REFLECTIONS ON FILM CULTURE

Daily | Goings On | Mankiewicz, Akerman, Hairy Who

All About Eve

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s ‘All About Eve’ (1952)

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced that this year’s New York Film Festival (September 26 through October 12) will feature a Joseph L. Mankiewicz retrospective. “Godard thought that the cinema of Mankiewicz was the most intelligent to come out of Hollywood in the ’40s and ’50s. Quite right,” NYFF director Kent Jones tells the FSLC’s Brian Brooks. Also, among the Revivals will be Howard Brookner’s Burroughs: The Movie (1983), Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1968) and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984).

Yesterday, I noted that MoMA’s given Carte Blanche to producer, distributor, director and exhibitor Marin Karmitz, and today, Scott Macaulay‘s posted his interview with him at Filmmaker: “Beginning his career as an assistant director to, among others, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda, Karmitz went on to become one of the most distinguished producers of his generation, with such classics as Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy, Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself and Claude Chabrol’s Ceremonie to his name. But his list of producing credits only tells half the story because Karmitz expanded MK2 into distribution and exhibition, creating a stylish chain of art house cinemas, whose graphic design, architecture and urban practices reinforced, not detracted from, the cultural values of the films on their screens.”

Open Roads: New Italian Cinema 2014 opens today and runs through June 12. In the New York Times, Mike Hale talks with Gianfranco Rosi about Sacro GRA, his Golden Lion-winning documentary about “the Grande Raccordo Anulare, or ring road, that surrounds Rome, a self-contained world that is always the same and never the same, reinventing itself each day.”

Grady Hendrix for Film Comment: “BAM is holding a King Hu retrospective called All Hail the King: The Films of King Hu from June 6 to 17, featuring A Touch of Zen (which anyone who cares about movies should see), his all-action fiesta The Valiant Ones (75), and two of his autumnal late-career movies (Legend of the Mountain and Raining in the Mountain, both from 1979). But the program doesn’t include the film that was supposed to be his big breakthrough in the West, the one that would change everything: The Battle of Ono.”

In One Day Pina Asked… (1983), Chantal Akerman tracked Pina Bausch and her dance troupe on a five-week tour of Europe, capturing, as Melissa Anderson has it in the Voice, “the soaring grace of bodies in motion onstage but also behind it, with dressing rooms filled with lithe, sinewy men and women slicking back hair, adjusting ties, reapplying makeup…. Self-conscious importance, unfortunately, marks Chantal Akerman, From Here, an hour-long interview with the auteur from 2010 that plays free in the Film Society amphitheater once a day in conjunction with its run of One Day.”

Tomorrow, Le Petit Versailles and the Film-makers’ Cooperative Present It’s Been a Hell of a Life: A Night of Jasmine Hirst’s Films.

And on Saturday: “Microscope is very pleased to present Rewriting Film History, Reinventing Film Apparatus, a program of 16mm films curated by Enrico Camporesi. The evening includes historical and more recent works by Jean-Michel Bouhours, Werner Nekes, David Wharry, Mary Helena Clark, Ernst Schmidt Jr., and Peter Miller that have rarely, if ever, screened in the US, and coming from the Light Cone Collection (Paris).”

Chicago. A new 35mm print of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb will be screened for a week starting tomorrow at the Music Box, which will also be showing a new 35mm restoration of Robert Woodburn’s Corn’s-a-Poppin’ (1955) with a screenplay by Robert Altman on June 23. At Newcity Film, Ray Pride explains what he misses about 35mm, specifically, the “physicality… Cinephilia was the clank of metal boxes, the unfurling of lurid posters, plus the scarcity of everything.”

At the Cine-File Blog, Harrison Sherrod talks with Leslie Buchbinder about her new documentary, Hairy Who & the Chicago Imagists, screening tomorrow and June 14 at the Block Museum of Art Cinema. As Edward M. Gómez explains at Hyperallergic, Hairy Who was “one of several coteries of artists who came together in the 1960s–1970s under the broader moniker of the Chicago Imagists… If New York’s Pop artists of that same era often assumed a cool, ironic stance toward such ‘low’-culture subjects as comic-strip panels, Hollywood stars and consumer goods, their Chicago counterparts offered big, wet kisses to such muses, animate and inanimate, as circus-midway performers and freaks (including bearded ladies); carnival banners; neon signs; blues musicians; antique toys; pinball machines; and just about every permutation of human body parts, from pendulous breasts to big noses and an endless array of pickle-shaped penises.”

Los Angeles. At Thompson on Hollywood, Ryan Lattanzio has the full lineup for Outfest, running from July 10 through 20.

“The Cinematheque’s Aero Theatre is hosting a tribute to Lang this weekend,” notes the TimesKenneth Turan, “and it’s an excellent opportunity to catch up on some of the director’s finest work, starting Thursday with the Edward G. RobinsonJoan Bennett Scarlet Street (based on Jean Renoir’s La Chienne) and the World War II-themed Hangmen Also Die!

On Sunday, Dance Camera West “returns to REDCAT with all-new programs of experimental shorts as part of its month-long celebration of dance film.”

Also on Sunday, filmmakers Thom Andersen, Daniel Brantley, Sílvia Das Fadas, Andrew Kim, Troy Morgan, Charlotte Pryce and Mark Toscano will be at the Velaslavasay Panorama for LA <===> AA, a presentation of films from the 52nd Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Toronto. Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema arrives at TIFF Cinematheque today and will be playing there through July 1.

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