‘The Thief and the Cobbler: A Moment in Time’ (1992), AMPAS
New York. We begin with Glenn Kenny, writing for the Times: “The Thief and the Cobbler is to animated movies what The Magnificent Ambersons is to live-action ones: a staggering masterpiece that can never be seen in its ideal form. Ambersons, directed by Orson Welles, was completed but then mutilated by its studio, its original version lost; Cobbler, a dream project the animator Richard Williams had been working on since the 1960s, was wrested from him by financiers in 1993, incomplete by about 15 minutes…. Bootleg ‘reconstructions’ have circulated among buffs for years. This week, the Museum of Modern Art (in collaboration with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) screens a restored version of Mr. Williams’s last workprint of the film, titled The Thief and the Cobbler: A Moment in Time.” Today through Tuesday. “Women filmmakers aren’t a footnote in the history of cinema; they are its authors,” argues Melissa Anderson in her overview of Woman with a Movie Camera: Female Directors Before 1950, a series running through Wednesday at Anthology Film Archives. Anderson focuses on the work of Alice Guy-Blaché, who “oversaw, whether as director or producer, hundreds of films (mostly one-reelers) until 1922”; Guy-Blaché’s “compatriot and near-contemporary” Germaine Dulac; Dorothy Arzner, “the only female director in the Hollywood studio system from the late 20s through the early 40s”; Lois Weber, “the first female member of the Motion Picture Directors Association”; and Edith Carlmar, whose Death Is a Caress (1949) is “the first film from Norway directed by a woman and a fascinating, low-key noir.” In Brooklyn Magazine, Elina Mishuris considers Esfir Shub‘s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), whose “greatest bequest… is the curious faces turned toward us—soldiers, peasant women, minor officials, protesters, people who have no awareness of what it is to be filmed, perhaps faced with a camera for the first time—who look into the future with faith, or caution, or mistrust, or occasional awe.” Screens Saturday—and also tomorrow as part of Movie in My Head: Bruce Conner and Beyond, the series running at MoMA through September 30. Back in the Voice, Alan Scherstuhl recommends Sara Fishko’s The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith, a group portrait of the artists and musicians who worked at 861 Broadway in the 1950s and 60s. And Anderson and Peter Labuza have put together a robust preview of the movie-going season in the city. “Duck Soup’s debauched satire of petty warfare and monied politics has a potent resonance equaling its vaudevillian absurdity,” writes Max Kyburz. Leo McCarey‘s 1933 Marx Brothers comedy screens on a double bill with Sam Wood‘s “decidedly stagier” A Night at the Opera (1935) on Saturday as part of the Film Forum series The Marx Brothers and the Golden Age of Vaudeville opening Friday and running through September 29. More capsule previews in Brooklyn Magazine:
- Jaime Grijalba on François Truffaut‘s Day for Night (1973), screening tonight at the Metrograph as part of a celebration of Breixo Viejo’s new book, Film Books: A Visual History.
- Tanner Tafelski on Ivan Passer’s Born to Win (1971), tonight and Monday as part of the Spectacle series Bad2Worse.
- Aaron Cutler on Leslie Arliss’s The Night Has Eyes (1942), tomorrow as part of Spectacle’s Fresh Masonry: Pre- Brexit Thrills of James Mason.
- Lauren Ro on The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1962), Saturday as part of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
- And someone on Le Bonheur (1965), Sunday as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series Agnès Varda.
Los Angeles. At Hyperallergic, Susan Silas notes that Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life, on view at the Broad through October 2, “includes Sherman’s new series from 2016, which, when combined with the exhibition’s title, Imitation of Life, as well its location in Los Angeles, suggests a certain lens through which to see the work: Hollywood.” On Saturday, REDCAT presents Trinh T. Minh-ha: Forgetting Vietnam, followed on Monday by Laura Kraning: Spectral Landscapes.
Seattle. “The beauty of our part of the world can be attributed to three things,” argues Charles Mudede in the Stranger: “the greenness of its many trees, the watery duskiness of its light, and the silent sublimity of its volcanoes…. Indeed, the reason so many of the films in the annual Local Sightings festival are naturally, effortlessly beautiful is that the festival is devoted to working made in the Pacific Northwest. And these natural elements often form the core of the features, documentaries, and short films they program.” Vienna. “In the 1960s, as cinema was set in motion all over the world, Germany was no exception. Aesthetic and political borders were constantly on the move, and alliances were broken as quickly as they were established. In this period of upheaval, a kind of undercover New Wave arose in Munich.” Kino-Atlas 4: München-Schwabing runs at the Austrian Film Museum from today through Monday.
