Anthology Film Archives

with Middle East Filmmakers Group

Emilie McDonald OTHER PEOPLE'S HOUSES (2010, 17 minutes)
When a lonely, struggling single mom searches for a connection with a clique of upwardly mobile moms, she finds that the greatest connection is the one with her daughter.

Charles Mann, Franco Sacchi 'IT'S A YOUNG COUNTRY': TURKEY AND AKBANK (2009, 18 minutes)
Akbank's quest for future growth provides a lens through which to view the energy of contemporary Turkey. Striking images, insightful commentary, and well-crafted vignettes portray Turkey's transformation.

Edward Roy HIDDEN IN TIME (2009, 16 minutes)
One man's American Dream is another man's nightmare come true. Ahmad, an Iraqi immigrant who drives a taxi in New York City, picks up a mysterious box from a close friend. Then, while driving in Manhattan, he picks up an American businessman on his way t

Third World Newsreel and Downtown Community Television Center Present New Shorts by New Filmmakers. Third World Newsreel (TWN) has trained over 400 film and video artists of color in the past 30 years through its annual TWN Film & Video Production Workshop. Downtown Community Television Center (DCTV) is a media arts center that fosters diverse viewpoints by providing professional training, state-of-the-industry resources, and by creating outstanding documentary productions, with the belief that diversity of expression strengthens our democracy and enhances civil society. Together, we are proud to present the following short films:

My New York by Derek Horton, Jenny Lam, Jonathan Cheng, Aaron Mincey, Bertil Gaspard, Jawara Drigo, Emily Lu, Mohammed Yakub & John Dargan - A young girl feels New York City is a boring place until she finds a pair of magical glasses that change her point of view. (fiction, 5 min)

The Skin I'm In by Natalie Setoute - Natalie desires to get into film school despite her daily struggle against Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. (doc, 16 min)

El Mariachi Infante by Rosalino Ramos - Rosalino grew up in a mariachi family, and just like all his brothers, has been playing mariachi music as long as he can remember. (doc, 12 min)

Diary of a Young Father by Michael Rosa - A day in the life of a High School teenage father. His responsibilities and future plans as a family man. (doc, 5 min)

Skate by Michael Cannon-Ford - Young skateboarders discuss their passion, challenges and the need for more city sponsored skateboard parks. (doc, 5 min)

2mins5 by Fouzia Najar, music by Zerobridge - 16mm music video from Zerobridge's second album There We Were, Now Here We Are. (music video, 3 min)

Senioritis by Fouzia Najar - A profile of Danielle, a charismatic and driven high school senior in the Bronx. (doc, 7 min)

Excuse My Gangsta Ways by Corinne Manabat - The story of Davina Wan, a Chinese American former gang member in the 1990s. (doc, 15 min)

Walking Home by Nuala Cabral - Experimental short about women facing street harassment as they walk home. (experimental, 4 min)

Trust Me by Sienna Pinderhughes - Sam meets an older guy named Chris while out shopping for her prom dress. (fiction, 10 min)

Squeaky Wheel by Tracey Huger, Marisa Franco, Wilkie Cornelius Jr & Ayisha Owens - A coming of age story about a girl with big dreams in a tough neighborhood. (fiction, 7 min)

Becca Steals a Puppy by Rob Cangiano, music of Bryan Zimmerman's Corpse of Discovery - Bored, sad and lonely in Brooklyn. What's a girl to do? (fiction, 5 min)

Hannah Fidell WE'RE GLAD YOU'RE HERE

Presented with UnionDocs. Jones will be here in-person for a discussion with critic Amy Taubin, and the program will be introduced by DJ Spooky!
M. Henry Jones has been a seminal figure in the downtown Manhattan art scene throughout the last three decades. With a focus on perceptual phenomena, Jones explores color and sound relationships and investigates the effects of sequential fragments of motion.
This evening will present the most comprehensive selection of Jones’s work to date, from his Kodak Teenage Movie award-winning film THE THREE FERTKNUCKLES; through the work he completed while attending the School of Visual Arts (alongside Manuel DeLanda, with whom he worked on RAW NERVES, also screening March 4-6), which laid the groundwork for his now-classic stroboscopic photo-animation, SOUL CITY; and including a sneak preview of BRAND NEW CADILLAC and a glimpse of the much-anticipated APPLE HEART DAISY movie project. The final section of the program will feature work created collaboratively at SnakeMonkey Studio, where Jones is the founder and director, and will include television commercials, web animation, and experimental 3D.
Program curated with Steve Holmgren (UnionDocs). Special thanks to Ralph McKay, DJ Spooky, Jon Gartenberg, Josh Harris, Bruce Jenkins, and Jonas Mekas.

HIGH SCHOOL FILMS:
FLYING HIPPO (1971, 1.5 minutes, 8mm-to-video, silent)
THE BOOK (1971, 3 minutes, 8mm-to-video, silent with musical accompaniment)
SUN KING (1972, 3 minutes, 8mm-to-video)
ROCKY RACCOON (1973, 3.5 minutes, 8mm-to-video)
THE THREE FERTKNUCKLES (1974, 11 minutes, Super8mm-to-video)

NEW YORK CITY FILMS:
NEW GLASSES, PALM TREES, DANCE FILM & WALKING MAN (1975-76, 9 minutes, 16mm)
SOUL CITY (1977-79, 2 minutes, 16mm)
GO GO GIRL (1978-81, 3.5 minutes, 16mm-to-video)
BRAND NEW CADILLAC (1979-2010, 2.5 minutes, 16mm-to-video)
BEAUTIFUL LIGHT (1993, 4 minutes, video)
BANGIN IN MY HEAD (2008-10, 3.5 minutes, video)
THE WELL (THE APPLE HEART DAISY MOVIE) (1982-94, unfinished, 6.5 minutes, 16mm-to-video)
TELEVISION COMMERCIALS / WEB & 3D ANIMATIONS (1984-96, 5 minutes, video)
Plus:
Numerous shorts for web release, both finished and unfinished, including the long-awaited Daniel Johnston video presented as a work-in-progress.
&
SLATHERPUSS & THE ISLAND OF LOST KITES (2010, work-in-progress, 1 minute, video)
Total running time: ca. 80 minutes.

Filmmaker in person on Saturday, March 5!
Audacious. Outlandish. Subversive. Intense. Insane. These are just a few of the inadequate adjectives that fail to describe Manuel DeLanda’s fantastically disarming and deeply funny films. Known today as an author, teacher, and philosopher, DeLanda’s iconic celluloid works remain among the most innovative, abrasive, and hypnotic films produced in the 70s and early 80s. Raised in Mexico and transplanted to NYC, DeLanda, rather amazingly, created most of these films while still an undergraduate at the School of Visual Arts. Radically conceived and frantically edited, DeLanda’s energetic, semiotic cinema earned him instant acclaim in the international experimental film world. Unique among the films of their era (or of any other for that matter), DeLanda’s movies have a highbrow philosophical tinge, lowbrow wit, and punk rock style. Out of circulation for nearly two decades and newly restored by Anthology from the best existing sources, these utterly distinctive films will undoubtedly rearrange your synapses.
“An anarchist who studies analytical philosophy, DeLanda makes aggressive, wild movies that simultaneously leap all over the place and stand absolutely still. His punchy Dada-like stances have a certain built-in versatility insofar as they manage to defy The System while both embodying and benefiting from it. … DeLanda brings a certain Latin camp wit to his European theoretical models, from Wittgenstein to Deleuze and Guattari. A touch of the happy charlatan is similarly brought to his glitter punk credentials that hark back to such diverse Spanish-speaking surrealists as Arrabal, Buñuel, Dali, and Jodorowsky – although, unlike most of his predecessors, DeLanda prefers LSD and computers to the sacraments and anti-Christs of Catholicism in establishing the terms of his shock (and semi-mock) rebellion.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum
Anthology Film Archives’ preservation of the films of Manuel DeLanda was generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Manuel DeLanda will be here in person for the screening on Saturday, March 5!

JUDGEMENT DAY (1983, 8 minutes, Super8mm-to-16mm)
Cockroaches meet their maker in the first installment of DeLanda’s incomplete “Jerry Falwell trilogy.”

THE ITCH SCRATCH ITCH CYCLE (1976, 8 minutes, 16mm)
A bickering couple unleash holy hell on each other in this deconstruction of the shot/countershot technique.

INCONTINENCE: A DIARRHETIC FLOW OF MISMATCHES (1978, 18 minutes, 16mm)
WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF goes gaga in this optically-printed masterpiece featuring a very surprise appearance by Professor Mamboozoo (painter Joe Coleman).

ISMISM (1979, 8 minutes, Super8mm-to-16mm)
“Documents my graffiti activities in New York (before switching to more obscene drawings on subway walls). The film was originally made as a class project for P. Adams Sitney. It has the form of a manifesto against the orthopedic power of language.” –Manuel DeLanda

RAW NERVES: A LACANIAN THRILLER (1980, 30 minutes, 16mm)
A noir mostly set in a bathroom stall and stairwell. A private dick trapped in a tight spot. A narrator searching for a way out of the story. Toilet humor and pulp fiction captured in colors like you’ve never seen, RAW NERVES is DeLanda’s most accomplished film.

Total running time: ca. 75 minutes.

One of Keaton’s best silent features, setting comedy against a true Civil War story of a stolen train and Union spies.

Filmmaker in person on Saturday, March 5!
Audacious. Outlandish. Subversive. Intense. Insane. These are just a few of the inadequate adjectives that fail to describe Manuel DeLanda’s fantastically disarming and deeply funny films. Known today as an author, teacher, and philosopher, DeLanda’s iconic celluloid works remain among the most innovative, abrasive, and hypnotic films produced in the 70s and early 80s. Raised in Mexico and transplanted to NYC, DeLanda, rather amazingly, created most of these films while still an undergraduate at the School of Visual Arts. Radically conceived and frantically edited, DeLanda’s energetic, semiotic cinema earned him instant acclaim in the international experimental film world. Unique among the films of their era (or of any other for that matter), DeLanda’s movies have a highbrow philosophical tinge, lowbrow wit, and punk rock style. Out of circulation for nearly two decades and newly restored by Anthology from the best existing sources, these utterly distinctive films will undoubtedly rearrange your synapses.
“An anarchist who studies analytical philosophy, DeLanda makes aggressive, wild movies that simultaneously leap all over the place and stand absolutely still. His punchy Dada-like stances have a certain built-in versatility insofar as they manage to defy The System while both embodying and benefiting from it. … DeLanda brings a certain Latin camp wit to his European theoretical models, from Wittgenstein to Deleuze and Guattari. A touch of the happy charlatan is similarly brought to his glitter punk credentials that hark back to such diverse Spanish-speaking surrealists as Arrabal, Buñuel, Dali, and Jodorowsky – although, unlike most of his predecessors, DeLanda prefers LSD and computers to the sacraments and anti-Christs of Catholicism in establishing the terms of his shock (and semi-mock) rebellion.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum
Anthology Film Archives’ preservation of the films of Manuel DeLanda was generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Manuel DeLanda will be here in person for the screening on Saturday, March 5!

JUDGEMENT DAY (1983, 8 minutes, Super8mm-to-16mm)
Cockroaches meet their maker in the first installment of DeLanda’s incomplete “Jerry Falwell trilogy.”

THE ITCH SCRATCH ITCH CYCLE (1976, 8 minutes, 16mm)
A bickering couple unleash holy hell on each other in this deconstruction of the shot/countershot technique.

INCONTINENCE: A DIARRHETIC FLOW OF MISMATCHES (1978, 18 minutes, 16mm)
WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF goes gaga in this optically-printed masterpiece featuring a very surprise appearance by Professor Mamboozoo (painter Joe Coleman).

ISMISM (1979, 8 minutes, Super8mm-to-16mm)
“Documents my graffiti activities in New York (before switching to more obscene drawings on subway walls). The film was originally made as a class project for P. Adams Sitney. It has the form of a manifesto against the orthopedic power of language.” –Manuel DeLanda

RAW NERVES: A LACANIAN THRILLER (1980, 30 minutes, 16mm)
A noir mostly set in a bathroom stall and stairwell. A private dick trapped in a tight spot. A narrator searching for a way out of the story. Toilet humor and pulp fiction captured in colors like you’ve never seen, RAW NERVES is DeLanda’s most accomplished film.

Total running time: ca. 75 minutes.

“His remarkable faculty is as maker of images.... [T]he images he photographs are among the most radical, super-real and haunting images the cinema has ever given us.” –P. Adams Sitney, VISIONARY FILM
“Film is a complex medium, combining elements of many other media. The ideal film artist would be a great poet, great painter, great playwright, great composer, great inventor – and maybe even a great business man or woman (most probably a woman – all the artists of the future may be women, men having long given up that profession to become soldiers or mystics). Such a composite genius has yet to appear.” –interview with George Landow, IMAGE FORUM
EARLY FILMS BY GEORGE LANDOW
ca. 1961-62, ca. 15 minutes, 8mm-to-16mm blow-up. Preserved with support from Cineric, Inc.
These films are not part of the Essential Cinema. According to Jonas Mekas, Landow used to show these films along with FLEMING FALOON at early screenings before he pulled them from his repertoire. They seem to be studies for FLEMING FALOON, more raw, less concise, messy split-screens and footage re-filmed off the screen. Talking heads (including Mike Wallace and film historian Richard Kraft) blur, stretch, fade; what Jonas says is a festering arm wound that Landow had at the time is shot at various blurry exposures.
FLEMING FALOON (1963, 6 minutes, 16mm)
FILM IN WHICH THERE APPEAR SPROCKET HOLES, EDGE LETTERING, DIRT PARTICLES, ETC. (1965/66, 5 minutes,
16mm, silent)
DIPLOTERATOLOGY: BARDO FOLLIES (1967, 7 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent)
THE FILM THAT RISES TO THE SURFACE OF CLARIFIED BUTTER (1968, 9 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
INSTITUTIONAL QUALITY (1969, 5 minutes, 16mm)
REMEDIAL READING COMPREHENSION (1970, 5 minutes, 16mm)
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? (1972, 13 minutes, 16mm)
THANK YOU JESUS FOR THE ETERNAL PRESENT (1973, 6 minutes, 16mm)
Total running time: ca. 80 minutes.

Filmmaker in person on Saturday, March 5!
Audacious. Outlandish. Subversive. Intense. Insane. These are just a few of the inadequate adjectives that fail to describe Manuel DeLanda’s fantastically disarming and deeply funny films. Known today as an author, teacher, and philosopher, DeLanda’s iconic celluloid works remain among the most innovative, abrasive, and hypnotic films produced in the 70s and early 80s. Raised in Mexico and transplanted to NYC, DeLanda, rather amazingly, created most of these films while still an undergraduate at the School of Visual Arts. Radically conceived and frantically edited, DeLanda’s energetic, semiotic cinema earned him instant acclaim in the international experimental film world. Unique among the films of their era (or of any other for that matter), DeLanda’s movies have a highbrow philosophical tinge, lowbrow wit, and punk rock style. Out of circulation for nearly two decades and newly restored by Anthology from the best existing sources, these utterly distinctive films will undoubtedly rearrange your synapses.
“An anarchist who studies analytical philosophy, DeLanda makes aggressive, wild movies that simultaneously leap all over the place and stand absolutely still. His punchy Dada-like stances have a certain built-in versatility insofar as they manage to defy The System while both embodying and benefiting from it. … DeLanda brings a certain Latin camp wit to his European theoretical models, from Wittgenstein to Deleuze and Guattari. A touch of the happy charlatan is similarly brought to his glitter punk credentials that hark back to such diverse Spanish-speaking surrealists as Arrabal, Buñuel, Dali, and Jodorowsky – although, unlike most of his predecessors, DeLanda prefers LSD and computers to the sacraments and anti-Christs of Catholicism in establishing the terms of his shock (and semi-mock) rebellion.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum
Anthology Film Archives’ preservation of the films of Manuel DeLanda was generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Manuel DeLanda will be here in person for the screening on Saturday, March 5!

JUDGEMENT DAY (1983, 8 minutes, Super8mm-to-16mm)
Cockroaches meet their maker in the first installment of DeLanda’s incomplete “Jerry Falwell trilogy.”

THE ITCH SCRATCH ITCH CYCLE (1976, 8 minutes, 16mm)
A bickering couple unleash holy hell on each other in this deconstruction of the shot/countershot technique.

INCONTINENCE: A DIARRHETIC FLOW OF MISMATCHES (1978, 18 minutes, 16mm)
WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF goes gaga in this optically-printed masterpiece featuring a very surprise appearance by Professor Mamboozoo (painter Joe Coleman).

ISMISM (1979, 8 minutes, Super8mm-to-16mm)
“Documents my graffiti activities in New York (before switching to more obscene drawings on subway walls). The film was originally made as a class project for P. Adams Sitney. It has the form of a manifesto against the orthopedic power of language.” –Manuel DeLanda

RAW NERVES: A LACANIAN THRILLER (1980, 30 minutes, 16mm)
A noir mostly set in a bathroom stall and stairwell. A private dick trapped in a tight spot. A narrator searching for a way out of the story. Toilet humor and pulp fiction captured in colors like you’ve never seen, RAW NERVES is DeLanda’s most accomplished film.

Total running time: ca. 75 minutes.

NewFilmmakers travels to Williamsburg.

6:00 PM NEWFILMMAKERS FIRST SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Comedy
Emily Pelstring WILD LOVE (2010, 2 Minutes, Video)
Elena Shpak SHEAR PRATIQUE (2010, 5 Minutes. Video)
Katrina Saville THE APPOINTMENT (2010, 8 Minutes, Video)
MacKenzie Cleveland THE PAPER BOY (2009, 25 Minutes, Video)

7:00 PM NEWFILMMAKERS SECOND SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Drama
Jocelyn Marquis PLUSH (2010, 2 Minutes, Video)
Linling Zing BORN IN AMERICA (2010, 12 Minutes, Video)
Donald Prokop GONE (2010, 15 Minutes, Video)
Peter Pavlakis THIS RUTHLESS EFFICENCY (2010, 25 Minutes, Video)

8:15 PM NEWFILMMAKERS FEATURE PRESENTATION
Marcin Ramocki BROOKLYN DIY (2009, 75 Minutes, Video)
Brooklyn DIY is a long overdue examination of the creative renaissance in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Home to underground warehouse parties, anarchistic street creativity, and artist-run galleries and performance spaces, Williamsburg gave birth to one of the most vibrant and rebellious artistic communities to arise in the 1980s, permanently changing the city's cultural landscape.  Featuring interviews with a host of artists and neighborhood characters, Ramocki's film captures life in a utopian universe made by artists, for artists alone with its inevitable decline in the face of real estate development, gentrification, and the post September 11 market collapse.

Filmmaker Frank Henenlotter (BASKET CASE, FRANKENHOOKER), co-director Jimmy Maslon, and Something Weird Video have joined forces to chronicle the amazing exploits of H.G. Lewis from the 50s to the present day. Featuring John Waters, Joe Bob Briggs, and a variety of cast and crew members from many of Lewis’s films, it’s a documentary as mad and unique as the story it tells. As someone who not only lived through 42nd Street’s sleazy reign as ‘the Duece’ but who enjoyed wallowing in it, Henenlotter learned a lot from the cheap gore and twisted sex films that painted the walls of 42nd Street’s grindhouses, and it’s that sensibility that shines in this cinematic exploration of H.G. Lewis’s outrageous career.

After a long absence from our screens, one of Anthology’s favorite filmmakers, F.P. Boué, returns to the Maya Deren Theater with an all-new found sound and moving image presentation.
Boué, who studied linguistics, as well as the history of art, architecture, and film in London and Paris, has been showing three-dimensional works focusing on structures or phenomena in the natural and urban landscape since 1981, and began presenting films in 1999. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunstmuseum, Bern; Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart; the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Tate Modern, London; and the New Museum, New York, among others.
SITE SHORTCUTS is a program of alternating elements. Short Super-8mm film and sound components captured at different sites have been collected and arranged for this time-specific presentation. The screening is scheduled to coincide with Boué’s first-ever multimedia solo exhibition in New York, opening at Participant Inc. on Sunday, February 27 and running through Sunday, April 3, 2011.
For detailed program info, please visit Anthology’s website in mid-February: www.anthologyfilmarchives.org
Total running time: ca. 55 minutes.

In 1962, David F. Friedman and Herschell Gordon Lewis had tried every trick in the book when it came to exploitation filmmaking. From nudist camps to peeping toms to sex kittens gone bad, they had done it all. In a quest to broaden the definition of just what an exploitation film could be, they tried hard to invent a genre that no one had attempted before. What they stumbled upon was ‘Gore’, and movies have been a lot less wholesome ever since. With its lack of production values and real actors, the sparseness of the score, and the absolutely demented nature of the bloody gore scenes, BLOOD FEAST is a bizarre, totally unique film experience. Call it cheap, say it’s in bad taste or even disgusting, but the fact remains: there’s nothing quite like BLOOD FEAST.

Filmmaker Frank Henenlotter (BASKET CASE, FRANKENHOOKER), co-director Jimmy Maslon, and Something Weird Video have joined forces to chronicle the amazing exploits of H.G. Lewis from the 50s to the present day. Featuring John Waters, Joe Bob Briggs, and a variety of cast and crew members from many of Lewis’s films, it’s a documentary as mad and unique as the story it tells. As someone who not only lived through 42nd Street’s sleazy reign as ‘the Duece’ but who enjoyed wallowing in it, Henenlotter learned a lot from the cheap gore and twisted sex films that painted the walls of 42nd Street’s grindhouses, and it’s that sensibility that shines in this cinematic exploration of H.G. Lewis’s outrageous career.

“What do vampires, Hollywood melodramas, porn films, the countdown of golden oldies, and drives down the highway with Mick Jagger on the radio have in common? CASUAL RELATIONS knows. In Rappaport’s dazzling and bizarre feature-length debut, he focuses on states of imaginative possession and dispossession, demonstrating how impossible it is to separate fantasies, dreams, and realities. The point is that we are all vampires – or being vampirized. We are all obsessed – or the object of someone else’s obsession. We are all under somebody’s thumb – to quote the Jagger lyric Rappaport uses – if we’re not thumb-wrestling ourselves and pinning ourselves down.” –Ray Carney
With:
BLUE STREAK (1971, 15 minutes, video)

Preserved print courtesy of George Eastman House; preserved through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by the Film Foundation and administered by The National Film Preservation Foundation.
“A film about eight people whose lives overlap…in strange and sometimes unexpected configurations…. They inhabit a universe of coincidence and chance, excessive emotionalism and dry irony. Flamboyant melodrama in dreary, desperate lives – operatic passions ground underfoot by the crushing flatness of daily existence. It is melodrama stripped bare, drained of the heavy breathing we associate with soap opera…. In a sense, the movie is the plot and the plot is the movie. Except that the plot is irrelevant. Suffice it to say, there is enough of it to choke a horse….” –Mark Rappaport
“A strange and wonderful movie, a fusion of black-and-white photography, starkly simple confrontations within a group of eight people, and a plot worthy of MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN. … If you want to see something absolutely original, and consistent within its own fantasies, and haunting, and starkly beautiful, give it a try.” –Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN TIMES

The title hardly begins to describe the lunacy packed into this, perhaps Lewis’s strangest outing. Among the ingredients are an electrical accident that leaves a man with both a badly scarred face and the power to read minds; an evil old witch who can morph into sexy young Elizabeth Lee; and an FBI Agent who pushes the then-new drug LSD, resulting in a bad, bad trip, double-exposed celluloid and all. The original tag lines had it right: “SOMETHING WEIRD comes to haunt you…a boiling, bizarre tale of a mad love that crashes through the supernatural! An unbelievable journey into the awesome worlds of E.S.P. and witchcraft!”

“Described by its maker as ‘a film about the Madame Bovary in all of us,’ THE SCENIC ROUTE presents a closed set of emotional relationships, incestuously interwoven: two sisters and a man who is first the lover of one and then of the other. Self-deluding romantics, they see ‘mythic landscapes, places where you could live out heroic passions.’ In the end, the elder sister…realizes she’s moving beyond the scenic (voyeuristic) route of these affairs. The standard elements of melodrama (love, jealousy, revenge) are abundantly present. But it’s a very dry melodrama, achieved by undercutting the characters’ mythic inner life with the banality of their everyday existence. … Wildly inventive, refreshing, and alert, [it] looks, feels, and sounds like no other movie.” –Gene Youngblood

In 1962, David F. Friedman and Herschell Gordon Lewis had tried every trick in the book when it came to exploitation filmmaking. From nudist camps to peeping toms to sex kittens gone bad, they had done it all. In a quest to broaden the definition of just what an exploitation film could be, they tried hard to invent a genre that no one had attempted before. What they stumbled upon was ‘Gore’, and movies have been a lot less wholesome ever since. With its lack of production values and real actors, the sparseness of the score, and the absolutely demented nature of the bloody gore scenes, BLOOD FEAST is a bizarre, totally unique film experience. Call it cheap, say it’s in bad taste or even disgusting, but the fact remains: there’s nothing quite like BLOOD FEAST.

With Charles Ludlam.
“A strange, obsessive, darkly funny film that Rappaport has described as ‘an unholy union between THE MALTESE FALCON and REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST’ – although that overlooks the obvious references to Cole Porter, Boris Karloff, Jean Cocteau and the Three Stooges. Sinister, silly, and sometimes murderous twins named Chuckie and Mikey track down an Egyptian treasure while performing a magic act with their assistant, Tina. She is romanced by Peter, a soulfully glum young man who is bothered by, among other things, Tina’s apparent yen for Gina, her former partner in what Chuckie euphemistically calls ‘a tumbling act.’ … [A] sober meditation on false and true love and the ways in which fictions of romance (particularly Hollywood’s fictions) permeate our lives.” –Gene Siskel, CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Filmmaker Frank Henenlotter (BASKET CASE, FRANKENHOOKER), co-director Jimmy Maslon, and Something Weird Video have joined forces to chronicle the amazing exploits of H.G. Lewis from the 50s to the present day. Featuring John Waters, Joe Bob Briggs, and a variety of cast and crew members from many of Lewis’s films, it’s a documentary as mad and unique as the story it tells. As someone who not only lived through 42nd Street’s sleazy reign as ‘the Duece’ but who enjoyed wallowing in it, Henenlotter learned a lot from the cheap gore and twisted sex films that painted the walls of 42nd Street’s grindhouses, and it’s that sensibility that shines in this cinematic exploration of H.G. Lewis’s outrageous career.

“Rappaport’s most deliciously lush and Byzantine work. It poses a mystery, but while most mysteries want us to dive down and excavate secrets, Rappaport insists that we ice-skate the fractured, opaque surfaces. Strange puzzles, symmetries, and coincidences abound. Doppelgängers and mirror-image anti-types lurk around every corner. … One character in the film believes all of life is a plot orchestrated by a vast government bureaucracy, but Rappaport tells us that the bureaucracy of the imagination puts that of the Pentagon to shame. The real plots are in our brains – the plots that form the haunted graveyard of Western civilization.” –Ray Carney

Commonly referred to as the first ‘Roughie’ – a term used by exploitation filmmakers of the time to describe movies whose main attractions were their grittiness and realistic violence. The team of Friedman and Lewis were quick to realize their audience’s ugly side, and appropriately went for the gut with the story of a young woman who begins modeling innocently for glamour photos before her corrupt photographers demand more ‘adult’ material. SCUM was shot in black-and-white on 16mm, the result of Friedman’s desire to have SCUM OF THE EARTH resemble an actual stag film, not only a clever touch but a trend-setting move for both Exploitation and Hollywood alike.

Rappaport’s first experiment with his singular film-criticism essay form (“VCR-cheology” in J. Hoberman’s phrase) was this hour-long work, in which actor Eric Farr serves as an on-screen stand-in for closeted gay Hollywood star Rock Hudson, conducting us on a guided tour of excerpts from his films in a search for traces of his hidden life.
“Rappaport plays his new brand of film criticism like a grand organ.... Showing us a way to talk back to the movie mythologies that influence and often corrupt us, even to the point of poisoning our dreams, he suggests that we don’t have to be millionaires or commandeer a television network to enter into a dialogue with the crushing Hollywood machine. At the bare minimum all we need is a will, two VCRs to play with, and something trenchant to say.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER
“[Rappaport] invest[s] that thing we called ‘Rock Hudson’ with a degree of passion and pathos only barely evident in his original performances.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

Followed by:
EXTERIOR NIGHT
1993, 36 minutes, video.
Rappaport uses video technology to insert his own filmed narrative into footage shot on the empty sets of classic Hollywood films including THE MALTESE FALCON, THE BIG SLEEP, and STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, among others.

The title hardly begins to describe the lunacy packed into this, perhaps Lewis’s strangest outing. Among the ingredients are an electrical accident that leaves a man with both a badly scarred face and the power to read minds; an evil old witch who can morph into sexy young Elizabeth Lee; and an FBI Agent who pushes the then-new drug LSD, resulting in a bad, bad trip, double-exposed celluloid and all. The original tag lines had it right: “SOMETHING WEIRD comes to haunt you…a boiling, bizarre tale of a mad love that crashes through the supernatural! An unbelievable journey into the awesome worlds of E.S.P. and witchcraft!”

With Mary Beth Hurt.
“Adapting the inventive technique of his 1992 film ROCK HUDSON’S HOME MOVIES, Rappaport invokes Jean Seberg herself, as played by actress Mary Beth Hurt, to lead us on a guided tour of her life. Rappaport’s imagined Seberg is self-conscious and sardonic, able to comment from beyond the grave on all the forces that defeated her in life. She looks directly into the camera, addressing the audience with the same first-person candor that, as Rappaport suggests, was Seberg’s great strength and discovery. … Rappaport has discovered a new form here – part straight biography, part fictional speculation, part critical investigation. It is a rich and volatile combination that yields one of the more intellectually engaging films of recent years.” –Dave Kehr, DAILY NEWS

Filmmaker Frank Henenlotter (BASKET CASE, FRANKENHOOKER), co-director Jimmy Maslon, and Something Weird Video have joined forces to chronicle the amazing exploits of H.G. Lewis from the 50s to the present day. Featuring John Waters, Joe Bob Briggs, and a variety of cast and crew members from many of Lewis’s films, it’s a documentary as mad and unique as the story it tells. As someone who not only lived through 42nd Street’s sleazy reign as ‘the Duece’ but who enjoyed wallowing in it, Henenlotter learned a lot from the cheap gore and twisted sex films that painted the walls of 42nd Street’s grindhouses, and it’s that sensibility that shines in this cinematic exploration of H.G. Lewis’s outrageous career.

“Rappaport’s elegant essay-documentary…teases out the homoerotic subtext in Hollywood movies…[locating] the ‘hints, allusions, and mixed signals’ of suppressed gayness in the strangest places: Cary Grant and Randolph Scott we all know about; Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis simpered around the fringes of female impersonation; but who would have suspected John Wayne of ‘trans-gender gaffes’? … Rappaport has a talent for imaginative speculation which rivals Norman Mailer’s, but even he concedes that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and that hindsight comes with its own entrapment. ‘Do we know too much,’ he wonders, ‘or did they acknowledge too little?’ This dishy decoding of the ‘Hollywood telegraph system,’ whose charades and winky euphemisms masked a squeamish fascination with homosexuality, is a serious piece of fun.” –NEW YORKER

Commonly referred to as the first ‘Roughie’ – a term used by exploitation filmmakers of the time to describe movies whose main attractions were their grittiness and realistic violence. The team of Friedman and Lewis were quick to realize their audience’s ugly side, and appropriately went for the gut with the story of a young woman who begins modeling innocently for glamour photos before her corrupt photographers demand more ‘adult’ material. SCUM was shot in black-and-white on 16mm, the result of Friedman’s desire to have SCUM OF THE EARTH resemble an actual stag film, not only a clever touch but a trend-setting move for both Exploitation and Hollywood alike.

Preserved print courtesy of George Eastman House; preserved through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by the Film Foundation and administered by The National Film Preservation Foundation.
“A film about eight people whose lives overlap…in strange and sometimes unexpected configurations…. They inhabit a universe of coincidence and chance, excessive emotionalism and dry irony. Flamboyant melodrama in dreary, desperate lives – operatic passions ground underfoot by the crushing flatness of daily existence. It is melodrama stripped bare, drained of the heavy breathing we associate with soap opera…. In a sense, the movie is the plot and the plot is the movie. Except that the plot is irrelevant. Suffice it to say, there is enough of it to choke a horse….” –Mark Rappaport
“A strange and wonderful movie, a fusion of black-and-white photography, starkly simple confrontations within a group of eight people, and a plot worthy of MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN. … If you want to see something absolutely original, and consistent within its own fantasies, and haunting, and starkly beautiful, give it a try.” –Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN TIMES

Now in its 56th year, the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar is the longest continuously running film event in North America. With our monthly screening series, FLAHERTY NYC, we are able to bring the essential components of the Seminar – ground-breaking cinema and impassioned discussions – to New York City audiences. Each screening will be followed by a dialogue with the filmmaker(s) in which the audience is encouraged to participate. And starting this season, each program will end with a reception where the discussions can continue in a more casual environment.
FLAHERTY NYC is programmed by Penny Lane.

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIES IN 16MM: KATHRYN RAMEY, JASON LIVINGSTON, JOEL SCHLEMOWITZ
Filmmakers in person!
Psychogeography was defined by Guy Debord as the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. An all-16mm program of films about people who change and are changed by the landscape; where boundaries between places slip; and where the future commingles with the past.
Joel Schlemowitz WEIMAR (1996, 8 minutes, 16mm)
Jason Livingston UNDERFOOT AND OVER STORY (2005, 35 minutes, 16mm)
Kathryn Ramey “Yanqui WALKER and the OPTICAL REVOLUTION” (2009, 33 minutes, 16mm)
Total running time: ca. 80 minutes.

“Described by its maker as ‘a film about the Madame Bovary in all of us,’ THE SCENIC ROUTE presents a closed set of emotional relationships, incestuously interwoven: two sisters and a man who is first the lover of one and then of the other. Self-deluding romantics, they see ‘mythic landscapes, places where you could live out heroic passions.’ In the end, the elder sister…realizes she’s moving beyond the scenic (voyeuristic) route of these affairs. The standard elements of melodrama (love, jealousy, revenge) are abundantly present. But it’s a very dry melodrama, achieved by undercutting the characters’ mythic inner life with the banality of their everyday existence. … Wildly inventive, refreshing, and alert, [it] looks, feels, and sounds like no other movie.” –Gene Youngblood

Rappaport’s first experiment with his singular film-criticism essay form (“VCR-cheology” in J. Hoberman’s phrase) was this hour-long work, in which actor Eric Farr serves as an on-screen stand-in for closeted gay Hollywood star Rock Hudson, conducting us on a guided tour of excerpts from his films in a search for traces of his hidden life.
“Rappaport plays his new brand of film criticism like a grand organ.... Showing us a way to talk back to the movie mythologies that influence and often corrupt us, even to the point of poisoning our dreams, he suggests that we don’t have to be millionaires or commandeer a television network to enter into a dialogue with the crushing Hollywood machine. At the bare minimum all we need is a will, two VCRs to play with, and something trenchant to say.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER
“[Rappaport] invest[s] that thing we called ‘Rock Hudson’ with a degree of passion and pathos only barely evident in his original performances.” –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

Followed by:
EXTERIOR NIGHT
1993, 36 minutes, video.
Rappaport uses video technology to insert his own filmed narrative into footage shot on the empty sets of classic Hollywood films including THE MALTESE FALCON, THE BIG SLEEP, and STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, among others.

With Mary Beth Hurt.
“Adapting the inventive technique of his 1992 film ROCK HUDSON’S HOME MOVIES, Rappaport invokes Jean Seberg herself, as played by actress Mary Beth Hurt, to lead us on a guided tour of her life. Rappaport’s imagined Seberg is self-conscious and sardonic, able to comment from beyond the grave on all the forces that defeated her in life. She looks directly into the camera, addressing the audience with the same first-person candor that, as Rappaport suggests, was Seberg’s great strength and discovery. … Rappaport has discovered a new form here – part straight biography, part fictional speculation, part critical investigation. It is a rich and volatile combination that yields one of the more intellectually engaging films of recent years.” –Dave Kehr, DAILY NEWS

NewFilmmakers hosts our Women Filmmakers and NewLatino Filmmakers Groups

6:00 PM NEWFILMMAKERS SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Bryant James OUR SYMPHONY (2010, 3 Minutes, Video)
Silvana Jakich ELEPHANT ROOM (2010, 14 Minutes, Video)
Hayoung Jeon A LOVER’S FRAGMENT (2010, 23 Minutes, 16mm)
Daniel Brown EMILY IN THE A.M. (2010, 33 Minutes, Video)

7:30 PM NEWFILMMAKERS SPECIAL PROGRAM
The Women’s Filmmaker Group and EYE:AM presents
ANOTHER EXPERIMENT by WOMEN
curated by Lili White
Carolyn Radlo CAUDA PAVANIS (4 Minutes, Video)
Katya Yakubov RETREAT (9 Minutes, Video)
Diane Kitchen ECSTATIC VESSELS (20 Minutes, 16mm)
Marta Renzi CONSIDERING AN EXHIBITION (5 Minutes, Video)
Denise Wyllie & Clare O. Hagan STILL LIFE (6 Minutes, Video)
Cinzia Sarto UNA SPORCA VACANZA (DIRTY VACATION) (7 Minutes, Video)
Fabienne Gautier ICELAND (4 Minutes, Video)

8:45 PM NEWFILMMAKERS SPECIAL PROGRAM
With The NewLatino Filmmakers Group
NewLatino Filmmakers is the best and only independent Latino “cinematheque” showcase in New York City -- now in its 9th year!

“Rappaport’s most deliciously lush and Byzantine work. It poses a mystery, but while most mysteries want us to dive down and excavate secrets, Rappaport insists that we ice-skate the fractured, opaque surfaces. Strange puzzles, symmetries, and coincidences abound. Doppelgängers and mirror-image anti-types lurk around every corner. … One character in the film believes all of life is a plot orchestrated by a vast government bureaucracy, but Rappaport tells us that the bureaucracy of the imagination puts that of the Pentagon to shame. The real plots are in our brains – the plots that form the haunted graveyard of Western civilization.” –Ray Carney

“What do vampires, Hollywood melodramas, porn films, the countdown of golden oldies, and drives down the highway with Mick Jagger on the radio have in common? CASUAL RELATIONS knows. In Rappaport’s dazzling and bizarre feature-length debut, he focuses on states of imaginative possession and dispossession, demonstrating how impossible it is to separate fantasies, dreams, and realities. The point is that we are all vampires – or being vampirized. We are all obsessed – or the object of someone else’s obsession. We are all under somebody’s thumb – to quote the Jagger lyric Rappaport uses – if we’re not thumb-wrestling ourselves and pinning ourselves down.” –Ray Carney
With:
BLUE STREAK (1971, 15 minutes, video)

“Rappaport’s elegant essay-documentary…teases out the homoerotic subtext in Hollywood movies…[locating] the ‘hints, allusions, and mixed signals’ of suppressed gayness in the strangest places: Cary Grant and Randolph Scott we all know about; Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis simpered around the fringes of female impersonation; but who would have suspected John Wayne of ‘trans-gender gaffes’? … Rappaport has a talent for imaginative speculation which rivals Norman Mailer’s, but even he concedes that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and that hindsight comes with its own entrapment. ‘Do we know too much,’ he wonders, ‘or did they acknowledge too little?’ This dishy decoding of the ‘Hollywood telegraph system,’ whose charades and winky euphemisms masked a squeamish fascination with homosexuality, is a serious piece of fun.” –NEW YORKER

A once-in-a-calendar opportunity to take a peek at the teeming hive of creativity hiding behind the scenes at Anthology, thanks to the film- and video-making efforts of AFA’s staff, friends, fellow-travelers, and devotees.

A once-in-a-calendar opportunity to take a peek at the teeming hive of creativity hiding behind the scenes at Anthology, thanks to the film- and video-making efforts of AFA’s staff, friends, fellow-travelers, and devotees.

With Charles Ludlam.
“A strange, obsessive, darkly funny film that Rappaport has described as ‘an unholy union between THE MALTESE FALCON and REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST’ – although that overlooks the obvious references to Cole Porter, Boris Karloff, Jean Cocteau and the Three Stooges. Sinister, silly, and sometimes murderous twins named Chuckie and Mikey track down an Egyptian treasure while performing a magic act with their assistant, Tina. She is romanced by Peter, a soulfully glum young man who is bothered by, among other things, Tina’s apparent yen for Gina, her former partner in what Chuckie euphemistically calls ‘a tumbling act.’ … [A] sober meditation on false and true love and the ways in which fictions of romance (particularly Hollywood’s fictions) permeate our lives.” –Gene Siskel, CHICAGO TRIBUNE

ALFRED HITCHCOCK:
THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH x 2
Running a taut 75 minutes, Hitchcock’s first MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (made in his native Britain) was also his first international success – a cat-and-mouse kidnapping thriller that provided the blueprint for many of his later suspense classics (and gave Peter Lorre his first English-speaking role). Ever the perfectionist, though, Hitchcock told Truffaut he found his original film “the work of a talented amateur”, and David O. Selznick purchased the remake rights in 1941, encouraging an American version. Hitchcock couldn’t devise a new spin on the material until, a decade later, a vacation in Morocco offered the inspiration he needed. The U.S. version is an altogether glossier affair, with movie stars James Stewart and Doris Day, Technicolor VistaVision, and an Oscar-winning song (“Que Sera Sera”), plus a new climax and a beefed-up running time. But both films remain a joy, rife with the thrills – and gallows humor – only Hitchcock could deliver.

“Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are the movies’ greatest comic duo, the quintessential dumb and dumber odd-couple. Though critically overshadowed by Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, they were enormously popular, and proved a major influence on Abbott & Costello, Lucille Ball & Vivian Vance, and Jackie Gleason & Art Carney, not to mention Samuel Beckett (they were an inspiration for WAITING FOR GODOT), Roman Polanski (who paid homage to them in his existentialist short films FAT AND LEAN and TWO MEN AND A WARDROBE), and Ken Jacobs (whose ONTIC ANTICS deconstructs one of their films).” –David Mulkins
COUNTY HOSPITAL (1932, 20 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
Directed by James Parrott.
THE MUSIC BOX (1932, 30 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
Directed by James Parrott.
THEM THAR HILLS (1934, 20 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
Directed by Charley Rogers.
TIT FOR TAT (1935, 20 minutes, 16mm, b&w)
Directed by Charley Rogers.
Total running time: ca. 95 minutes.

Running a taut 75 minutes, Hitchcock’s first MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (made in his native Britain) was also his first international success – a cat-and-mouse kidnapping thriller that provided the blueprint for many of his later suspense classics (and gave Peter Lorre his first English-speaking role). Ever the perfectionist, though, Hitchcock told Truffaut he found his original film “the work of a talented amateur”, and David O. Selznick purchased the remake rights in 1941, encouraging an American version. Hitchcock couldn’t devise a new spin on the material until, a decade later, a vacation in Morocco offered the inspiration he needed. The U.S. version is an altogether glossier affair, with movie stars James Stewart and Doris Day, Technicolor VistaVision, and an Oscar-winning song (“Que Sera Sera”), plus a new climax and a beefed-up running time. But both films remain a joy, rife with the thrills – and gallows humor – only Hitchcock could deliver.

LEO MCCAREY:
LOVE AFFAIR / AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER
Two socialites meet and fall in love on a transatlantic ocean liner; the only hitch is that they’re each engaged to someone else. They agree to test fate and reunite six months later atop the Empire State Building, but a tragic accident leaves their rendezvous in doubt. From this same mawkish framework, McCarey constructed two funny, bittersweet romantic classics, investing the melodrama with the kind of emotion and insight that proved, per Jean Renoir, “McCarey understood people better than any other Hollywood director.” The two renditions are nearly identical on a scene-by-scene level, but viewed together they demonstrate McCarey’s sensitivity to different performance styles (Charles Boyer vs. Cary Grant, Irene Dunne vs. Deborah Kerr) and his underrated strengths as a stylist. The Technicolor Cinemascope framings of AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER, in particular, demonstrate a film artist at the peak of his visual powers. As Jonathan Rosenbaum has asserted, “Both versions have their claims to greatness.”

Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy
BALLET MÉCANIQUE  (1924, 19 minutes, 35mm, b&w, silent. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.)
René Clair & Francis Picabia
ENTR’ACTE (1924, 22 minutes, 35mm, b&w)
Man Ray
LE RETOUR À LA RAISON (1923, 2 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent)
ÉTOILE DE MER (1927, 13 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent)
EMAK BAKIA (1927, 18 minutes, 35mm, b&w, silent)
Marcel Duchamp & Man Ray
ANEMIC CINEMA (1926, 7 minutes, 35mm, b&w, silent)
Total running time: ca. 85 minutes.

LEO MCCAREY:
LOVE AFFAIR / AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER
Two socialites meet and fall in love on a transatlantic ocean liner; the only hitch is that they’re each engaged to someone else. They agree to test fate and reunite six months later atop the Empire State Building, but a tragic accident leaves their rendezvous in doubt. From this same mawkish framework, McCarey constructed two funny, bittersweet romantic classics, investing the melodrama with the kind of emotion and insight that proved, per Jean Renoir, “McCarey understood people better than any other Hollywood director.” The two renditions are nearly identical on a scene-by-scene level, but viewed together they demonstrate McCarey’s sensitivity to different performance styles (Charles Boyer vs. Cary Grant, Irene Dunne vs. Deborah Kerr) and his underrated strengths as a stylist. The Technicolor Cinemascope framings of AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER, in particular, demonstrate a film artist at the peak of his visual powers. As Jonathan Rosenbaum has asserted, “Both versions have their claims to greatness.”

MOSAIC IN CONFIDENCE / MOSAIK IM VERTRAUEN (1955, 16 min, 35mm, b&w/color)
ADEBAR (1957, 1 min, 35mm, b&w)
SCHWECHATER (1958, 1 min, 35mm, b&w/color)
ARNULF RAINER (1960, 7 min, 35mm, b&w)
OUR TRIP TO AFRICA / UNSERE AFRIKAREISE (1966, 12 min, 16mm)
PAUSE (1977, 12 min, 16mm)
POETRY AND TRUTH / DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT (2003, 13 min, 35mm)
“Peter Kubelka is the perfectionist of the film medium; and, as I honor that quality above all others at this time finding such a lack of it now elsewhere, I would simply like to say: Peter Kubelka is the world’s greatest filmmaker – which is to say, simply: see his films!…by all means/above all else…etcetera.” –Stan Brakhage
Total running time: ca. 65 min.

HOWARD HAWKS:
BALL OF FIRE / A SONG IS BORN
Hawks retooled RIO BRAVO’s Western set-up for both EL DORADO and RIO LOBO, but Golden Age Hollywood’s jack-of-all-genres did something more radical for his remake of screwball farce BALL OF FIRE – he turned it into a musical. In both BALL and A SONG IS BORN, a gaggle of stuffy academics compiling an encyclopedia take in a sexy nightclub performer on the run from gangsters. Working from a snappy Brackett-Wilder script, the former is all about language: the professors (including a bumbling Gary Cooper) hit a snag on the entry for ‘slang’, only to learn a thing or two from their sassy new boarder Barbara Stanwyck. The Technicolor remake, though, shifts the focus to the music; Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo play the leads, but the real star-power comes from Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and their swinging jazz numbers, “some of the finest and strangest work [Hawks] ever did” (NEW YORKER).

Special thanks to Martin Rauchbauer & Andreas Stadler (Austrian Cultural Forum NY), and to Brigitta Burger-Utzer (Sixpack Films).

MICHAEL BERGER – A HYSTERIA / MICHAEL BERGER. EINE HYSTERIE
2010, 50 minutes, video.
Thomas Fürhapter’s MICHAEL BERGER is a haunting, formally rigorous experimental portrait of the Austrian-born investment banker who made millions as a hedge-fund manager, fled New York in 2002 after pleading guilty to a $400 million securities fraud, and was eventually found and captured in Austria. Implying that his story is reflective of the nebulous, tangled, and profoundly corrupt 21^st-century world economy, Fürhapter foregrounds Berger’s elusiveness and impenetrability, constructing a portrait – composed entirely of carefully composed, fixed shots of the spaces and landscapes through which Berger moved – in which the subject himself is conspicuously absent. Reminiscent of the work of James Benning and Gerhard Benedikt Friedl, but with a very particular set of thematic preoccupations, MICHAEL BERGER is an extraordinary film.
“In six attempts, the film tries to draw together a case from the traces of Berger’s undertakings. It traverses his path, starting from [his] non-appearance before an American court: from this emerges the outline of a rise-and-fall story that extends from the narrow borders of Austrian working worlds through to Wall Street. … While the factual, off-screen narrator randomly mixes fact and anecdote, and with that alone, undermines a realization process, the pictures, in their function as scenes, remain as speculative as Berger’s financial capers.” –Dominik Kamalzadeh

Plus:
THE YELLOW WITHOUT ZEBRA / DAS GELB OHNE ZEBRA (2004, 24 minutes, digital video)
The town appears in all its facets: streets, buildings, metro platforms, etc. Movements or immobility, chaos and geometric lines: forms oppose one another and repeat themselves, and appear to think all by themselves.
PLANES (2006, 4 minutes, digital video)
“A spatial composition made of horizontals and verticals, a receptacle in which the crush of the images’ lines and masses can find balance, and their movements a firm footing. This goes well until irritations creep in, and at first it isn’t certain where they are: in the picture, in the viewer’s head, or both?” –Thomas Fürhapter
Total running time: ca. 80 minutes.

HOWARD HAWKS:
BALL OF FIRE / A SONG IS BORN
Hawks retooled RIO BRAVO’s Western set-up for both EL DORADO and RIO LOBO, but Golden Age Hollywood’s jack-of-all-genres did something more radical for his remake of screwball farce BALL OF FIRE – he turned it into a musical. In both BALL and A SONG IS BORN, a gaggle of stuffy academics compiling an encyclopedia take in a sexy nightclub performer on the run from gangsters. Working from a snappy Brackett-Wilder script, the former is all about language: the professors (including a bumbling Gary Cooper) hit a snag on the entry for ‘slang’, only to learn a thing or two from their sassy new boarder Barbara Stanwyck. The Technicolor remake, though, shifts the focus to the music; Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo play the leads, but the real star-power comes from Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and their swinging jazz numbers, “some of the finest and strangest work [Hawks] ever did” (NEW YORKER).

ERNST LUBITSCH:
THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE / ONE HOUR WITH YOU
A happily married doctor meets his wife’s less-happily-married friend…and so the romantic roundelay begins in this pair of sparkling Lubitsch sex farces. The silent MARRIAGE CIRCLE, with its cavalier attitude toward love, elegant design, and devastating wit, stands as an early example of the famed “Lubitsch Touch” and the director’s first American hit. By the early 30s, Lubitsch had become a star director, and Paramount contracted him to supervise a musical by a young George Cukor, starring Lubitsch vets Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. Unhappy with the material, he and frequent co-writer Samson Raphaelson threw out the script and returned to the plot of THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE (itself a play adaptation); unhappy with Cukor’s work, he also took over the director’s chair. The resulting ONE HOUR WITH YOU is pure Lubitsch bliss – one of his frothiest, funniest depictions of fidelity and a testament to his innovations in early sound cinema.
Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with support from The National Film Preservation Foundation and The Film Foundation.

“The few facts that are known about Maclaine are, at best, sketchy. He was a published poet, a sort of down and out San Francisco bohemian who later became one of the psychic casualties of that scene. His last years were spent at Sunnyacres, a state mental hospital in Fairfield, California. These films, along with Ron Rice’s, are clearly the most significant work to come out of the beat period.” –J.J. Murphy
All films preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
THE MAN WHO INVENTED GOLD (1957, 14 minutes, 16mm)
BEAT (1958, 6 minutes, 16mm)
SCOTCH HOP (1959, 5.5 minutes, 16mm)
THE END (1953, 35 minutes, 16mm)
“Six stories of people on the last day of their lives. Most are about to commit suicide, or some metaphorical equivalent, but the mushroom cloud with which the film begins and ends reminds us that, as Maclaine's voice intones on the sound track, we await ‘the grand suicide of the human race’ – his conceit is that his characters have reached the end of their personal ropes the day before a nuclear holocaust. Throughout the film he compares the dehumanizing effects of mass culture to the dehumanizing effects of personal despair, weaving these two threads together until the mannequins he films in store windows, the anonymous people he films on the street, and his characters all seem variations on the same half-living, half-dead persona.” –Fred Camper
Total running time: ca. 65 minutes.

ERNST LUBITSCH:
THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE / ONE HOUR WITH YOU
A happily married doctor meets his wife’s less-happily-married friend…and so the romantic roundelay begins in this pair of sparkling Lubitsch sex farces. The silent MARRIAGE CIRCLE, with its cavalier attitude toward love, elegant design, and devastating wit, stands as an early example of the famed “Lubitsch Touch” and the director’s first American hit. By the early 30s, Lubitsch had become a star director, and Paramount contracted him to supervise a musical by a young George Cukor, starring Lubitsch vets Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. Unhappy with the material, he and frequent co-writer Samson Raphaelson threw out the script and returned to the plot of THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE (itself a play adaptation); unhappy with Cukor’s work, he also took over the director’s chair. The resulting ONE HOUR WITH YOU is pure Lubitsch bliss – one of his frothiest, funniest depictions of fidelity and a testament to his innovations in early sound cinema.

THE GREAT BLONDINO
1967, 42 min, 16mm. Newly preserved print; thanks to the Academy Film Archive!
“The original Blondino was a 19^th-century tightrope artist who among other feats crossed Niagara Falls trundling a wheelbarrow. In this film, Nelson sees Blondino as a metaphor for those who still try. Too subtle to be allegorical, the picture is in the shape of a quixotic search in which the goal is the journey and the means is the end.” –Museum of Modern Art
“It is…difficult to get at the rich visual texture that is the film’s most striking attribute. Long stretches are concerned with Blondino’s visions, dreams, and dreams within dreams. The film unfolds in brief recurring patterns of imagery. Even the more straightforward sections are dense with interpolated newsreel and TV commercial footage, visual gags, and homemade special effects. The net effect is funny, seamless, and elusive.” –J. Hoberman, “A Filmmakers Filming Monograph”
&
BLEU SHUT
1970, 33 min, 16mm. Newly preserved print; thanks to the Academy Film Archive!
“Boat-name quizzes, dogs, cuts from Dreyer’s JOAN OF ARC in montage with a sultry whore, a car running up a ramp and crashing, pornography, a passionate embrace by a thirties hero and heroine; all somehow implicating Dreyer and Joan in the perverse synthesis of sex and technology. What’s happening here? Basically Nelson is leaving things unsaid.” –Leo Regan
Total running time: ca. 80 min.

(UMARETE WA MITA KEREDO…)

In referring to this film Ozu stated, “I started to make a film about grownups. While I had originally planned to make a fairly bright little story, it changed while I was working on it and came out very dark.” The story concerns a very average suburban office worker, with a wife and two very un-average sons, who is unable to stand up to his boss.
“Joyful…as true and as moving and as timely today as it was in 1932.” –Jonas Mekas

YASUJIRO OZU:
I WAS BORN, BUT… / GOOD MORNING
Ozu was no stranger to the auto-remake: his STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS became FLOATING WEEDS, LATE SPRING became LATE AUTUMN, and so many of his films share similar themes, subject matters, and styles that he often seems to be remaking himself. I WAS BORN, BUT… and GOOD MORNING offer a particularly fascinating case study: both feature the same core story – a pair of rowdy schoolboys give their parents the silent treatment – but as Japan changed over the course of WWII, so too did Ozu’s art. The first version is a gently comic, heartbreaking late silent, a look at familial disappointment with some of the most expressive mobile camerawork of Ozu’s career. GOOD MORNING, meanwhile, employs a locked-down camera (typical of later Ozu) and eye-popping Technicolor, along with a tonal change to flat-out satire – among the most cutting of the director’s career.
[Please note: These are Essential Cinema screenings, and are FREE for AFA members!]

Special thanks to Martin Rauchbauer & Andreas Stadler (Austrian Cultural Forum NY), and to Brigitta Burger-Utzer (Sixpack Films).

MICHAEL BERGER – A HYSTERIA / MICHAEL BERGER. EINE HYSTERIE
2010, 50 minutes, video.
Thomas Fürhapter’s MICHAEL BERGER is a haunting, formally rigorous experimental portrait of the Austrian-born investment banker who made millions as a hedge-fund manager, fled New York in 2002 after pleading guilty to a $400 million securities fraud, and was eventually found and captured in Austria. Implying that his story is reflective of the nebulous, tangled, and profoundly corrupt 21^st-century world economy, Fürhapter foregrounds Berger’s elusiveness and impenetrability, constructing a portrait – composed entirely of carefully composed, fixed shots of the spaces and landscapes through which Berger moved – in which the subject himself is conspicuously absent. Reminiscent of the work of James Benning and Gerhard Benedikt Friedl, but with a very particular set of thematic preoccupations, MICHAEL BERGER is an extraordinary film.
“In six attempts, the film tries to draw together a case from the traces of Berger’s undertakings. It traverses his path, starting from [his] non-appearance before an American court: from this emerges the outline of a rise-and-fall story that extends from the narrow borders of Austrian working worlds through to Wall Street. … While the factual, off-screen narrator randomly mixes fact and anecdote, and with that alone, undermines a realization process, the pictures, in their function as scenes, remain as speculative as Berger’s financial capers.” –Dominik Kamalzadeh

Plus:
THE YELLOW WITHOUT ZEBRA / DAS GELB OHNE ZEBRA (2004, 24 minutes, digital video)
The town appears in all its facets: streets, buildings, metro platforms, etc. Movements or immobility, chaos and geometric lines: forms oppose one another and repeat themselves, and appear to think all by themselves.
PLANES (2006, 4 minutes, digital video)
“A spatial composition made of horizontals and verticals, a receptacle in which the crush of the images’ lines and masses can find balance, and their movements a firm footing. This goes well until irritations creep in, and at first it isn’t certain where they are: in the picture, in the viewer’s head, or both?” –Thomas Fürhapter
Total running time: ca. 80 minutes.

YASUJIRO OZU:
I WAS BORN, BUT… / GOOD MORNING
Ozu was no stranger to the auto-remake: his STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS became FLOATING WEEDS, LATE SPRING became LATE AUTUMN, and so many of his films share similar themes, subject matters, and styles that he often seems to be remaking himself. I WAS BORN, BUT… and GOOD MORNING offer a particularly fascinating case study: both feature the same core story – a pair of rowdy schoolboys give their parents the silent treatment – but as Japan changed over the course of WWII, so too did Ozu’s art. The first version is a gently comic, heartbreaking late silent, a look at familial disappointment with some of the most expressive mobile camerawork of Ozu’s career. GOOD MORNING, meanwhile, employs a locked-down camera (typical of later Ozu) and eye-popping Technicolor, along with a tonal change to flat-out satire – among the most cutting of the director’s career.

NewFilmmakers celebrates alienation

6:00 PM NEWFILMMAKERS DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Heather Kessinger IN THE SHADOW OF BUDDHA (2010, 45 Minutes, Video)
In the Shadow of Buddha takes us to the seldom seen world of Tibetan Buddhist Nuns in northernmost India. Many Buddhists believe that one cannot attain enlightenment in the body of a woman, so what compels these women to dedicate their lives to being a nun?

7:00 PM NEWFILMMAKERS SHORT FILM PROGRAM
Joe Petrilla THE LINE (2010, 9 Minutes, Video)
Pierre M Coleman HELLO, MY NMAE IS TROUBLE (2010. 19 Minutes. Video)
Shane Dewalt RAIMO’S PRICE (2009, 17 Minutes, Video)

8:00 PM NEWFILMMAKERS FEATURE PRESENTATION
Barry Kneller LIFE OF LEMON (2010, 75 Minutes, Video)
A blue collar man, inspired by his homeless friend, sets out to better his life by pursuing a more meaningful job going against his father's wishes. On his journey he discovers how important it is to believe in himself and with having hope and ambition magical things happen.

JOHN FORD:
JUDGE PRIEST / THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT
In 1934, Ford (already with some 40 features under his belt) adapted a series of popular Irwin S. Cobb stories as JUDGE PRIEST. With the help of folksy charmer Will Rogers as the plainspoken title lawman, he crafted a flavorful, warmly comic portrait of a small Kentucky town still scarred by vestiges of intolerance decades after the Civil War. The finished film, though, didn’t go as far as Ford originally planned: a scene depicting the lynching of Stepin Fetchit’s character (and Priest’s condemnation of the act) was cut by Fox. With his obvious affection for Priest, Ford loosely reshaped the Cobb stories two decades later for Republic Pictures as cheapie THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT, this time keeping the lynching scene (and Fetchit in a supporting role). The result is “a masterpiece” (Dave Kehr), a subtle, poetic, and profound portrait of community, and Ford’s personal favorite among all his own films.

JOHN FORD:
JUDGE PRIEST / THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT
In 1934, Ford (already with some 40 features under his belt) adapted a series of popular Irwin S. Cobb stories as JUDGE PRIEST. With the help of folksy charmer Will Rogers as the plainspoken title lawman, he crafted a flavorful, warmly comic portrait of a small Kentucky town still scarred by vestiges of intolerance decades after the Civil War. The finished film, though, didn’t go as far as Ford originally planned: a scene depicting the lynching of Stepin Fetchit’s character (and Priest’s condemnation of the act) was cut by Fox. With his obvious affection for Priest, Ford loosely reshaped the Cobb stories two decades later for Republic Pictures as cheapie THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT, this time keeping the lynching scene (and Fetchit in a supporting role). The result is “a masterpiece” (Dave Kehr), a subtle, poetic, and profound portrait of community, and Ford’s personal favorite among all his own films.

Preserved print courtesy of the EYE Film Institute Netherlands.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK:
THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH x 2
Running a taut 75 minutes, Hitchcock’s first MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (made in his native Britain) was also his first international success – a cat-and-mouse kidnapping thriller that provided the blueprint for many of his later suspense classics (and gave Peter Lorre his first English-speaking role). Ever the perfectionist, though, Hitchcock told Truffaut he found his original film “the work of a talented amateur”, and David O. Selznick purchased the remake rights in 1941, encouraging an American version. Hitchcock couldn’t devise a new spin on the material until, a decade later, a vacation in Morocco offered the inspiration he needed. The U.S. version is an altogether glossier affair, with movie stars James Stewart and Doris Day, Technicolor VistaVision, and an Oscar-winning song (“Que Sera Sera”), plus a new climax and a beefed-up running time. But both films remain a joy, rife with the thrills – and gallows humor – only Hitchcock could deliver.

Running a taut 75 minutes, Hitchcock’s first MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (made in his native Britain) was also his first international success – a cat-and-mouse kidnapping thriller that provided the blueprint for many of his later suspense classics (and gave Peter Lorre his first English-speaking role). Ever the perfectionist, though, Hitchcock told Truffaut he found his original film “the work of a talented amateur”, and David O. Selznick purchased the remake rights in 1941, encouraging an American version. Hitchcock couldn’t devise a new spin on the material until, a decade later, a vacation in Morocco offered the inspiration he needed. The U.S. version is an altogether glossier affair, with movie stars James Stewart and Doris Day, Technicolor VistaVision, and an Oscar-winning song (“Que Sera Sera”), plus a new climax and a beefed-up running time. But both films remain a joy, rife with the thrills – and gallows humor – only Hitchcock could deliver.

6:00 PM Film of the Month Screening
Every Month NewFilmmakers awards The Film Of The month to the most watched film on NewFilmmakers Online, Winners receive a screening in New York and an award plaque as well as a NewFilmmakers Ecard to our 20,000 person mailing list.

Fred Uhter DRIVE SOMEWHERE, THE SAGA OF THE VULGAR BOATMEN (2010, 59 minutes)
A fan documents the band as they drive to their final gig of their 30 year career. What do you do when you have sacrificed everything for music and it's taken away ? Stellar reviews, cross country tours, European TV and seamless pop music. 'Buddy Hol

7:30 PM Special Program
NewFilmmakers remembers the Triangle Fire ninety-nine years ago.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was one of the largest industrial disasters in the history of the city of New York, causing the death of 146 garment workers, most of them women, who either died from the fire or jumped from the fatal height.

RAOUL WALSH:
HIGH SIERRA / COLORADO TERRITORY
“The 1941 film in which Humphrey Bogart became Humphrey Bogart” (Dave Kehr), the moody gangster saga HIGH SIERRA stars Bogie as ex-con “Mad-Dog” Earle (modeled on John Dillinger) gunning for One Last Score, with accomplice Arthur Kennedy and moll Ida Lupino along for the ride. An important early noir (with punchy dialogue courtesy a pre-MALTESE FALCON John Huston), the film became a prime candidate for a remake by a cash-strapped postwar Warner Bros. eight years later. Walsh took the reins again for COLORADO TERRITORY, keeping the story arc and high-contrast black-and-white photography intact but switching the genre to Western and casting Joel McCrea (now an outlaw) and a tough-as-nails Virginia Mayo (an auto-remake vet from A SONG IS BORN) in the lead roles. McCrea cranks up the desperation and Walsh lavishes even more attention on the jagged landscape, creating a classic Western in the process.

RAOUL WALSH:
HIGH SIERRA / COLORADO TERRITORY
“The 1941 film in which Humphrey Bogart became Humphrey Bogart” (Dave Kehr), the moody gangster saga HIGH SIERRA stars Bogie as ex-con “Mad-Dog” Earle (modeled on John Dillinger) gunning for One Last Score, with accomplice Arthur Kennedy and moll Ida Lupino along for the ride. An important early noir (with punchy dialogue courtesy a pre-MALTESE FALCON John Huston), the film became a prime candidate for a remake by a cash-strapped postwar Warner Bros. eight years later. Walsh took the reins again for COLORADO TERRITORY, keeping the story arc and high-contrast black-and-white photography intact but switching the genre to Western and casting Joel McCrea (now an outlaw) and a tough-as-nails Virginia Mayo (an auto-remake vet from A SONG IS BORN) in the lead roles. McCrea cranks up the desperation and Walsh lavishes even more attention on the jagged landscape, creating a classic Western in the process.

YASUJIRO OZU:
I WAS BORN, BUT… / GOOD MORNING
Ozu was no stranger to the auto-remake: his STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS became FLOATING WEEDS, LATE SPRING became LATE AUTUMN, and so many of his films share similar themes, subject matters, and styles that he often seems to be remaking himself. I WAS BORN, BUT… and GOOD MORNING offer a particularly fascinating case study: both feature the same core story – a pair of rowdy schoolboys give their parents the silent treatment – but as Japan changed over the course of WWII, so too did Ozu’s art. The first version is a gently comic, heartbreaking late silent, a look at familial disappointment with some of the most expressive mobile camerawork of Ozu’s career. GOOD MORNING, meanwhile, employs a locked-down camera (typical of later Ozu) and eye-popping Technicolor, along with a tonal change to flat-out satire – among the most cutting of the director’s career.
[Please note: These are Essential Cinema screenings, and are FREE for AFA members!]

(UMARETE WA MITA KEREDO…)

In referring to this film Ozu stated, “I started to make a film about grownups. While I had originally planned to make a fairly bright little story, it changed while I was working on it and came out very dark.” The story concerns a very average suburban office worker, with a wife and two very un-average sons, who is unable to stand up to his boss.
“Joyful…as true and as moving and as timely today as it was in 1932.” –Jonas Mekas

FILMMAKER MICHAEL SNOW IN PERSON!

SINGLE FRAME is a new series focusing on the increasingly outmoded world of slide-based projection. Whether presented in portfolios, lectures, libraries, or living rooms, the transparent photographic positive known as a slide was for decades a common way to view amateur, artistic, industrial, and educational imagery. From vacation photos and pre-show movie theater ads to gallery installations and multi-projector happenings, the slide is a significant time-based medium worthy of further investigation and illumination. SINGLE FRAME programs will feature old and new works by artists, as well as performances, found images of mysterious origin, and other exploratory excursions.
We are elated to inaugurate our premiere program with a visit from a master of the medium, Michael Snow. An artist and filmmaker with a decades-long photography practice, Snow created the three pieces presented here during a particularly prolific period in which he was engaged with the theatrical presentation of still images. This is a very rare opportunity to experience some of Snow’s least-seen works.

SLIDELENGTH
1969-71, 80 slides, 20 minutes.
A photographic slide installation consisting of eighty 35mm slides, arranged like a filmic sequence and projected at fifteen-second intervals, SLIDELENGTH addresses Snow’s central themes of time, memory, and perception. Usually shown as a looped projection in a gallery but here seen in a theater, it is closely related to WAVELENGTH, which will screen separately on this calendar as part of our Essential Cinema repertory series.

SIDE SEAT PAINTINGS SLIDES SOUND FILM
1970, 20 minutes, 16mm, color, sound.
“A 20-minute sound film made in 1970 of the projecting and verbal (my voice) identification of slides (made at various times, by various people) of paintings in various media made by myself from 1955 to 1965. It is not autobiographical. The film is a recycling, a conversion which, by employing the illusion of temporal alteration which film and sound recording have made possible, becomes a completely new experience.” –Michael Snow

A CASING SHELVED
1970, 1 slide, 45 minutes, sound.
A groundbreaking work in which a single color slide of a bookshelf in Snow’s studio is accompanied by audio of the artist describing the image in detail.
“A projected slide with a separate tape sound. Being a movie would be entirely another matter because it would introduce motion…no matter what you’d do you’d have the flicker and you’d have the things that happened in the projector. Slides have a particularly frozen quality if you look at them for a while. … Bob Breer told me that for a long time he thought A CASING SHELVED was a movie. I think that’s very nice, because it means that the thing is moving in time in a way that I really wanted the sound to do – and it is the sound that does it because if you really look at it you don’t see the effects that happen with films…that little bit of instability.” –Michael Snow
Total running time: ca. 90 minutes.

YASUJIRO OZU:
I WAS BORN, BUT… / GOOD MORNING
Ozu was no stranger to the auto-remake: his STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS became FLOATING WEEDS, LATE SPRING became LATE AUTUMN, and so many of his films share similar themes, subject matters, and styles that he often seems to be remaking himself. I WAS BORN, BUT… and GOOD MORNING offer a particularly fascinating case study: both feature the same core story – a pair of rowdy schoolboys give their parents the silent treatment – but as Japan changed over the course of WWII, so too did Ozu’s art. The first version is a gently comic, heartbreaking late silent, a look at familial disappointment with some of the most expressive mobile camerawork of Ozu’s career. GOOD MORNING, meanwhile, employs a locked-down camera (typical of later Ozu) and eye-popping Technicolor, along with a tonal change to flat-out satire – among the most cutting of the director’s career.

“WAVELENGTH is without precedent in the purity of its confrontation with the essence of cinema: the relationships between illusion and fact, space and time, subject and object. It is the first post-Warhol, post-Minimal movie; one of the few films to engage those higher conceptual orders which occupy modern painting and sculpture. It has rightly been described as a ‘triumph of contemplative cinema.’” – Gene Youngblood, L.A. FREE PRESS, 1968

RAOUL WALSH:
HIGH SIERRA / COLORADO TERRITORY
“The 1941 film in which Humphrey Bogart became Humphrey Bogart” (Dave Kehr), the moody gangster saga HIGH SIERRA stars Bogie as ex-con “Mad-Dog” Earle (modeled on John Dillinger) gunning for One Last Score, with accomplice Arthur Kennedy and moll Ida Lupino along for the ride. An important early noir (with punchy dialogue courtesy a pre-MALTESE FALCON John Huston), the film became a prime candidate for a remake by a cash-strapped postwar Warner Bros. eight years later. Walsh took the reins again for COLORADO TERRITORY, keeping the story arc and high-contrast black-and-white photography intact but switching the genre to Western and casting Joel McCrea (now an outlaw) and a tough-as-nails Virginia Mayo (an auto-remake vet from A SONG IS BORN) in the lead roles. McCrea cranks up the desperation and Walsh lavishes even more attention on the jagged landscape, creating a classic Western in the process.

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Distributed by FiGa Films; special thanks to Sandro Fiorin, Cristina Garza, and Alex Garcia.
José Renato, a 35-year-old geologist, is sent on a fieldtrip to the scrublands of the Sertão, a semi-arid isolated region in the northeast of Brazil. The goal of his survey is to assess possible routes for a water canal from the region’s only voluminous river. For many of the region’s inhabitants, the canal will be a lifeline, the chance for a future and a source of hope. But for those living on the canal’s direct course, it means only requisitions, departure, and loss. Many of the properties through which Renato passes will be flooded; many of the people and families will be relocated.
As the fieldtrip progresses, it becomes clear that Renato shares something in common with the places he visits: emptiness, a sense of abandonment, and isolation. His geological research is slowly pervaded by a sensation of groundlessness, an incessant pining for his ex-wife, and a yearning to return home. But he presses ahead, continuing the trip in the hope that the voyage can somehow transmute his feelings.
This haunting, melancholy, and resourceful film takes the form of a first-person travelogue, communicating its unseen protagonist’s sensibility and state of mind through an impressionistic photographic record of the landscapes through which he travels and the people he encounters, and his own nakedly revealing, confessional narration. A simple but beautiful film which glides fluidly and elegantly across the borders between fictional narrative, documentary, and experimental filmmaking, I TRAVEL… is difficult to categorize but impossible to resist.

 “Beautifully structured and ultimately transcendent…a road movie in its purest form, offering an affecting record of processing loss and coming through to the other side. Gomes and Aïnouz work seamlessly together in the bleak Brazilian Northeast, creating a fictional travelogue for a character heard but never seen thanks to a creative combination of p.o.v. lensing and snapshots. Utterly unpretentious and deeply touching.” –Jay Weissberg, VARIETY

RAOUL WALSH:
HIGH SIERRA / COLORADO TERRITORY
“The 1941 film in which Humphrey Bogart became Humphrey Bogart” (Dave Kehr), the moody gangster saga HIGH SIERRA stars Bogie as ex-con “Mad-Dog” Earle (modeled on John Dillinger) gunning for One Last Score, with accomplice Arthur Kennedy and moll Ida Lupino along for the ride. An important early noir (with punchy dialogue courtesy a pre-MALTESE FALCON John Huston), the film became a prime candidate for a remake by a cash-strapped postwar Warner Bros. eight years later. Walsh took the reins again for COLORADO TERRITORY, keeping the story arc and high-contrast black-and-white photography intact but switching the genre to Western and casting Joel McCrea (now an outlaw) and a tough-as-nails Virginia Mayo (an auto-remake vet from A SONG IS BORN) in the lead roles. McCrea cranks up the desperation and Walsh lavishes even more attention on the jagged landscape, creating a classic Western in the process.

HOWARD HAWKS:
BALL OF FIRE / A SONG IS BORN
Hawks retooled RIO BRAVO’s Western set-up for both EL DORADO and RIO LOBO, but Golden Age Hollywood’s jack-of-all-genres did something more radical for his remake of screwball farce BALL OF FIRE – he turned it into a musical. In both BALL and A SONG IS BORN, a gaggle of stuffy academics compiling an encyclopedia take in a sexy nightclub performer on the run from gangsters. Working from a snappy Brackett-Wilder script, the former is all about language: the professors (including a bumbling Gary Cooper) hit a snag on the entry for ‘slang’, only to learn a thing or two from their sassy new boarder Barbara Stanwyck. The Technicolor remake, though, shifts the focus to the music; Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo play the leads, but the real star-power comes from Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and their swinging jazz numbers, “some of the finest and strangest work [Hawks] ever did” (NEW YORKER).

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Distributed by FiGa Films; special thanks to Sandro Fiorin, Cristina Garza, and Alex Garcia.
José Renato, a 35-year-old geologist, is sent on a fieldtrip to the scrublands of the Sertão, a semi-arid isolated region in the northeast of Brazil. The goal of his survey is to assess possible routes for a water canal from the region’s only voluminous river. For many of the region’s inhabitants, the canal will be a lifeline, the chance for a future and a source of hope. But for those living on the canal’s direct course, it means only requisitions, departure, and loss. Many of the properties through which Renato passes will be flooded; many of the people and families will be relocated.
As the fieldtrip progresses, it becomes clear that Renato shares something in common with the places he visits: emptiness, a sense of abandonment, and isolation. His geological research is slowly pervaded by a sensation of groundlessness, an incessant pining for his ex-wife, and a yearning to return home. But he presses ahead, continuing the trip in the hope that the voyage can somehow transmute his feelings.
This haunting, melancholy, and resourceful film takes the form of a first-person travelogue, communicating its unseen protagonist’s sensibility and state of mind through an impressionistic photographic record of the landscapes through which he travels and the people he encounters, and his own nakedly revealing, confessional narration. A simple but beautiful film which glides fluidly and elegantly across the borders between fictional narrative, documentary, and experimental filmmaking, I TRAVEL… is difficult to categorize but impossible to resist.

 “Beautifully structured and ultimately transcendent…a road movie in its purest form, offering an affecting record of processing loss and coming through to the other side. Gomes and Aïnouz work seamlessly together in the bleak Brazilian Northeast, creating a fictional travelogue for a character heard but never seen thanks to a creative combination of p.o.v. lensing and snapshots. Utterly unpretentious and deeply touching.” –Jay Weissberg, VARIETY

HOWARD HAWKS:
BALL OF FIRE / A SONG IS BORN
Hawks retooled RIO BRAVO’s Western set-up for both EL DORADO and RIO LOBO, but Golden Age Hollywood’s jack-of-all-genres did something more radical for his remake of screwball farce BALL OF FIRE – he turned it into a musical. In both BALL and A SONG IS BORN, a gaggle of stuffy academics compiling an encyclopedia take in a sexy nightclub performer on the run from gangsters. Working from a snappy Brackett-Wilder script, the former is all about language: the professors (including a bumbling Gary Cooper) hit a snag on the entry for ‘slang’, only to learn a thing or two from their sassy new boarder Barbara Stanwyck. The Technicolor remake, though, shifts the focus to the music; Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo play the leads, but the real star-power comes from Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and their swinging jazz numbers, “some of the finest and strangest work [Hawks] ever did” (NEW YORKER).

ERNST LUBITSCH:
THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE / ONE HOUR WITH YOU
A happily married doctor meets his wife’s less-happily-married friend…and so the romantic roundelay begins in this pair of sparkling Lubitsch sex farces. The silent MARRIAGE CIRCLE, with its cavalier attitude toward love, elegant design, and devastating wit, stands as an early example of the famed “Lubitsch Touch” and the director’s first American hit. By the early 30s, Lubitsch had become a star director, and Paramount contracted him to supervise a musical by a young George Cukor, starring Lubitsch vets Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. Unhappy with the material, he and frequent co-writer Samson Raphaelson threw out the script and returned to the plot of THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE (itself a play adaptation); unhappy with Cukor’s work, he also took over the director’s chair. The resulting ONE HOUR WITH YOU is pure Lubitsch bliss – one of his frothiest, funniest depictions of fidelity and a testament to his innovations in early sound cinema.
Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with support from The National Film Preservation Foundation and The Film Foundation.

ERNST LUBITSCH:
THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE / ONE HOUR WITH YOU
A happily married doctor meets his wife’s less-happily-married friend…and so the romantic roundelay begins in this pair of sparkling Lubitsch sex farces. The silent MARRIAGE CIRCLE, with its cavalier attitude toward love, elegant design, and devastating wit, stands as an early example of the famed “Lubitsch Touch” and the director’s first American hit. By the early 30s, Lubitsch had become a star director, and Paramount contracted him to supervise a musical by a young George Cukor, starring Lubitsch vets Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. Unhappy with the material, he and frequent co-writer Samson Raphaelson threw out the script and returned to the plot of THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE (itself a play adaptation); unhappy with Cukor’s work, he also took over the director’s chair. The resulting ONE HOUR WITH YOU is pure Lubitsch bliss – one of his frothiest, funniest depictions of fidelity and a testament to his innovations in early sound cinema.

An absolute masterpiece from one of the most inspiring innovators of modern cinema.
“Original 1905 film shot and probably directed by G.W. ‘Billy’ Bitzer, rescued via a paper print filed for copyright purposes with the Library of Congress. It is most reverently examined here, absolutely loved, with a new movie, almost as a side effect, coming into being.” –K.J.

KEN JACOBS:
TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON / RETURN TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME / ANAGLYPH TOM
Jacobs’s 1969 masterpiece is a landmark of both experimental cinema and film scholarship – a thorough de- and re-construction of a little-seen 1905 Biograph short. Jacobs used practically every conceivable editing and camera technique available to him at the time, looping the film and reversing it, panning across and zooming in – slicing, dicing, and manipulating his source material to examine (from every angle) the ways we watch movies. He returned to the original short some four decades later, now with the tools of 21^st-century digital technology at his disposal, which Jacobs said allow for “an unbounded freedom of study and playfulness…. Far more is revealed…and, joined to sound, the old movie even tells a new story.” Jacobs called the effects of the second film “quasi-3D”, but when he reinterpreted TOM, TOM yet again later that same year, he added literal 3D (and an Alan Greenspan cameo!) for another dazzling contemporary look at this century-old film.

[Please note: This is an Essential Cinema screening, and is FREE for AFA members!]

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Distributed by FiGa Films; special thanks to Sandro Fiorin, Cristina Garza, and Alex Garcia.
José Renato, a 35-year-old geologist, is sent on a fieldtrip to the scrublands of the Sertão, a semi-arid isolated region in the northeast of Brazil. The goal of his survey is to assess possible routes for a water canal from the region’s only voluminous river. For many of the region’s inhabitants, the canal will be a lifeline, the chance for a future and a source of hope. But for those living on the canal’s direct course, it means only requisitions, departure, and loss. Many of the properties through which Renato passes will be flooded; many of the people and families will be relocated.
As the fieldtrip progresses, it becomes clear that Renato shares something in common with the places he visits: emptiness, a sense of abandonment, and isolation. His geological research is slowly pervaded by a sensation of groundlessness, an incessant pining for his ex-wife, and a yearning to return home. But he presses ahead, continuing the trip in the hope that the voyage can somehow transmute his feelings.
This haunting, melancholy, and resourceful film takes the form of a first-person travelogue, communicating its unseen protagonist’s sensibility and state of mind through an impressionistic photographic record of the landscapes through which he travels and the people he encounters, and his own nakedly revealing, confessional narration. A simple but beautiful film which glides fluidly and elegantly across the borders between fictional narrative, documentary, and experimental filmmaking, I TRAVEL… is difficult to categorize but impossible to resist.

 “Beautifully structured and ultimately transcendent…a road movie in its purest form, offering an affecting record of processing loss and coming through to the other side. Gomes and Aïnouz work seamlessly together in the bleak Brazilian Northeast, creating a fictional travelogue for a character heard but never seen thanks to a creative combination of p.o.v. lensing and snapshots. Utterly unpretentious and deeply touching.” –Jay Weissberg, VARIETY

KEN JACOBS:
TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON / RETURN TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME / ANAGLYPH TOM
Jacobs’s 1969 masterpiece is a landmark of both experimental cinema and film scholarship – a thorough de- and re-construction of a little-seen 1905 Biograph short. Jacobs used practically every conceivable editing and camera technique available to him at the time, looping the film and reversing it, panning across and zooming in – slicing, dicing, and manipulating his source material to examine (from every angle) the ways we watch movies. He returned to the original short some four decades later, now with the tools of 21^st-century digital technology at his disposal, which Jacobs said allow for “an unbounded freedom of study and playfulness…. Far more is revealed…and, joined to sound, the old movie even tells a new story.” Jacobs called the effects of the second film “quasi-3D”, but when he reinterpreted TOM, TOM yet again later that same year, he added literal 3D (and an Alan Greenspan cameo!) for another dazzling contemporary look at this century-old film.

KEN JACOBS:
TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON / RETURN TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME / ANAGLYPH TOM
Jacobs’s 1969 masterpiece is a landmark of both experimental cinema and film scholarship – a thorough de- and re-construction of a little-seen 1905 Biograph short. Jacobs used practically every conceivable editing and camera technique available to him at the time, looping the film and reversing it, panning across and zooming in – slicing, dicing, and manipulating his source material to examine (from every angle) the ways we watch movies. He returned to the original short some four decades later, now with the tools of 21^st-century digital technology at his disposal, which Jacobs said allow for “an unbounded freedom of study and playfulness…. Far more is revealed…and, joined to sound, the old movie even tells a new story.” Jacobs called the effects of the second film “quasi-3D”, but when he reinterpreted TOM, TOM yet again later that same year, he added literal 3D (and an Alan Greenspan cameo!) for another dazzling contemporary look at this century-old film.

“I love hamming it up, you can tell.” In 1979 filmmaker Trent Harris discovered a true American original: Beaver, Utah’s Larry Huff – chatterbox, Olivia Newton-John impersonator, talent show superstar – and documented his goofball charm in THE BEAVER KID. Two years later Harris scripted and filmed THE BEAVER KID #2, a near shot-for-shot video remake with a young Sean Penn (fresh off his turn as Spicoli in FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH) impersonating the impersonator. Going even deeper, Harris then remade his film yet again in 1985 as THE ORKLY KID, shooting on celluloid with a $50,000 budget and casting Crispin Glover as Huff (or is he playing Penn playing Huff?). A legendary cult sensation presented here in rare theatrical screenings, THE BEAVER TRILOGY constitutes an auto-remake par excellence, a profound statement on performance, exploitation, and the thin line between documentary and fiction.

Director Trent Harris will be here in person!

LEO MCCAREY:
LOVE AFFAIR / AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER
Two socialites meet and fall in love on a transatlantic ocean liner; the only hitch is that they’re each engaged to someone else. They agree to test fate and reunite six months later atop the Empire State Building, but a tragic accident leaves their rendezvous in doubt. From this same mawkish framework, McCarey constructed two funny, bittersweet romantic classics, investing the melodrama with the kind of emotion and insight that proved, per Jean Renoir, “McCarey understood people better than any other Hollywood director.” The two renditions are nearly identical on a scene-by-scene level, but viewed together they demonstrate McCarey’s sensitivity to different performance styles (Charles Boyer vs. Cary Grant, Irene Dunne vs. Deborah Kerr) and his underrated strengths as a stylist. The Technicolor Cinemascope framings of AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER, in particular, demonstrate a film artist at the peak of his visual powers. As Jonathan Rosenbaum has asserted, “Both versions have their claims to greatness.”

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Distributed by FiGa Films; special thanks to Sandro Fiorin, Cristina Garza, and Alex Garcia.
José Renato, a 35-year-old geologist, is sent on a fieldtrip to the scrublands of the Sertão, a semi-arid isolated region in the northeast of Brazil. The goal of his survey is to assess possible routes for a water canal from the region’s only voluminous river. For many of the region’s inhabitants, the canal will be a lifeline, the chance for a future and a source of hope. But for those living on the canal’s direct course, it means only requisitions, departure, and loss. Many of the properties through which Renato passes will be flooded; many of the people and families will be relocated.
As the fieldtrip progresses, it becomes clear that Renato shares something in common with the places he visits: emptiness, a sense of abandonment, and isolation. His geological research is slowly pervaded by a sensation of groundlessness, an incessant pining for his ex-wife, and a yearning to return home. But he presses ahead, continuing the trip in the hope that the voyage can somehow transmute his feelings.
This haunting, melancholy, and resourceful film takes the form of a first-person travelogue, communicating its unseen protagonist’s sensibility and state of mind through an impressionistic photographic record of the landscapes through which he travels and the people he encounters, and his own nakedly revealing, confessional narration. A simple but beautiful film which glides fluidly and elegantly across the borders between fictional narrative, documentary, and experimental filmmaking, I TRAVEL… is difficult to categorize but impossible to resist.

 “Beautifully structured and ultimately transcendent…a road movie in its purest form, offering an affecting record of processing loss and coming through to the other side. Gomes and Aïnouz work seamlessly together in the bleak Brazilian Northeast, creating a fictional travelogue for a character heard but never seen thanks to a creative combination of p.o.v. lensing and snapshots. Utterly unpretentious and deeply touching.” –Jay Weissberg, VARIETY

LEO MCCAREY:
LOVE AFFAIR / AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER
Two socialites meet and fall in love on a transatlantic ocean liner; the only hitch is that they’re each engaged to someone else. They agree to test fate and reunite six months later atop the Empire State Building, but a tragic accident leaves their rendezvous in doubt. From this same mawkish framework, McCarey constructed two funny, bittersweet romantic classics, investing the melodrama with the kind of emotion and insight that proved, per Jean Renoir, “McCarey understood people better than any other Hollywood director.” The two renditions are nearly identical on a scene-by-scene level, but viewed together they demonstrate McCarey’s sensitivity to different performance styles (Charles Boyer vs. Cary Grant, Irene Dunne vs. Deborah Kerr) and his underrated strengths as a stylist. The Technicolor Cinemascope framings of AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER, in particular, demonstrate a film artist at the peak of his visual powers. As Jonathan Rosenbaum has asserted, “Both versions have their claims to greatness.”

RAOUL WALSH:
HIGH SIERRA / COLORADO TERRITORY
“The 1941 film in which Humphrey Bogart became Humphrey Bogart” (Dave Kehr), the moody gangster saga HIGH SIERRA stars Bogie as ex-con “Mad-Dog” Earle (modeled on John Dillinger) gunning for One Last Score, with accomplice Arthur Kennedy and moll Ida Lupino along for the ride. An important early noir (with punchy dialogue courtesy a pre-MALTESE FALCON John Huston), the film became a prime candidate for a remake by a cash-strapped postwar Warner Bros. eight years later. Walsh took the reins again for COLORADO TERRITORY, keeping the story arc and high-contrast black-and-white photography intact but switching the genre to Western and casting Joel McCrea (now an outlaw) and a tough-as-nails Virginia Mayo (an auto-remake vet from A SONG IS BORN) in the lead roles. McCrea cranks up the desperation and Walsh lavishes even more attention on the jagged landscape, creating a classic Western in the process.

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Distributed by FiGa Films; special thanks to Sandro Fiorin, Cristina Garza, and Alex Garcia.
José Renato, a 35-year-old geologist, is sent on a fieldtrip to the scrublands of the Sertão, a semi-arid isolated region in the northeast of Brazil. The goal of his survey is to assess possible routes for a water canal from the region’s only voluminous river. For many of the region’s inhabitants, the canal will be a lifeline, the chance for a future and a source of hope. But for those living on the canal’s direct course, it means only requisitions, departure, and loss. Many of the properties through which Renato passes will be flooded; many of the people and families will be relocated.
As the fieldtrip progresses, it becomes clear that Renato shares something in common with the places he visits: emptiness, a sense of abandonment, and isolation. His geological research is slowly pervaded by a sensation of groundlessness, an incessant pining for his ex-wife, and a yearning to return home. But he presses ahead, continuing the trip in the hope that the voyage can somehow transmute his feelings.
This haunting, melancholy, and resourceful film takes the form of a first-person travelogue, communicating its unseen protagonist’s sensibility and state of mind through an impressionistic photographic record of the landscapes through which he travels and the people he encounters, and his own nakedly revealing, confessional narration. A simple but beautiful film which glides fluidly and elegantly across the borders between fictional narrative, documentary, and experimental filmmaking, I TRAVEL… is difficult to categorize but impossible to resist.

 “Beautifully structured and ultimately transcendent…a road movie in its purest form, offering an affecting record of processing loss and coming through to the other side. Gomes and Aïnouz work seamlessly together in the bleak Brazilian Northeast, creating a fictional travelogue for a character heard but never seen thanks to a creative combination of p.o.v. lensing and snapshots. Utterly unpretentious and deeply touching.” –Jay Weissberg, VARIETY

RAOUL WALSH:
HIGH SIERRA / COLORADO TERRITORY
“The 1941 film in which Humphrey Bogart became Humphrey Bogart” (Dave Kehr), the moody gangster saga HIGH SIERRA stars Bogie as ex-con “Mad-Dog” Earle (modeled on John Dillinger) gunning for One Last Score, with accomplice Arthur Kennedy and moll Ida Lupino along for the ride. An important early noir (with punchy dialogue courtesy a pre-MALTESE FALCON John Huston), the film became a prime candidate for a remake by a cash-strapped postwar Warner Bros. eight years later. Walsh took the reins again for COLORADO TERRITORY, keeping the story arc and high-contrast black-and-white photography intact but switching the genre to Western and casting Joel McCrea (now an outlaw) and a tough-as-nails Virginia Mayo (an auto-remake vet from A SONG IS BORN) in the lead roles. McCrea cranks up the desperation and Walsh lavishes even more attention on the jagged landscape, creating a classic Western in the process.

JOHN FORD:
JUDGE PRIEST / THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT
In 1934, Ford (already with some 40 features under his belt) adapted a series of popular Irwin S. Cobb stories as JUDGE PRIEST. With the help of folksy charmer Will Rogers as the plainspoken title lawman, he crafted a flavorful, warmly comic portrait of a small Kentucky town still scarred by vestiges of intolerance decades after the Civil War. The finished film, though, didn’t go as far as Ford originally planned: a scene depicting the lynching of Stepin Fetchit’s character (and Priest’s condemnation of the act) was cut by Fox. With his obvious affection for Priest, Ford loosely reshaped the Cobb stories two decades later for Republic Pictures as cheapie THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT, this time keeping the lynching scene (and Fetchit in a supporting role). The result is “a masterpiece” (Dave Kehr), a subtle, poetic, and profound portrait of community, and Ford’s personal favorite among all his own films.

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Distributed by FiGa Films; special thanks to Sandro Fiorin, Cristina Garza, and Alex Garcia.
José Renato, a 35-year-old geologist, is sent on a fieldtrip to the scrublands of the Sertão, a semi-arid isolated region in the northeast of Brazil. The goal of his survey is to assess possible routes for a water canal from the region’s only voluminous river. For many of the region’s inhabitants, the canal will be a lifeline, the chance for a future and a source of hope. But for those living on the canal’s direct course, it means only requisitions, departure, and loss. Many of the properties through which Renato passes will be flooded; many of the people and families will be relocated.
As the fieldtrip progresses, it becomes clear that Renato shares something in common with the places he visits: emptiness, a sense of abandonment, and isolation. His geological research is slowly pervaded by a sensation of groundlessness, an incessant pining for his ex-wife, and a yearning to return home. But he presses ahead, continuing the trip in the hope that the voyage can somehow transmute his feelings.
This haunting, melancholy, and resourceful film takes the form of a first-person travelogue, communicating its unseen protagonist’s sensibility and state of mind through an impressionistic photographic record of the landscapes through which he travels and the people he encounters, and his own nakedly revealing, confessional narration. A simple but beautiful film which glides fluidly and elegantly across the borders between fictional narrative, documentary, and experimental filmmaking, I TRAVEL… is difficult to categorize but impossible to resist.

 “Beautifully structured and ultimately transcendent…a road movie in its purest form, offering an affecting record of processing loss and coming through to the other side. Gomes and Aïnouz work seamlessly together in the bleak Brazilian Northeast, creating a fictional travelogue for a character heard but never seen thanks to a creative combination of p.o.v. lensing and snapshots. Utterly unpretentious and deeply touching.” –Jay Weissberg, VARIETY

JOHN FORD:
JUDGE PRIEST / THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT
In 1934, Ford (already with some 40 features under his belt) adapted a series of popular Irwin S. Cobb stories as JUDGE PRIEST. With the help of folksy charmer Will Rogers as the plainspoken title lawman, he crafted a flavorful, warmly comic portrait of a small Kentucky town still scarred by vestiges of intolerance decades after the Civil War. The finished film, though, didn’t go as far as Ford originally planned: a scene depicting the lynching of Stepin Fetchit’s character (and Priest’s condemnation of the act) was cut by Fox. With his obvious affection for Priest, Ford loosely reshaped the Cobb stories two decades later for Republic Pictures as cheapie THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT, this time keeping the lynching scene (and Fetchit in a supporting role). The result is “a masterpiece” (Dave Kehr), a subtle, poetic, and profound portrait of community, and Ford’s personal favorite among all his own films.

Preserved print courtesy of the EYE Film Institute Netherlands.

YASUJIRO OZU:
I WAS BORN, BUT… / GOOD MORNING
Ozu was no stranger to the auto-remake: his STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS became FLOATING WEEDS, LATE SPRING became LATE AUTUMN, and so many of his films share similar themes, subject matters, and styles that he often seems to be remaking himself. I WAS BORN, BUT… and GOOD MORNING offer a particularly fascinating case study: both feature the same core story – a pair of rowdy schoolboys give their parents the silent treatment – but as Japan changed over the course of WWII, so too did Ozu’s art. The first version is a gently comic, heartbreaking late silent, a look at familial disappointment with some of the most expressive mobile camerawork of Ozu’s career. GOOD MORNING, meanwhile, employs a locked-down camera (typical of later Ozu) and eye-popping Technicolor, along with a tonal change to flat-out satire – among the most cutting of the director’s career.

NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Distributed by FiGa Films; special thanks to Sandro Fiorin, Cristina Garza, and Alex Garcia.
José Renato, a 35-year-old geologist, is sent on a fieldtrip to the scrublands of the Sertão, a semi-arid isolated region in the northeast of Brazil. The goal of his survey is to assess possible routes for a water canal from the region’s only voluminous river. For many of the region’s inhabitants, the canal will be a lifeline, the chance for a future and a source of hope. But for those living on the canal’s direct course, it means only requisitions, departure, and loss. Many of the properties through which Renato passes will be flooded; many of the people and families will be relocated.
As the fieldtrip progresses, it becomes clear that Renato shares something in common with the places he visits: emptiness, a sense of abandonment, and isolation. His geological research is slowly pervaded by a sensation of groundlessness, an incessant pining for his ex-wife, and a yearning to return home. But he presses ahead, continuing the trip in the hope that the voyage can somehow transmute his feelings.
This haunting, melancholy, and resourceful film takes the form of a first-person travelogue, communicating its unseen protagonist’s sensibility and state of mind through an impressionistic photographic record of the landscapes through which he travels and the people he encounters, and his own nakedly revealing, confessional narration. A simple but beautiful film which glides fluidly and elegantly across the borders between fictional narrative, documentary, and experimental filmmaking, I TRAVEL… is difficult to categorize but impossible to resist.

 “Beautifully structured and ultimately transcendent…a road movie in its purest form, offering an affecting record of processing loss and coming through to the other side. Gomes and Aïnouz work seamlessly together in the bleak Brazilian Northeast, creating a fictional travelogue for a character heard but never seen thanks to a creative combination of p.o.v. lensing and snapshots. Utterly unpretentious and deeply touching.” –Jay Weissberg, VARIETY

YASUJIRO OZU:
I WAS BORN, BUT… / GOOD MORNING
Ozu was no stranger to the auto-remake: his STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS became FLOATING WEEDS, LATE SPRING became LATE AUTUMN, and so many of his films share similar themes, subject matters, and styles that he often seems to be remaking himself. I WAS BORN, BUT… and GOOD MORNING offer a particularly fascinating case study: both feature the same core story – a pair of rowdy schoolboys give their parents the silent treatment – but as Japan changed over the course of WWII, so too did Ozu’s art. The first version is a gently comic, heartbreaking late silent, a look at familial disappointment with some of the most expressive mobile camerawork of Ozu’s career. GOOD MORNING, meanwhile, employs a locked-down camera (typical of later Ozu) and eye-popping Technicolor, along with a tonal change to flat-out satire – among the most cutting of the director’s career.
[Please note: These are Essential Cinema screenings, and are FREE for AFA members!]

(UMARETE WA MITA KEREDO…)

In referring to this film Ozu stated, “I started to make a film about grownups. While I had originally planned to make a fairly bright little story, it changed while I was working on it and came out very dark.” The story concerns a very average suburban office worker, with a wife and two very un-average sons, who is unable to stand up to his boss.
“Joyful…as true and as moving and as timely today as it was in 1932.” –Jonas Mekas