“Never before has there been such a glut of programming designed to highlight and increase awareness of format,” writes Nick Pinkerton for Artforum. Following the Nitrate Picture Show at the George Eastman House and BAMcinématek’s 3D in the 21st Century earlier this month, Anthology Film Archive’s This Is Celluloid, opening today and running through June 21, “is the first leg of what will eventually be a tripartite series, with subsequent sections highlighting 16-mm and 8-mm prints.” And from June 5 through August 5, MoMA presents Glorious Technicolor, “celebrating the centenary of the color process.” Then, “beginning in mid-June, Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox has their own Dreaming in Technicolor program…. The DCP changeover, in both first-run and repertory exhibition, came so swiftly—and with the backing of such a powerful consortium of interests—that its unconditional victory seemed assured before the conversation had even begun in earnest. Belatedly—perhaps too late—the issue of DCP versus original format is now having its moment in the court of public opinion.”
At Reverse Shot, Sean Flynn tells us that the “basic premise” of Sensory Stories: An Exhibition of New Narrative Experiences, on view at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York through July 24, “suggests that technologies like virtual reality are in the process of transforming the way we experience stories, ‘bringing the body, mind, and senses,’ in the words of the Museum’s executive director, Carl Goodman, ‘into a new relationship with the moving image.'”
In the Notebook, Adrian Curry previews Scorsese Collects, an exhibition on view at MoMa from tomorrow through October 25 that “brings together 34 of the most prized items in his reportedly vast collection. There are posters for many of Marty’s avowed favorite directors: Kazan and Kubrick, Ford and Franju, Mann and Melville, Siegel and Sturges, and, especially, Jacques Tourneur, Max Ophüls and Michael Powell, who each get practically a wall to themselves.”
Brunello Rondi‘s The Demon (1963) screens tomorrow as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series Titanus: A Family Chronicle of Italian Cinema. Jackson Arn for Film Comment: “Like the Titanus executives who alternated between green-lighting weepy melodramas, sword-and-sandal epics, and screwball comedies, Rondi was comfortable working as a screenwriter and a director in an absurdly diverse collection of genres, ranging from shoestring giallos to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. He was equally adept at adding physical comedy to weighty existential pictures and suffusing lowbrow thrillers with an air of sophistication.”
At the Film Stage, Nick Newman rounds up more NYC goings on.
Chicago. The Reader‘s J.R. Jones rounds up local screenings and events.
Austin. The Chronicle‘s Richard Whittaker previews two series at the Alamo Ritz, both opening tomorrow and running through June 14: Black Sabbats & Blood Rites: British Folk Horror Cinema and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger: The Archers.
Nashville. A new 4K restoration of Powell and Pressburger‘s The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) sees a week-long run at the Belcourt beginning today. Donna Bowman for the Scene: “In its full glory, it displays like no other movie the freedom and power Powell found in the basic tools of cinema.”
London. As Timbuktu opens today in the UK, it launches a new season at BFI Southbank, Abderrahmane Sissako: Poetry, Politics and the New African Cinema, and Basia Lewandowska Cummings presents a primer: “Since rising to prominence in 2002 with his contemplative but humorous film about one Mauritanian boy’s desire for an electric lightbulb (Waiting for Happiness), his films—addressing globalization, identity politics and now, most controversially, Islamic radicalism—have offered serious narratives about the realities facing Africa today, told through searingly beautiful images.”
“Where Hollywood delivers a costumed crowd of heroes spectacularly (and repeatedly) saving the world, this year’s Sci-Fi-London opens with The Death of ‘Superman Lives’: What Happened?, Jon Schnepp’s documentary on a 1998 superhero film that never was, and closes with SuperBob, Jon Drever’s action romcom rejoinder to the conventional superhero flick, featuring a hyper-English hero (from Peckham).” Anton Bitel picks out the highlights for the BFI. Today through June 5.
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