REFLECTIONS ON FILM CULTURE

Daily | Goings On | Jarman, Ulmer, Pontecorvo

Derek Jarman

Derek Jarman

We have to start in the UK, because a year-long celebration of the life and work of Derek Jarman, who died twenty years ago this year, will be kicking off in just a few days. Jarman2014 encompasses “a range of exhibitions, screenings and retrospectives, readings, commissions and other events at a variety of London’s most significant cultural institutions.”

New York. This coming Tuesday, Light Industry will be screening Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986). “Jarman received high praise for the design and cinematography of the film, which evokes Caravaggio’s art meticulously, including a dusky color palette and light streaming in from the left side of the frame. But like his screen portraits of St. Sebastian, King Edward II, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jarman works freely with anachronisms… just as Caravaggio populated his Biblical scenes with contemporary details. Both the art world and the Church hierarchy are given a queer makeover: painters are shown socializing with whores and cross-dressing buskers, and the Papal court is depicted as a claque of bitchy mandarins.”

MoMA’s series The Aesthetics of Shadow, Part 1: Japan is on through January 19 and, at the L, Justin Stewart recommends catching Josef von Sternberg‘s Docks of New York (1928) on Saturday and Aaron Cutler writes up Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Page of Madness (1926), screening on Sunday.

This year’s New York Jewish Film Festival runs through January 23 and, at Filmmaker, Howard Feinstein picks five to recommend, beginning with Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida.

Starting tomorrow, the Film Society at Lincoln Center presents Edgar G. Ulmer: Back From the Margins. Through January 18.

Los Angeles. Tonight, LA Filmforum at MOCA presents William E. Jones, “a Los Angeles based artist, filmmaker and curator whose diverse body of work explores materiality, memory and subcultures; he has recently produced a body of work in conversation with the career of the late German artist Peter Roehr. This program will include a rare presentation of Peter Roehr’s sound and film montages.”

And on Sunday at the Egyptian, Filmforum presents the new restoration of Far from Vietnam, the 1967 film by Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais—introduced by Thom Andersen!

San Francisco. The Little Tramp at 100: A Charlie Chaplin Centennial Celebration happens on Saturday at the Castro. Cheryl Eddy in the Bay Guardian: “In Chaplin‘s 1964 autobiography, he wrote about assembling the character in the wardrobe room. ‘I wanted everything to be a contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small, and the shoes large. I was undecided whether to look old or young, but remembering [producer Mack] Sennett had expected me to be a much older man [Chaplin was around 25 at the time of filming], I added a small mustache, which I reasoned, would add age without hiding my expression. I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. By the time I walked on stage he was fully born.”

Philadelphia. Free to Love: The Cinema of the Sexual Revolution is happening at International House through February 15, and the City Paper‘s Shaun Brady talks with Radley Metzger, who’ll be in town “to screen and discuss his 1972 movie Score… Based on an off-Broadway play, the film is an early depiction of bisexuality that shows a swinging couple getting it on with a number of friends and acquaintances—including a telephone repairman originally played on stage (though, sadly, not on screen) by a young Sylvester Stallone.”

Vienna. The Austrian Film Museum’s Thriller Politics: Italy, France, and the Seventies is now running through February 6, and Gillo Pontecorvo series opens tomorrow and runs through February 5.

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