Minneapolis, MN | November 4 to November 23, 2009
The People's Republic of Cinema: 60 Years of China on Film
The history of a country and the history of cinema become entwined in a program at the Walker Arts Center entitled The People's Republic of Cinema: 60 Years of China on Film. The 14-film series goes from the dawn of the People’s Republic to its current state of affairs. Zheng Junli’s 1949 classic Crows and Sparrows imagines a country in transition as a Shanghai boarding house comes under new management with the advent of Mao’s government. Xie Jin’s 1961 Red Detachment of Women (made in the midst of the cultural revolution) captures the fervent patriotism of a group of women who fought against the Nationalist movement. Chen Kaige’s 1984 Yellow Earth brought a new emotional depth and distance to Chinese history. By 2000, Jia Zhangke’s Platform, a decade-long road movie, opens up the traditional view of history to capture the slow admission of western culture and influences, including rock and roll. Ying Liang’s 2009 Good Cats brings China to the present with the new capitalism and the new corruption.
Berkeley, CA | November 1 to December 6, 2009
Watching the Unwatchable: Films Confront Torture
While torture becomes a staple narrative device in TV shows like 24 or films like Taken, real torture is not quite as exciting. The documentaries presented in the Pacific Film Archive’s “Watching the Unwatchable: Films Confront Torture” stare back at the abyss that is torture. Perhaps the most prescient is Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, a studied look at the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the photographs that documented them. But others try to get the core of the problem. The 1988 Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment revisits the infamous 1971 experiment that proved that anyone could be pushed into the most inhumane actions.
Los Angeles, CA | November 6 to December 14, 2009
1939 Redux: Digging Deeper Into "Hollywood’s Greatest Year"
It’s now a cinematic truism, that 1939 was Hollywood’s greatest year. Sure it produced such work as The Wizard of Oz, Gone With Wind, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Women and Ninotchka––admittedly all very good films. But what of the others? The UCLA Film Archive’s “1939 Redux: Digging Deeper Into “Hollywood’s Greatest Year” considers the whole year. The 14-film survey contains some well-known gems, such as Howard Hawks’s stunt-flying thriller Only Angels Have Wings and Busby Berkeley’s musical extravaganza Babes in Arms. But who remembers Remember?, Norman Z. McLeod’s screwball comedy about amnesia and romance. Or Garson Kanin’s The Great Man Votes, a social drama with John Barrymore as a drunken professor who finds himself the last vote in a mayoral election (a plot line picked up by the recent Swing Vote). And what about John Cromwell’s melodrama In Name Only which casts a couple of comedy champs (Cary Grant and Carole Lombard) in a very soapy drama. While these films are not as great as the classic 1939 movies, they make that year all the more loveable.
Chicago, IL | November 7 to December 2, 2009
Mindscape: the Films of Alain Resnais
When the white-haired 87-year-old filmmaker took to the stage to introduce his recent film The Wild Grass this Fall when it opened the 2009 New York Film Festival, many in the audience were in awe. And for good reason. Many filmmakers have made good, even great, films. But few have changed film history. The Gene Siskel Film Center “Mindscape: the Films of Alain Resnais” looks back on the man that Jonathan Rosenbaum named "Probably the greatest living French filmmaker.” Starting with four of his short documentary works, including his remarkable film on Nazi concentration camps, “Night and Fog,” the series showcases his seminal 1961 work Last Year at Marienbad, the cinematic maze that elegantly rethinks our assumptions about cinematic time and space. The 11-film series includes work from across his long career, including his 1963 Muriel, a deeply emotional work that many consider to be Resnais masterpiece, his 1974 portrait of a con man Stavisky (with a score by Stephen Sondheim), his snappy 1980 commercial hit Mon Oncle D’Amérique, and his recent Private Fears in Public Places.
Omaha, NE | October 16 to December 24, 2009
New Hollywood: American 70s
There’s a moment in Focus Features’ forthcoming film Pirate Radio in which Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the rebellious DJ “The Count,” says, “These are the best days of our lives.” For rock ‘n’ roll, the 60s – when the film is set – was the high watermark, but when was the equivalent time for movies? For a lot of people, and particularly those who love American cinema, the zenith came in the 1970s, when the collapse of the studio system resulted in a changing of the guard that led to the production of much more daring, interesting and innovative movies. At Omaha’s Film Streams, you can catch some of the cream of the crop from that era in New Hollywood: American 70s, a season which kicks off with two films that are not, in fact, from the 1970s: Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) and Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980). (Those two films are, though, a sly reference to the definitive book on New Hollywood, Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.) It’s literally impossible to pick out highlights from a line-up so universally strong, though films like Hal Ashby’s The Landlord (1970), Elaine May’s A New Leaf (1971) deserve special mention as lesser known but very underrated movies among the ranks of titans like Apocalypse Now, The Exorcist, Chinatown, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver, Nashville and Days of Heaven, all of which are also screening.
September 2 to December 15, 2009
The Art of the Remake: Revisions and Revivals
Whenever Hollywood remakes a classic film or foreign hit, many bemoan the limited imagination of these new versions. But what if, rather than complain, we actually celebrated the remake as art, then we might approach the current film series, The Art of the Remake: Revisions and Revivals, at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center. Sara Hall’s list of remakes in her program notes highlight the genre’s vast variety: “the Hollywood film remade as a foreign film, the foreign film remade by Hollywood, the silent film remade as a sound film, the nonmusical remade as a musical, the short subject remade as a feature film, the unofficial remake, the "shot-for-shot" remake, and the multiple remake.” Among the pairings to be explored are F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent vampire film Nosferatu and Werner Herzog’s 1979 sound remake Nosferatu the Vampyre, Mel Stuart’s 1971 family friendly Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Tim Burton’s 2005 hipper-than-thou remake Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and finally a three-way remake with Douglas Sirk’s 1955 melodrama classic All That Heaven Allows, R.W. Fassbinder’s 1974 gritty German remake, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and finally Todd Haynes 2002 lush nostalgia piece Far From Heaven.
San Francisco, CA | Until November 29, 2009
Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946 - 2004
In the 1940s and 1950s, when Hollywood movies were increasingly made in color rather than black and white, the original crop of cinematographers who had been making films since the 20s struggled with the shift. These veterans had developed their skills thinking and seeing purely in terms of light and shadow, and found color clumsy and unsubtle. In many ways, Richard Avedon was the direct successor of these men, a photographer who had an incredible eye for capturing an image in black and white, as well as the knack for bringing out surprising aspects of a subject’s personality. Avedon made his mark initially as a fashion photographer and worked as Vogue’s lead photographer until 1988, but is maybe best known as a portrait photographer. Now over half a century of the late artist’s work is on show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the show Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946 – 2004, a selection of pictures from Avedon’s massive body that includes shots of both Marilyn Monroe (taken in 1955) and Björk (from just before Avedon’s death in 2004). Also on show from September 8 is Helen Whitney’s 1996 documentary, Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light.
