Hopper, wearing a crumpled cowboy hat, who is given to philosophic flights of fancy while regarding everything going on around him. He wants Jonathan as a hired gun for a hit in the Paris Métro. As Jonathan is slowly pulled into the Hopper’s seductive world, where crime and art intertwine, Wenders and cinematographer Robby Müeller design stylish, color-coordinated set pieces. “Easily Wenders's best film and, along with Chinatown, the most powerful '70s neonoir.”—Amy Taubin, Village Voice. ANATOMY OF A MURDER A riveting courtroom drama pitting small town lawyer James Stewart against big city prosecutor George C. Scott in the trial of Ben Gazzara, accused of murdering his wife's (Lee Remick) rapist. Stylish and sophisticated with a brilliant score by Duke Ellington. 1959, USA, 35mm, 160 minutes. directed and produced by Otto Preminger; screenplay by Wendell Mayes; story by John D. Voelker; music by Duke Ellington; starring James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, Arthur O'Connell, George C. Scott ANGEL CITY For decades, Jon Jost has remained one of our country’s most radical, experimental and truly independent filmmakers — and a revelatory font of boundless cinematic energy. Having worked constantly from the mid-’60s up through to today, Jost has worked outside the mainstream filmmaking apparatus to write, direct, photograph, produce and edit a landmark body of docs, fiction features and essay films that pierce through our collective soul, and question the very foundation of our alienated American experience. Join us as we probe Jon’s mind in an in-depth Q&A session about his one-of-a-kind whirlwind international filmmaking career, followed by a rare screening of Angel City, one of his very first features (and a fantastic Los Angeles time capsule to boot.) In an inventive and playful post-Godardian neo-noir riff, Angel City’s loose narrative gives us both the satisfying shape of a hardboiled detective fiction, and a densely-layered lasagna of Hollywood trope mockery, gleefully disruptive textual asides and pure love for the cinematic form. Dir. Jon Jost, 1977, HD presentation, 75 min. AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON This profoundly simple and moving film examines changing familial relationships in an increasingly Americanized postwar Tokyo. With his unmistakable and inimitable style, Ozu has created a serenely beautiful film which tells the timeless, moving tale of a father giving up his only daughter in marriage. Both humorous and heartbreaking, An Autumn Afternoon was Ozu's 53rd and last film. In Japanese with English subtitles. 1962, Japan, 35mm, 112 minutes. directed bt Yasujirô Ozu; starring Chishû Ryû, Shima Iwashita, Keiji Sada; in Japanese with English subtitles Ararat Ararat, is hands down the year’s [2002] most thought-provoking film. —New York Times Ararat is based loosely on the Siege of Van during the Armenian Genocide. While exploring the human impact of that specific historical event, the film also examines the nature of truth and its representation through art. Ararat stars Charles Aznavour, Christopher Plummer, and David Alpay and won several awards, including Best Film on Human Rights by the Political Film Society of Hollywood and the Freedom of Expression Award from the National Board of Review in New York. (2002, Dir. Atom Egoyan, 115 min.) ARTISTS AND MODELS 1956/color/109 min./VistaVision Scr: Frank Tashlin, Hal Kanter, Herbert Baker; dir: Frank Tashlin; w/ Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Shirley MacLaine, Dorothy Malone, Eva Gabor, Anita Ekberg Jerry Lewis’s success at Paramount was so vital that the studio’s head once said, “If he wants to set fire to the studio, I’ll give him the match.” Lewis began his climb to the top with Dean Martin in Artists and Models (1955), which was one of their biggest budgeted efforts. In the film, Lewis plays Eugene, whose obsession with comic strips gives him horrific nightmares. Worst of all, Eugene’s continual state of anxiety is enormously irritating to his roommate, the would-be painter Rick (Martin). When Eugene discovers that one of his neighbors (Shirley MacLaine) is the creator of the Bat Lady comic that has invaded his dreams, his world goes into the most suggestive paroxysms of cartoon sexuality that director Frank Tashlin can mine. ATTENBERG Born and raised in an abandoned mill town built around a single high-rise apartment building, Marina (Ariane Labed) has fallen in love with a failed architectural experiment and forgotten all about the people who were supposed to live in it. Built sometime in the sixties, Attenberg was never meant to harbor human warmth in the first place. Its sole purpose was to procure obedient workers for the nearby aluminum factory, offering a colorless life to go with the regulation outfit. Hardly the stuff dreams are made of. The only romance that ever blossoms amidst the white-washed walls of this ghost town is of the fleeting variety, here now and gone tomorrow, as Marina’s promiscuous friend Bella (Evangelia Randou) would readily attest to. The only long-standing engagement is the one between Marina’s father – one of the project’s leading architects – and the city. Eternally bound to his concrete mistress, he now follows her downward spiral, as his cancerous innards are decaying in synch with the building’s ancient plumbing. No wonder his daughter never learned how to love. And the only man who could ever teach her – a handsome stranger in town for business – might have entered her life a little too late. Will Marina follow her father down the path of destruction, or will she break free of the asphalt and concrete jungle that is her home? Join us for a post-show Q&A with costume designer Thanos Papastergiou! Writer/Director: Athina Rachel Tsangari; Starring: Ariane Labed, Giorgos Lanthimos, Vangelis Mourikis, Evangelia Randou; Strand Releasing; Blu-Ray, 97 min. BAD FEVER Eddie (Kentucker Audley) is a twenty-something loner whose primary goal in life is to one day take the stage at the local comedy club. He spends most of his free time speaking into a handheld recorder, practicing “jokes” (more like monologues without a punch line) and reflecting on his day-to-day life. He is so inept at social interaction that his conversations with others frequently mirror his conversations with himself – they are free-form, nearly incomprehensible, and at times so formally worded that one gets the impression that his only concept of language comes from books or movies rather than from other people. His life is thrown into a tailspin when he begins a quasi-romantic relationship with a drifter named Irene (Eleonore Hendricks) that soon becomes the dominant focus of his life. But Irene is just as broken as he is and brings her own set of issues to the table, and Eddie’s tenderness and fragility make him an easy target for manipulation. Join us for a post-show Q&A with writer/director Dustin Guy Defa, moderated by Melnitz Movies Director Samuel B. Prime. Writer/Director: Dustin Guy Defa; Starring: Kentucker Audley, Eleonore Hendricks, Annette Wright, Allison Baar, Duane Stephens, Dustin Guy Defa, Hayward Buchanan, Scott Parisi; Factory 25 Releasing; Blu-Ray, 77 min. BETTER THAN SOMETHING: JAY REATARD 2011, 89 min, USA, Dir: Alex Hammond, Ian Markiewicz. This intimate documentary portrait of the controversial and prolific garage rock icon Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr., better known to the world as Jay Reatard, shines a light on Jay's complicated punk-rock world in Memphis, Tennessee. Shot just months before his untimely death, BETTER THAN SOMETHING eloquently interweaves cinéma vérité, interviews, archival concert performances and scenes from an insightful and candid week spent with Jay, who reveals personal childhood stories and the struggles of life in Memphis. THE BIG STORE 1914, Warner Bros., 83 min, USA, Dir: Charles Reisner When department store co-owner and heir Tommy Rogers (Tony Martin) makes the unpopular decision to sell and an attempt is made on his life, he hires the world’s worst private detective, Wolf J. Flywheel (Groucho Marx), to protect him and track down the assailant. Groucho is joined by Chico and Harpo in this hilarious slapstick farce, with freewheeling department store antics that include the use of elevators, chandeliers, roller skates and a mail chute! BILL MORRISON: MINERS, BRIDGES, LOST LOVE AND OTHER RETRIEVED TREASURES Los Angeles premiere | The Miners’ Hymns (USA/UK, 2011, 52 min, HD) Since The Film of Her (1996), award-winning filmmaker Bill Morrison has completed more than 20 experimental pieces in which he poetically and rhythmically reworks archival footage in various stages of preservation or decomposition. With The Miners’ Hymns, he teams up with Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson to celebrate the culture and political struggles of the Durham collieries in northeastern England. Weaving together stunning black-and-white footage from the early 1900s through the massive 1984 strikes, the film montages different aspects of the miners’ lives—the hardship of pit work, the role of the trade unions, the tradition of the colliery brass bands and the annual Miners’ Gala in Durham. A selection of earlier short films, including Outerborough (2005) and Release (2010) rounds out the evening. In person: Bill Morrison BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ 1962, Park Circus, 147 min, USA, Dir: John Frankenheimer, Charles Crichton Convicted killer Robert Stroud (Burt Lancaster) becomes an internationally respected bird expert from behind prison bars in this true story. Director John Frankenheimer livens up a potentially static tale with innovative visuals and help from a supporting cast that includes Karl Malden, Telly Savalas and Edmond O'Brien. THE BLUE NOTE (from IMDB) The exiled Polish composer Chopin (played by Janusz Olejniak, a real-life Polish pianist with no prior acting experience) is living with his mistress, the romantic novelist George Sand (Marie-France Pisier) in her idyllic country retreat at Nohant. After years of tempestuous on-and-off passion, Chopin still loves his lady, but his eye is turning more and more towards her provocative and nubile daughter (Sophie Marceau). Dir. Andrzej Zulawski, 1991, 35mm, 135 min. BURNING AMBITION (from IMDB) This is director/martial arts star Frankie Chan's unofficial remake of the Kinji Fukasaku film SHOGUN'S SAMURAI (1978). Instead of Japanese samurai in a period setting, we get modern day Chinese gangsters battling each other for the position left vacant after the mysterious death of their head honcho. There's lots of well-choreographed kungfu and gunplay in this frenetically-paced flick, and Frankie Chan himself makes for a decent hero. On the downside, spectacular fighting femme Yukari Oshima has a rather minor role, and the story turns a bit ludicrous at times. Still, this is a solid piece of action film-making and probably Chan's best film next to the rollicking THE OUTLAW BROTHERS. 1989, Hong Kong, 35mm, 104 minutes. directed by Frankie Chan; starring Frankie Chan, Simon Yam, Miu Kiu-wai, Yukari Oshima, Ko Chuen-hsiang, Kara Hui, Roy Chiao, Eddie Ko; in Cantonese with English subtitles CARRÉ BLANC A suicide survivor works for a nameless corporation, where he puts other employees through series of bizarre performance tests in this dystopian, Tarkovsky-esque sci-fi and surreal dark fantasy, with flashes of dark humor and deep emotion. A young boy ekes out an existence with his mother in an austere, unidentified city where loudspeakers make strange announcements and proclamations, a rapidly declining population resides in grim high-rises and the weak are killed and likely used for meat. In the wake of a suicide attempt, the boy undergoes a harsh rehabilitation in a state-run school. When we next see him, he’s a productive adult member of society (Sami Bouajila), estranged from his wife (Julie Gayet) and working for a nameless organization, where he puts other employees through a series of humiliating and bizarre performance tests. CARRÉ BLANC’s cold, corporate world and atmosphere of impotent rage evoke the best of Orwell and Kafka. Making his feature debut, writer-director Jean-Baptiste Léonetti doesn’t provide easy answers regarding this infernal world in which there is no escape from the watchful eye of a cruel state, where nets surround apartment buildings to catch the frequent jumpers and people have, apparently, stopped having children — or have begun to hide them. Léonetti does, however, permeate his unrelentingly bleak critique of late capitalism with flashes of dark humor and waves of deep emotion, aided immensely by the raw, intense performances of his two leads. Both Gayet and Bouajila imbue their characters with a repressed sadness and anger that’s disturbing and powerful. Join us for a post-show Q&A with writer/director Jean-Baptiste Leonetti, producer Benjamin Mamou, and executive producer Camille Havard Bourdon! Writer/Director: Jean-Baptiste Léonetti; Starring: Sami Bouajila, Julie Gayet, Jean-Pierre Andréani, Carlos Leal, Dominique Paturel, Fejria Deliba; Solair Films; 35mm, 77 min. CASQUE D'OR Ellsworth Kelly Selects 1952/b&w/94 min. Scr: Jacques Becker, Jacques Companeez; dir: Jacques Becker; w/ Simone Signoret, Serge Reggiani, Claude Dauphin, Raymond Bussiéres, Gaston Modot. Although this taut French tragedy may be set in belle epoque Paris, it etches the lines of a doomed love triangle with a hardened, Postwar sobriety—violence and hostility abound in the dark corners of every smoky dance hall and along the mossy hills of every bucolic countryside. After eyeing flaxen-haired Marie (played in a career-changing performance by an entrancing Simone Signoret), reformed crook Manda (Serge Reggiani) immediately clashes with her gangster boyfriend and the members of his pugnacious crime syndicate. The stage is set at once for a crushing love affair and its doomed conclusion. Director Jacques Becker assisted Jean Renoir on classics such as The Rules of the Game (1939) and Grand Illusion (1937). Becker’s use of a gliding camera and detailed mise-en-scène owe a debt to Renoir and imbue each character and locale with a robust sense of individuality. Perhaps most brutal of all is his handling of Marie, whose towering coiffure (literally the “helmet of gold” of the film’s title) and piercing eyes suggest the tenacity and self-sufficiency with which she steels herself for life’s battles—only letting her hair down, and thus her guard, for the fleeting reprieve of a few happy days of love with Manda in the countryside. CHAMBRE 666 1982/color/45 min./digital Scr/dir: Wim Wenders; w/ Michelangelo Antonioni, Steven Spielberg,Chantal Akerman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean-Luc Godard, Yilmaz Güney, Monte Hellman, Werner Herzog, Robert Kramer, Paul Morrissey. In 1982, Wim Wenders ensconced himself in room 666 on the Hotel Martinez in Cannes and conducted interviews with a series of directors from whom he wanted to proffer feelings on the state and future of film. The final product, the documentary Chambre 666, captures the thoughts of filmmakers ranging from Jean-Luc Godard to Steven Spielberg, Monte Hellman to Rainer Werner Fassbinder. As with most great films, Chambre 666 reflects a moment in time so perfectly and precisely that it evokes a sense of awe, not only in the directors who ponder Wenders's questions, but also in Wenders as he considers their responses, and, finally, in the viewers who are fortunate enough to watch all of this happen before them. CHERRY 2000 1987, Park Circus, 99 min, USA, Dir: Steve De Jarnatt Melanie Griffith plays a female variation on Mad Max in this post-apocalyptic story of a hired killer who takes on psychotic criminals in a robot warehouse. John Ford stalwarts Ben Johnson and Harry Carey, Jr. costar, giving this futuristic Western added street cred. Discussion between films with director Steve De Jarnatt. Cine Povera: Mexican Experiments in 16MM As an echo to the Arte Povera movement, Cine Povera showcases work from Mexico by filmmakers who persist in working in 16mm with the most modest resources. Using antiquated techniques to produce emphatically anti-corporate and insistently artisanal cinema, the artists address social and political concerns—from the recent upheavals in Oaxaca to the gentrification of urban neighborhoods. Not consumed with the medium’s illusions, this eclectic selection of handcrafted shorts reveals the passion, craft and ingenuity of artists who adhere to the ethos of honest effort. The screening features young Mexican filmmakers Uriel Lopez España, Txema Novelo, Hanne Jimenez, Rosario Sotelo, Mayra Isabel Cespedes Vaca, Elena Pardo, Andres García Franco, Jorge Lorenzo Flores Garza and Bruno Varel, alongside artists who have made work in Mexico, including Naomi Uman, Robert Fenz, Rocio Aranda de la Figuera and Erika Loic. THE CIRCUS After The Gold Rush made him an even bigger star than he previously was, Chaplin focused the subject matter of his follow-up film inwards, turning the spotlight on the act of comedy-making itself. The Circus finds The Tramp running afoul of the law and hiding out within the confines of a travelling three-ring operation; barging in during the middle of a performance, the Tramp inadvertently displays astounding comic skills on the stage, and becomes the circus’s new hottest act. This deceptively simple set-up gives Chaplin one of his greatest possibility-laden canvases, one onto which he projects a fantastic run of iconic, beautifully executed comic set-pieces: the funhouse hall-of-mirrors chase, the monkey-laden tightrope walk, and his perilous, hilarious stint stuck in the lion cage. As well, The Circus’s core romance, between Chaplin and co-star Merna Kennedy, is possibly his most realistic and bittersweet, lending a fittingly somber farewell to what Chaplin had (in the end, falsely) assumed would be his final silent. The show kicks off with the classic 1922 Chaplin short Pay Day! The Circus Dir. Charles Chaplin, 1928, 35mm, 70 min. Pay Day Dir. Charles Chaplin, 1922, 35mm, 28 min. The Clock Join us for another twenty-four-hour screening of artist Christian Marclay's The Clock beginning Saturday, March 24, at noon and ending at noon on Sunday, March 25. Awarded the prestigious Golden Lion at last year's Venice Biennale, The Clock is a twenty-four-hour single-channel montage constructed from thousands of moments of cinema and television history depicting the passage of time. Marclay has excerpted each of these moments from their original contexts and edited them together to create a functioning timepiece synchronized to local time wherever it is viewed—marking the exact time in real time for the viewer for twenty-four consecutive hours. The sampled clips come from films of all genres, time periods, and cultures, some lasting only seconds, others minutes, and have been culled from hundreds of films, famous and obscure, into a seamless whole. The result, a melding of video and reality, unfolds with a seemingly endless cast of cameos. By making the film available in its entirety, this free screening will allow The Clock to be viewed in the way Marclay intended. THE COCOANUTS 1929, Universal, 96 min, USA, Dir: Robert Florey, Joseph Santley The Marx Brothers’ very first film finds Groucho trying to save his sinking-fast Florida hotel with the aid of Chico and Harpo, but things don’t go the way he planned (largely thanks to his two crazy helpers). Co-starring Kay Francis, Zeppo Marx and of course, Margaret Dumont. CONFINED MADNESS IN FILM: BUNKER 731 & TITICUT FOLLIES Explore the theme of madness in confined spaces presented through both short and feature film media. Screened publicly for the first time, Kerrie Scher and Jacob Scarpaci’s short “Bunker 731” tells the story of a married couple trapped in a bomb shelter, struggling with their only remaining option for survival. The short will be coupled with “Titicut Follies,” Frederick Wiseman’s rare and controversial 1967 documentary about a Massachusetts state hospital and the treatment of its criminally insane habitants. Curated and introduced by Rena Durrant. Short Q&A with writers/directors after “Bunker 731.” Cooked Cooked tells the story of the most traumatic heat wave in U.S. history, in which 739 Chicago citizens died in a single week of July 1995, most of them poor, elderly, and African American. The film explores the intersection of poverty, global warming, and the politics of crisis. Judith Helfand’s other films include the Sundance award-winning, Emmy nominated Blue Vinyl, and its Peabody Award-winning prequel A Healthy Baby Girl (a five-year video diary about her experience with cancer). The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Helfand. (Dir. Judith Helfand, approx. 60 mins.) CREEPERS (AKA "PHENOMENA") Coming hot on the heels of his shock classics Deep Red and Suspiria, Italian horror maestro Dario Argento was at the height of his powers in the early ‘80s — and Phenomena, aka Creepers, plays as both a sort of greatest-hits package of the director’s best impulses and fetishes, and a brain-busting head-spinner that stands mightily on its own. A very young Jennifer Connelly stars as a psychic ingenue (with a love of creepy-crawly insects) who’s menaced by a giallo-style killer at a Swiss Academy for girls. Throw in a a razor-wielding chimp(!), a typically nutty Donald Pleasance, a stellar soundtrack featuring Iron Maiden, Motorhead and (of course) the inimitable Goblin — and you have one of the best psychotronic film freakouts of the era. Tonight, we’ll be screening Creepers, the original American release cut — but have no fear, as it’s considered by many to be the preferred, faster-paced version of the film. So come get your creep on with this ultra-rare 35mm screening of one of Argento’s creepiest classics! Dir. Dario Argento, 1985, 35mm, 82 min. DAMSELS IN DISTRESS Pioneering indie filmmaker Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days Of Disco) returns to the screen with Damsels In Distress, his first new feature in over a decade, starring Greta Gerwig, Adam Brody and Aubrey Plaza! Whit Stillman will be at the Cinefamily for a Q&A after the film! Dir. Whit Stillman, 2012, 35mm, 99 min. DANIEL EISENBERG: THE UNSTABLE OBJECT What do a luxury automobile, a wall clock, and a cymbal have in common? Daniel Eisenberg’s (Persistence, Something More Than Night) latest film, The Unstable Object (2011) is an elegant and visually sensual essay on contemporary models of production. Interested in the ways “things” affect both producer and consumer, Eisenberg travels to a Volkswagen factory in Dresden, Germany, where individualized cars are hand-built by high-tech specialists; to Chicago Lighthouse Industries, where blind workers produce wall clocks for government offices; and to a deafening cymbal factory in Istanbul, Turkey, where sought-after cymbals are cast and hammered by hand, exactly as they were 400 years ago. Through sequences sympathetic to each site and subject that highlight the senses of sight, sound, and touch, The Unstable Object quietly probes the relationships our global economy creates among individuals around the world. In person: Daniel Eisenberg DANTE'S INFERNO (1924) In conjunction with the exhibition Heaven, Hell, and Dying Well: Images of Death in the Middle Ages, this series focuses on three interpretations of Dante Alighieri's Inferno. Since the fifteenth century, illustrators, painters, and (finally) filmmakers have envisioned the "nine circles of hell." Dante's Inferno (1924, United States, 60 minutes, black and white) Directed by Henry Otto. Silent, presented with live piano accompaniment. DANTE'S INFERNO (2007) In conjunction with the exhibition Heaven, Hell, and Dying Well: Images of Death in the Middle Ages, this series focuses on three interpretations of Dante Alighieri's Inferno. Since the fifteenth century, illustrators, painters, and (finally) filmmakers have envisioned the "nine circles of hell." Dante's Inferno (2007, United States, 88 minutes, color) Directed by Sean Meredith DAVID HOCKNEY: A BIGGER PICTURE Award-winning documentary film director Bruno Wollheim brings his acclaimed documentary, David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, to LACMA for a screening and discussion. Filmed over a span of three years, this documentary is an unprecedented record of a major artist at work. Hockney's most recent work—inspired by digital photography and iPad applications—is currently on view in a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Hear the filmmaker's thoughts as he discusses his own creative process in documenting one of today's greatest living British-born artists. DETACHMENT Director Tony Kaye's (American History X) long-awaited film Detachment stars Adrien Brody as Henry Barthes, a substitute teacher who conveniently avoids any emotional connections by never staying anywhere long enough to form a bond with either his students or colleagues. A lost soul grappling with a troubled past, Henry finds himself at a public school where an apathetic student body has created a frustrated, burned-out administration. Inadvertently becoming a role model to his students, while also bonding with a runaway teen who is just as lost as he is, Henry finds that he’s not alone in a life and death struggle to find beauty in a seemingly vicious and loveless world. Kaye has molded a contemporary vision of people who become increasingly distant from others while still feeling the need to connect. Detachment features a stellar ensemble cast, including Marcia Gay Harden, Christina Hendricks, William Petersen, Bryan Cranston, Tim Blake Nelson, Lucy Liu, Blythe Danner, James Caan, and newcomers Sami Gayle and Betty Kaye. THE DEVIL Hitting an off-the-charts level of subversive allegory, Zulawski’s second feature is a blood-splattered rampage through a war-charred 1790s Poland that turns the historical epic inside out, and dances on its carcass. Immediately banned in the director’s Communist Poland for over a decade and a half, The Devil writhes with nonstop demonic energy as it follows an nobleman who, after escaping from prison, swandives into insanity and mass murder. Returning home to his once-rich family — one now reduced to savages — and manipulated by a black-cloaked Satanic stranger at the center of a web of political treachery, the nobleman eventually enacts a Hamlet-like pyrrhic revenge on just about everyone in sight. But The Devil’s most spectacularly intense violence is all emotional, with near-constant outbursts of grief, and desperation of a seizure-like intensity that is downright mesmerizing. You won’t be able to look away, and with the way Zulawski’s gloriously restless camerawork captures all the detail, you’ll never want to. Dir. Andrzej Zulawski, 1972, 35mm, 119 min. DUBLAB PRESENTS A LABRAT MATINEE 10: THE LIGHT BENDS Open your pupils wide and join us for another sublime installment of rarely-seen music videos, comedy clips, out-there animation, new Dublab films, and other eye-melting magic. EAGLEHEART: SEASON 2 SNEAK PREVIEW Join Chris Elliott (“Get A Life”, Cabin Boy), along with the cast and creators of Adult Swim’s hit live action comedy ”Eagleheart” for a sneak peek of the show’s second season! They’ll be screening new, never-before-seen episodes, as well as outtakes and clips from the never-aired original pilot, followed by an audience Q&A! EASY LIVING 1937/b&w/88 min. Scr: Preston Sturges; dir: Mitchell Leisen; w/ Jean Arthur, Edward Arnold, Esther Dale, Luis Alberni, Ray Milland, Franklin Pangborn. Millionaire Edward Arnold tosses the fur coat his dilettante wife has just bought off the roof. It lands on secretary Jean Arthur, and as she wears it through the streets of Manhattan, her newfound fur changes her life—for better and for worse. Ray Milland is Arnold’s ungrateful son. And the spectacular cast, many of whom would go on to appear in films directed by Easy Living screenwriter Preston Sturges, includes Franklin Pangborn as a gossipy salesclerk. Pangborn delivers—with hissy aplomb—one of the best lines ever in a film: “When there’s smoke, there’s usually... somebody smoking.” The Eleventh Year (Odinnadtsatyi) (U.S.S.R., 1928) Directed by Dziga Vertov Dziga Vertov, cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman, and editor Elizaveta Svilova worked in perfect harmony to create this visually and rhythmically spectacular film. Made to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the revolution—but only completed in “the eleventh year”—the film charts the excavation of a future riverbed for the construction of a giant hydroelectric power station. Cinematographer: Mikhail Kaufman. Editor: Elizaveta Svilova. 35mm, b/w, silent w/ Russian intertitles and live English translation, 20 fps, 53 min. Musical accompaniment provided by Cliff Retallick. ETERNITY AND A DAY From master filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos (Ulysses' Gaze, The Traveling Players) comes the 1998 Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner. Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire) stars in this poetic, haunting and abundantly beautiful film, playing a dying man trying to make peace with his past. He finds a surprising source of hope when he encounters a young Albanian orphan. "A masterpiece that recalls such classics as Bergman's Wild Strawberries and Kurosawa's Ikiru" (Kevin Thomas, Newsday). 1998, Greece, 35mm, 132 minutes. Palme d'Or winner, 1998 Cannes Film Festival. directed by Theo Angelopoulos; starring Bruno Ganz, Isabelle Renauld, Fabrizio Bentivoglio; in Greek with English subtitles EVILENKO 2004, Jinga Films, 111 min, Italy, Dir: David Grieco It is 1984 in Kiev, and communist professor Andrej Romanovic Evilenko (Malcolm McDowell) is dismissed from his teaching position after charges of pedophilic behavior toward one of his students. Thus begins the harrowing real-life tale of a serial killer who terrorized Russia, raping, killing and cannibalizing women and children, with magistrate and family man Vadim Timurouvic Lesiev (Marton Csokas) assigned to catch the psychopath before more civilians fall prey to his depravities. 5 DAYS IN DENVER A kid dressed in all black wearing a bandanna throws a rock at riot police. Pepper spray spews forth. Arrests are made. We’ve all seen it on the news: the 90-second video clip that sums up America’s general perception of the protester. But, is that all there is? 5 DAYS IN DENVER is an in-depth documentary about the American protest experience, as seen through a group of demonstrators calling themselves Re-create 68 who organize against the 2008 Democratic National Convention (DNC). Not only does Re-create 68 march, picket and dissent for the 5 days surrounding the Denver-hosted DNC, but they also sue the Secret Service, fight feces bombs in front of the City Council and battle bad press in the many weeks leading up to the DNC. In short, these protesters – ranging in age from 21 to 71 - go to great lengths “to re-create the spirit of the 60’s and carry the revolution that began there, another step forward.” 5 DAYS IN DENVER is an immersive, in-the-moment view of what it takes to protest in today’s post-9/11 America. More importantly, it’s an embedded observation of the people who choose to take their version of democracy beyond the ballot box and into the streets. In the end, it’s a much more complex and multi-layered story than media sound bites would have you believe. But never fear, there will be plenty of police and pepper spray. DIRECTOR: Todd Cassety; RUNTIME: 90 Minutes FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE “The good American, still devoutly believed in during the 1920s, was two things: he was aggressive, and he was innocent…and then there was Harold Lloyd. A boy whom nothing could defeat.” — Walter Kerr, “The Silent Clowns” Made famous by his stunningly athletic physical comedy and his “glasses” character — an ambitious go-getting Man of the Century, yet an everyman who resembled those in his audience — Harold Lloyd remains one of the era’s greatest comedians, alongside Chaplin and Keaton. Tonight’s first feature is For Heaven’s Sake (one of Lloyd’s best gags-for-gags’-sake films) in which he plays a wealthy man who falls for a homeless mission volunteer, is kidnapped by his friends offended by his breaching of class, and must escape their clutches to “make it to the church on time”. The ensuing escape on a double-decker bus remains one of Lloyd’s finest chase numbers. Harold Lloyd’s granddaughter Suzanne Lloyd will be be here at the Cinefamily to introduce the show — and join us for birthday cake, as we celebrate Harold’s upcoming April birthday! Dir. Sam Taylor, 1926, 35mm, 58 min. For You, Front! (For the Front!/Tebe, Front!) (U.S.S.R, 1943) Directed by Dziga Vertov and Elizaveta Svilova From the start, Vertov announced himself an enemy of “acted films” but at the peak of World War II, such lofty principles proved impractical. For You, Front! is a poetic and patriotic fiction film. In a letter to his fiancée, Dzhamil, a soldier on the front, tells her what he needs most: lead, that most precious metal, used to make bullets to kill the enemies of “our beloved country.” Cinematographer: B. Pumpyansky. 35mm, b/w, in Russian w/ English subtitles, 45 min. GERMAINE GROENTEN UIT BALEN 2011, Skyline Entertainment, 110 min, Belgium, Dir: Frank van Mechelan It's 1971 and 18-year-old Germaine (Evelien Bosmans) trudges through a typically bland existence, living at home in the small town of Balen and keeping a day job at the local supermarket. When the workers from the town factory, including Germaine's own reluctant father, decide to go on strike - which stretches on for an unanticipated three months - the citizens of Balen find their lives irrevocably changed. Based on true events. In Dutch with English subtitles. Belgian beer reception to follow the screening. THE GREAT ESCAPE 1963, Park Circus, 172 min, USA, Dir: John Sturges Superlative WWII drama chronicling the real-life, large-scale prison camp escape of Allied POWs in Germany, featuring Steve McQueen in his (literally) breakout role as Captain Virgil Hilts, "The Cooler King." Nail-biting suspense and exhilarating action are punctuated with just the right amount of raucous humor, aided by composer Elmer Bernstein’s rousing score. With James Garner, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Richard Attenborough, James Donald and Donald Pleasence. Introduction to the screening by Neile Adams. THE GREAT WAR Directed by Mario Monicelli, The Great War tells the story of an odd couple of army buddies in World War I; the movie, while played on a comedic register, does not hide from the viewer the horrors and grimness of trench warfare. Starring Alberto Sordi and Vittorio Gassman, the film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was an Academy Award nominee as Best Foreign Film. Directed by Mario Monicelli; Screenplay by Lucian Vicenzoni; Produced by Dino De Laurentiis; Running time: 137 minutes. HIT SO HARD: THE LIFE AND NEAR-DEATH STORY OF DRUMMER PATTY SCHEMEL HIT SO HARD: The Life and Near-Death Story of Drummer Patty Schemel is a behind-the scenes portrait of what has been dubbed the unlucky 13th Generation, told through one woman’s amazing journey. In HIT SO HARD we follow the rise and fall and recovery of Patty Schemel, an openly gay female drummer who can rock with the best of them, most notable for her remarkable artistry in Courtney Love’s seminal rock band “Hole.” And it hopefully offers inspiration for its audience to embrace the redemptive power of facing your demons to find your place in what can feel like a hostile world. Directed by P. David Ebersole. Produced by Todd Hughes and Christina Soletti. Running time: 103 minutes. Hot Coffee Seinfeld mocked it. Letterman ranked it in his top ten list. And more than fifteen years later, its infamy continues. Everyone knows the McDonald's coffee case. Hot Coffee reveals what really happened to Stella Liebeck, the Albuquerque woman who spilled coffee on herself and sued McDonald's, while exploring how and why the case garnered so much media attention, who funded the effort, and to what end. After seeing this film, you will decide who really profited from spilling hot coffee. Join us for a special panel discussion after the film co-moderated by Jan Frel & Amy Ziering. Mr. Frel, a former managing director for AlterNet.org, has covered banking and finance issues for seven years. Ms. Ziering is an Emmy nominated and award-winning documentary filmmaker. Panelists include attorney Brad Seligman, advocate and consumer watchdog Harvey Rosenfield, and law professor John Nockleby. HUNGER This devastating debut by artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen dramatizes the last months in the life of Bobby Sands, an IRA member whose arrest, imprisonment, and hunger strike made headlines in 1981. Before his arrival at Northern Ireland's Maze prison, Hunger presents a still-free Sands (Michael Fassbender), passionately espousing his politics to a priest (Liam Cunningham) in one extremely long take. Once convicted, Sands declares himself a political prisoner, and his withering away, descent into dementia, and martyrdom are rendered in painstaking detail. Winner of the Camera D'Or at Cannes, the Discovery Award at the Toronto Film Festival, the Gucci Prize at Venice, and countless other awards. Featuring Stuart Graham. 2008, UK/Ireland, 35mm, 96 minutes. Winner - Camera d'Or Cannes Film Festival 2008. directed by Steve McQueen; starring Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham, Liam McMahon, Stuart Graham, Brian Milligan THE HUNTER 1980, Paramount, 97 min, USA, Dir: Buzz Kulik Steve McQueen plays bounty hunter Ralph "Papa" Thorson in this action-packed bio-pic, the actor's final film. With Eli Wallach and Ben Johnson. IL BOSS WIPEOUT! 1973, RaroVideo, 100 min, Italy, Dir: Fernando Di Leo Genre specialist Fernando Di Leo serves up a potent cocktail of high-intensity action in a story of warring mobsters. Henry Silva is at his scowling best as the low-level gangster who sees a way to move up in the organization by mowing down every other criminal in sight. In Italian with English subtitles. THE IMAGINARY VOYAGES OF MAUREEN SELWOOD Since 1980 Maureen Selwood’s hand-drawn animations have taken viewers into the strange, beautiful, and sometimes terrifying lands of the mind. For her first solo show in Los Angeles, she presents a selection of more recent pieces, including the haunting black-and-white imagery of Hail Mary (1998); the expressively rendered Drawing Lessons (2006) and I Started Early (2007); As You Desire Me (2009), the single-channel version of an installation inspired by her residence at the American Academy in Rome at the beginning of the Iraq War; the hallucinogenic trip of How Much Better if Plymouth Rock Had Landed on the Pilgrims (2009); the unexpected washing-machine madness of A Modern Convenience (2012); as well as Mistaken Identity (2001), her alluring deconstruction of 1955 noir classic Kiss Me Deadly, presented with live performance. In person: Maureen Selwood THE IMPORTANT THING IS TO LOVE Impossibly funneling all of Zulawski’s violent, expansive energy into the delicate, cramped indoor spaces of the heart and well-furnished Parisian apartments, The Important Thing Is To Love charts a precarious, slow-burning love triangle between an actress-turned-porn starlet (Romy Schneider, in a career-defining performance), her jester-like husband (pop star Jacques Dutronc), and an admiring photographer (Fabio Testi) that explores the tension between passion and duty, as well as art and trash. Here, Zulawski is at his most rigorously restrained, mirroring the unconsummated smoldering between the luminous Schneider and moody Testi, a relationship unfazed through a sensualist hailstorm of grandiose orgies, pet bats, morose clowns, loan sharks, and geriatric drug addicts. As if that’s not enough, Klaus Kinski himself plays an overly intense thespian with a hair-trigger anger problem, thanks to one of history’s most awesomely self-aware casting choices. A tremendous Euro arthouse smash upon its release in the mid-’70s, The Important Thing Is To Love is not only essential Zulawski viewing, but essential viewing period. Dir. Andrzej Zulawski, 1975, HD presentation, 109 min. IN THE MIRROR OF MAYA DEREN 2002/color and b&w/104 min. Scr/dir: Martina Kudlácek Born in Kiev and raised in the United States, Maya Deren was the first filmmaker to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is among the artists featured in LACMA’s exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States. She worked primarily in 16mm film from 1943 until 1959 before her death at the age of forty-four. The recent, critically acclaimed documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren features interviews with Deren’s fellow experimental filmmakers, outtakes from her work, and recordings of the artist discussing her life and practice. THE ITALIAN CONNECTION LA MALA ORDINA 1972, RaroVideo, 92 min, Italy, Dir: Fernando Di Leo NYC mob boss Cyril Cusack dispatches two emotionally dead hitmen (Henry Silva and Woody Strode) to Milan to execute a small time pimp (Mario Adorf, THE TIN DRUM) for allegedly absconding with a valuable drug shipment. The only problem is Adorf is a scapegoat for the real guilty party. So flee he does in the relentless remainder of the saga, including one of the most heartpounding, grueling foot pursuits ever committed to celluloid, all culminating in a brutal confrontation in an auto graveyard. “THE ITALIAN CONNECTION is a work of genius… The two killers in [the film] inspired me to conceive of Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield for PULP FICTION.” - Quentin Tarantino. In Italian with English subtitles. JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES Taking a cue from the early work of Godard, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman created Jeanne Dielman as a feminist assault on narrative filmmaking conventions. Rhythmic, minimalist and monotonous, Akerman's style perfectly frames the tedious daily tasks of Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig), a widow and mother on the brink of collapse. In a lengthy film where the preparation of a meal constitutes an entire Act, the final payoff is sublime. Spare cinematography by Babette Mangolte. 1975, Belgium/France, 35mm, 201 minutes. written and directed by Chantal Akerman; starring Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Yves Bical; in French with English subtitles JON JOST’S CHAMELEON A scathing portrait of the Hollywood/LA arts milieu of the late 70s, Jon Jost’s Chameleon (1978, 90 minutes) follows the amorphous day of its lead character, an Armani-jacketed peddler of high-class dope, fraudulent art, and preening postures suited-to-fit the changing victims. In association with Filmforum’s series Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, this almost never-screened film returns to the town of its making. Renowned filmmaker Jon Jost in person! JULIA One of four films by director Fred Zinnemann screening at the Getty Center this April, Julia stars Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave in an adaptation of playwright Lillian Hellman's memories of her best friend, a leader in the 1930s antifascist resistance. A conversation with Academy Award-winning sound designer and film editor Walter Murch, Academy Award-winning screenwriter Alvin Sargent, and Getty scholar Jennifer Smyth follows the screening. (20th Century Fox; 35 mm, 117 min. Print courtesy of 20th Century Fox.) Kino-Eye (Kino-Glaz/Life Off-Guard) (U.S.S.R, 1924) Directed by Dziga Vertov Kino-Eye is also a brilliant demonstration of Vertov's radical film theories: his rejection of narrative structure, his sense of ordinary life as the stuff of cinematic art. Vertov and his cameraman, brother Mikhail Kaufman, employed every shooting method then known, from ultra-high speed to microcinematography and multiple exposure to create this fascinating look at life in the young Soviet state. Cinematographer: Mikhail Kaufman. 35mm, b/w, silent w/ Russian intertitles and live English translation, 20 fps, 78 mins. Kino-Pravda, Nos. 18, 20-22 (U.S.S.R., 1924-'25) In-person: Margarita Nafpaktitis, PhD, Librarian for Slavic and East European Studies. Directed by Dziga Vertov More newsreels from the foreground of the cinematic revolution, including the famous No. 21, “Film Poem about Lenin,” commemorating the first anniversary of Lenin’s death through a Hegelian-Marxist dialectical triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, and No. 22, the “Peasant Kino-Pravda,” made as part of the smychka campaign to unite workers and peasants, and to demonstrate that “Lenin is Alive in the Heart of the Peasant” and oppressed Asians and Africans. Cinematographer: Mikhail Kaufman. Editor: Elizaveta Svilova. 35mm, b/w, silent w/ Russian intertitles and live English translation, 18 fps, 81 min. Musical accompaniment provided by Cliff Retallick. Kino-Pravda No. 23 (Radio Pravda) (U.S.S.R., 1925) Directed by Dziga Vertov Though only a third of this final issue of Kino-Pravda seems to survive, we are nonetheless treated to Aleksandr Bushkin’s time-lapse animation and his brilliant sequence in which, as Yuri Tsivian describes, “a cross-section of a photographically correct izba (Russian peasant’s log hut) is penetrated by schematically charted radio waves”—a testament to the magical properties and propagandistic uses of radio in reaching out to Russia’s distant peasantry. 35mm, b/w, silent w/ Russian intertitles and live English translation, 18 fps, 23 min. Musical accompaniment provided by Robert Israel. Kino-Week, Nos. 31-35 (U.S.S.R., 1919) Directed by Dziga Vertov In this program, we see workers forced by the Russian government to clear the streets and sidewalks of Moscow after a heavy snowfall, the funerals of field commanders and a demonstration in Kiev protesting the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany. As Yuri Tsivian writes, “(the protesters seem) ready to invade Germany to help Communists there.” 35mm, b/w, silent w/ Russian and Norwegian intertitles presented with live English translation, 16 fps, 45 min KLOWN “The funniest movie of the year!” (IFC) In a giddy Scandinavian NC-17-flavored take on “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, Klown (based upon the popular long-running TV show of the same name) follows two wildly inappropriate friends (played by celebrated comedians Frank Hvam and Casper Christensen) as they run amok through the Danish countryside plowing through social taboos and unspeakable debaucheries. Our odd-couple pals have opposing agendas for their upcoming camping trip: Frank kidnaps his nephew in a thick-headed attempt to prove his fatherhood potential, while Casper is determined to visit a mysterious world-renowned brothel as the final stop on his “Tour de Pussy.” As these jovially confrontational and consistently unpredictable Dogme-95-meets-the-Farrelly-Brothers plotlines collide, Klown will leave you hurting from nonstop laugh fits, and genuinely shocked by several denouements you’ll never have seen coming. Soon to be a household name amongst comedy fans across the country, this internationally acclaimed and award-winning saga of genial depravity has indieWIRE proudly proclaiming it “raunchy, fearless and awesome!”. Dir. Mikkel Nørgaard, 2011, HD presentation, 89 min. KREN / LOWDER / SCHALLER "Much has been written about the abstract, serial, musical, structural or mathematical nature of Kurt Kren's films, their affinity to painting, poetry or twelve-tone music; but too much concentration on their structure and rhythm has eclipsed the films' objectivisation, their almost documentary quality … appreciating Kurt Kren's films is not a question of dissecting his technique, recognizing their richness of innovation or analyzing their rhythm. To understand these film it is not necessary to see through them but to feel and perceive them as real.” (Hans Hurch). Rose Lowder and Robert Schaller, like Kurt Kren, have developed their own idiosyncratic practices that have in common with one another the use of rigorously formal editing structures. In distinctly personal ways, these formal concerns are used as jumping off points to explore a more critical and aesthetic relationship to the landscape. “Underlying these studies is a search for meaningful ways to work with film regarding our contemporary society controlled by multinational economics. As the totalitarian environments of urban landscapes become more and more uninhabitable, I seek, against the grain in our "virtual" space age it seems, a more human physical home.” (Rose Lowder). All works projected from 16mm, including: 31/75 Asyl, 37/78 Tree Again, 3/60 Bäume im Herbst and 32/76 An W+B by Kurt Kren; Roulement, Rouerie, Aubage and Coulerurs Mecanigues by Rose Lowder; Sea View Movie and Tree of Life by Robert Schaller. LA AIR: MARGIE SCHNIBBE LA AIR is a new artist-in-residence program that invites Los Angeles filmmakers to utilize EPFC resources in creating a new work over a four-week period. Our March resident, Margie Schnibbe, will be working on a new project titled Friends and Neighbors: “to celebrate my ten-plus year relationship with the Echo Park Film Center I will create a series of short super-8 portraits of friends and neighbors in my Silver Lake/Echo Park community. The residency will culminate with a screening of these portraits along with a selection of short films created by my friends and neighbors.” THE LADY VANISHES 1938, MGM Repertory, 97 min, UK, Dir: Alfred Hitchcock No one believes witty playgirl Iris Henderson (a fine Margaret Lockwood) when she claims the elderly “governess” Miss Froy has mysteriously disappeared from a train en route from the fictional country of Bandrika to Western Europe. No one, except for charming Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), who joins forces with Iris to expose the foreboding magic trick of a woman vanishing into thin air on a moving locomotive. Featuring mesmerizing overlapping camera work by cinematographer Jack Cox and a script loaded with can’t-believe-that-slid-past-the-censors political doozies, THE LADY VANISHES is so much more than its usual branding as “light entertainment” - it’s Hitchcock at his pre-Hollywood best, a perfect blend of suspense and screwball.Watch for Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford as two cricket-obsessed fellow passengers - their pairing here was so successful, they co-starred in a further 10 films playing essentially the same characters! LA FEMME PUBLIQUE Andrzej Zulawski's La Femme Publique shares much with its predecessor, Possession, in terms of challenging art-house audiences with over-the-top sex and violence. Valerie Kaprisky [Breathless (1983)] stars as an unproven actress who earns the leading role in a film adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, only to be put through an unmotivated series of humiliating, reality-shattering "acting experiments" by a host of ghouls. Cast includes Francis Huster and Lambert Wilson. Cinematography by Sacha Vierny (Last Year at Marienbad). Nominated for three Cesar Awards for Best Actress, Supporting Actor, and Adaptation (Zulawski, Dominique Garnier). Dir. Andrzej Zulawski, 1984, 35mm, 113 min. LA FIDELITE (from IMDB) Intriguing that Sophie Marceau should make a film about fidelity under the direction of Zulawski, her companion for more than fifteen years. But this is just one aspect of a baroque and flamboyant film which evokes the gutter press and organ trafficking to bring up to date a literary classic, "The Princess of Cleves." Torn between her oath not to deceive her husband and her desire for a suicidal young photographer, Sophie Marceau finds herself in one of her best roles. Dir. Andrzej Zulawski, 2000, 35mm, 166 min. L.A. FILMWORKS: THE STATE OF THE ART IN LOS ANGELES, 1980 In the early 1980s, Filmforum’s Terry Cannon assembled a few mixed shows for touring of experimental films by Los Angeles filmmakers. Along with Filmforum Film (Craig Rice, 1980), a document of Filmforum, selections from these shows proves a fitting end to the series, revealing the state of the art as seen by its curators in Los Angeles, circa 1980. Guests will include Craig Rice, William Scaff and Filmforum founder Terry Cannon. L'AMOUR BRAQUE (from IMDB) After the successful bank robbery Micky hopes to take back his girlfriend Mary who has been taken from him by the brothers Venin. On the way to Paris he meets one Leon, a neurotic and dreamer, whom he and his associates consider an idiot. Leon can hardly understand what Micky is up to but he follows him everywhere and soon falls in love with Mary. This strange love triangle resolves in a tragic ending. Strange it may seem but the credits tell us that "The film is inspired by Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot" and intended as a homage to the great writer." Dir. Andrzej Zulawski, 1985, 35mm, 101 min. THE L.A. REBELLION: BOUNDARY-BREAKING SHORTS The early 1970s was a very important time for people of color artist/filmmakers at UCLA. After the arrival of future MacArthur Grant winner Charles Burnett in 1967 and Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima the following year, there emerged a significant black independent movement. The students develop a fecund, cosmopolitan and politically engaged movement that came to be unofficially known, as essayist Ntongela Masilela dubbed, the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers or “LA REBELLION”. The first wave of these filmmakers also included Larry Clark, John Reir, Ben Caldwell, Pamela Jones,Carol Blue, Abdosh Abdulhafiz Tommy Wright, Barbara-O, Charles David Brooks III, Jamaa Fanaka. The second continued the remarkable cinematic work with Julie Dash, Sharon Larkin, Barbara McCullough, Bernard Nicolas, Billy Woodberry, Jacqueline Frazier, Adisa Anderson, and Zeinabu irene Davis. The program includes some of the short films by these makers pursuing less conventional modes of storytelling. In person: Ben Caldwell, more to be announced Films to be Screened: Hour Glass (1971, Digital video, b/w & color, 14 min.) Directed by Haile Gerima. A young African-American male rethinks his role as a basketball player for the white establishment as he reads the works of Third World theoreticians, such as Franz Fanon, in Haile Gerima’s “Project One” film. A Day in the Life of Willie Faust, or Death on the Installment Plan (1972, Digital video, transferred from 16mm blow-up from 8mm, color, 20 min.) Directed by Jamaa Fanaka. Jamaa Fanaka’s first project is an adaption of Goethe’s Faust, superimposed over a remake of Super Fly. A morality tale in two reels. Medea (1973, Digital video, transferred from 16mm, color, 7 min) Directed by Ben Caldwell. Made as Ben Caldwell’s first project at UCLA, Medea is a collage film that explores the information that permeates into a child before it is born. Four Women (1975, 16mm, color, 7 min.) Directed by Julie Dash. Dancer Linda Martina Young portrays the four Black women described in Julie Dash's dance film set to Nina Simone’s stirring ballad. Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979, 35mm, b/w, sound, 6 min.) In collaboration with performer Yolanda Vidato, Barbara McCullough presents a Black woman’s attempt to expel the putrefaction she has absorbed from her blighted urban environment, while symbolically cleansing the environment itself. Daydream Therapy (1977, Digital video, transferred from 16mm, b/w & color, 8 min.) Directed by Bernard Nicolas. Daydream Therapy is set to Nina Simone’s haunting rendition of “Pirate Jenny” and poetically envisions the fantasy life of a hotel worker whose daydreamsprovide an escape from workplace indignities. I&I: An African Allegory (1979, Digital video, transferred from 16mm, color, 32 min.) Directed by Ben Caldwell. Weaving experimental, dramatic and documentary styles, Ben Caldwell’s I & I is a moving meditation on reciprocity. The Horse (1973, 16mm, color, 14 min.) Directed by Charles Burnett. Charles Burnett employs a sparse lyricism in this haunting coming-of-age tale about an African American boy tending to a horse that is to be put down. LAST DAYS HERE “Ingenious and suspenseful…to call this a mere music documentary is like saying Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is a pretty tune.” — Lauren Wissot, Filmmaker Magazine From the makers of Rock School comes an astonishing fly-on-the-wall portrait of an underground music icon that will surprise you at every turn, and have you alternately cringing, laughing and crying before the end credits roll. Going against every expectation you could ever have from its subject matter, Last Days Here is neither rock doc nor junkie oblivion epitaph, as it covers the hugely talented, prematurely aged and completely dysfunctional Bobby Liebling (founder and vocalist of metal pioneers Pentagram), and his endless states of metamorphosis. As we watch him kick drugs, find drugs again, fall in love, go to jail, reform his band and beyond, Last Days Here is a profoundly touching (if dark) affirmation that even the most tortured life is full of possibility, as well as a moving depiction of how a fan’s love can change the life of his idol, as Pentagram uber-fan Sean Pelletier goes from admirer to friend, to band manager. Plus — it’s packed with some of the crunchiest metal tracks you’ve ever heard. Stop reading here. Just go see it. Dirs. Don Argott & Demian Fenton, 2011, HD presentation, 90 min. THE LAST HURRAH Directed by John Ford In this moving, autumnal work, Tracy and John Ford (who collaborated on Up The River, 1930) ennoble the image of the dogged fighter in this portrait of an aging mayor running for re-election, deploying high-minded principle and dirty politics with equal fervor. Tracy’s unapologetic Frank Skeffington seems reconciled to both his cynicism and public virtues, allowing for a complex picture of leadership as a hardscrabble game. Columbia Pictures Corp. Producer: John Ford. Based on the novel by Edwin O’Connor. Screenwriter: Frank Nugent. Cinematographer: Charles Lawton, Jr. Editor: Jack Murray. Cast: Spencer Tracy, Jeffrey Hunter, Diane Foster, Pat O’Brien, Basil Rathbone. 35mm, b/w, 122 min. THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP 1943, Park Circus, 163 min, UK, Dir: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger One of British cinema’s crowning glories, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s stunning epic hopscotches between the end of the Boer War and World Wars I and II, and charts the heartbreaking attempts of gentlemanly officer Clive Candy (Roger Livesey) to find his ideal woman, embodied in three different forms by the gorgeous Deborah Kerr, while he spars with German officer Anton Walbrook. LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE An ordinary bank teller turned financial analyst is forced to sell high risk securities to her customers in order to meet her sales target. A small-time thug delves into the futures index hoping to earn easy money to post bail for a buddy in trouble with the law. A straight-arrow Police inspector who has always enjoyed his middle income lifestyle is suddenly desperate for money when his wife puts a down payment on a luxury flat she can’t afford and his dying father wants him to look after a young half-sister he never knew he had. Three little people who are in dire need of money for the predicaments in their respective lives have nothing in common until a bag of stolen money worth five million dollars forces them into making soul searching decisions about right and wrong and everything in between. Director: Johnnie To; Writers: Au Kin-yee, Wong King Fai, Milkyway Creative Team; Starring: Denise Ho, Lau Ching-Wan, Richie Ren, Lo Hoi-Pang, Philip Keung, Myolie Wu, Ken Lo; The Indomina Group; 35mm, 107 min. L'INFERNO In conjunction with the exhibition Heaven, Hell, and Dying Well: Images of Death in the Middle Ages, this series focuses on three interpretations of Dante Alighieri's Inferno. Since the fifteenth century, illustrators, painters, and (finally) filmmakers have envisioned the "nine circles of hell." L'Inferno (1911, Italy, 68 minutes, black and white) Directed by Giuseppe de Liguoro THE LIVING END Directed by Gregg Araki In a time when Hollywood largely skirted the topic of AIDS, Gregg Araki’s breakaway hit, The Living End, was one of the few independent features to boldly take it on. A hustler and a film critic, both gay and HIV+, set off on an anarchic road trip, wasting homophobes and hurtling toward certain doom with reckless abandon. As tender as it is hard-boiled, the stylish film gave voice to a growing population and turned the heads of audiences and critics. Screenwriter/Cinematographer/Editor: Gregg Araki. Cast: Mike Dytri, Craig Gilmore, Mark Finch, Mary Woronov, Johanna Went. In-person: filmmaker Gregg Araki. THE LONG DAY CLOSES 1992, FilmDesk, 85 min, UK, Dir: Terence Davies An elegant hymn to memory and the transporting power of the movies, Terence Davies’ tale of young Bud, a lonely, isolated preteen in postwar Liverpool, was listed by Time Out London as one of the best British films ever made, and is a moving biographical work. Though doted upon by his mother and sisters, Bud is miserable at his new school, where menacing bullies make his life hell, and he retreats to the local movie house, letting the silvery images of the cinema bring him some solace. Discussion following with director Terence Davies. Lullaby (Kolybel'naja) (U.S.S.R., 1937) Directed by Dziga Vertov Commissioned to make a documentary on the State’s network of maternity homes, nurseries and kindergartens, Vertov produced Lullaby, with its approximately six hundred shots of different women symbolizing Woman and Motherhood all shown to love and worship Joseph Stalin. The film was shelved as soon as it was finished; rumor has it that Stalin was unhappy with the interminable images of him being smothered by all these women. 35mm, b/w, in Russian w/ English subtitles, 67 min. MADCAP MODERNISM: MID-CENTURY CARTOONS FROM UPA AND BEYOND Modernism was enthusiastically embraced by animators of the 1950s. Led by Hollywood’s United Productions of America (UPA) studio, animators began exploring new styles and designs diametrically opposed to the fairy-tale worlds created by Walt Disney. Esteemed animation historian Jerry Beck curates and hosts two programs of theatrical cartoons, presented in conjunction with California Design. Both programs offer visually-exciting—and rarely seen—cartoons in 35mm and include several Oscar-winning shorts. THE MAKIOKA SISTERS The Makioka Sisters chronicles the life and affairs of four sisters in late '30s Japan. An older, conservative sister tries to continue family traditions and pretensions to status, while the younger sisters discover the new freedoms becoming available to them. "This Kon Ichikawa film has a triumphant simplicity about it. You don't just watch the film--you coast on its rhythms and glide past the precipitous spots" (Pauline Kael, The New Yorker). The cast includes Juzo Itami, who would later emerge as a prominent director with The Funeral, Tampopo and A Taxing Woman. In Japanese with English subtitles. 1983, Japan, 35mm, 140 minutes. 35mm print made in 2011! directed by Kon Ichikawa; starring Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yûko Kotegawa; in Japanese with English subtitles MAYA DEREN ON FILM Born in Kiev and raised in the United States, Maya Deren was the first filmmaker to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is among the artists featured in LACMA’s exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States. She worked primarily in 16mm film and is considered the inventor of two genres: the dance film and the psychodrama. She worked primarily from 1943 until 1959, when she died at the age of forty-four. Tonight’s program presents all of her completed shorts—from the hallucinatory trance film Meshes of the Afternoon, which she shot in her Los Angeles home and remains a landmark of avant-garde cinema, to The Very Eye of Night, a stunning ballet kaleidoscope—as well as her unfinished collaboration with Marcel Duchamp (The Witch’s Cradle). MIRACLE MILE 1988, Park Circus, 87 min, USA, Dir: Steve De Jarnatt Musician Anthony Edwards is feeling good after a first date with a cute waitress (Mare Winningham), but his night takes a turn for the worse when he answers a ringing pay phone and obtains a terrifying piece of information: The U.S. has just fired a nuclear missile and the end of the world is at hand. The action all takes place in real time, more or less, on and around Wilshire Boulevard, and the compact sense of time and place makes for a taut, riveting modern-day noir. Discussion between films with director Steve De Jarnatt. MR. ARKADIN 1955, Janus Films, 99 min, USA, Dir: Orson Welles A ruthless financier (Welles) hires a sleazy young cigarette smuggler to write a "confidential report" on his past, hoping to erase the last traces of his infamy so that his beloved daughter will never find the truth about him. Welles decks out this mock-tragic "chronicle of a death foretold" with down-and-dirty rococo effects and tall tales, including that epitome of cynicism, the fable about the frog and the scorpion. MY NIGHTS ARE MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN YOUR DAYS French singing sensation Jacques Dutronc stars in a tender, melancholy drama about the romance that develops between a terminally ill man (Dutronc) and a tortured actress (Sophie Marceau). Haunted by their respective pasts, the couple finds comfort in each other's arms. Dir. Andrzej Zulawski, 1989, 35mm, 110 min. NARRATIVE BODIES: FILMS AND VIDEOS BY ABIGAIL CHILD Poet, essayist and filmmaker Abigail Child sees her creations as a curious and particular intersection, often humorous, sometimes alchemical, between sound and image. Bodies, fetishes, symbols, icons and relics are reinvented and refitted to new realities and new desires. The total assembly is a movement metaphorically (with the ghostly re-emergence of Griffith on one side and on the other Eisenstein), and the images and poetic rhythms use structure as a magnifying glass to uncover the lies and injustices of history. Child’s film cycle, Is This What You Were Born For (1981–89), is a landmark of contemporary avant-garde cinema, and her recent works continue to be widely shown and celebrated. Films include Peripeteia I (1977), Perils (1986), Mayhem (1987), The Future is Behind You (2004–05), Mirror World (2006) and Ligatures (2009). In person: Abigail Child New Day at 40: A Community's Celebration REDCAT is proud to host a celebratory screening (program TBA) to mark the 40th anniversary of New Day Films—created by filmmakers Julia Reichert and Jim Klein when they failed to secure distribution for Growing Up Female (1971), about the social constraints placed on women aged 4 to 35. In the early 1970s the act of hearing women’s voices was perceived as a “radical,” and New Day welcomed the work of filmmakers—both men and women—who were challenging the political status quo in terms of gender, social and racial inequality. Today, New Day Films counts more than 100 members, whose films have won Academy Awards, Emmys, and premiered at major film festivals, and cover issues as diverse as immigration, human rights, LGBT, disability, addiction, criminal justice, youth and aging. In person: Members of New Day Films NEW WORKS SALON Several local artists will present new in-progress or recently completed works. Sean Batton and Kelsey Brain will present a 16mm film comprising footage of Occupy Los Angeles's two-month encampment at City Hall. Marcy Saude presents her in-progress Alternative Strategies #1, in which Filmmaker Robert Nelson talks about the house he and William Wiley built by hand in rural Mendocino County. Mark Toscano will present two recent 16mm films, Rating Dogs on a Scale of 1 to 10 (2011) and Demonstration (2012). Also, Rick Bahto will present sketches towards a documentary on the composer Mark So, Pablo Valencia will project a collection of Super 8 miniatures, and Hayley Elliott will present a developing cut of hand-processed Super 8 film. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER 1955, MGM Repertory, 93 min, USA, Dir: Charles Laughton Robert Mitchum is astonishing as a sociopathic wandering preacher who uses his fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism to mask his schemes to blithely rob and murder gullible yokels - and puritanical Shelley Winters, left alone with her son and daughter and a stash of cleverly hidden loot, is a perfect target. Lillian Gish is rock-solid as the elderly matron who shelters the children when they flee from the homicidal Mitchum. Charles Laughton’s simultaneous debut and swan song as a film director. Preston Neal Jones will introduce the screening and show outtakes following the film. O LUCKY MAN! 1973, Warner Bros., 178 min, UK, Dir: Lindsay Anderson This incredible surrealistic allegory is a stunning sequel to IF..., following the adventures of Travis (Malcolm McDowell) as he seeks his fortune navigating an untamed frontier of nuclear-plant meltdowns, experimental genetics clinics and Swinging London. With Rachel Roberts, Ralph Richardson, Helen Mirren and Alan Price. Discussion following with actor Malcolm McDowell. ON THE SILVER GLOBE “Plays like Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’ by way of a Jodorowsky acid-trip spectacle.” — BAMcinématek A three-hour spaceman journey straight into the center of Andrzej Zulawski’s poetic heart, On The Silver Globe is the director’s most phantasmagorical film. In 1976, Zulawski embarked on the largest-scale film production in Polish history, and over the course of two intense years, executed an eye-popping, grandiloquent sci-fi epic concerning astronauts who crash-land on the moon and kickstart their own bizarre, primitive society. Sadly, the Polish government deemed the film subversive, shut the production down just before shooting was completed, and destroyed its film print materials, sets and impossibly lush costumes. Ten years later, using secreted footage, Zulawski was able to piece together a version of the film that came as close as possible to his original vision — and the results will defy your mind, as even in its reconstituted form, On The Silver Globe is a true brainquake that effortlessly takes you to dizzying heights, and just keeps on elevating. Our 35mm show of On The Silver Globe is truly a once-in-a-lifetime screening, as this archival Polish print may never screen in Los Angeles again! Dir. Andrzej Zulawski, 1977/1988, 35mm, 166 min. PIG In Henry Barrial's Pig, a man wakes up alone in the middle of the desert with a black hood on his head and his hands tied behind his back. At death's door, he is discovered by a woman living alone in the desert and is nursed back to health. Upon regaining consciousness, the man realizes he has no idea who he is or how he got in the desert. His only clue, a piece of paper in his pocket with the name "Manny Elder" written on it, sends him on a journey to Los Angeles to discover his past. But things and people are not what they seem and clues lead to something bigger and more unusual than the man could have ever imagined. A panel discussion will follow the screening and include a brief Q&A with the film's director, Henry Barrial. Cast and crew will be in attendance, along with Dr. David Glanzman, a UCLA Neuroscientist working on the cutting edge of memory intervention. THE RAID The brand-new Indonesian genre madhouse that’s taken Asian audiences by storm, and that will rip your face off with its ultra-gory, uber-intense and unbelievably relentless action blitz! Special Forces member Rama arrives with his team at a huge decrepit safe house, on a secret mission to remove its notorious drug lord owner. When the mission goes horribly awry, the building’s hordes of criminal underworld tenants converge to wipe out Rama & Co., forcing the cops to fight their way through every floor and every room in increasingly insane and visceral ways using the art of Silat (the ancient Indonesian combat system that will quickly become your new favorite kind of ass-kicking!) Combining the pulse-pounding siege action of Assault On Precinct 13, the non-stop flowing kineticism of a dystopian shoot-em-up video game and the most super-skillful bash-the-teeth-right-outta-your-head martial arts madness you’ve ever seen, The Raid kicked our brains in when we caught it at Sundance just a few weeks ago, and is the best goddamned action movie you’ve seen IN YEARS. Dir. Gareth Huw Evans, 2011, 100 min. ROD BRADLEY FILMS - BRADLEY's (in person) moving portraits of poets, painters and jazz musicians reveal inner consciousness. ROOM SERVICE 1938, Warner Bros., 78 min, USA, Dir: William A. Seiter Groucho, Chico and Harpo stall to extend their hotel credit while trying to mount a play - with the expected chaotic results - in this zany Marx Brothers farce. Based on the play by Allen Boretz and John Murray, ROOM SERVICE is not only a delightful showcase for the brothers themselves, but for comedienne Lucille Ball, whose presence almost makes up for the lack of Margaret Dumont! THE RULES OF THE GAME Ellsworth Kelly Selects 1939/b&w/106 min. Scr/dir: Jean Renoir; w/ Marcel Dalio, Nora Gregor, Roland Toutain, Jean Renoir, Mila Parély Filmmakers as disparate as Noah Baumbach, Bernardo Bertolucci, Robert Altman, Wim Wenders, and Alain Resnais all credit this comic masterpiece of social satire as among the greatest films ever made. Yet upon its release on the precipice of World War II, the film reception could not have received a more hostile reception. An angry mob tried to burn the theater where it was being shown down; critics tore it apart for its complex structure and mockery of the upper classes; a cautious Vichy government ultimately banned the film, a decision wholeheartedly supported by the Nazi regime during the War. Nonetheless, this upstairs-downstairs story about a wealthy clique of embroiled friends and lovers, and the equally-enmeshed domestics who serve them at a country retreat, remains a potent, prescient work. Socially, it presaged not only the deconstruction of class but also the power of base emotions to transcend the veneer of civility. Technically, it pushed cinematic boundaries in its fluid camera movement and deep focus photography that encourage the viewer to acknowledge the complex entanglements that abound in the foreground, background, and at the edges of the frame. Just like Orson Welles’s game-changing Citizen Kane (1941) that would follow a few years later and borrow significantly from Renoir’s revolutionary use of depth-of-field, The Rules of the Game was unleashed on a world not quite ready for its genesis. THE SEARCH One of four films by director Fred Zinnemann screening at the Getty Center this April, The Search examines one Czechoslovakian boy's survival in postwar Germany. A conversation with director Fred Zinnemann's son, Tim Zinnemann, and Getty scholar Jennifer Smyth follows the screening. (Praesens Film, MGM; 35 mm, 104 min. Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.) SEEING AND AWAKENING: NEW FILMS BY NATHANIEL DORSKY Nathaniel Dorsky’s work celebrates the essence of cinema, creating profound experiences that explore the world through images of extraordinary beauty and a use of montage that subverts the descriptive to awaken mystery. Dorsky’s Devotional Cinema is a modern classic on the poetics of the medium, and he has written, “It is the direct connection of light and audience that interests me.” Making films beginning in the 1960s, Dorsky has completed thirteen films since 1996 that have been prominently featured at festivals and museums throughout the world. This program includes Pastourelle (2010), The Return (cited by The New York Times as one of the best films of 2011), and the world premiere of August and After. An additional program of Dorsky’s films is presented at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. In person: Nathaniel Dorsky THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION 1976, Universal, 113 min, UK, Dir: Herbert Ross Sherlock Holmes (Nicol Williamson) and Sigmund Freud (Alan Arkin) meet up when Watson (Robert Duvall) decides his boss needs help with his cocaine-fueled delusions. Screenwriter Nicholas Meyer's dazzling blend of comic adventure and serious drama, adapted from his own novel, is a rousing crowd-pleaser that's also smart and moving. Discussion between films with author and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer. The Seventh Cross (1944) Directed by Fred Zinnemann An unusual European subject for Tracy, this film tells the story of anti-Fascist George Heisler, who escapes a Nazi Concentration camp and must carefully plot escape from Germany. The role demanded much of Tracy for large sections of the film during which his traumatized character must keep silent while communicating dread and determination to the audience, ultimately finding escape and hope for human nature. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corp. Producer: Pandro S. Berman. Based on the novel by Anna Seghers. Screenwriter: Helen Deutsch. Cinematographer: Karl Freund. Editor: Thomas Richards. Cast: Spencer Tracy, Signe Hasso, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Agnes Moorehead. 35mm, b/w, 113 min. SHAME "The cruel paradox of addiction is that it transforms a source of pleasure into an inescapable, insatiable need. An abundance--an overdose--of movies and books explores the logic of this condition, mostly with respect to drugs or alcohol. Shame, the relentless new feature from the British artist turned filmmaker Steve McQueen, has a lot in common with films that plumb the toxic romance of the bottle or the needle. The crucial difference is that its protagonist, a handsome, youngish Manhattanite named Brandon (Michael Fassbender), is hooked on sex. This poses a special challenge for Mr. McQueen, since there are rules, conventions and cognitive habits that limit how explicit--and how explicitly unpleasant--movie sex can be. Watching someone else take a drink or snort a line will not cause intoxication in the viewer, but watching other people get naked and squirm around together is a sure-enough turn-on to be the basis of a lucrative industry. How can visual pleasure communicate existential misery? It is a real and interesting challenge, and if Shame falls short of meeting it, the seriousness of its effort is hard to deny" (A. O. Scott, New York Times). 2011, UK, 35mm, 101 minutes. directed by Steve McQueen; starring Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, Nicole Beharie, James Badge Dale, Hannah Ware SHARON LOCKHART: DOUBLE TIDE 16mm transferred to HD, color, sound, 93 min. In the wake of her cinematic meditations on the relationship between laboring bodies and their environment—NO (2003) and Lunch Break (2008), both shown at REDCAT—artist/filmmaker Sharon Lockhart positioned her camera in the wild coastal landscape of Seal Cove, Maine, a historic site for commercial clamming. Following the backbreaking efforts of clam digger Jen Casad, the film unfolds in two uninterrupted takes to capture the rare phenomenon of “double tide”—when low tide occurs twice during daylight hours, once at dawn and once at dusk. The splendid imagery is matched by a seductive sound track, bird chirpings mixed with the sound of wind, water and an invisible foghorn, interrupted just once by the digger’s lone, moving cry. In person: Sharon Lockhart SHERLOCK, JR. Directed by Buster Keaton. Produced by Joseph M. Schenck. Story Jean Havez, Joe Mitchell, Clyde Bruckman. Cinematography Elgin Lessley, Byron Houck. Metro Pictures Corp. 48 minutes. 35mm print courtesy of Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, David Shepard Collection. Focusing on early cinema, the first night of the series highlights the work of such film pioneers as Thomas Armat, George Eastman, Thomas Edison, Georges Méliès, Eadweard Muybridge and the Lumière brothers. The evening includes a live demonstration of hand-cranked films and a screening of Buster Keaton’s classic silent comedy "Sherlock, Jr.," which tells the story of a lonely projectionist who longs to be a detective. SHOAH An extraordinary film...One of the noblest ever made. It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness. —Roger Ebert Shoah is one of the greatest documentaries in the history of the cinema…you must see it. —New York Magazine Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s monumental epic on the Holocaust, features interviews with survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators in 14 countries. The film does not contain any historical footage but rather features interviews that seek to remember the Jewish tragedy and revisits places where the crimes took place. Shoah grew out of Lanzmann’s concern that the genocide perpetrated only 40 years earlier was already retreating into the mists of time and that the atrocities of the Holocaust were becoming sanitized as history. His massive achievement—at once epic and intimate, immediate and definitive—is a triumph of form and content that reveals hidden truths while rewriting the rules of documentary filmmaking. (1985, Dir. Claude Lanzmann, First Era: 273 min. Second Era: 230 min. total: 503 min.) Silent Comedy Shorts Program Join us for our monthly program of favorite early comedians and pranksters: A compilation of shorts from Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Georges Méliès, W.C. Fields and Fatty Arbuckle will be presented with live musical accompaniment. "The Cure" (1917, 31 min). Charlie Chaplin plays "The Inebriate," a well-intentioned drunk who checks into a rehab spa and promptly turns the place upside down. "The Untamable Whiskers" (1904, 3 min). Watch Georges Méliès’ magical whiskers grow from a proper mustache into a Merlin-like beard. "The Devil and the Statue" (1901, 2 min). Georges Méliès plays a rapscallion demon of many sizes. "Coney Island" (1917, 25 min). Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle spend a day at the amusement park feuding over the same available young woman. Never mind that Fatty arrived with his wife! "Easy Street" (1917, 19 min). Charlie Chaplin's iconic Tramp reforms his ways when he becomes smitten with a missionary (Edna Purviance) and takes up work as a constable on the rough-and-tumble Easy Street. "Pool Sharks" (1915, 15 min). W.C. Fields makes his screen debut as one of two rivals playing a game of pool for the hand of a lady love - a skit Fields performed often during his career in vaudeville. THE SNOWTOWN MURDERS 2011, IFC Midnight, 119 min, Australia, Dir: Justin Kurzel In Justin Kurzel's directorial debut, the bizarre saga of Australia's most infamous serial killer is brought to the screen with mesmerizing and pitiless intensity. Taciturn teen Jamie Vlassakis (Lucas Pittaway) and his single mother and younger brothers live an unenviable existence on the atrophied outskirts of Adelaide. When the charismatic and paternal John (a terrific Daniel Henshall) enters their lives, everything seems to be looking up for the beleaguered family, so much that Jamie overlooks John's cultish obsession with revenge in favor of bonding with his new father figure. As John involves Jamie in increasingly unsettling acts of violence, a brutal, perfectly structured tale untwines of the snowballing effect of murder, and of Darwinism gone frightfully wrong. Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize Special Mention at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. SOUND OF NOISE “Bonnie And Clyde on drums” – Indiewire “How can something so simple be so joyful? Maybe that’s the key. Like Jackie Chan, the six drummers in Sound of Noise believe in using everyday objects to make mayhem. As one of them says in a recruiting pitch, ‘it’s dangerous, it’s illegal, and it will change the world’.” — Peter Martin, Twitch “A brilliant twist on the conventional. This movie is ALL KINDS OF AWESOME” — Rob Hunter, Filmschoolrejects.com Springboarding off the ebullient Cannes award-nominated viral short Music For One Apartment and Six Drummers, Sound of Noise takes the concept of the crime drama, and turns it right on its ear. Police officer Amadeus was born into a family with a long history of famous musicians — but is terrified by the thought of music, and must face his fear when a rogue band of anarcho-musicians decides to perform a musical apocalypse, using the entire city as their orchestra. Using every single surface and object they come across as a potential instrument, the six drummers’ jaw-dropping ability to turn everyday locations like a bank branch, a hospital operating room or a construction site into whimsical, crazily inventive and highly earworm-y musical setpieces will leave you with an infectious sense of wonder — and the urge to tap sweet melodies of your own. Dirs. Ola Simonsson & Johannes Stjärne Nilsson, 2010, HD presentation, 102 min. At the opening night party on 3/9 at 10 PM, Sound of Noise directors Ola Simonsson & Johannes Stjärne Nilsson, along with co-writer Jim Birmant, will be here for a Q&A after the film — PLUS, Melvins drummers Dale Crover & Coady Willis will be here to first drum-battle Ola Simonsson, and then drum-battle each other to the death! SWIMMING IN NEBRASKA After two nights of his films made in Los Angeles in the 1970s, Filmforum hosts Jon Jost with the United States premiere of a new digital video work, Swimming in Nebraska. Continuing the examination of place and mood found in the earlier works, Jost has fully embraced the medium of digital technology in his work of the past decade. His recent films are rigorous and beautiful, often abstract, and yet immersed in the real world. Swimming in Nebraska continues Jost’s ongoing challenges to the assumptions of American mass media while embracing the possibilities of artistic practice and meditation. Swimming in Nebraska (2010, digital video, color, sound, 74 min) U.S. Premiere! “An essay-documentary of what I suppose most would call an experimental kind. It is meant as an oblique critique of the kind of provincialism in which New Yorkers or Parisians or Angelinos say things like, "Nebraska, there's nothing there" or refer to the American mid-West as "fly-over country." This film is a celebration of the provincialism where there's "nothing." A rich tapestry of color, ideas, and a kind of spirituality. An electronic essay.” – Jon Jost SZAMANKA (from IMDB) Director Andrzej Zulawski's adaptation of Manuela Gretkowska's controversial screenplay tells the story of an anthropology professor Michal (Boguslaw Linda) who, as the movie progresses, develops two overwhelming obsessions. The first one is a mummified, 3,000 year-old, perfectly preserved body of a shaman he and his colleagues have recently dragged out of a swamp, and the second – an enigmatic student (Iwona Petry) he meets by chance at Krakow Railway Station... Dir. Andrzej Zulawski, 1996, 35mm, 110 min. THE THIRD PART OF THE NIGHT Emerging right out of the gate with a debut as emotionally potent and stylistically inventive as any of his dazzling later works, Andrzej Zulawski’s masterful fever dream The Third Part of the Night is a elliptical wonder on par with the most mind-stretching intellectual Moebius strips of Tarkovsky and David Lynch. Based on the real-life experiences of Zulawski’s father during the Nazi occupation of Poland, the film follows a fugitive who, after witnessing the murder of his wife and child, is hurled into a life that literally is not his own. Littered with trapdoors, doubles, and wormholes, Zulawski creates a cinematic world on the verge of collapse, where doppelgangers and dread abound alongside the true untold story of a Nazi vaccine laboratory, where Jews and members of the resistance were “employed” as feeders for parasites infected with typhus (thus protecting them from persecution.) It’s a history that’s mind-bogglingly fascinating on its own; in Zulawski’s hands, it’s one of the most unique war films ever created. Dir. Andrzej Zulawski, 1971, 35mm, 105 min. Three Heroines (U.S.S.R., 1938) Directed by Dziga Vertov Vertov the filmmaker had two passions: women and planes. These two passions came together in Three Heroines (1938), which follows the legendary female pilots Raskova, Osipenko and Grisodubova in their failed but magnificent attempt to make the first nonstop trans-Siberian flight. The film’s unspoken irony: a good crash and a successful rescue make a better story than a mission accomplished. Cinematographer: S. Semenov. 35mm, b/w, in Russian w/ English subtitles, 54 min. Three Songs of Lenin (Tri pesni o Lenine) (U.S.S.R., 1935/'38) Directed by Dziga Vertov In 1938, Vertov was instructed to reedit his most celebrated film to remove any references to “enemies of the people” who had since become victims of Stalin’s purges. This sound version features images of Stalin removed from yet-another edit in 1970. The film, structured in three parts, glorifies Lenin’s life and legacy through folkloric songs and tales. H.G. Wells called it “One of the greatest and most beautiful films I have ever seen.” Screenwriter: Dziga Vertov. Cinematographer: Dmitrii Surensky, Mark Magidson, Bentsion Monastyrsky. 35mm, b/w, in Russian w/ English subtitles, 67 min. TILLIE'S PUNCTURED ROMANCE Silent film on the big screen, with sounds from the magnificent Skinner Organ filling Royce Hall. Acclaimed organist and Fulbright scholar Steven Ball — widely known for his aptitude in silent-film composition — sets a live score to Tillie’s Punctured Romance, which film historians believe may be the first full-length comedy ever. The 1914 film stars Charlie Chaplin and also marks the screen debut of Marie Dressler, popular stage actress of the time. The film is a rarely seen treasure that was preserved in 2004 by UCLA Film and Television Archive with funding from the Film Foundation, UK Film Council and Saving the Silents. TIME AFTER TIME 1979, Warner Bros., 112 min, USA, Dir: Nicholas Meyer One of his most popular and engaging films finds Malcolm McDowell as Victorian author H.G. Wells, in pursuit of Jack the Ripper (David Warner), time-traveling to contemporary San Francisco and finding help and romance from shy modern girl Mary Steenburgen. A marvelously entertaining blend of sci-fi, literary history and modern pop culture from Nicholas Meyer, the director of STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN. Discussion between films with actor Malcolm McDowell. UPRISING: HIP HOP AND THE L.A. RIOTS “Uprising: Hip Hop and the L.A. Riots” is told from the diverse perspective of the rappers, musicians, police officers and victims who lived through the landmark LA Riots in April, 1992. With definitive accounts of the four fiery days that left 53 people dead, over 12,000 arrested and put a searing spotlight on race relations and American pop culture, viewers will also hear never-before-heard stories from hip hop artists who were effected by or actual participants in the riots, including: Rodney King, John Singleton, Too Short, Big Boy, Sir Jinx, and others. DIRECTOR: Mark Ford; EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Snoop Dogg; RUNTIME: 66 Minutes VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS 1970/color/77 min. Scr: Jaromil Jireš, Ester Krumbachová; dir: Jaromil Jireš; w/ Jaroslava Schallerová, Helena Anýzová, Petr Kopriva, Jirí Prýmek. Valerie and her Week of Wonders meshes a coming-of-age allegory with baroque fantasy, trippy horror, and potent symbolism. Equal parts old-world superstition and Victorian fairy tale, Valerie infuses its splintered narrative with hippie audacity. Living with her grandmother in a Transylvanian hamlet, teenage Valerie walks a fine line between dream state and waking life after she begins to menstruate. Past and present merge, characters take on multiple identities, vampires, priests and other strange creatures abound. A lasting cult classic, Valerie most recently had a substitute to its original Luboš Fišer score created by a psych-rock supergroup that calls itself The Valerie Project. We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists Cinema Speakeasy is thrilled to team up with Southern California Public Radio, 89.3 KPCC and the Crawford Family Forum to present a free sneak preview of director Brian Knappenberger’s festival buzz-maker: ”We are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists“. The evening will start with a panel, featuring director Knappenberger and several activists. WHY WORRY? “The good American, still devoutly believed in during the 1920s, was two things: he was aggressive, and he was innocent…and then there was Harold Lloyd. A boy whom nothing could defeat.” — Walter Kerr, “The Silent Clowns” Made famous by his stunningly athletic physical comedy and his “glasses” character — an ambitious go-getting Man of the Century, yet an everyman who resembled those in his audience — Harold Lloyd remains one of the era’s greatest comedians, alongside Chaplin and Keaton. In Why Worry?, Lloyd arrives on a South American island, to find himself caught up in the locals’ political revolution. The film benefits from a breathtaking abundance of non-stop gags, and the eye-catching presence of giant Johan Aasen as Lloyd’s sidekick. As well, Why Worry? marks the first appearance in a Lloyd film of Jobyna Ralston, who was to be his romantic foil in five subsequent features. Harold Lloyd’s granddaughter Suzanne Lloyd will be be here at the Cinefamily to introduce the show — and join us for birthday cake, as we celebrate Harold’s upcoming April birthday! Dirs. Fred Newmeyer & Sam Taylor, 1923, 35mm, 60 min. WIZARDS 1977/color/82 min. Scr/dir: Ralph Bakshi It’s the thirty-fifth anniversary of animation icon Ralph Bakshi’s 1977 fantasy film, Wizards. Released the same year as Star Wars, it was Twentieth Century Fox’s first foray into feature animation. Bakshi wrote, directed, and produced this post-apocalyptic adventure about an earth recovering from nuclear fallout millions of years after a bomb was detonated—an uneasy co-existence between humans and a race of mystic creatures.