USA 1939-52 (60 mins)
Their series of FILM EXERCISES, produced between 1943-44, are visually based on modernist composition theory with varied permutation of forms. The eerie glow of these forms is paralleled by a pioneer music sound score composed using an elaborate pendulum device they invented to write out sounds directly onto the film's soundtrack.
3 Untitled Films
Film Exercise No. 1
Film Exercises No. 2 & 3
Film Exercises No. 4
Film Exercises No. 5
Hot House
Mozart Rondo
Celery Stalks at Midnight
Original URL
[ I might as well leave the rest of the text here, some of it looks interesting too... ]
November 10 - 15
Exclusive Boston Premiere
USA, Canada, Norway, Sweden 1991-1994 (103 mins)
Fri, 11/10, Sun, 11/12 @7:00/9:00pm;
Mon, 11/13, thru Wed 11/15 @9:30pm
A collection of six short films - live action, animation, claymation - reflecting the diverse experiences of Iranian-born filmmakers residing in various parts of the world. "There are Iranian filmmakers from Uzbakestan to Austria and from Holland to the United States who are working hard to express their visions through the medium of film. We believe that they are all of the same fabric, of humanity with a Persian heritage. This fabric is exposed to other languages and their respective cultural backbone and, like a Persian carpet, woven into colorful patterns. This collection of six films is a small section." (Iranian American Film Forum)
TREASON
A LETTER TO ARMITA
ONE KRONEN
HE AND SHE
THE LAST ILLUSION
Fri, 11/3 7:00pm;
Mon, 11/6 9:45pm
USA 1958 (78 mins)
The most consistently comic of the Boetticher/Scott Westerns, BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE was described by Jim Kitses as "a parody of the morality play" and by the director as "a very amusing, very mathematical Western." Buchanan (Scott) is imprisoned with a young Mexican accused of killing Roy Agry, who molested his sister. When the two are sprung, they band together to rid the town of the whole corrupt Agry family in one epic shoot-out.
DIRECTED BY BUDD BOETTICHER
(color, 35mm, courtesy Columbia Pictures Repertory)
Fri, 11/3 8:30pm; Tue, 11/7 9:30pm
USA 1957 (80 mins)
The second of the Ranown cycle Westerns pits Pat Brennan (Scott) against Boetticher's most compelling villain in a stagecoach-bound thriller. Brennan is only the nominal hero, as the director steers the audience towards the more charming and loquacious outlaw, played by Richard Boone.
DIRECTED BY BUDD BOETTICHER
Sat, 11/4 7:00pm;
Sun, 11/5 8:30pm;
Wed, 11/8 9:30pm
USA 1959 (73 mins)
Former sheriff Ben Brigade (Scott) hunts obsessively for the man who hung his wife ten years earlier. He captures the murderer's brother and uses him as bait in a three-day odyssey across a trecherous, arid landscape. Using CinemaScope for the first time, Boetticher "observes landscapes and the people moving about in them with a sensitivity rivaling Renoir's." (Ian Christie)
DIRECTED BY BUDD BOETTICHER
Sat, 11/4 8:30pm;
Sun, 11/5 7:00pm
USA 1960 (74 mins)
The perennially widowed Randolph Scott plays Jefferson Cody, whose beloved was kidnapped by Indians ten years earlier. Cody buys back some white captives from the Commanches hoping to recover his wife, ending up instead with a woman whose husband has offered a spectacular reward for her return. The final and perhaps greatest of the Boetticher/Scott Westerns.
DIRECTED BY BUDD BOETTICHER
6th New England Children's Film/Video Festival
November 11 - 12 at HFA
Co-sponsor: Center For Children's Media
Admissions: $5.00/Adults;
$4.00/Children, Seniors
Show Time Information Call (617) 391-4260
Sun, 12/10 10:00am
Analytical Abstractions Beyond the Screen
Introduced by Gerald O'Grady
France, Germany, USA 1923-76 (90 mins)
European influences on the American abstract film came from multiple sources. One such thread follows images that have been abstracted to the point of appearing to step off the screen.
Return to Reason
Recreation
H2O
Rhythm 21
Light-Play in Black, White, Gray
Dream Displacement
Sun, 12/10 1:00pm
USA 1952-61 (60 mins)
Hirsh's films developed a masterful mix of sound and image via oscillascope electronics and optical printing synchronized to his home-made recordings of jazz and Afro-Caribbean music. He was an influential figure of the West Coast film scene and manifested himself in front of, and behind, the camera for films by Sidney Peterson, Harry Smith, Jordan Belson and others.
Directed by Hy Hirsh:
Gyromorphosis (USA, 1957, 7 mins, 16mm, color);
Come Closer (USA, 1952, 7 mins, 16mm, color);
Défense d'afficher (USA, 1958-59, 8 mins, 16mm, color);
Scratch Pad (USA, 1959, 7 mins, 16mm, color);
Autumn Spectrum (USA, 1957, 7 mins, 16mm, color);
Chasse des Touches (USA, 1959, 4 mins, 16mm, color);
La Couleur de la forme (USA, 1961, 7 mins, 16mm, color);
Eneri (USA, 1953, 7 mins, 16mm, color)
Sun, 12/10 2:00pm
Hilla Rebay & the Guggenheim Nexus
Panel Discussion with Films
USA 1937-51 (60 mins)
Stars and Stripes
Film No. 7
Sun, 12/10 4:00pm
James Davis USA 1948-64 (90 mins)
Davis started making films in 1946 and continued until his death (completing 113 films) to photograph his curved plastic sculpture, mobile-like structures that would hang in space, rotate and reflect/refract light into shifting pools and points of color. Abstract and mysterious to many spectators, these waves and streams of light were for Davis images of "the causative force of nature."
Directed by James Davis:
Light Reflections (USA, 1948, 14 mins, 16mm, color);
The Sea (USA, 1950, 8.5 mins, 16mm, color);
Analogies #1 (USA, 1953, 9.5 mins, 16mm, color);
Taliesin-West (USA, 1950, 9.5 mins, 16mm, color);
Evolution (USA, 1955, 8 mins, 16mm, color);
Taliesin-East (USA, 1950, 9.5 mins, 16mm, color);
Energies (USA, 1957, 9.5 mins, 16mm, color);
Like a Breeze (USA, 1954, 8.5 mins, 16mm, color);
Fathomless (USA, 1964, 11 mins, 16mm, color)
Sun, 12/10 7:00pm
James Sibley Watson, Jr. & Melville Webber Lecture by Robert Haller
USA 1928-30 (90 mins)
Watson (1894-1982) and Webber (1895-1947) worked from literary sources-Poe, the Bible-but so transmuted them that their films THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER and LOT IN SODOM stand as extraordinary visual cinema. In USHER letters and words rise up out of the dark-forming messages we can not hear but can see and grasp far more vividly. In Lot in Sodom the world is seen through prismatic curtains of light and darkness, curtains over the windows of dreams and imagination, if not the soul.
Directed by James Sibley Watson, Jr. & Melville Webber:
Fall of the House of Usher (USA, 1928, 15 mins, 16mm, bw);
Lot in Sodom (USA, 1930, 30 mins, 35mm, bw)
Tue, 10/31 7:00pm
Electronic Surrealism
USA 1979-1983 (70 mins)
Since the mid 70s video artists have explored intricate transformations of vision, space and sound through the use of digital technologies, mechanical devices and natural images. The tapes that make up this program all rely on electronic image processing to create their meaning and impact. Ed Emshwiller was one of the first to investigate the capabilities of video synthesizers and computers to transform his imagery. Other video artists, like Steina, use mechanical means of distortion in addition to electronic distortion to create their video images. Woody Vasulka, creator of such devices as the Buffer Oriented Digital Device and the Digital Image Articulator, emphasizes the dialogue between man and machine.
LILITH
URBAN EPISODES
SUNSTONE
ART OF MEMORY
ACT III
Tue, 11/7 7:00pm
USA 1972-1985 (90 mins)
"The belief that I could reach an audience without being there somehow appealed to me... Video was ideal for that." (William Wegman) The first reel to reel recorders were unable to produce in-camera edits, and therefore encouraged the user to record uninterrupted performances often composed specifically for the video camera. William Wegman's comic performance tapes from the 70s are among the most enduring of this genre. Recorded in single takes, his tapes document absurd anecdotes and sight gags. The late Man Ray plays the part of Wegman's comic foil and straight man/dog.
ED HENDERSON SUGGESTS SOUND TRACKS FOR PHOTOGRAPHS
VERTICAL ROLL
ANTHEM
AMPHIBIAN
Tue, 11/14 7:00pm
USA 1994 (90 mins)
>From the beginning, the TV monitor was a source of inspiration to artists such as Nam June Paik who saw in its box like form an icon for modern living. Combined with three dimensional settings or installations, the TV not only became a window for imagery created by video artists but the central icon in a new sculptural environment. These four documentaries investigate several important video installations.
SITE OF THE UNSEEN: BILL VIOLA
SITES RECITED: BILL VIOLA
VIDEO INSTALLATION: MARY LUCIER
Tue, 11/21 7:00pm
USA 1981-1987 (61 mins)
Increasingly video is becoming a tool for comprehending other landscapes, other modes of feeling and seeing. Reeves's Sabda, explores themes of alienation and inner spirituality as seen by Reeves's camera in India. Merging the ethnographic and the interpretive, Edin Velez's personal video documentaries are cross cultural portraits of subjects ranging from the indigenous peoples of Guatemala to contemporary rituals of Japan.
META MAYAN
SABDA
MOTHERLAND
Tue, 11/28 7:00pm
Language in Video, Investigation and Play
USA 1981-87 (115 mins)
Cecelia Condit's video narratives have been termed "feminist fairy tales." Using found footage, Super-8 film and sung dialogue, NOT A JEALOUS BONE is a powerful look at femininity and aging, couched in the form of an irreverent video fantasy. In POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN, two women with a penchant for "violence and perfume" take revenge on their animal masked tormentor. Since the late 70s Gary Hill has been exploring the structural relationship between linguistics and electronic phenomena. In making INCIDENCE OF CATASTROPHE, Hill was inspired Thomas Blanchot's novel Jude the Obscure and the experience of observing his child acquire speech.
POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN
NOT A JEALOUS BONE
SUBURBS OF EDEN
INCIDENCE OF CATASTROPHE
Tue, 12/5 7:00pm
USA 1976-1986 (152 mins)
In Bill Viola's systematic renderings of light and time through video technology, modes of perception and cognition become metaphorical, even metaphysical vehicles for self knowledge and self discovery. In THE PASSING he examines images from his own personal history, including an incident from his boyhood where he almost drowned. Using a black and white camera designed for night surveillance, Viola captures images of bodies floating underwater, and the night sky over the desert.
THE PASSING
I DO NOT KNOW WHAT IT IS I AM LIKE
Tue, 12/12 7:00pm
Landscape/Body USA 1984-1990 (60 mins)
In her rich exploration of light and landscape as agents of visual perception and memory, both personal and mythic, Mary Lucier examines 19th century art historical and literary traditions through the lens of contemporary technology. Reinvestigating the American pastoral myth in what she terms,
"an ironic dialogue between past and present, mundane and poetic, real and ideal." Recently, images of the human body have merged with images of landscape sites in her work.
WINTERGARDEN
ASYLUM
MASS
NOAH'S RAVEN
Tue, 12/19 7:00pm
Video as Cultural Critique USA 1976-1988 (205 mins)
Beginning in the 70s, many videomakers began to confront the assumptions of power and control inherent in the act of viewing and being viewed. Vito Acconci was one of the first video artists to utilize intense personal monologues as a subversive strategy. In describing his masterwork THE RED TAPES he states: the work "moves from Vito Acconci to a larger Americanism, between a psychological personal space and a cultural personal space." Martha Rosler's THE STRANGE CASE OF BABY M, is an acerbic interpretation of the notorious "Baby M" case.
THE RED TAPES
5 DIM/MIND
THE STRANGE CASE OF BABY M
Tue, 11/7 5:30pm
Wed, 11/8 7:30pm
USA 1936 (87 mins)
MODERN TIMES takes on the inequities of the Great Depression and the modern experience of regimented and alienated labor, showing that the natural product of this is insanity. The film contains some of Chaplin's most hilarious - and humanly meaningful - sequences, such as those on the factory assembly line or with the feeding machine, or roller skating in a department store. Paulette Goddard as the gamine creates one of the most masculine and intriguing female roles in any Chaplin film.
DIRECTED BY CHARLES CHAPLIN
(bw, 35mm, HFA collection)
Tue, 11/14 5:30pm
Wed, 11/15 7:30pm
USA 1942 (88 mins)
With his seductive voice on the soundtrack, and with wonderful deep-focus images amid gothic decor, Welles presents his adaptation of the Booth Tarkington novel about the decay of an old monied family with an arrogant son, and the rise of new economic forces. Welles uses long takes with complex camera movements, very pointed editing, and a creative soundtrack with echoes and overlapping, to create his unique mixed mood of nostalgia and bitterness, warmth and distance, sympathy and condemnation.
DIRECTED BY ORSON WELLES
(bw, 35mm, HFA collection)
Tue, 11/21 5:30pm
Wed, 11/22 7:30pm
Roma, città aperta
This founding work of Italian Neorealism was shot in the streets and real dwellings of Rome just after the end of World War II, and deals with the late struggle of Italian partisans against the Nazi occupiers. Rossellini's plain, documentary-like way of observing people and places, and letting episodes build naturally, is fascinating to watch and in fact represents one of the most creative and individual sensibilities in film. The cast here is very moving, with Anna Magnani outstanding as an unmarried pregnant woman involved in the resistance, and Aldo Fabrizi also wonderful as the socialist priest.
DIRECTED BY ROBERTO ROSSELLINI
Tue, 11/28 5:30pm
Wed, 11/29 7:30pm
Los Olvidados Mexico 1950 (88 mins)
Buñuel began filmmaking as a pure surrealist, but with this film he turned to the mostly realistic style, with surreal touches, that would distinguish the great films of the rest of his career. LOS OLVIDADOS (the forgotten ones) is about deprived and violent young people in the slums of Mexico City, and is uncompromising in its presentation of the setting, the quirks of daily life with older people and animals, and the betrayal and brutality of gang life. At times there wells up in the film a sense of uncanniness or nightmare, or a perverse humor, reminding us that we live not only on the familiar earth but on a strange other plane as well.
DIRECTED BY LUIS BUÑUEL
Tue, 12/5 5:30pm
Wed, 12/6 7:45pm
Italy 1952 (89 mins)
With BICYCLE THIEVES and UMBERTO D, de Sica and writer Cesare Zavattini brought Italian Neorealism to its highpoint in the 1950s. UMBERTO D is the story of a retired man living with his beloved dog in a single room on an inadequate pension, having troubles with his landlady, eventually feeling suicidal. The film presents the milieu and the social forces at work very clearly, and identifies with its protagonist very intimately and warmly, creating a wonderful character. Altogether, one of the great humanist films.
DIRECTED BY VITTORIO DE SICA
Tue, 12/12 5:00pm
Wed, 12/13 8:00pm
Ikiru Japan 1952 (143 mins)
Interesting to compare with UMBERTO D, this film is also the story of an aging civil servant at odds with the world, and presents early 1950s Japan as incisively as UMBERTO D does early 1950s Italy. But the protagonist of IKIRU is not yet retired: rather, he learns he has a fatal disease, and devotes his remaining time to rethinking his life and values and trying to do some social good very much against the grain of the bureaucracy that employs him. Kurosawa's imagery and storytelling style are tense and dreamlike as well as realistic, and make the film into a compelling psychological experiment like a story of Dostoievsky: what will a man do, given certain extreme conditions?
DIRECTED BY AKIRA KUROSAWA
Tue, 12/19 5:30pm
Wed, 12/20 7:30pm
The Earrings of Madame De... Madame De...
Critic Andrew Sarris has called THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE... "the greatest film ever made," and certainly it is an amazing fusion of pure filmic art with adult subject matter and deeply affecting performances from the three great stars who are its principals. Max OphÙls is the master of the moving camera, and he gives his tracking and crane shots amid rich decor the very breath of life as the film identifies with (and comments upon) the sufferings, ecstasies, and intelligence of sophisticated people caught up in marriage, confining social traditions, and the passions of adultery.
DIRECTED BY MAX OPH LS
Surrealist Visions
October 30 - December 18
Mondays at 5:30pm
Wednesdays at 7:30pm
Mon, 10/30 5:30pm
Wed, 11/1 7:30pm
Hans Richter, René Clair &
Luis Buñuel
France/Germany 1924-30 (83 mins)
A continuation of the free-association of Surrealist Cinema: René Clair's ENTR'ACTE spawned many similar films with its frenetic rhythms and sublime style and L'AGE D'OR reached an apex of avant-garde confrontation with its being banned by the authorities. GHOSTS BEFORE BREAKFAST is extreme absurdist Dada farce - pixillated derbies flying through the air, pistols firing as no one dies, and bearded men looming towards the camera.
GHOSTS BEFORE BREAKFAST Vormittagsspuk
ENTR'ACTE
L'AGE D'OR
Mon, 11/6 5:30pm
Wed, 11/8 7:30pm
USA 1943-46 (82 mins)
Working in mid-20th century New York, Maya Deren created a unique body of work which made notorious the American avant-garde film movement. She worked exclusively in 16mm and produced films of great aesthetic and visceral beauty whose sources can be found in modern dance, psychoanalysis and film theory. Her use of silence was intentional as she developed visual methods to communicate complex ideas of great depth and resonance.
AT LAND
A STUDY IN CHOREOGRAPHY FOR CAMERA
RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME
WITCH'S CRADLE
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF A CAT
Mon, 11/13 5:30pm
Wed, 11/15 7:30pm
The Crazy Ray
René Clair's first film exploits stop-motion filming in a comedy about a night watchman on the Eiffel Tower who wakes one morning to find the city of Paris asleep below. However, it is the process of filmmaking that is the subject of this film. Basic elements of cinema, time and movement, are its chief characters. Another preoccupation evident in this film is the fascination with abstract forms of machinery, shown here as the camera glides around the steel curves and fretwork in its exploration of the Eiffel Tower from every angle.
DIRECTED BY RENé CLAIR
USA 1939 (19 mins)
Joseph Cornell was a noted box maker and collagist who was an intense fan of film, having collected numerous 16mm prints of all types of genres. Reediting into a collage EAST OF BORNEO (1931) which starred Rose Hobart and introducing a few fragments of a scientific documentary into this work, Cornell was able to convert a typical Hollywood jungle drama into a surrealist experience that caused Dali to exclaim, "He stole my dreams!"
DIRECTED BY JOSEPH CORNELL
Mon 11/20 5:30pm
Wed 11/22 7:30pm
USA 1947 (80 mins)
Probably the first feature-length avant-garde film produced in America, DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY is an omnibus work in which seven dreams are offered for sale by Joe, a poor young poet with a rich imagination. The dreams are tailored to the unconscious of seven different people, each dream episode shaped by one of the contributing visual artists.
DIRECTED BY HANS RICHTER, MAX ERNST, FERNAND LéGER, MAN RAY, MARCEL DUCHAMP, ALEXANDER CALDER
Mon 11/27 5:30pm
Wed 11/27 7:30pm
El Angel Exterminador
Psycho pathological-sexual-religiosity at a high society dinner: the guests find themselves unable to leave the room, stay there for days, and speed towards utter sublimeness before the strange spell is broken. They go to church to give thanks, and then find themselves unable to leave. A weird fantasia on themes expressed in THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE.
DIRECTED BY LUIS BUÑUEL
Mon 12/4 5:30pm
Traite de bauve et d'eternite
When this film was first shown at the Cannes Film Festival, a riot broke out and fire hoses were brought in. Isou wrote, directed, photographed, composed the music for and acted in VENOM, a piece which he referred to as a "revolt against cinema." It is a bizarre abstraction in the form of pure cinema. To quote Isou: "My film shall be like hell composed of circles."
DIRECTED BY JEAN ISIDORE ISOU
Myth and Fate in Cinema
November 6 „ December 11
Mondays at 7:30pm
Mon, 11/6 7:30pm
Yume
Brief and fleeting sequences of an old man's life-memories, with stunning visual and auditory effects. The second dream, with a stylized song-and-dance reenactment of peach trees in bloom, gives a better sense of the communicative and evocative power inherent in the medium of the classical Greek chorus-despite the vast cultural differences-than any modern guesswork theatricalization of Greek tragedy could possibly achieve.
DIRECTED BY AKIRA KUROSAWA
Mon, 11/13 7:30pm
Australia 1980 (110 mins)
A fantastic piece of inconclusiveness, enigma and slight absurdity: a group of girls from a boarding school, spending a lazy afternoon at Hanging Rock, experience a sublime tragedy when three of them, who have been climbing up the rock passages, suddenly and mysteriously disappear. The film is an interesting exercise in the anti-rational, as the nature of the disappearance remains a mystery.
DIRECTED BY PETER WEIR
Mon, 11/20 7:30pm
37.2Å au matin
Jean-Jacques Beineix's (DIVA) torrid tale of passion focuses on the reckless relationship between a would-be writer and a disgruntled waitress (Beatrice Dalle) careening towards madness. Explosively erotic, this is a flamboyant hymn to youthful abandon, emotional excess and romanticized self-destruction.
DIRECTED BY JEAN-JACQUES BEINEIX
Mon, 11/27 7:30pm
Bleu
The first film in Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Three Colors Trilogy," BLUE is a music drama in the full sense of the term. A haunting exploration of one's responsibility for others, it is the story of a young woman who tries, none too successfully, to shut herself off from the world following the death of her husband. It is also a story that seems to turn into music as visionary direction reveals a breathtaking sensuality in the everyday. Juliette Binoche gives a harsh, furious performance in the central role, and the unforgettable score is by Zbigniew Preisner.
DIRECTED BY KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI
Mon, 12/11 7:30pm
Red Rouge
The final installment of Kieslowski's trilogy, RED is the story of a young woman and a much older man, who, despite finding that they are made for each other, realize that a love affair may not be possible because of the difference in their ages. An evocative anti-romance, with Irene Jacob providing an emotional vortex absorbing her sensual vulnerability.
DIRECTED BY KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI
Perspectives in Film
October 31 - December 13
Tuesdays at 7:30pm
Wednesdays at 5:30pm
Tue, 10/31 7:30pm
Wed, 11/1 5:30pm
Craig's Wife
USA 1936 (75 mins)
Rosalind Russel's wild performance dominates Arzner's adaptation of George Kelly's play about a woman's struggle to control every inch of her home. By assuming the housewife's perspective and muting plot and conflict to discreet moments within the home, the film takes the cult of domesticity to a strange extreme. Through the director's subtle yet subversive treatment of domestic space, a remarkably sympathetic portrait emerges of a housewife who walls herself up, brick by brick, in a pathological tomb of her own creation.
DIRECTED BY DOROTHY ARZNER
Tue, 11/7 7:30pm
Wed, 11/8 5:30pm
France/Belgium 1982 (89 mins)
On a sultry summer night in Brussels, various bodies in search of another collide. Some find love, others do not. Foregrounding small gestures and actually capturing the shape of solitude, Akerman's fragmentary style quietly subverts typical narrative conventions.
DIRECTED BY CHANTAL AKERMAN
Wed, 11/15 5:30pm
France/Belgium 1978 (95 mins)
Aurore Clément plays a Belgian filmmaker who is traveling through Northern Europe to promote her latest film. Akerman displays a fully autobiographical impulse as she reveals the alienating world her character moves through, including lonely hotel rooms and meaningless love affairs.
DIRECTED BY CHANTAL AKERMAN
Tue, 11/21 7:30pm
USA 1980 (146 mins)
A frustrated writer and his family become winter caretakers of the Overlook, a posh resort isolated high in the Colorado Rockies. As dad (Nicholson) becomes gradually more possessed by the demonic forces inhabiting the hotel, the mother and child's only defense is the boy's clairvoyance, his "shining." Kubrick takes every liberty with Stephen King's best-seller, foregrounding his own intricate, almost fetishistic cinematic techniques.
DIRECTED BY STANLEY KUBRICK
Tue, 11/28 7:30pm
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover Great Britain 1989 (120 mins)
Greenaway's grisly, color-coded fugue built on the themes of gluttony, adultery and retaliation makes this his most nefarious venture. The film's blend of violence, eroticism, melancholia and wicked satire recalls a classic revenge play out of Jacobean theatre and looks relentlessly at a taboo subject on the far reaches of physical experience.
DIRECTED BY PETER GREENAWAY
Tue, 12/5 7:30 pm
Great Britain 1978 (41 mins)
Also known as THE RE-INCARNATION OF AN ORNITHOLOGIST, Greenaway's idiosyncratic short is based on a treatise by bird-watcher Tulse Luper that recounts a mythical journey through the land of H. Time Out's Tony Rayns called it: "One of the best British movies of the decade... a cross between vintage Borges ïfiction' and a Disney True Adventure."
DIRECTED BY PETER GREENAWAY
M is for Man, Music and Mozart
Great Britain
1991 (29 mins)
Premiering on the "Not Mozart" program during the Mozart Bicentenary on BBC Television, M IS FOR MAN, MUSIC AND MOZART is a collaboration between composer Louis Andriessen and Greenaway set in a 16th century anatomy theatre. Cued to visual references of Howgrath, Vesalius and Archimboldo, this music theater film explores the mysteries of that central letter of the alphabet "M".
DIRECTED BY PETER GREENAWAY
Wed, 12/6 5:30pm
Original release version
Los Angeles, A.D. 2019. Former blade runner Rick Deckard (Ford) is forced out of retirement to pursue four renegade "replicants" - genetically engineered super androids who have escaped from a deep space work colony and returned to Earth to seek out their creators. Loosely based on Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Scott's film questions the nature of humanity in the underworld of the future.
DIRECTED BY RIDLEY SCOTT
Tue, 12/12 7:30 pm
Wed, 12/13 5:00pm
Until the End of the World West Germany 1991 (168 mins)
Wender's elaborate globe-hopping adventure is part road movie and part fantasy travelogue. The film begins as a detective-adventure yarn, focusing on a young decadent, two bank robbers and a handsome stranger with a price on his head. It is the fugitive who holds what becomes the motivating object of the story -a device which allows the images of dreams to be recorded and viewed. And, as if that weren't enough, there lurks the global threat of a satellite gone AWOL.
DIRECTED BY WIM WENDERS
Japanese Cinema: The Last Fifty Years
Part I: Voices From the Past
November 11 - December 14
Co-sponsor: Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. Commemorating the 20th year of the Reischauer Institute and the anniversary of the end of the Pacific War, this series celebrates postwar Japanese cinema as a form of popular culture. While Part II of the series focuses on recent films from the 1980s and 1990s, Part I raises new questions about Japanese cinema by exploring lesser-known films from the 1940s-1970s.
Sat, 11/11 8:00pm
Sun, 11/12 8:00pm
Waga seishun ni kuinashi
Loosely based on actual events involving the Sorge spy ring, Kurosawa's first postwar film features Setsuko Hara as Yukie, the daughter of a liberal university professor stripped of his position during the war. This focus on a strong woman is rare in Kurosawa's work, and the film is an interesting example of Japanese efforts to comply with Occupation film censorship demands for liberated and independent heroines.
DIRECTED BY AKIRA KUROSAWA
Sat, 11/18 8:00pm
Sun, 11/19 8:00pm
Ukigumo
Hideko Takamine (Yukiko) and Masayuki Mori (Tomiko) star in this adaptation of Fumiko Hayashi's novel about a woman's attempts to reunite with her war-time lover in the bombed ruins and spiritual rubble of postwar Japan. The film movingly captures the melancholy despair and harshness of postwar life, but not without a few humorous touches that remain relevant even today. A visually stunning film, it is one of six adaptations Naruse made of Hayashi's work, and is one of the films for which he is best known.
DIRECTED BY MIKIO NARUSE
Sat, 12/2 8:00pm
Sun, 12/3 8:00pm
A Full Life 0
Against the background of the 1960 Anti-Security Pact demonstrations, Ineko Arima stars as a housewife and former actress who leaves her husband to pursue fulfillment and a meaningful life on the outskirts of society. In portraying Ineko's quest for independence, Hani explores the ties that bind her to tradition, challenging the idea that the end of the war brought about change for Japanese women.
DIRECTED BY SASUMU HANI
Thu, 12/14 8:30pm
Koji Chino in person
Secret Agreement Mitsuyaki
Secret Agreement focuses on an illicit relationship and espionage committed by a foreign ministry employee and a journalist concerning the reversion of Okinawa. The film explores political responsibility for a "secret agreement" between Japan and the US.
Filmmaker Koji Chinoc is currently vice president of the Directors Guild of Japan and has been active in television and film production since 1955. His recent work includes the eight hour television drama MIDWAY SLEEP IN PEACE (1984) which received several awards in Japan.
DIRECTED BY KOJI CHINO
Sat, 12/2 7:00pm
Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern
USA 1995 (88 mins)
I was raised on Westerns. RED RIVER, HIGH NOON, GUNSMOKE - where the bad guys sometimes won but never prevailed. Our film is a Midwestern. It's the story of my family's farm in Iowa. From crossing the Mississippi by covered wagon in 1867 to driving to Daddy Date Night in 1967. From my great-grandfather fighting off the Crooked Creek Gang in the 1880s to my father fighting off foreclosure in the 1990s. It looks like the bad guys are winning, but will they prevail? Troublesome Creek: A Midwestern is a first-person personal film that speaks to the universal problem of the fate of rural communities. It's a cliffhanger about history, loss and the humor and deep character that settled America, and now presides at its unsettling.
DIRECTED BY JEANNE JORDAN & STEVEN ASCHER
Thu, 11/16 7:30pm
Boston Jewish Film Festival Special Event: $8.00 adults/$7.00 students, seniors
Harvard University students
w/ID FREE
Canada 1994 (55 mins)
Of the million of Holocaust victims, perhaps the least understood are the thousands of Jewish children who somehow escaped Nazi detection during the war. Many were physically hidden for months or years by non-Jews, while others were forced to masquerade as gentiles. By the end of the war, many of the children had assimilated to some degree, abandoning their original culture and faith. HIDDEN CHILDREN recounts the life-stories of six such Jewish survivors, examining the ways in which they have struggled with their identity, and how they've dealt with the guilt and pain of dislocation.
DIRECTED BY JOHN WALKER (color, 16mm) Also: A SAUCER OF WATER FOR THE BIRDS
INCARCERATED DREAMS
Sun, 11/5 4:30pm
Co-sponsor: Modern Greek Studies Symposium
Special Event: $6.50
Lefteris Dimakopoulos
Two old friends meet at a New Year's Eve party and, against a backdrop of chaos and revelry, begin to reminisce about their pasts. Lefteris, which translates as "free... free as a bird," reaches back fifteen years to when he was an idealistic, promising youth, realizing that in the interim he has lost both his youth and his values, and that he has sacrificed one life for the right to acquire another.
DIRECTED & Written BY PERICLIS HOURSOGLOU (Greek with English subtitles, color, 35mm courtesy the filmmaker)
Fri, 12/15 8:00pm
Sat, 12/16 8:00pm
Sun, 12/17 8:00pm
Juan Mandelbaum in person
Juan Mandelbaum Presents
"What continues to interest me is the creative process, what artists from different disciplines go through to create interesting work."
Juan Mandelbaum has achieved international recognition for his documentaries, which focus on the blending of diverse cultures and media in the work of individual artists. From his Boston based firm, Geovision, Juan has produced documentaries that have won awards including a CINE Golden Eagle, American Film Festival, Havana Film Festival and The New York Festivals. Among his other independent projects, he has also produced documentaries on the artist Ted Clausen and the Argentine painter Liliana Porter.
Caetano in Bahia Boston Theatrical Premiere
USA 1994 (29 mins)
CAETANO IN BAHIA follows Brazilian songwriter Caetano Veloso through the streets of Säo Salvador da Bahia de todos os Santos, the heart of Brazil's cultural mix. The prolific star of Brazilian popular music reviews his eclectic career, singing along with a street band and a Carnival samba ensemble and visiting his hometown for the Sao Joao festival. A music filled insight into a remarkable artist's creative process.
DIRECTED BY JUAN MANDELBAUM
"Caetano is a perfect example of how important an artist can be in society and how much richness they can bring to life."
Ringl & Pit Cambridge Theatrical Premiere
USA 1995 (58 mins)
RINGL AND PIT explores the lives and times of émigré photographers Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach, focusing especially on the activities of their advertising photography studio from 1929-1933. Though the studio lasted only five years, its burst of creativity is at the heart of the documentary as we see the inventive compositions of the two young women, which subtly comment on the esthetics of female identity. The film follows their lives from the early days to their current activities spanning three continents.
DIRECTED BY JUAN MANDELBAUM
Special EventSTroublesome Creek: A MidwesternHFA Schedule November/December