SPRING 2008 SCHEDULE

January 11: Opening Night Double Feature

Blood of the Poet (Jean Cocteau, 1930, 55 min.)
In the first film of Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy he uses dream imagery to explore poetry, artistic creation, memory, death, and rebirth in four separate fantasy sequences. Cocteau works as a visual artist, transforming still images into a medium that moves through time, beautifully and evocatively. Cocteau returned to many of the same themes in his later films, including Orpheus.

Orpheus (Jean Cocteau, 1950, 112 min.)
Twenty years later, in Jean Cocteau’s second film in his Orphic Trilogy, a Parisian poet becomes seduced by the prospect of eternal fame. The café set won't give successful Orpheus (Jean Marais) the time of day, so he obliges when the Princess of Death (Maria Casarés) orders him into her Rolls Royce with her injured young protégé. This beautifully composed black-and-white film slyly explores the dark side of the creative urge with panache. Dreamy and mesmerizing, it depicts an underworld not too different from everyday life.

January 18: Punk Cinema Night

While the punk rock scene in New York City in the 1970s has been widely celebrated and eulogized, the film movement that accompanied it is considerably lesser-known, but no less vital and raw. Though clearly influenced by the French New Wave and the 1960s Underground Cinema, these films are of their own time, documenting the sense of ennui and desperation of the American ‘70s. We will screen several of these energetic and abrasive works. Note: this night's screening will begin at 8:00 PM.

January 25: Girls About Town (George Cukor, 1931, 66 min.)

This racy pre-Code film stars Kay Francis and Lilyan Tashman as two self-styled “party-girls” living it up in Depression-era New York. Excellent supporting cast includes Joel McCrea, Eugene Pallette, and Louise Beavers. Like many films of this period, it has never been made available on home video.

The feature will be accompanied by Boop-Oop-A-Doop (Fleischer Bros., 1932, 9 min.)—one of many very risque pre-Code Fleischer cartoons starring Betty Boop. Note: this night's screening will begin at 8:00 PM.

February 1: Films of Marjorie Keller

Marjorie Keller (1950-1994) wrote: “The current art of the film deranges its predecessors…It is in the work of women filmmakers of the avant-garde that the old forms are seen as if through an anamorphic lens.” Her films honor and challenge the traditions that she assumed when she learned filmmaking from Saul Levine, Sidney Peterson, and Stan Brakhage. Keller consistently explored the political implications of daily living and personal pleasures in her films. Tonight’s screening will feature a selection of her work from the 1970s and 1980s.

The screening will be preceded by an encore presentation of Janis Crystal Lipzin's "Other Reckless Things."

February 8: Liebelei (Max Ophuls, 1933, 88 min.)

One of Max Ophuls first films he directed in Germany before fleeing to France to escape the Nazis. In Liebelei a young philandering army officer, trapped in a loveless affair with the wife of a strutting baron, falls in love with a shy young seamstress but cannot escape repercussions of his past. Based on a play by Arthur Schnitzler, Liebelei contrasts the obsession with appearances and social decorum of high society with the rash sincerity and energy of youth in a style more visual than verbal.

The feature will be accompanied by Mabel and Fatty Viewing the World’s Fair at San Francisco (Keystone, 1915) (9 min.) and Mabel’s Dramatic Career (Keystone, 1913) (14 min.). These two wonderful films showcase Mabel Normand and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in their most well known form, slapstick, with a turn towards documentary/biography in both.

February 15: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975, 201 min.)

A classic of both feminist and experimental filmmaking, Chantal Akerman's marathon dissection of the life of Belgian housewife/mother/prostitute Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) stays on the surface of the details of Jeanne's humdrum daily life, as if it were a real-life, real-time documentary of an ordinary life. Playing with feminist film theory’s critique of the masculine spectatorial gaze, Akerman crafts a cinematic experience that is rapturous, critical, and desolate all at once.

February 22: The Battle of Chile: The bourgeois insurrection(Patricio Guzmán, 1975, 96 min.) and
The Battle of Chile: The coup (Patricio Guzmán, 1976, 87 min.)

The first two parts of Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s documentary trilogy trace the decline of democracy in 1970s Chile. A critique of the middle and upper classes, these two films explore the murder of President Salvador Allende, the ascension of Augusto Pinochet and the brutal state violence brought upon the Chilean people.

February 29: Alan Berliner Films, Part 2

Following up on our Berliner double feature in the Fall, we present two more of his smart and sensitive autobiographical documentaries. Wide Awake (2005, 78 min.) uses both metaphor and candid first-person observations to illuminate how an obsessive mind that won’t shut down at night leaves him feeling “jet lagged in his own time zone.” In The Sweetest Sound (2001, 60 min.), Berliner dives headfirst inside the American name pool in search of the treasures and dangers hidden inside his own name, convening a dinner at his house of a group of men, all named Alan Berliner. A film that starts out in search of identity slowly transforms into a meditation on mortality. Note: this night's screening will begin at 8:00 PM.

March 21: Yoko Ono and Satan’s Bed

Tonight we explore the cross-fertilization between the avant-garde and trash cinema. A selection of Ono's films is highlighted by Rape (1969, 70 min.), in which a crew hired by Ono follows an Austrian woman around London. As the subject becomes more and more irritated, then frightened, the film forces the audience to confront not only their own positions as spectators, but also the problem of the social responsibility of art.

Michael and Roberta Findlay's film Satan's Bed (1965, 72 min.) stars Ono as an innocent young Japanese girl kidnapped and raped by drug dealers. This film is combined with portions of another film altogether (Judas City), which depicts three addicts brutalizing women. Dealing with some of the same questions as Rape (if perhaps not intentionally), Satan's Bed is the perfect grindhouse complement to Ono's own shocking but decidedly artier fare.

March 28: Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933, 96 min.)

Directed by the great Mervyn LeRoy, Gold Diggers of 1933 features a young Ginger Rogers in a supporting role as one of a large group of showgirls who must grind out a living on the stage when all of the country is feeling the pinch in their purses. The most striking feature of this film is the stunning song and dance numbers created by the incomparable Busby Berkley. Still early in his development, this film demonstrates many of the distinguishing features of later Berkley numbers including elaborate costumes and precision dance moves carried out by a large number of dancers. The pluck that the stage company demonstrates to continue working in such hard times proves the adage that the show must go on, even in the midst of the Depression.

The feature will be accompanied by Nickel Nurser (Warren Doane, 1932, 18 min.)—a slapstick comedy about an efficiency expert, played by the underrated early comedian Charlie Chase, hired to teach 3 daughters of a wealthy industrialist the errors of their spendthrift lifestyles. Plenty of mistaken identities, sight gags and slapstick ensue.

April 4: The Case of the Grinning Cat (Chris Marker, 2004, 58 min.)

In November 2001, mercurial film-essayist Marker became intrigued, as did many other Parisians, by the sudden appearance of alluring portraits of grinning yellow cats on buildings, Metro walls and other public surfaces. Marker's cinematic efforts to document the mysterious materializations of this charming feline throughout Paris are a recurring theme of this film, which, like much of Marker’s work, wrenches the political from the mundane while honoring humanity’s inventiveness in the everyday. The feature will be preceded by Film (1965, 22 min.), conceived by Samuel Beckett and starring Buster Keaton.

April 11: City Lights Double Feature

Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937, 106 min.)
In this wonderful melodrama Barbara Stanwyck gives one of her inimitable and wonderfully enigmatic performances as a mill worker who marries her way into high society and soon experiences layers of frustration. Channeling her restlessness, she makes a positive though highly self-sacrificial decision on her daughter's behalf, and endures the agony of being replaced in her husband's life by an old, blue-blooded flame. Like Vidor’s earlier masterpiece The Crowd, Stella Dallas features an unforgettable and moving final shot.

The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927, 63 min.)
From the famous early horror director Tod Browning, The Unknown features Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford as circus performers. Alonzo (Chaney) is an apparently armless knife thrower who uses his feet to encircle Estrellita (Crawford) with blades. Estrellita allows herself to fall in love with Alonzo and insanity ensues. Note: this night's screening will begin at 8:00 PM.

April 18: Peter Greenaway experimental shorts

Before his international arthouse hits The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover and Prospero’s Books, Greenaway made a series of highly inventive films that established all the obsessions that run through his later work. The content of these six playful shorts varies widely—from the condensed, wry history of 37 people who have fallen to their deaths from windows, to a sequence of 92 maps to guide a dead ornithologist on his way into the afterlife set. All of these quirkily delightful works take great pleasure in outlandish detail, fake erudition and corkscrew narratives.

April 25: Double Shorts Night: An evening with David Bradley and Underground

The City Lights/Underground double feature turns to shorts, beginning with several of David Bradley’s personal films. Bradley–a prominent collector of Hollywood films and ephemera whose materials are now owned by Indiana University–produced numerous films and videos of travels within and without the United States, holiday celebrations, and other events. City Lights will feature a sample of several shorts and a feature length film.

Underground will present three captivating short films, beginning with Larry Gottheim's Fog Line (1970, 11 min.), a subtle study of nature and its relationship to cinema. Next is Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968, 14 min.) by Joyce Wieland, a parable of power enacted by rats and cats. Concluding the program is John Smith's The Black Tower (1987, 24 min.), which recalls the work of Peter Greenaway in its deft blend of wit and melancholy, all couched in a menacing tale of paranoia.