Anthology Film Archives

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

Sidney Lumet directed this intense adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s novel, which Nat Hentoff calls “a far more seizing transformation of the book than Robert Rossen’s [big-]screen version.” Willie Stark (played with thuggish bravado by Neville Brand, who won a Sylvania Award for his performance) is an idealistic country lawyer who mutates into a demagogic state Governor. After using blackmail to overcome an impeachment attempt, he fixes his political gaze upon the U.S. Senate, but his ambitions are foiled by an assassin.

(BOVEN IS HET STIL)

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

With Jeroen Willems, Henri Garcin, Wim Opbrouck, and Martijn Lakemeier. Distributed by Big World Pictures; special thanks to Jonathan Howell.

Helmer, a single farmer in his fifties, lives with his aged, bedridden father in the Dutch countryside. His working days are marked by the visits of milk collector Johan, a man of his own age for whom Helmer holds a secret fascination. One day Helmer decides to renovate the house, buying himself a new double bed and moving his father upstairs. His life gains even more momentum when adolescent farmhand Henk comes to help him out.

The late Jeroen Willems, in his final leading role for the big screen, turns in a powerful, slowburn performance in this adaptation of the award-winning novel BOVEN IS HET STIL by Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker. In this battle of wills between two powerful personalities – the father, once domineering and now in decline, and the son, preparing to live his own life when his father is gone – what is left unsaid takes precedence over dialogue. But when unexpected words do come to Helmer late in the film, their quiet force is indisputable. Adapting the source novel in unusual, elliptical fashion – much of the backstory is merely alluded to on-screen – director Leopold has created an exquisitely sensitive film whose deceptively controlled, placid exterior masks a wealth of emotion – a dynamic that perfectly reflects the nature of its protagonist.

“Leopold’s careful staging of the scenario contains shades of Carlos Reygadas’s similarly lyrical and country-set SILENT LIGHT. In both movies, nature takes on definition as a palpable force with greater substance than the precise demons haunting each character. Stillness dominates, from the first shots of cornfields at sunrise to the final one that finds Helmer lying among them. When IT’S ALL SO QUIET comes full circle, the title is virtually an understatement.” –Eric Kohn, INDIEWIRE

“Outstanding…this film would have held its own [at the Berlin Film Festival] in even the most demanding Competition.” –Olaf Möller, FILM COMMENT

See the trailer here!

This adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novella (considered by some to be the first great literary expression of existentialism) tells the story of a spiteful wretch who is plagued by despair and an acute sense of awareness. It was made by Herridge for CBS’s CAMERA THREE – a show that he created and for which he served as producer-writer. Herridge’s CAMERA THREE work – exemplified in this production – was, in some ways, the TV equivalent of the Off-Broadway theater: a place for new ideas to be tried-out on a shoestring budget. As the New York Times reported, the show “genuinely fulfills the roles of an experimental workshop on television.” Michael Kane (LONELY ARE THE BRAVE, THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR) plays the bitter, nameless narrator in a stark Herridge-style production which, when first viewed by writer Nat Hentoff, so surprised and impressed him that he exclaimed, “Where the hell did that come from?”

George C. Scott gives a rich and nuanced performance in this adaptation of one of the stories that first brought author Bret Harte to national prominence. Poker Flat is a town of the Old West that is in moral and economic decline. In order to ‘save’ the community, a secret society is formed to identify ‘immoral individuals’ who will be exiled or killed. Among those banished are John Oakhurst (Scott), a professional poker player who has been winning too much money from the secret committee members, a saloon girl (Janet Ward: FAIL-SAFE, NIGHT MOVES), a madam (Ruth White: MIDNIGHT COWBOY, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, HANG ’EM HIGH), and the town drunk. In their banishment, they become snowbound in the wilderness and meet a pair of runaway lovers, Tom (Larry Hagman: FAIL-SAFE, NIXON, DALLAS) and his fiancée Piney (Lane Bradbury: ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE). The six misfit exiles take shelter together and, amidst many tense conflicts, wait out the unending storm with ever-dwindling provisions – finally facing a series of life and death choices. An engaging sample of Herridge’s devotion to “The American Experience” (a title he had adopted for many of his favorite shows of the early 1950s).

(BOVEN IS HET STIL)

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

With Jeroen Willems, Henri Garcin, Wim Opbrouck, and Martijn Lakemeier. Distributed by Big World Pictures; special thanks to Jonathan Howell.

Helmer, a single farmer in his fifties, lives with his aged, bedridden father in the Dutch countryside. His working days are marked by the visits of milk collector Johan, a man of his own age for whom Helmer holds a secret fascination. One day Helmer decides to renovate the house, buying himself a new double bed and moving his father upstairs. His life gains even more momentum when adolescent farmhand Henk comes to help him out.

The late Jeroen Willems, in his final leading role for the big screen, turns in a powerful, slowburn performance in this adaptation of the award-winning novel BOVEN IS HET STIL by Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker. In this battle of wills between two powerful personalities – the father, once domineering and now in decline, and the son, preparing to live his own life when his father is gone – what is left unsaid takes precedence over dialogue. But when unexpected words do come to Helmer late in the film, their quiet force is indisputable. Adapting the source novel in unusual, elliptical fashion – much of the backstory is merely alluded to on-screen – director Leopold has created an exquisitely sensitive film whose deceptively controlled, placid exterior masks a wealth of emotion – a dynamic that perfectly reflects the nature of its protagonist.

“Leopold’s careful staging of the scenario contains shades of Carlos Reygadas’s similarly lyrical and country-set SILENT LIGHT. In both movies, nature takes on definition as a palpable force with greater substance than the precise demons haunting each character. Stillness dominates, from the first shots of cornfields at sunrise to the final one that finds Helmer lying among them. When IT’S ALL SO QUIET comes full circle, the title is virtually an understatement.” –Eric Kohn, INDIEWIRE

“Outstanding…this film would have held its own [at the Berlin Film Festival] in even the most demanding Competition.” –Olaf Möller, FILM COMMENT

See the trailer here!

Sidney Lumet
THREE PLAYS BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
1958, 60 min, video, b&w
Tennessee Williams introduces three of his early one-act plays, directed by Sidney Lumet. In MOONY’S KID DON’T CRY, Ben Gazzara (who had recently played the role of Brick in Williams’s CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF) and Oscar-winner Lee Grant (SHAMPOO) star as a poor young married couple who argue tumultuously over their child and, eventually, their relationship; THE LAST OF MY SOLID GOLD WATCHES (written in 1946, between THE GLASS MENAGERIE and A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE) focuses on a Mississippi shoe salesman (thought to have been based on Williams’s father, a traveling salesman) who returns after years on the road to find that the people he once knew are all dead; and in THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED, Zina Bethune (“The Girl” in Martin Scorsese’s first feature film, WHO’S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR) plays a destitute girl who is haunted by her older sister’s death.

&

Clay Yurdin
THE TELL-TALE HEART
(1958, 30 min, 16mm, b&w)
A quintessential Herridge-style CAMERA THREE production of Edgar Allan Poe’s harrowing story in which an unnamed narrator (played by Herridge favorite, Michael Kane) relates how he committed murder and reveals an obsessed and guilt-ridden mind. This simple, hypnotic, and disturbing one-character show demonstrates Herridge’s aesthetic philosophy that “the TV medium has a function and ability different from any other artistic form. […] The problem is to bring material into a studio with three cameras and no fixed audience. Camera work and lighting play an important part. Everything that happens must free the cameras so that they can surround the action and pick up the truth of all phases of the scene. TV has its own language in which the story must be told. The stage we use is not a room or a street; it’s a theatre of the imagination.”

This adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novella (considered by some to be the first great literary expression of existentialism) tells the story of a spiteful wretch who is plagued by despair and an acute sense of awareness. It was made by Herridge for CBS’s CAMERA THREE – a show that he created and for which he served as producer-writer. Herridge’s CAMERA THREE work – exemplified in this production – was, in some ways, the TV equivalent of the Off-Broadway theater: a place for new ideas to be tried-out on a shoestring budget. As the New York Times reported, the show “genuinely fulfills the roles of an experimental workshop on television.” Michael Kane (LONELY ARE THE BRAVE, THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR) plays the bitter, nameless narrator in a stark Herridge-style production which, when first viewed by writer Nat Hentoff, so surprised and impressed him that he exclaimed, “Where the hell did that come from?”

(BOVEN IS HET STIL)

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

With Jeroen Willems, Henri Garcin, Wim Opbrouck, and Martijn Lakemeier. Distributed by Big World Pictures; special thanks to Jonathan Howell.

Helmer, a single farmer in his fifties, lives with his aged, bedridden father in the Dutch countryside. His working days are marked by the visits of milk collector Johan, a man of his own age for whom Helmer holds a secret fascination. One day Helmer decides to renovate the house, buying himself a new double bed and moving his father upstairs. His life gains even more momentum when adolescent farmhand Henk comes to help him out.

The late Jeroen Willems, in his final leading role for the big screen, turns in a powerful, slowburn performance in this adaptation of the award-winning novel BOVEN IS HET STIL by Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker. In this battle of wills between two powerful personalities – the father, once domineering and now in decline, and the son, preparing to live his own life when his father is gone – what is left unsaid takes precedence over dialogue. But when unexpected words do come to Helmer late in the film, their quiet force is indisputable. Adapting the source novel in unusual, elliptical fashion – much of the backstory is merely alluded to on-screen – director Leopold has created an exquisitely sensitive film whose deceptively controlled, placid exterior masks a wealth of emotion – a dynamic that perfectly reflects the nature of its protagonist.

“Leopold’s careful staging of the scenario contains shades of Carlos Reygadas’s similarly lyrical and country-set SILENT LIGHT. In both movies, nature takes on definition as a palpable force with greater substance than the precise demons haunting each character. Stillness dominates, from the first shots of cornfields at sunrise to the final one that finds Helmer lying among them. When IT’S ALL SO QUIET comes full circle, the title is virtually an understatement.” –Eric Kohn, INDIEWIRE

“Outstanding…this film would have held its own [at the Berlin Film Festival] in even the most demanding Competition.” –Olaf Möller, FILM COMMENT

See the trailer here!

Sidney Lumet directed this intense adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s novel, which Nat Hentoff calls “a far more seizing transformation of the book than Robert Rossen’s [big-]screen version.” Willie Stark (played with thuggish bravado by Neville Brand, who won a Sylvania Award for his performance) is an idealistic country lawyer who mutates into a demagogic state Governor. After using blackmail to overcome an impeachment attempt, he fixes his political gaze upon the U.S. Senate, but his ambitions are foiled by an assassin.

With Norman Alden.

Sarafian is best known for his existential, V8-powered road picture VANISHING POINT. In 1965, however, he wrote and directed his first feature, ANDY, a boundary-pushing melodrama about a mentally challenged middle-aged man. Featuring a career-defining performance by headliner Richard Alden and atmospherically lit by journeyman DP Ernesto Caparrós (who also shot THE MIRACLE WORKER for Arthur Penn), ANDY is a lost little homebrewed gem. Not available on DVD, this is probably the film’s first theatrical screening in fifty years.

(BOVEN IS HET STIL)

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

With Jeroen Willems, Henri Garcin, Wim Opbrouck, and Martijn Lakemeier. Distributed by Big World Pictures; special thanks to Jonathan Howell.

Helmer, a single farmer in his fifties, lives with his aged, bedridden father in the Dutch countryside. His working days are marked by the visits of milk collector Johan, a man of his own age for whom Helmer holds a secret fascination. One day Helmer decides to renovate the house, buying himself a new double bed and moving his father upstairs. His life gains even more momentum when adolescent farmhand Henk comes to help him out.

The late Jeroen Willems, in his final leading role for the big screen, turns in a powerful, slowburn performance in this adaptation of the award-winning novel BOVEN IS HET STIL by Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker. In this battle of wills between two powerful personalities – the father, once domineering and now in decline, and the son, preparing to live his own life when his father is gone – what is left unsaid takes precedence over dialogue. But when unexpected words do come to Helmer late in the film, their quiet force is indisputable. Adapting the source novel in unusual, elliptical fashion – much of the backstory is merely alluded to on-screen – director Leopold has created an exquisitely sensitive film whose deceptively controlled, placid exterior masks a wealth of emotion – a dynamic that perfectly reflects the nature of its protagonist.

“Leopold’s careful staging of the scenario contains shades of Carlos Reygadas’s similarly lyrical and country-set SILENT LIGHT. In both movies, nature takes on definition as a palpable force with greater substance than the precise demons haunting each character. Stillness dominates, from the first shots of cornfields at sunrise to the final one that finds Helmer lying among them. When IT’S ALL SO QUIET comes full circle, the title is virtually an understatement.” –Eric Kohn, INDIEWIRE

“Outstanding…this film would have held its own [at the Berlin Film Festival] in even the most demanding Competition.” –Olaf Möller, FILM COMMENT

See the trailer here!

Sidney Lumet
THREE PLAYS BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
1958, 60 min, video, b&w
Tennessee Williams introduces three of his early one-act plays, directed by Sidney Lumet. In MOONY’S KID DON’T CRY, Ben Gazzara (who had recently played the role of Brick in Williams’s CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF) and Oscar-winner Lee Grant (SHAMPOO) star as a poor young married couple who argue tumultuously over their child and, eventually, their relationship; THE LAST OF MY SOLID GOLD WATCHES (written in 1946, between THE GLASS MENAGERIE and A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE) focuses on a Mississippi shoe salesman (thought to have been based on Williams’s father, a traveling salesman) who returns after years on the road to find that the people he once knew are all dead; and in THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED, Zina Bethune (“The Girl” in Martin Scorsese’s first feature film, WHO’S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR) plays a destitute girl who is haunted by her older sister’s death.

&

Clay Yurdin
THE TELL-TALE HEART
(1958, 30 min, 16mm, b&w)
A quintessential Herridge-style CAMERA THREE production of Edgar Allan Poe’s harrowing story in which an unnamed narrator (played by Herridge favorite, Michael Kane) relates how he committed murder and reveals an obsessed and guilt-ridden mind. This simple, hypnotic, and disturbing one-character show demonstrates Herridge’s aesthetic philosophy that “the TV medium has a function and ability different from any other artistic form. […] The problem is to bring material into a studio with three cameras and no fixed audience. Camera work and lighting play an important part. Everything that happens must free the cameras so that they can surround the action and pick up the truth of all phases of the scene. TV has its own language in which the story must be told. The stage we use is not a room or a street; it’s a theatre of the imagination.”

With Barry Newman, Cleavon Little, Dean Jagger, and Severn Darden.

Persistently overshadowed by Monte Hellman’s TWO LANE BLACKTOP, Sarafian’s VANISHING POINT is 1971’s ‘other’ existential road picture, a symphony of roaring pistons and wafting dust clouds. Blasting through the Nevada desert in a V-8 muscle car, Vietnam vet and ex-policeman Kowalski (Barry Newman) plunges ever deeper – and ever more meaninglessly – into a showdown with the law. Athletic and philosophical in turn, the film was also an early coup for cinematographer John Alonzo, who went on a few years later to lens Roman Polanski’s CHINATOWN.

(BOVEN IS HET STIL)

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

With Jeroen Willems, Henri Garcin, Wim Opbrouck, and Martijn Lakemeier. Distributed by Big World Pictures; special thanks to Jonathan Howell.

Helmer, a single farmer in his fifties, lives with his aged, bedridden father in the Dutch countryside. His working days are marked by the visits of milk collector Johan, a man of his own age for whom Helmer holds a secret fascination. One day Helmer decides to renovate the house, buying himself a new double bed and moving his father upstairs. His life gains even more momentum when adolescent farmhand Henk comes to help him out.

The late Jeroen Willems, in his final leading role for the big screen, turns in a powerful, slowburn performance in this adaptation of the award-winning novel BOVEN IS HET STIL by Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker. In this battle of wills between two powerful personalities – the father, once domineering and now in decline, and the son, preparing to live his own life when his father is gone – what is left unsaid takes precedence over dialogue. But when unexpected words do come to Helmer late in the film, their quiet force is indisputable. Adapting the source novel in unusual, elliptical fashion – much of the backstory is merely alluded to on-screen – director Leopold has created an exquisitely sensitive film whose deceptively controlled, placid exterior masks a wealth of emotion – a dynamic that perfectly reflects the nature of its protagonist.

“Leopold’s careful staging of the scenario contains shades of Carlos Reygadas’s similarly lyrical and country-set SILENT LIGHT. In both movies, nature takes on definition as a palpable force with greater substance than the precise demons haunting each character. Stillness dominates, from the first shots of cornfields at sunrise to the final one that finds Helmer lying among them. When IT’S ALL SO QUIET comes full circle, the title is virtually an understatement.” –Eric Kohn, INDIEWIRE

“Outstanding…this film would have held its own [at the Berlin Film Festival] in even the most demanding Competition.” –Olaf Möller, FILM COMMENT

See the trailer here!

With Burt Reynolds, Sarah Miles, Lee J. Cobb, Jack Warden, George Hamilton, and Bo Hopkins.

Burt Reynolds (yes…Burt Reynolds!) gives a tour-de-force performance in this gutsy widescreen Western. A complex chronicle of vengeance and self-discovery, its sumptuous photography (by Harry Stradling) and endlessly stunning Southwestern locations make this rarely-revived sleeper a must-see. Though it was once referred to by the New York Times as a “festival of incompetence,” Sarafian actually handles the film’s visual and narrative breadth with outstanding aplomb.

PLEASE NOTE: After we went to press with our printed calendar, the distributor informed us that the print we'd arranged to borrow is in fact not in good enough condition to screen; as a result we will have to show THE MAN WHO LOVED CAT DANCING digitally. We apologize for any inconvenience.

With Burt Reynolds, Sarah Miles, Lee J. Cobb, Jack Warden, George Hamilton, and Bo Hopkins.

Burt Reynolds (yes…Burt Reynolds!) gives a tour-de-force performance in this gutsy widescreen Western. A complex chronicle of vengeance and self-discovery, its sumptuous photography (by Harry Stradling) and endlessly stunning Southwestern locations make this rarely-revived sleeper a must-see. Though it was once referred to by the New York Times as a “festival of incompetence,” Sarafian actually handles the film’s visual and narrative breadth with outstanding aplomb.

PLEASE NOTE: After we went to press with our printed calendar, the distributor informed us that the print we'd arranged to borrow is in fact not in good enough condition to screen; as a result we will have to show THE MAN WHO LOVED CAT DANCING digitally. We apologize for any inconvenience.

(BOVEN IS HET STIL)

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

With Jeroen Willems, Henri Garcin, Wim Opbrouck, and Martijn Lakemeier. Distributed by Big World Pictures; special thanks to Jonathan Howell.

Helmer, a single farmer in his fifties, lives with his aged, bedridden father in the Dutch countryside. His working days are marked by the visits of milk collector Johan, a man of his own age for whom Helmer holds a secret fascination. One day Helmer decides to renovate the house, buying himself a new double bed and moving his father upstairs. His life gains even more momentum when adolescent farmhand Henk comes to help him out.

The late Jeroen Willems, in his final leading role for the big screen, turns in a powerful, slowburn performance in this adaptation of the award-winning novel BOVEN IS HET STIL by Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker. In this battle of wills between two powerful personalities – the father, once domineering and now in decline, and the son, preparing to live his own life when his father is gone – what is left unsaid takes precedence over dialogue. But when unexpected words do come to Helmer late in the film, their quiet force is indisputable. Adapting the source novel in unusual, elliptical fashion – much of the backstory is merely alluded to on-screen – director Leopold has created an exquisitely sensitive film whose deceptively controlled, placid exterior masks a wealth of emotion – a dynamic that perfectly reflects the nature of its protagonist.

“Leopold’s careful staging of the scenario contains shades of Carlos Reygadas’s similarly lyrical and country-set SILENT LIGHT. In both movies, nature takes on definition as a palpable force with greater substance than the precise demons haunting each character. Stillness dominates, from the first shots of cornfields at sunrise to the final one that finds Helmer lying among them. When IT’S ALL SO QUIET comes full circle, the title is virtually an understatement.” –Eric Kohn, INDIEWIRE

“Outstanding…this film would have held its own [at the Berlin Film Festival] in even the most demanding Competition.” –Olaf Möller, FILM COMMENT

See the trailer here!

With Barry Newman, Cleavon Little, Dean Jagger, and Severn Darden.

Persistently overshadowed by Monte Hellman’s TWO LANE BLACKTOP, Sarafian’s VANISHING POINT is 1971’s ‘other’ existential road picture, a symphony of roaring pistons and wafting dust clouds. Blasting through the Nevada desert in a V-8 muscle car, Vietnam vet and ex-policeman Kowalski (Barry Newman) plunges ever deeper – and ever more meaninglessly – into a showdown with the law. Athletic and philosophical in turn, the film was also an early coup for cinematographer John Alonzo, who went on a few years later to lens Roman Polanski’s CHINATOWN.

(BOVEN IS HET STIL)

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

With Jeroen Willems, Henri Garcin, Wim Opbrouck, and Martijn Lakemeier. Distributed by Big World Pictures; special thanks to Jonathan Howell.

Helmer, a single farmer in his fifties, lives with his aged, bedridden father in the Dutch countryside. His working days are marked by the visits of milk collector Johan, a man of his own age for whom Helmer holds a secret fascination. One day Helmer decides to renovate the house, buying himself a new double bed and moving his father upstairs. His life gains even more momentum when adolescent farmhand Henk comes to help him out.

The late Jeroen Willems, in his final leading role for the big screen, turns in a powerful, slowburn performance in this adaptation of the award-winning novel BOVEN IS HET STIL by Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker. In this battle of wills between two powerful personalities – the father, once domineering and now in decline, and the son, preparing to live his own life when his father is gone – what is left unsaid takes precedence over dialogue. But when unexpected words do come to Helmer late in the film, their quiet force is indisputable. Adapting the source novel in unusual, elliptical fashion – much of the backstory is merely alluded to on-screen – director Leopold has created an exquisitely sensitive film whose deceptively controlled, placid exterior masks a wealth of emotion – a dynamic that perfectly reflects the nature of its protagonist.

“Leopold’s careful staging of the scenario contains shades of Carlos Reygadas’s similarly lyrical and country-set SILENT LIGHT. In both movies, nature takes on definition as a palpable force with greater substance than the precise demons haunting each character. Stillness dominates, from the first shots of cornfields at sunrise to the final one that finds Helmer lying among them. When IT’S ALL SO QUIET comes full circle, the title is virtually an understatement.” –Eric Kohn, INDIEWIRE

“Outstanding…this film would have held its own [at the Berlin Film Festival] in even the most demanding Competition.” –Olaf Möller, FILM COMMENT

See the trailer here!

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Distributed by Cinelicious Pics; thanks to Dennis Bartok & David Marriott, and to Mike Plante.

While the rest of America sleeps, DIY filmmaker/musician Giuseppe Andrews (a one-time teen actor in INDEPENDENCE DAY and DETROIT ROCK CITY) has made over 30 experimental features with titles like DOILY’S SUMMER OF FREAK OCCURRENCES, TRAILER TOWN, and UTOPIA BLUES, set in some demented alternate universe (i.e. Ventura, California) populated by real-life alcoholics and drug addicts, trash-talking senior citizens and trailer park residents dressed in cow outfits and costume-shop wigs, acting out booze-fueled vignettes of severe psychosis filtered through Giuseppe’s John Waters-meets-Harmony Korine-meets-Werner Herzog sensibility. With GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE, Adam Rifkin has created a wildly surreal, outrageously funny, and strangely touching portrait of a truly Outsider Artist, as he follows Giuseppe and his seriously impaired troupe on the production of his latest 2-day opus, GARBANZO GAS, starring Vietnam Ron as a cow given a weekend reprieve from the slaughterhouse at the local motel. Beyond the sun-stroked Theater of the Absurd madness of Giuseppe’s vision, there is a remarkable and endearing sense of family among the director, his amiably bonkers dad Ed, patient girlfriend Mary, Sir Bigfoot George, and the rest of his surreal Trailer Park rep company. As skate-punk Spit sagely observes about Giuseppe’s movies: “They’re just like, nothing really makes any sense, and I don’t know, that’s kinda how reality is, and nobody really cares to accept that.”

“AMERICAN MOVIE meets Charles Bukowski in a trailer park.” –Bobcat Goldthwait

“Eschewing the youthful casts, which generally dominate independent cinema, the engagingly articulate Andrews – whose cited inspirations include New German Cinema giant Rainer Werner Fassbinder and, specifically, the tramp-banquet ‘Last Supper’ parody in Luis Buñuel’s VIRIDIANA (1961) – instead prefers collaborations with individuals of ‘a certain age.’ […] The resulting fruits, meanwhile, recall the earlier reaches of John Waters’ output, or the wackier fringes of Harmony Korine’s.” –Neil Young, THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

Please note: alongside the run of GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE, we'll be screening two of Andrews's films; click here and here for more info.

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Distributed by Cinelicious Pics; thanks to Dennis Bartok & David Marriott, and to Mike Plante.

While the rest of America sleeps, DIY filmmaker/musician Giuseppe Andrews (a one-time teen actor in INDEPENDENCE DAY and DETROIT ROCK CITY) has made over 30 experimental features with titles like DOILY’S SUMMER OF FREAK OCCURRENCES, TRAILER TOWN, and UTOPIA BLUES, set in some demented alternate universe (i.e. Ventura, California) populated by real-life alcoholics and drug addicts, trash-talking senior citizens and trailer park residents dressed in cow outfits and costume-shop wigs, acting out booze-fueled vignettes of severe psychosis filtered through Giuseppe’s John Waters-meets-Harmony Korine-meets-Werner Herzog sensibility. With GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE, Adam Rifkin has created a wildly surreal, outrageously funny, and strangely touching portrait of a truly Outsider Artist, as he follows Giuseppe and his seriously impaired troupe on the production of his latest 2-day opus, GARBANZO GAS, starring Vietnam Ron as a cow given a weekend reprieve from the slaughterhouse at the local motel. Beyond the sun-stroked Theater of the Absurd madness of Giuseppe’s vision, there is a remarkable and endearing sense of family among the director, his amiably bonkers dad Ed, patient girlfriend Mary, Sir Bigfoot George, and the rest of his surreal Trailer Park rep company. As skate-punk Spit sagely observes about Giuseppe’s movies: “They’re just like, nothing really makes any sense, and I don’t know, that’s kinda how reality is, and nobody really cares to accept that.”

“AMERICAN MOVIE meets Charles Bukowski in a trailer park.” –Bobcat Goldthwait

“Eschewing the youthful casts, which generally dominate independent cinema, the engagingly articulate Andrews – whose cited inspirations include New German Cinema giant Rainer Werner Fassbinder and, specifically, the tramp-banquet ‘Last Supper’ parody in Luis Buñuel’s VIRIDIANA (1961) – instead prefers collaborations with individuals of ‘a certain age.’ […] The resulting fruits, meanwhile, recall the earlier reaches of John Waters’ output, or the wackier fringes of Harmony Korine’s.” –Neil Young, THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

Please note: alongside the run of GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE, we'll be screening two of Andrews's films; click here and here for more info.

(QUE TA JOIE DEMEURE)

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Special thanks to Valeska Neu (Films Boutique).

Perhaps the most internationally recognized of contemporary Quebec filmmakers, Denis Côté has fashioned a singularly protean body of work over the past decade. Since his fourth feature, CARCASSES (2009), an apparent documentary portrait of a solitary rural scavenger that transformed before viewers’ eyes into a mysterious, menacing fiction, he has freely and unapologetically mixed documentary and narrative conventions, as well as alternating between (relatively) commercial films and more uncategorizable, experimental projects. Just as the predominantly naturalistic narrative film CURLING (2010) was followed by BESTIAIRE (2012), a near-wordless study of the relationship between animals and humans at a Quebec safari park, so VIC + FLO SAW A BEAR (2013) (another unambiguously fictional film, albeit one that performed its own formal and narrative experiments) has been followed by JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING, a cinematic reflection on the nature of work that pivots almost continuously from mode to mode, approaching its subject from a myriad of directions. Filmed in factories and workshops, it’s composed in turn of theatrical monologues, poetic musings, immaculately composed documentation, and the whisper of a narrative. Its constantly shifting form triggers a reckoning with the concept of manual labor – and with the daily routines and inner lives of the factory workers who populate the film – which breaks free of the rhetoric that typically goes with the territory.

“JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING is not a documentary about being a slave to the machine, alienation, dehumanization, or exploitation. Sound and image, editing and dramatic structure are merely employed to transpose workshops and factory floors into the cinematic space so as to explore the bizarre environments that workers adapt to and with which they skillfully interact, as if humanity had never done anything else since time immemorial. This too is part of the fiction that slowly but surely creeps in, impossible to separate from the documentary elements – cinema has no need for such distinctions.” –BERLINALE

JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING will be having a preview screening as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “First Look” festival on January 10; visit movingimage.us for more details

Karl Valentin
CONFIRMATION DAY / DER FIRMLING
(1934, 23 min, 35mm, b&w. In German with no subtitles; English synopsis available.)
A father and son, celebrating the son’s confirmation, go to a fancy restaurant and drink all day. They want to order Emmentaler cheese, but can only find Affentaler wine on the menu. How did the Affentaler, which they think is cheese, get into the bottle? They keep on drinking away, attracting attention and causing more and more confusion.
“Valentin plays a drunken father treating his giggly young son to lunch, and the inspired muddle he creates out of a table, two chairs, an umbrella, and a watch chain rivals some of Laurel and Hardy’s best moments.” –J.R. Jones, CHICAGO READER

&

Jean Vigo
TARIS (1931, 9 min, 35mm-to-DCP)
&
ZERO FOR CONDUCT / ZÉRO DE CONDUITE
(1935, 44 min, 35mm, b&w. In French with English subtitles.)
An eloquent parable of freedom versus authority, Vigo’s film is set at a boys’ boarding school and undoubtedly echoes Vigo’s own unhappy experiences as a child. Under the pressure of various civic groups the film was removed from screens several months after its release in 1933. It was branded “anti-French” by censors and was not shown again in Paris until 1945.

Total running time: ca. 80 min.

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“When a lucky cow wins an all-expense-paid weekend at a local hotel, it can’t believe its good fortune. It gets to relax, unwind, and avoid a trip to the slaughterhouse – at least for a few days. Of course, it couldn’t imagine the menagerie of madmen it would run into. Down the hall is a pair of drug-addled dimwits who are desperate for something to eat. The cow becomes their main focus. Meanwhile, two different spree killers are wreaking havoc. One murders at the command of some erroneous bath linen. The other listens to a voice inside his shoe, the instructions resulting in even more dead bodies. All the while, our contented animal tries to accommodate everyone’s needs, which typically revolve around a room service meal of meat and potatoes.” –Bill Gibron

Screening in conjunction with our week-long run of the new documentary about Giuseppe Andrews, GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE; click here for more details. 

(QUE TA JOIE DEMEURE)

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Special thanks to Valeska Neu (Films Boutique).

Perhaps the most internationally recognized of contemporary Quebec filmmakers, Denis Côté has fashioned a singularly protean body of work over the past decade. Since his fourth feature, CARCASSES (2009), an apparent documentary portrait of a solitary rural scavenger that transformed before viewers’ eyes into a mysterious, menacing fiction, he has freely and unapologetically mixed documentary and narrative conventions, as well as alternating between (relatively) commercial films and more uncategorizable, experimental projects. Just as the predominantly naturalistic narrative film CURLING (2010) was followed by BESTIAIRE (2012), a near-wordless study of the relationship between animals and humans at a Quebec safari park, so VIC + FLO SAW A BEAR (2013) (another unambiguously fictional film, albeit one that performed its own formal and narrative experiments) has been followed by JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING, a cinematic reflection on the nature of work that pivots almost continuously from mode to mode, approaching its subject from a myriad of directions. Filmed in factories and workshops, it’s composed in turn of theatrical monologues, poetic musings, immaculately composed documentation, and the whisper of a narrative. Its constantly shifting form triggers a reckoning with the concept of manual labor – and with the daily routines and inner lives of the factory workers who populate the film – which breaks free of the rhetoric that typically goes with the territory.

“JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING is not a documentary about being a slave to the machine, alienation, dehumanization, or exploitation. Sound and image, editing and dramatic structure are merely employed to transpose workshops and factory floors into the cinematic space so as to explore the bizarre environments that workers adapt to and with which they skillfully interact, as if humanity had never done anything else since time immemorial. This too is part of the fiction that slowly but surely creeps in, impossible to separate from the documentary elements – cinema has no need for such distinctions.” –BERLINALE

JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING will be having a preview screening as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “First Look” festival on January 10; visit movingimage.us for more details

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Distributed by Cinelicious Pics; thanks to Dennis Bartok & David Marriott, and to Mike Plante.

While the rest of America sleeps, DIY filmmaker/musician Giuseppe Andrews (a one-time teen actor in INDEPENDENCE DAY and DETROIT ROCK CITY) has made over 30 experimental features with titles like DOILY’S SUMMER OF FREAK OCCURRENCES, TRAILER TOWN, and UTOPIA BLUES, set in some demented alternate universe (i.e. Ventura, California) populated by real-life alcoholics and drug addicts, trash-talking senior citizens and trailer park residents dressed in cow outfits and costume-shop wigs, acting out booze-fueled vignettes of severe psychosis filtered through Giuseppe’s John Waters-meets-Harmony Korine-meets-Werner Herzog sensibility. With GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE, Adam Rifkin has created a wildly surreal, outrageously funny, and strangely touching portrait of a truly Outsider Artist, as he follows Giuseppe and his seriously impaired troupe on the production of his latest 2-day opus, GARBANZO GAS, starring Vietnam Ron as a cow given a weekend reprieve from the slaughterhouse at the local motel. Beyond the sun-stroked Theater of the Absurd madness of Giuseppe’s vision, there is a remarkable and endearing sense of family among the director, his amiably bonkers dad Ed, patient girlfriend Mary, Sir Bigfoot George, and the rest of his surreal Trailer Park rep company. As skate-punk Spit sagely observes about Giuseppe’s movies: “They’re just like, nothing really makes any sense, and I don’t know, that’s kinda how reality is, and nobody really cares to accept that.”

“AMERICAN MOVIE meets Charles Bukowski in a trailer park.” –Bobcat Goldthwait

“Eschewing the youthful casts, which generally dominate independent cinema, the engagingly articulate Andrews – whose cited inspirations include New German Cinema giant Rainer Werner Fassbinder and, specifically, the tramp-banquet ‘Last Supper’ parody in Luis Buñuel’s VIRIDIANA (1961) – instead prefers collaborations with individuals of ‘a certain age.’ […] The resulting fruits, meanwhile, recall the earlier reaches of John Waters’ output, or the wackier fringes of Harmony Korine’s.” –Neil Young, THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

Please note: alongside the run of GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE, we'll be screening two of Andrews's films; click here and here for more info.

“Daisy is devastated. Her boyfriend recently committed suicide in their ‘garden’ – a loving reference to the beach volleyball court where they first met. Unable to find happiness, she’s lost in a world of borderline insanity. One day, police officer Rick stops by her trailer. He is the one who found her dead lover, and hopes he can make a connection with the grieving gal. Sure enough, they become an item, which irks toupee-wearing Bill to no end. He’s the father of the man who killed himself, and he wants Daisy as well. As the suitors maneuver for her affections, our heroine is confused. She has strong feelings for both of them. Then Rick drops a personal bombshell which violates her ever-present trust issues. As Bill moves in, our former cop turns to the bottle, and then crack cocaine. All he wants is a chance to get back into Daisy’s good graces. But unless something happens to Bill, that seems unlikely.” –Bill Gibron

Screening in conjunction with our week-long run of the new documentary about Giuseppe Andrews, GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE; click here for more details.  

(QUE TA JOIE DEMEURE)

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Special thanks to Valeska Neu (Films Boutique).

Perhaps the most internationally recognized of contemporary Quebec filmmakers, Denis Côté has fashioned a singularly protean body of work over the past decade. Since his fourth feature, CARCASSES (2009), an apparent documentary portrait of a solitary rural scavenger that transformed before viewers’ eyes into a mysterious, menacing fiction, he has freely and unapologetically mixed documentary and narrative conventions, as well as alternating between (relatively) commercial films and more uncategorizable, experimental projects. Just as the predominantly naturalistic narrative film CURLING (2010) was followed by BESTIAIRE (2012), a near-wordless study of the relationship between animals and humans at a Quebec safari park, so VIC + FLO SAW A BEAR (2013) (another unambiguously fictional film, albeit one that performed its own formal and narrative experiments) has been followed by JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING, a cinematic reflection on the nature of work that pivots almost continuously from mode to mode, approaching its subject from a myriad of directions. Filmed in factories and workshops, it’s composed in turn of theatrical monologues, poetic musings, immaculately composed documentation, and the whisper of a narrative. Its constantly shifting form triggers a reckoning with the concept of manual labor – and with the daily routines and inner lives of the factory workers who populate the film – which breaks free of the rhetoric that typically goes with the territory.

“JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING is not a documentary about being a slave to the machine, alienation, dehumanization, or exploitation. Sound and image, editing and dramatic structure are merely employed to transpose workshops and factory floors into the cinematic space so as to explore the bizarre environments that workers adapt to and with which they skillfully interact, as if humanity had never done anything else since time immemorial. This too is part of the fiction that slowly but surely creeps in, impossible to separate from the documentary elements – cinema has no need for such distinctions.” –BERLINALE

JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING will be having a preview screening as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “First Look” festival on January 10; visit movingimage.us for more details

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Distributed by Cinelicious Pics; thanks to Dennis Bartok & David Marriott, and to Mike Plante.

While the rest of America sleeps, DIY filmmaker/musician Giuseppe Andrews (a one-time teen actor in INDEPENDENCE DAY and DETROIT ROCK CITY) has made over 30 experimental features with titles like DOILY’S SUMMER OF FREAK OCCURRENCES, TRAILER TOWN, and UTOPIA BLUES, set in some demented alternate universe (i.e. Ventura, California) populated by real-life alcoholics and drug addicts, trash-talking senior citizens and trailer park residents dressed in cow outfits and costume-shop wigs, acting out booze-fueled vignettes of severe psychosis filtered through Giuseppe’s John Waters-meets-Harmony Korine-meets-Werner Herzog sensibility. With GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE, Adam Rifkin has created a wildly surreal, outrageously funny, and strangely touching portrait of a truly Outsider Artist, as he follows Giuseppe and his seriously impaired troupe on the production of his latest 2-day opus, GARBANZO GAS, starring Vietnam Ron as a cow given a weekend reprieve from the slaughterhouse at the local motel. Beyond the sun-stroked Theater of the Absurd madness of Giuseppe’s vision, there is a remarkable and endearing sense of family among the director, his amiably bonkers dad Ed, patient girlfriend Mary, Sir Bigfoot George, and the rest of his surreal Trailer Park rep company. As skate-punk Spit sagely observes about Giuseppe’s movies: “They’re just like, nothing really makes any sense, and I don’t know, that’s kinda how reality is, and nobody really cares to accept that.”

“AMERICAN MOVIE meets Charles Bukowski in a trailer park.” –Bobcat Goldthwait

“Eschewing the youthful casts, which generally dominate independent cinema, the engagingly articulate Andrews – whose cited inspirations include New German Cinema giant Rainer Werner Fassbinder and, specifically, the tramp-banquet ‘Last Supper’ parody in Luis Buñuel’s VIRIDIANA (1961) – instead prefers collaborations with individuals of ‘a certain age.’ […] The resulting fruits, meanwhile, recall the earlier reaches of John Waters’ output, or the wackier fringes of Harmony Korine’s.” –Neil Young, THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

Please note: alongside the run of GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE, we'll be screening two of Andrews's films; click here and here for more info.

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Distributed by Cinelicious Pics; thanks to Dennis Bartok & David Marriott, and to Mike Plante.

While the rest of America sleeps, DIY filmmaker/musician Giuseppe Andrews (a one-time teen actor in INDEPENDENCE DAY and DETROIT ROCK CITY) has made over 30 experimental features with titles like DOILY’S SUMMER OF FREAK OCCURRENCES, TRAILER TOWN, and UTOPIA BLUES, set in some demented alternate universe (i.e. Ventura, California) populated by real-life alcoholics and drug addicts, trash-talking senior citizens and trailer park residents dressed in cow outfits and costume-shop wigs, acting out booze-fueled vignettes of severe psychosis filtered through Giuseppe’s John Waters-meets-Harmony Korine-meets-Werner Herzog sensibility. With GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE, Adam Rifkin has created a wildly surreal, outrageously funny, and strangely touching portrait of a truly Outsider Artist, as he follows Giuseppe and his seriously impaired troupe on the production of his latest 2-day opus, GARBANZO GAS, starring Vietnam Ron as a cow given a weekend reprieve from the slaughterhouse at the local motel. Beyond the sun-stroked Theater of the Absurd madness of Giuseppe’s vision, there is a remarkable and endearing sense of family among the director, his amiably bonkers dad Ed, patient girlfriend Mary, Sir Bigfoot George, and the rest of his surreal Trailer Park rep company. As skate-punk Spit sagely observes about Giuseppe’s movies: “They’re just like, nothing really makes any sense, and I don’t know, that’s kinda how reality is, and nobody really cares to accept that.”

“AMERICAN MOVIE meets Charles Bukowski in a trailer park.” –Bobcat Goldthwait

“Eschewing the youthful casts, which generally dominate independent cinema, the engagingly articulate Andrews – whose cited inspirations include New German Cinema giant Rainer Werner Fassbinder and, specifically, the tramp-banquet ‘Last Supper’ parody in Luis Buñuel’s VIRIDIANA (1961) – instead prefers collaborations with individuals of ‘a certain age.’ […] The resulting fruits, meanwhile, recall the earlier reaches of John Waters’ output, or the wackier fringes of Harmony Korine’s.” –Neil Young, THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

Please note: alongside the run of GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE, we'll be screening two of Andrews's films; click here and here for more info.

(QUE TA JOIE DEMEURE)

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Special thanks to Valeska Neu (Films Boutique).

Perhaps the most internationally recognized of contemporary Quebec filmmakers, Denis Côté has fashioned a singularly protean body of work over the past decade. Since his fourth feature, CARCASSES (2009), an apparent documentary portrait of a solitary rural scavenger that transformed before viewers’ eyes into a mysterious, menacing fiction, he has freely and unapologetically mixed documentary and narrative conventions, as well as alternating between (relatively) commercial films and more uncategorizable, experimental projects. Just as the predominantly naturalistic narrative film CURLING (2010) was followed by BESTIAIRE (2012), a near-wordless study of the relationship between animals and humans at a Quebec safari park, so VIC + FLO SAW A BEAR (2013) (another unambiguously fictional film, albeit one that performed its own formal and narrative experiments) has been followed by JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING, a cinematic reflection on the nature of work that pivots almost continuously from mode to mode, approaching its subject from a myriad of directions. Filmed in factories and workshops, it’s composed in turn of theatrical monologues, poetic musings, immaculately composed documentation, and the whisper of a narrative. Its constantly shifting form triggers a reckoning with the concept of manual labor – and with the daily routines and inner lives of the factory workers who populate the film – which breaks free of the rhetoric that typically goes with the territory.

“JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING is not a documentary about being a slave to the machine, alienation, dehumanization, or exploitation. Sound and image, editing and dramatic structure are merely employed to transpose workshops and factory floors into the cinematic space so as to explore the bizarre environments that workers adapt to and with which they skillfully interact, as if humanity had never done anything else since time immemorial. This too is part of the fiction that slowly but surely creeps in, impossible to separate from the documentary elements – cinema has no need for such distinctions.” –BERLINALE

JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING will be having a preview screening as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “First Look” festival on January 10; visit movingimage.us for more details

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Distributed by Cinelicious Pics; thanks to Dennis Bartok & David Marriott, and to Mike Plante.

While the rest of America sleeps, DIY filmmaker/musician Giuseppe Andrews (a one-time teen actor in INDEPENDENCE DAY and DETROIT ROCK CITY) has made over 30 experimental features with titles like DOILY’S SUMMER OF FREAK OCCURRENCES, TRAILER TOWN, and UTOPIA BLUES, set in some demented alternate universe (i.e. Ventura, California) populated by real-life alcoholics and drug addicts, trash-talking senior citizens and trailer park residents dressed in cow outfits and costume-shop wigs, acting out booze-fueled vignettes of severe psychosis filtered through Giuseppe’s John Waters-meets-Harmony Korine-meets-Werner Herzog sensibility. With GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE, Adam Rifkin has created a wildly surreal, outrageously funny, and strangely touching portrait of a truly Outsider Artist, as he follows Giuseppe and his seriously impaired troupe on the production of his latest 2-day opus, GARBANZO GAS, starring Vietnam Ron as a cow given a weekend reprieve from the slaughterhouse at the local motel. Beyond the sun-stroked Theater of the Absurd madness of Giuseppe’s vision, there is a remarkable and endearing sense of family among the director, his amiably bonkers dad Ed, patient girlfriend Mary, Sir Bigfoot George, and the rest of his surreal Trailer Park rep company. As skate-punk Spit sagely observes about Giuseppe’s movies: “They’re just like, nothing really makes any sense, and I don’t know, that’s kinda how reality is, and nobody really cares to accept that.”

“AMERICAN MOVIE meets Charles Bukowski in a trailer park.” –Bobcat Goldthwait

“Eschewing the youthful casts, which generally dominate independent cinema, the engagingly articulate Andrews – whose cited inspirations include New German Cinema giant Rainer Werner Fassbinder and, specifically, the tramp-banquet ‘Last Supper’ parody in Luis Buñuel’s VIRIDIANA (1961) – instead prefers collaborations with individuals of ‘a certain age.’ […] The resulting fruits, meanwhile, recall the earlier reaches of John Waters’ output, or the wackier fringes of Harmony Korine’s.” –Neil Young, THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

Please note: alongside the run of GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE, we'll be screening two of Andrews's films; click here and here for more info.

An evening of short pieces exploring emotional reactions to objects: an oversized man stuck in a shrunken board room, a wry look at an iconic chair, an impassioned and physical reaction to a virtual artwork. Videos include Turner Prize-winning artist Elizabeth Price’s IN THE HOUSE OF MR. X, a tour through high-value furnishings in a theatrically-lit modernist home; the New York premiere of Simon Martin’s LOUIS GHOST CHAIR; Andy Graydon’s sci-fi journey through the textures of Berlin; and Mores McWreath’s hilarious portrait of the psychology of a coldly anonymous corporate conference room.

João Enxuto & Erica Love ONEMENT (2015, 5 min, digital)
Simon Martin LOUIS GHOST CHAIR (2012, 16 min, digital)
Andy Graydon VOSTOK, FARETHEEWELL (2011, 35 min, digital)
Mores McWreath THE BUD, THE SEED, THE EGG (2008, 20 min, digital)
Elizabeth Price IN THE HOUSE OF MR. X (2007, 20 min, digital)
Total running time: ca. 100 min.

Followed by a conversation with Love, Enxuto, McWreath, and Graydon, moderated by Dan Fox, co-editor of Frieze Magazine.

This project is a collaboration with Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, and made possible with generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

(QUE TA JOIE DEMEURE)

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Special thanks to Valeska Neu (Films Boutique).

Perhaps the most internationally recognized of contemporary Quebec filmmakers, Denis Côté has fashioned a singularly protean body of work over the past decade. Since his fourth feature, CARCASSES (2009), an apparent documentary portrait of a solitary rural scavenger that transformed before viewers’ eyes into a mysterious, menacing fiction, he has freely and unapologetically mixed documentary and narrative conventions, as well as alternating between (relatively) commercial films and more uncategorizable, experimental projects. Just as the predominantly naturalistic narrative film CURLING (2010) was followed by BESTIAIRE (2012), a near-wordless study of the relationship between animals and humans at a Quebec safari park, so VIC + FLO SAW A BEAR (2013) (another unambiguously fictional film, albeit one that performed its own formal and narrative experiments) has been followed by JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING, a cinematic reflection on the nature of work that pivots almost continuously from mode to mode, approaching its subject from a myriad of directions. Filmed in factories and workshops, it’s composed in turn of theatrical monologues, poetic musings, immaculately composed documentation, and the whisper of a narrative. Its constantly shifting form triggers a reckoning with the concept of manual labor – and with the daily routines and inner lives of the factory workers who populate the film – which breaks free of the rhetoric that typically goes with the territory.

“JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING is not a documentary about being a slave to the machine, alienation, dehumanization, or exploitation. Sound and image, editing and dramatic structure are merely employed to transpose workshops and factory floors into the cinematic space so as to explore the bizarre environments that workers adapt to and with which they skillfully interact, as if humanity had never done anything else since time immemorial. This too is part of the fiction that slowly but surely creeps in, impossible to separate from the documentary elements – cinema has no need for such distinctions.” –BERLINALE

JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING will be having a preview screening as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “First Look” festival on January 10; visit movingimage.us for more details

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Distributed by Cinelicious Pics; thanks to Dennis Bartok & David Marriott, and to Mike Plante.

While the rest of America sleeps, DIY filmmaker/musician Giuseppe Andrews (a one-time teen actor in INDEPENDENCE DAY and DETROIT ROCK CITY) has made over 30 experimental features with titles like DOILY’S SUMMER OF FREAK OCCURRENCES, TRAILER TOWN, and UTOPIA BLUES, set in some demented alternate universe (i.e. Ventura, California) populated by real-life alcoholics and drug addicts, trash-talking senior citizens and trailer park residents dressed in cow outfits and costume-shop wigs, acting out booze-fueled vignettes of severe psychosis filtered through Giuseppe’s John Waters-meets-Harmony Korine-meets-Werner Herzog sensibility. With GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE, Adam Rifkin has created a wildly surreal, outrageously funny, and strangely touching portrait of a truly Outsider Artist, as he follows Giuseppe and his seriously impaired troupe on the production of his latest 2-day opus, GARBANZO GAS, starring Vietnam Ron as a cow given a weekend reprieve from the slaughterhouse at the local motel. Beyond the sun-stroked Theater of the Absurd madness of Giuseppe’s vision, there is a remarkable and endearing sense of family among the director, his amiably bonkers dad Ed, patient girlfriend Mary, Sir Bigfoot George, and the rest of his surreal Trailer Park rep company. As skate-punk Spit sagely observes about Giuseppe’s movies: “They’re just like, nothing really makes any sense, and I don’t know, that’s kinda how reality is, and nobody really cares to accept that.”

“AMERICAN MOVIE meets Charles Bukowski in a trailer park.” –Bobcat Goldthwait

“Eschewing the youthful casts, which generally dominate independent cinema, the engagingly articulate Andrews – whose cited inspirations include New German Cinema giant Rainer Werner Fassbinder and, specifically, the tramp-banquet ‘Last Supper’ parody in Luis Buñuel’s VIRIDIANA (1961) – instead prefers collaborations with individuals of ‘a certain age.’ […] The resulting fruits, meanwhile, recall the earlier reaches of John Waters’ output, or the wackier fringes of Harmony Korine’s.” –Neil Young, THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

Please note: alongside the run of GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE, we'll be screening two of Andrews's films; click here and here for more info.

(QUE TA JOIE DEMEURE)

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Special thanks to Valeska Neu (Films Boutique).

Perhaps the most internationally recognized of contemporary Quebec filmmakers, Denis Côté has fashioned a singularly protean body of work over the past decade. Since his fourth feature, CARCASSES (2009), an apparent documentary portrait of a solitary rural scavenger that transformed before viewers’ eyes into a mysterious, menacing fiction, he has freely and unapologetically mixed documentary and narrative conventions, as well as alternating between (relatively) commercial films and more uncategorizable, experimental projects. Just as the predominantly naturalistic narrative film CURLING (2010) was followed by BESTIAIRE (2012), a near-wordless study of the relationship between animals and humans at a Quebec safari park, so VIC + FLO SAW A BEAR (2013) (another unambiguously fictional film, albeit one that performed its own formal and narrative experiments) has been followed by JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING, a cinematic reflection on the nature of work that pivots almost continuously from mode to mode, approaching its subject from a myriad of directions. Filmed in factories and workshops, it’s composed in turn of theatrical monologues, poetic musings, immaculately composed documentation, and the whisper of a narrative. Its constantly shifting form triggers a reckoning with the concept of manual labor – and with the daily routines and inner lives of the factory workers who populate the film – which breaks free of the rhetoric that typically goes with the territory.

“JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING is not a documentary about being a slave to the machine, alienation, dehumanization, or exploitation. Sound and image, editing and dramatic structure are merely employed to transpose workshops and factory floors into the cinematic space so as to explore the bizarre environments that workers adapt to and with which they skillfully interact, as if humanity had never done anything else since time immemorial. This too is part of the fiction that slowly but surely creeps in, impossible to separate from the documentary elements – cinema has no need for such distinctions.” –BERLINALE

JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING will be having a preview screening as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “First Look” festival on January 10; visit movingimage.us for more details

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

(QUE TA JOIE DEMEURE)

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Special thanks to Valeska Neu (Films Boutique).

Perhaps the most internationally recognized of contemporary Quebec filmmakers, Denis Côté has fashioned a singularly protean body of work over the past decade. Since his fourth feature, CARCASSES (2009), an apparent documentary portrait of a solitary rural scavenger that transformed before viewers’ eyes into a mysterious, menacing fiction, he has freely and unapologetically mixed documentary and narrative conventions, as well as alternating between (relatively) commercial films and more uncategorizable, experimental projects. Just as the predominantly naturalistic narrative film CURLING (2010) was followed by BESTIAIRE (2012), a near-wordless study of the relationship between animals and humans at a Quebec safari park, so VIC + FLO SAW A BEAR (2013) (another unambiguously fictional film, albeit one that performed its own formal and narrative experiments) has been followed by JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING, a cinematic reflection on the nature of work that pivots almost continuously from mode to mode, approaching its subject from a myriad of directions. Filmed in factories and workshops, it’s composed in turn of theatrical monologues, poetic musings, immaculately composed documentation, and the whisper of a narrative. Its constantly shifting form triggers a reckoning with the concept of manual labor – and with the daily routines and inner lives of the factory workers who populate the film – which breaks free of the rhetoric that typically goes with the territory.

“JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING is not a documentary about being a slave to the machine, alienation, dehumanization, or exploitation. Sound and image, editing and dramatic structure are merely employed to transpose workshops and factory floors into the cinematic space so as to explore the bizarre environments that workers adapt to and with which they skillfully interact, as if humanity had never done anything else since time immemorial. This too is part of the fiction that slowly but surely creeps in, impossible to separate from the documentary elements – cinema has no need for such distinctions.” –BERLINALE

JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING will be having a preview screening as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “First Look” festival on January 10; visit movingimage.us for more details

“When a lucky cow wins an all-expense-paid weekend at a local hotel, it can’t believe its good fortune. It gets to relax, unwind, and avoid a trip to the slaughterhouse – at least for a few days. Of course, it couldn’t imagine the menagerie of madmen it would run into. Down the hall is a pair of drug-addled dimwits who are desperate for something to eat. The cow becomes their main focus. Meanwhile, two different spree killers are wreaking havoc. One murders at the command of some erroneous bath linen. The other listens to a voice inside his shoe, the instructions resulting in even more dead bodies. All the while, our contented animal tries to accommodate everyone’s needs, which typically revolve around a room service meal of meat and potatoes.” –Bill Gibron

Screening in conjunction with our week-long run of the new documentary about Giuseppe Andrews, GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE; click here for more details. 

With Annabella, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Louis Jouvet, and Arletty.

This rarely-screened film by Marcel Carné (CHILDREN OF PARADISE), made in-between his poetic-realist classics, PORT OF SHADOWS (1938) and LE JOUR SE LÈVE (1939), takes place at the eponymous Parisian hotel which, thanks to legendary production designer Alexandre Trauner, becomes a major character in its own right. A romantic melodrama featuring Annabella and Jean-Pierre Aumont as star-crossed lovers who have formed a suicide pact, and Louis Jouvet and Arletty as the underworld figures with whom the lovers become entangled, it’s an undervalued gem.

“[A] masterpiece of production design and performance, as exemplified by the fidelity of Trauner’s sets and Arletty’s role as the ‘tart with the heart’. Like PORT OF SHADOWS, HÔTEL DU NORD resonates with themes of imprisonment, disillusionment, and the impossibility of escape.” –Ben McCann, SENSES OF CINEMA

PLEASE NOTE: THE JANUARY 23RD SCREENING (WHICH WAS CANCELLED DUE TO THE SNOWSTORM) HAS BEEN RE-SCHEDULED FOR SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 1 AT 2:00PM.

Production and sound: Alexander Hacke; editing: Sylvia Steinhäuser

“Lary 7 –  founder of the Plastikville Records label and studio, student of Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, and Hollis Frampton, and a perennial figure of the New York music scene since the early 1980s – is finally seen, heard, and celebrated as never before in this film exploration of his important work. Lary 7 has collaborated with countless music icons for more than three decades: Michael Gira, Tom Verlaine, Jarboe, Foetus, Tony Conrad, Alexander Hacke, Larry Mullins, Dorit Chrysler, Jacob Kirkegaard, Ken Montgomery, Michael Evans, and Gordon Monahan. As an irrepressible film artist and photographer, Lary 7 has also hosted countless word-of-mouth, legendary multimedia events at which he employs rube-goldian projection techniques to produce other-worldly light shows and experiences.

NOT JUNK YET features never-before-seen interviews, performances, collaborations, and conversations with Lary 7 and his fellow artists on the New York art & music scenes, giving us an intimate glimpse into the modus operandi, working concepts, and sound and image experimentations of a man who has survived independent of the music industry for decades – influencing and inspiring all that have met him.” –Vance Whitestone & Jim Sharpe

With Arletty, Marie Déa, Fernand Ledoux, and Alain Cuny.

LES VISITEURS DU SOIR marked Carné’s third straight collaboration with both lead actress Arletty and art designer Alexandre Trauner, but it’s distinctly different than the poetic realist HÔTEL DU NORD and LE JOUR SE LÈVE: a medieval fable, LES VISITEURS centers on two mysterious strangers who are revealed to be emissaries of the devil. Sent to earth to spread suffering and despair, their mission is foiled by the redemptive power of love. Though Carné’s retreat from the contemporary settings of his previous films into the distant past (and the realm of lyrical fantasy) may be attributable to the onset of the German occupation, many critics have interpreted the film as an allegory of the Nazi incursion and of the survival of the French spirit during these years.

(LE ROMAN D’UN TRICHEUR)

With Sacha Guitry, Marguerite Moreno, Jacqueline Delubac, and Roger Duchesne.

“Widely regarded as Guitry’s masterpiece…this 1936 tour de force can be regarded as a kind of concerto for the writer-director-performer’s special brand of brittle cleverness. After a credits sequence that introduces us to the film’s cast and crew, Guitry settles into a flashback account of how the title hero learned to benefit from cheating over the course of his life. A notoriously anticinematic cineaste whose first love was theater, Guitry nevertheless had a flair for cinematic high jinks when it came to adapting his plays (or in this case a novel) to film, and most of this movie registers as a rather lively and stylishly inventive silent film, with Guitry’s character serving as offscreen lecturer. François Truffaut was sufficiently impressed to dub Guitry a French brother of Lubitsch, though Guitry clearly differs from this master of continental romance in that his own personality invariably overwhelms his characters.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

(LE CORBEAU)

With Pierre Fresnay, Ginette Leclerc, and Micheline Francey.

Made during the German occupation, THE RAVEN almost brought Clouzot’s career to a halt when it was misinterpreted following the war as anti-French propaganda. But au contraire: it is in fact a withering attack on the collaborationist bourgeois society of Vichy-era France. Upon the appearance of a series of anonymous letters exposing a small town’s dirty secrets, the polite veneer of society crumbles as suspicion, hatred, and paranoia rage out of control. A deeply unsettling, unsparing glimpse into the dark heart of human nature, THE RAVEN is one of Clouzot’s finest films.

In conjunction with screenings of a new documentary portrait of musician, photographer, filmmaker, sound artist, scavenger, and patron saint of mechanical and analogue technology, Lary 7, we’ve invited Lary to present a Show & Tell program (as well as a slide-based Single Frame program) showcasing his unique, indefinable, and media-spanning work. Though his art takes many forms – from music to visual art to performance and beyond – it’s nearly always founded on a fascination with arcane machinery, and a genius for recycling and reconfiguring this equipment into something entirely unique and inspired. His Show & Tell program will activate Anthology’s Maya Deren theater like only Lary can, with a mix of live projection performances, the double analyst 16mm film OWL MOVIE, a series of 35mm loops featuring his trademark animated photograms, and more. Attempting to predict or describe in advance what exactly will take place is tantamount to grasping hold of the wind – there’s only one way to find out precisely what he has up his sleeve!

For more Lary 7 screenings, click here. 

With Odette Joyeux, Madeleine Robinson, and Marguerite Moreno.

“Autant-Lara was one of the principal figures of the French ‘tradition of quality’ that flourished during the Nazi occupation, and this 1943 masterpiece, which also introduced the writing team of Pierre Bost and Jean Aurenche, is the first of several great films he made. The radiant Odette Joyeux stars as the title heroine, a socialite who seeks to flee her lavish but suffocating environs with the handsome family caretaker, only to discover that the relationship is doomed. Autant-Lara’s exquisite blend of social commentary, lush romanticism, and opulent sets and costumes – he began his career as a designer – vividly re-creates France’s belle epoque and recalls Orson Welles’s THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS both thematically and in its deep-focus exploration of interior space.” –Joshua Katzman, CHICAGO READER

With Raimu, Pierre Fresnay, and Orane Demazis. Archival print courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Having gained fame as a playwright, Marcel Pagnol soon became intoxicated by the possibilities of sound cinema, a fascination that would ultimately lead him to create his own production studios, and to write, produce, and direct numerous films. He began his film career by adapting his own play to create MARIUS, the first in a Marseilles-set trilogy that would later include FANNY (also adapted from the stage-play) and CÉSAR (which was written directly for the screen). In MARIUS, César (Raimu) is a cafe owner whose son Marius (Pierre Fresnay) loves Fanny (Orane Demazis), the daughter of a fishmonger, but also longs to live the adventurous life of a sailor. Even though the young couple become lovers and plan to marry, Fanny realizes that she cannot hold Marius from his dreams.

“Pagnol directed only one of his ‘Fanny Trilogy,’ as the films MARIUS, FANNY, and CÉSAR are affectionately known, but he is the true auteur of all three films about the inhabitants of the old port of Marseilles. See one or see all three – each is a gem on its own.” –Judy Bloch, PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

Production and sound: Alexander Hacke; editing: Sylvia Steinhäuser

“Lary 7 –  founder of the Plastikville Records label and studio, student of Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, and Hollis Frampton, and a perennial figure of the New York music scene since the early 1980s – is finally seen, heard, and celebrated as never before in this film exploration of his important work. Lary 7 has collaborated with countless music icons for more than three decades: Michael Gira, Tom Verlaine, Jarboe, Foetus, Tony Conrad, Alexander Hacke, Larry Mullins, Dorit Chrysler, Jacob Kirkegaard, Ken Montgomery, Michael Evans, and Gordon Monahan. As an irrepressible film artist and photographer, Lary 7 has also hosted countless word-of-mouth, legendary multimedia events at which he employs rube-goldian projection techniques to produce other-worldly light shows and experiences.

NOT JUNK YET features never-before-seen interviews, performances, collaborations, and conversations with Lary 7 and his fellow artists on the New York art & music scenes, giving us an intimate glimpse into the modus operandi, working concepts, and sound and image experimentations of a man who has survived independent of the music industry for decades – influencing and inspiring all that have met him.” –Vance Whitestone & Jim Sharpe

With Raimu, Pierre Fresnay, and Orane Demazis. Archival print courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

In the second part of the trilogy, the young and beautiful Fanny discovers that she is pregnant after her lover, Marius, has deserted her to follow the adventurous life of the sea. After finding succor in the kindness of the equally bereaved César, Fanny reluctantly accepts the marriage offer of an older wealthy suitor Panisse (Charpin), in order to make the child legitimate. Unaware that he is now a father, Marius returns to marry Fanny, but is sent away by his father César in order to prevent further unhappiness.

“Orson Welles once called Raimu the greatest actor of the cinema, and it is Raimu’s presence that pulls the threads of this twenty-year saga into a beautiful whole. The second film in the trilogy may be Fanny’s tragedy, but it is César’s story, as he asserts his strange wisdom and his mad love to create something marvelous – a family – out of characters who are all ‘at sea.’” –Judy Bloch, PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

With this special presentation of slides and photos shot over the last few decades, Lary 7 digs into his vast reservoir of images to present a guided tour of the East Village locale that he has called home for nearly 35 years. His priceless documentation of the Lower East Side shows us a neighborhood that is forever in transition and always on the cusp of yet more change.

With Raimu, Pierre Fresnay, and Orane Demazis. Archival print courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

The final film in Pagnol’s trilogy begins with the death of César’s best friend, old Panisse, the town merchant who has devoted his wealth and love to the happiness of his young wife, Fanny, and their son. After the death of Panisse, the son is told by his mother that his real father is the legendary Marius, César’s son, who left Marseilles twenty years earlier to travel the world. Feeling betrayed, the son sets out to find Marius, who is living quietly in a nearby town. The only film in the trilogy that Pagnol directed himself, CÉSAR is a deeply moving finale to a series of films that is one of the great accomplishments of 1930s French cinema.

With Madeleine Robinson, Gérard Philipe, and Jean Servais.

A deeply melancholy, bleak, but gorgeously photographed noir (the cinematographer is the great Henri Alekan, perhaps best known for Cocteau’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST), UNE SI JOLIE PETITE PLAGE stars Gérard Philipe as a haunted young man, harboring a dark secret, who returns to the godforsaken coastal village of his childhood. Welcomed by the local townsfolk with suspicion and hostility, and treated to perhaps the most relentless rainfall in the history of cinema, he finds his past catching up with him. This is one of the greatest films by Yves Allégret, yet another remarkable director from a generation of French filmmakers whose work is ripe for rediscovery.

With Annabella, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Louis Jouvet, and Arletty.

This rarely-screened film by Marcel Carné (CHILDREN OF PARADISE), made in-between his poetic-realist classics, PORT OF SHADOWS (1938) and LE JOUR SE LÈVE (1939), takes place at the eponymous Parisian hotel which, thanks to legendary production designer Alexandre Trauner, becomes a major character in its own right. A romantic melodrama featuring Annabella and Jean-Pierre Aumont as star-crossed lovers who have formed a suicide pact, and Louis Jouvet and Arletty as the underworld figures with whom the lovers become entangled, it’s an undervalued gem.

“[A] masterpiece of production design and performance, as exemplified by the fidelity of Trauner’s sets and Arletty’s role as the ‘tart with the heart’. Like PORT OF SHADOWS, HÔTEL DU NORD resonates with themes of imprisonment, disillusionment, and the impossibility of escape.” –Ben McCann, SENSES OF CINEMA

THIS SCREENING HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED FOR SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 1 AT 2:00PM.

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

[DUE TO THE IMPENDING SNOWSTORM, THIS SCREENING IS CANCELLED; VISIT NYWIFT.ORG IN FUTURE FOR NEWS OF A POSSIBLE RE-SCHEDULED SCREENING]

DREADLOCKS STORY examines the bonds of survival of African and Indian culture in Jamaica in the context of anti-slavery and anti-imperialist struggles. Indian and African descendants have met in the plantations and created something absolutely unique and indispensable as a form of self-expression in the face of British colonialism.

For full program listings, visit www.newfilmmakers.com.

(LE ROMAN D’UN TRICHEUR)

With Sacha Guitry, Marguerite Moreno, Jacqueline Delubac, and Roger Duchesne.

“Widely regarded as Guitry’s masterpiece…this 1936 tour de force can be regarded as a kind of concerto for the writer-director-performer’s special brand of brittle cleverness. After a credits sequence that introduces us to the film’s cast and crew, Guitry settles into a flashback account of how the title hero learned to benefit from cheating over the course of his life. A notoriously anticinematic cineaste whose first love was theater, Guitry nevertheless had a flair for cinematic high jinks when it came to adapting his plays (or in this case a novel) to film, and most of this movie registers as a rather lively and stylishly inventive silent film, with Guitry’s character serving as offscreen lecturer. François Truffaut was sufficiently impressed to dub Guitry a French brother of Lubitsch, though Guitry clearly differs from this master of continental romance in that his own personality invariably overwhelms his characters.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER

With Madeleine Robinson, Gérard Philipe, and Jean Servais.

A deeply melancholy, bleak, but gorgeously photographed noir (the cinematographer is the great Henri Alekan, perhaps best known for Cocteau’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST), UNE SI JOLIE PETITE PLAGE stars Gérard Philipe as a haunted young man, harboring a dark secret, who returns to the godforsaken coastal village of his childhood. Welcomed by the local townsfolk with suspicion and hostility, and treated to perhaps the most relentless rainfall in the history of cinema, he finds his past catching up with him. This is one of the greatest films by Yves Allégret, yet another remarkable director from a generation of French filmmakers whose work is ripe for rediscovery.

With Arletty, Marie Déa, Fernand Ledoux, and Alain Cuny.

LES VISITEURS DU SOIR marked Carné’s third straight collaboration with both lead actress Arletty and art designer Alexandre Trauner, but it’s distinctly different than the poetic realist HÔTEL DU NORD and LE JOUR SE LÈVE: a medieval fable, LES VISITEURS centers on two mysterious strangers who are revealed to be emissaries of the devil. Sent to earth to spread suffering and despair, their mission is foiled by the redemptive power of love. Though Carné’s retreat from the contemporary settings of his previous films into the distant past (and the realm of lyrical fantasy) may be attributable to the onset of the German occupation, many critics have interpreted the film as an allegory of the Nazi incursion and of the survival of the French spirit during these years.

With Annabella, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Louis Jouvet, and Arletty.

This rarely-screened film by Marcel Carné (CHILDREN OF PARADISE), made in-between his poetic-realist classics, PORT OF SHADOWS (1938) and LE JOUR SE LÈVE (1939), takes place at the eponymous Parisian hotel which, thanks to legendary production designer Alexandre Trauner, becomes a major character in its own right. A romantic melodrama featuring Annabella and Jean-Pierre Aumont as star-crossed lovers who have formed a suicide pact, and Louis Jouvet and Arletty as the underworld figures with whom the lovers become entangled, it’s an undervalued gem.

“[A] masterpiece of production design and performance, as exemplified by the fidelity of Trauner’s sets and Arletty’s role as the ‘tart with the heart’. Like PORT OF SHADOWS, HÔTEL DU NORD resonates with themes of imprisonment, disillusionment, and the impossibility of escape.” –Ben McCann, SENSES OF CINEMA

PLEASE NOTE: THE JANUARY 23RD SCREENING (WHICH WAS CANCELLED DUE TO THE SNOWSTORM) HAS BEEN RE-SCHEDULED FOR SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 1 AT 2:00PM.

(TRUDNO BYT BOGOM)

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Adapted from the novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. Distributed by Kino Lorber; special thanks to Gary Palmucci & Rodrigo Brandão.

When legendary Russian auteur Aleksei Guerman died last year at the age of 74, he left behind a body of work that ranks among the most extraordinary of the last half-century, despite encompassing only six feature films as director. Following his 1967 debut, THE SEVENTH COMPANION, the space between successive Guerman features grew progressively longer, thanks both to political and censorship battles and to his own increasingly extravagant ambition and perfectionism. Thirteen years would elapse between the seminal MY FRIEND IVAN LAPSHIN (1985) and the astounding KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! (1998), a triumphant accomplishment that is one of the most delirious, disorienting, and immersive films in modern cinema.

Difficult as it may be to believe, KHRUSTALYOV was not a terminal point – before his death Guerman created one final film, both longer in gestation and (if possible) even more stupefyingly ambitious. A phantasmagoric adaptation of the revered sci-fi novel by the Strugatsky brothers (authors of the source novel for Tarkosvky’s STALKER), HARD TO BE A GOD began percolating in Guerman’s consciousness in the mid-1960s, and would actively consume him for the last 15 years of his life. Many Guerman devotees despaired of its ever reaching a final form, and indeed he obsessively edited and tweaked it up until his death. Happily, he brought it close enough to completion for his wife and son to apply the finishing touches immediately after his passing, and the result unmistakably extends the cacophonous, unrestrained maximalism of KHRUSTALYOV.

HARD TO BE A GOD takes place on the planet Arkanar, which is in the midst of its own Middle Ages, a period of violence, filth, and crudeness into which Guerman thrusts viewers without a net. A group of Earth scientists have been sent to Arkanar, but with the proviso that they must not interfere in the planet’s political or historical development. Moving through this nightmarish society, in which all those who can read and write are brutally persecuted, one of these scientists, Don Rumata, struggles to remain detached. Treated by the planet’s natives as a kind of divinity, he is both godlike and impotent in the face of the planet’s chaos and brutality.

“HARD TO BE A GOD is like stepping into a panoramic Bruegel painting and putting your foot right into a shit-stained corpse…in a good way. […] Guerman retains so little of the science-fiction frame that his black-and-white film becomes the closest thing medieval times may get to a verité documentary portrait – warts, mud, guts, and all. […] Its vigor and openness to multiple allegorical readings will endure for years to come.” –Nicolas Rapold, FILM COMMENT

“Guerman was a Russian filmmaker, but the artists to whom his style here seems most strongly indebted are Dutch: the harried sprawl of Bruegel, the group portraiture effects of Frans Hals, and especially the fantasy horrors imagined by Hieronymus Bosch. Watching HARD TO BE A GOD often feels like wading into the Hell panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights….” –Calum Marsh, VILLAGE VOICE

HARD TO BE A GOD will be having a preview screening as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “First Look” festival in early January; visit movingimage.us for more details.

In conjunction with the run of HARD TO BE A GOD, we'll be screening three earlier films by Guerman; click here for more details.

A new translation of the Strugatsky brothers’ novel, Hard to Be a God, is available now from Chicago Review Press; click here for more details.

(LE CORBEAU)

With Pierre Fresnay, Ginette Leclerc, and Micheline Francey.

Made during the German occupation, THE RAVEN almost brought Clouzot’s career to a halt when it was misinterpreted following the war as anti-French propaganda. But au contraire: it is in fact a withering attack on the collaborationist bourgeois society of Vichy-era France. Upon the appearance of a series of anonymous letters exposing a small town’s dirty secrets, the polite veneer of society crumbles as suspicion, hatred, and paranoia rage out of control. A deeply unsettling, unsparing glimpse into the dark heart of human nature, THE RAVEN is one of Clouzot’s finest films.

(TRUDNO BYT BOGOM)

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Adapted from the novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. Distributed by Kino Lorber; special thanks to Gary Palmucci & Rodrigo Brandão.

When legendary Russian auteur Aleksei Guerman died last year at the age of 74, he left behind a body of work that ranks among the most extraordinary of the last half-century, despite encompassing only six feature films as director. Following his 1967 debut, THE SEVENTH COMPANION, the space between successive Guerman features grew progressively longer, thanks both to political and censorship battles and to his own increasingly extravagant ambition and perfectionism. Thirteen years would elapse between the seminal MY FRIEND IVAN LAPSHIN (1985) and the astounding KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! (1998), a triumphant accomplishment that is one of the most delirious, disorienting, and immersive films in modern cinema.

Difficult as it may be to believe, KHRUSTALYOV was not a terminal point – before his death Guerman created one final film, both longer in gestation and (if possible) even more stupefyingly ambitious. A phantasmagoric adaptation of the revered sci-fi novel by the Strugatsky brothers (authors of the source novel for Tarkosvky’s STALKER), HARD TO BE A GOD began percolating in Guerman’s consciousness in the mid-1960s, and would actively consume him for the last 15 years of his life. Many Guerman devotees despaired of its ever reaching a final form, and indeed he obsessively edited and tweaked it up until his death. Happily, he brought it close enough to completion for his wife and son to apply the finishing touches immediately after his passing, and the result unmistakably extends the cacophonous, unrestrained maximalism of KHRUSTALYOV.

HARD TO BE A GOD takes place on the planet Arkanar, which is in the midst of its own Middle Ages, a period of violence, filth, and crudeness into which Guerman thrusts viewers without a net. A group of Earth scientists have been sent to Arkanar, but with the proviso that they must not interfere in the planet’s political or historical development. Moving through this nightmarish society, in which all those who can read and write are brutally persecuted, one of these scientists, Don Rumata, struggles to remain detached. Treated by the planet’s natives as a kind of divinity, he is both godlike and impotent in the face of the planet’s chaos and brutality.

“HARD TO BE A GOD is like stepping into a panoramic Bruegel painting and putting your foot right into a shit-stained corpse…in a good way. […] Guerman retains so little of the science-fiction frame that his black-and-white film becomes the closest thing medieval times may get to a verité documentary portrait – warts, mud, guts, and all. […] Its vigor and openness to multiple allegorical readings will endure for years to come.” –Nicolas Rapold, FILM COMMENT

“Guerman was a Russian filmmaker, but the artists to whom his style here seems most strongly indebted are Dutch: the harried sprawl of Bruegel, the group portraiture effects of Frans Hals, and especially the fantasy horrors imagined by Hieronymus Bosch. Watching HARD TO BE A GOD often feels like wading into the Hell panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights….” –Calum Marsh, VILLAGE VOICE

HARD TO BE A GOD will be having a preview screening as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “First Look” festival in early January; visit movingimage.us for more details.

In conjunction with the run of HARD TO BE A GOD, we'll be screening three earlier films by Guerman; click here for more details.

A new translation of the Strugatsky brothers’ novel, Hard to Be a God, is available now from Chicago Review Press; click here for more details.

The screening on Friday, January 30 at 8:30 will be introduced by writer and scholar Tony Anemone.

Tony Anemone teaches Russian literature and cinema at The New School.  The author of many articles about modern Russian literature, culture, and cinema, he is the editor of Just Assassins:  The Culture of Terrorism in Russia (Northwestern UP, 2010) and, with Peter Scotto, the editor and translator of  "I am a Phenomenon quite out of the Ordinary": The Notebooks, Diaries, and Letters of Daniil Kharms (Academic Studies Press, 2013), which recently was named the best literary translation of 2013-14 by the Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. His essay "Aleksei Guerman:  The Last Auteur" will appear in The Companion to Russian Cinema in 2015.

With Odette Joyeux, Madeleine Robinson, and Marguerite Moreno.

“Autant-Lara was one of the principal figures of the French ‘tradition of quality’ that flourished during the Nazi occupation, and this 1943 masterpiece, which also introduced the writing team of Pierre Bost and Jean Aurenche, is the first of several great films he made. The radiant Odette Joyeux stars as the title heroine, a socialite who seeks to flee her lavish but suffocating environs with the handsome family caretaker, only to discover that the relationship is doomed. Autant-Lara’s exquisite blend of social commentary, lush romanticism, and opulent sets and costumes – he began his career as a designer – vividly re-creates France’s belle epoque and recalls Orson Welles’s THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS both thematically and in its deep-focus exploration of interior space.” –Joshua Katzman, CHICAGO READER

35mm print from the collection of George Eastman House.
“Banned for fifteen years, Guerman’s solo directorial debut, set during WWII, marries the muscular dynamics of the war film with a more searing, philosophical approach to the thin line between official ‘heroes’ and ‘traitors.’ A former Nazi collaborator rejoins his Russian brethren to fight against the Germans; for some partisans, he is and always will be a traitor, but others allow him to prove himself – and his commitment – on the battlefield. For Guerman, basic human concepts like loyalty, decency, and trust underline the film’s train-like narrative force and breathtaking black-and-white images; government censors, however, angered over the ‘immorality’ of portraying a former traitor as a hero, accused him of de-heroicizing Soviet history. […] Filmed in 1971, the film was finally released in 1986, during a political thaw.” –Jason Sanders, Pacific Film Archive

With Madeleine Robinson, Gérard Philipe, and Jean Servais.

A deeply melancholy, bleak, but gorgeously photographed noir (the cinematographer is the great Henri Alekan, perhaps best known for Cocteau’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST), UNE SI JOLIE PETITE PLAGE stars Gérard Philipe as a haunted young man, harboring a dark secret, who returns to the godforsaken coastal village of his childhood. Welcomed by the local townsfolk with suspicion and hostility, and treated to perhaps the most relentless rainfall in the history of cinema, he finds his past catching up with him. This is one of the greatest films by Yves Allégret, yet another remarkable director from a generation of French filmmakers whose work is ripe for rediscovery.

(TRUDNO BYT BOGOM)

U.S. THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!

Adapted from the novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. Distributed by Kino Lorber; special thanks to Gary Palmucci & Rodrigo Brandão.

When legendary Russian auteur Aleksei Guerman died last year at the age of 74, he left behind a body of work that ranks among the most extraordinary of the last half-century, despite encompassing only six feature films as director. Following his 1967 debut, THE SEVENTH COMPANION, the space between successive Guerman features grew progressively longer, thanks both to political and censorship battles and to his own increasingly extravagant ambition and perfectionism. Thirteen years would elapse between the seminal MY FRIEND IVAN LAPSHIN (1985) and the astounding KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR! (1998), a triumphant accomplishment that is one of the most delirious, disorienting, and immersive films in modern cinema.

Difficult as it may be to believe, KHRUSTALYOV was not a terminal point – before his death Guerman created one final film, both longer in gestation and (if possible) even more stupefyingly ambitious. A phantasmagoric adaptation of the revered sci-fi novel by the Strugatsky brothers (authors of the source novel for Tarkosvky’s STALKER), HARD TO BE A GOD began percolating in Guerman’s consciousness in the mid-1960s, and would actively consume him for the last 15 years of his life. Many Guerman devotees despaired of its ever reaching a final form, and indeed he obsessively edited and tweaked it up until his death. Happily, he brought it close enough to completion for his wife and son to apply the finishing touches immediately after his passing, and the result unmistakably extends the cacophonous, unrestrained maximalism of KHRUSTALYOV.

HARD TO BE A GOD takes place on the planet Arkanar, which is in the midst of its own Middle Ages, a period of violence, filth, and crudeness into which Guerman thrusts viewers without a net. A group of Earth scientists have been sent to Arkanar, but with the proviso that they must not interfere in the planet’s political or historical development. Moving through this nightmarish society, in which all those who can read and write are brutally persecuted, one of these scientists, Don Rumata, struggles to remain detached. Treated by the planet’s natives as a kind of divinity, he is both godlike and impotent in the face of the planet’s chaos and brutality.

“HARD TO BE A GOD is like stepping into a panoramic Bruegel painting and putting your foot right into a shit-stained corpse…in a good way. […] Guerman retains so little of the science-fiction frame that his black-and-white film becomes the closest thing medieval times may get to a verité documentary portrait – warts, mud, guts, and all. […] Its vigor and openness to multiple allegorical readings will endure for years to come.” –Nicolas Rapold, FILM COMMENT

“Guerman was a Russian filmmaker, but the artists to whom his style here seems most strongly indebted are Dutch: the harried sprawl of Bruegel, the group portraiture effects of Frans Hals, and especially the fantasy horrors imagined by Hieronymus Bosch. Watching HARD TO BE A GOD often feels like wading into the Hell panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights….” –Calum Marsh, VILLAGE VOICE

HARD TO BE A GOD will be having a preview screening as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “First Look” festival in early January; visit movingimage.us for more details.

In conjunction with the run of HARD TO BE A GOD, we'll be screening three earlier films by Guerman; click here for more details.

A new translation of the Strugatsky brothers’ novel, Hard to Be a God, is available now from Chicago Review Press; click here for more details.

With Raimu, Pierre Fresnay, and Orane Demazis. Archival print courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Having gained fame as a playwright, Marcel Pagnol soon became intoxicated by the possibilities of sound cinema, a fascination that would ultimately lead him to create his own production studios, and to write, produce, and direct numerous films. He began his film career by adapting his own play to create MARIUS, the first in a Marseilles-set trilogy that would later include FANNY (also adapted from the stage-play) and CÉSAR (which was written directly for the screen). In MARIUS, César (Raimu) is a cafe owner whose son Marius (Pierre Fresnay) loves Fanny (Orane Demazis), the daughter of a fishmonger, but also longs to live the adventurous life of a sailor. Even though the young couple become lovers and plan to marry, Fanny realizes that she cannot hold Marius from his dreams.

“Pagnol directed only one of his ‘Fanny Trilogy,’ as the films MARIUS, FANNY, and CÉSAR are affectionately known, but he is the true auteur of all three films about the inhabitants of the old port of Marseilles. See one or see all three – each is a gem on its own.” –Judy Bloch, PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

With Raimu, Pierre Fresnay, and Orane Demazis. Archival print courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

In the second part of the trilogy, the young and beautiful Fanny discovers that she is pregnant after her lover, Marius, has deserted her to follow the adventurous life of the sea. After finding succor in the kindness of the equally bereaved César, Fanny reluctantly accepts the marriage offer of an older wealthy suitor Panisse (Charpin), in order to make the child legitimate. Unaware that he is now a father, Marius returns to marry Fanny, but is sent away by his father César in order to prevent further unhappiness.

“Orson Welles once called Raimu the greatest actor of the cinema, and it is Raimu’s presence that pulls the threads of this twenty-year saga into a beautiful whole. The second film in the trilogy may be Fanny’s tragedy, but it is César’s story, as he asserts his strange wisdom and his mad love to create something marvelous – a family – out of characters who are all ‘at sea.’” –Judy Bloch, PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE