A nationwide retrospective tour of new prints will celebrate famed French New Wave director Alain Resnais from September 2009 to March 2010. Featuring thirteen of his best-known movies, including such timeless classics as L'Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad) and Mon Oncle d'Amérique (My American Uncle), the retrospective will delight film buffs eager to rediscover one of cinema's most iconic filmmakers. This will be a unique opportunity to do so: many of these films are not distributed in the U.S., and the prints have been fully restored-courtesy of CulturesFrance, the French agency in charge of international cultural exchanges.

The retrospective, which was produced by CulturesFrance under the guidance of Michel Ciment, editor-in-chief of the prestigious film magazine Positif, is supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and will tour the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago; the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, CA; the University of Wisconsin Madison; the Wexner Arts Center in Columbus, OH; the Harvard Film Archive and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Cultural institutions interested in screening the retrospective should contact the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. On the occasion of the retrospective, Moving Image Source, the Museum of the Moving Image's magazine, has commissioned several articles about Resnais's work from leading film critics and experts.

Featured Works:

Guernica (with Robert Hessens, 1950); Statues Also Die (Les Statues meurent aussi, with Chris Marker, 1953); Night and Fog (Nuit et Bouillard, 1955); All of the World's Memory (Toute la mémoire du monde, 1956); The Song of the Styrene (Le Chant du Styrène, 1958); Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienbad, 1961); Muriel, or The Time of Return (Muriel, ou le temps d'un retour, 1963); Je t'aime Je t'aime (1968); Stavisky... (1974); My American Uncle (Mon Oncle d'Amérique, 1980); Mélo (1986); Same Old Song (On connaît la chanson, 1997); Private Fears in Public Places (Cœurs, 2006, pictured)

Program information:
 

National Gallery of Art

September 5-20, 2009

LACMA

October 2-17, 2009

Gene Siskel Film Center

November 7-December 2, 2009

Pacific Film Archive

November 6- December 15, 2009

University of Wisconsin

December 5-19, 2009

Wexner Arts Center

January 1-February 28, 2010

Harvard Film Archive

January 15-25, 2010

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

March 1-31, 2010

Related Articles:
The Unknown Statue by Jonathan Rosenbaum posted Nov. 06, 2009

Promised Lands profiles cinematic and geopolitical relationships throughout the Indian subcontinent (Bangladesh, India, Kashmir, Pakistan, Sri Lanka) and across to West Asia and the Middle East (including Afghanistan, Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kurdistan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Turkey). In the context of the Asia Pacific Triennial, which seeks to question the cultural and geographical frameworks of the Asia Pacific region, Promised Lands opens up a deeper conversation with West Asia and the Middle East. This discussion underlines the need for a more specific awareness of distinct histories and genealogies within these regions, while also acknowledging interactions and shared influences across borders. Through the process of bringing political geographies and histories into question, the opportunity arises to reflect on how the region's complex and diverse cultures and artistic practices contribute to new and more nuanced understandings of "Asia."

Promised Lands includes five programs of film and video that consider local politics and individual lives within a larger context. Each program has an autonomous curatorial framework: responses to civil war in Sri Lanka (The Road to Jaffna) the legacies of partition across the Indian subcontinent (Cinema of Partition); dissent and the affirmation of cultural identity in a climate of political intervention in West Asia, as well as the fraught nexus of religious fundamentalism and national politics (The Tree of Life); the traumatic histories linking Armenia and Turkey (Return of the Poet); and fault lines throughout the Middle East in response to conflict and territorial incursions in Palestine, Lebanon, and Israel (Eating My Heart). Several broad themes appear across these strands, in particular the intersection of daily life with relationships to land, religious affiliations, and cultural histories.

While political and colonial legacies have divided land and communities, Promised Lands points to the aspirations of artists and filmmakers to reframe these struggles and find a path forward. Promised Lands looks to artists and filmmakers who find opportunities to rethink the past and imagine the future. Their work draws on the historical roots of contemporary experience, bringing the past to life in the present to transform our understanding of then and now. The program brings together works that project possibilities for change and explore the hopes of exiled and dispossessed communities to return to, or create, a homeland. The artists and filmmakers featured in Promised Lands provide extraordinary insights into complex contemporary situations, and work in myriad ways to counter the insidious effects of cultural homogenisation. Their individual narratives offer a depth of understanding rarely available in official histories and suggest new possibilities for relationships and understanding. The past and present in the first person take discussions of the future out of the realm of rhetoric and into a shared framework of responsibility.

Featured Works:

Chinnamul (Nemai Ghosh, 1950); Meghe Dhaka Tara (Ritwik Ghatak, 1960); Menq (Artavazd Pelechian, 1960); Komal Gandhar (Ritwik Ghatak, 1961); Subarnarekha (Ritwik Ghatak, 1965); Sayat Nova aka The Colour of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov, 1968); Obibateli (Artavazd Pelechian, 1970); Tarva Yeghanaknere aka Vremena goda (Artavazd Pelechian, 1972); Garm Hava (Ms Sathyu, 1973); Tamas (Govind Nihalani, 1986); Verj (Artavazd Pelechian, 1993-94); Girl from Moush (Gariné Torossian, 1994); Al-Shrit Bikyahr (Akram Zaatari, 1997); A Season Outside (Amar Kanwar, 1997); Pura handa Kaluwara (Prasanna Vithanage, 1997); Earth (Deepa Mehta, 1998); Djomeh (Hassan Yektapanah, 2000); Me mage sandai (Asoka Handagama, 2000); Takh té siah (Samira Makhmalbaf, 2000); Shou Bhabbak (Akram Zaatari, 2001); The Land of Silence (Vimukthi Jayasundara, 2001); Ararat (Atom Egoyan, 2002); Matir Monia (Tareque Masud, 2002); Yadon ilaheyya (Elia Suleiman, 2002); Ira Madiyama (Prasanna Vithanage, 2003); Khamosh Pani (Sabiha Sumar, 2003); Osama (Siddiq Barmak, 2003); Talaye sorkh (Jafa Panahi, 2003); Way Back Home (Supriyo Sen, 2003); Crossing the Lines: Kashmir, Pakistan, India (Pervez Hoodbhoy, 2004); Lakposhtha parvaz mikonand (Bahman Ghobadi, 2004); Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel (Eyal Sivan & Michel Khleifi, 2004); Nekam Achat Mishtey Eynay (Avi Mograbi, 2005); Oyun (Pelin Esmer, 2005); Paradise Now (Hany Abu-Assad, 2005); Sulanga Enu Pinisa (Vimukthi Jayasundara, 2005, pictured); A Declaration (Yael Bartana, 2006); Al-sateh (Kamal Aljafari, 2006); Beş Vakit (Reha Erdem, 2006); Beyond Partition (Lalit Mohan Joshi, 2006); Happy Days (Larissa Sansour, 2006); In Search of a Road (Dharmasena Pathiraja, 2006); Poeti veradardze (Harutyun Khachatryan, 2006); Soup over Bethlehem (Larissa Sansour, 2006); 33 Yaoum (Mai Masri, 2007); A Jihad for Love (Parvez Sharma, 2007); Buda as sharm foru rikht (Hana Makmalbaf, 2007); Ea' Adat Khalk (Mahmoud al Massad, 2007); Jashn-e-Azadi (Sanjay Kak, 2007); Khiam 2000 (Joana Hadjithomas, 2007); Land Confiscation Order 06/24/T (Larissa Sansour, 2007); Min datter terroristen (Beate Arnestad & Morten Daae, 2007); Nights and Days (Lamia Joreige, 2007); Stone Time Touch (Gariné Torossian, 2007); Summer Camp 2007 (Yael Bartana, 2007); The Sky Below (Sarah Singh, 2007); A Space Exodus (Larissa Sansour, 2008); Baddi Chouf (Joana Hadjithomas, 2008); Langue sacrée, langue parlée (Nurith Aviv, 2008); Life after the Fall (Kasim Abid, 2008); Mesopotamia (Fenar Ahmad, 2008); Milh Hadha al-Bahr (Annemarie Jacir, 2008); Tabiaah Samitah (Akram Zaatari, 2008); Tahaan: A Boy with a Grenade (Santosh Sivan, 2008); The Queen and I (Nahid Persson Sarvestani, 2008);  Vals Im Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008); Z32 (Avi Mograbi, 2008); Ahasin Wetei (Vimukthi Jayasundara, 2009); Al Zaman Al Baqi (Elia Suleiman, 2009); Carmel (Amos Gitaï, 2009); Chou am bi sir? (Jocelyne Saab, 2009); Darbareye Elly (Asghar Farhadi, 2009); Güneşi Gördüm (Mahsun Kırmızıgül, 2009); Port of Memory (Kamal Aljafari, 2009); Rachel (Simone Bitton, 2009); Ruzhaye sabz (Hana Makmalbaf, 2009); Sahman (Harutyun Khachatryan, 2009); Sirta la Gal ba (Shahram Alidi, 2009)

Program information:

Promised Lands

The art of animation in Iran today draws on the artistic heritage of textile design, Persian folk tales and literature, calligraphy and miniature painting, as well as the motifs of interior design, ceramics and architecture. Animation is recognised in Iran as a medium which is closely related to drawing, painting and the graphic arts. This landmark program profiles influential senior figures, including Esfandiar Ahmadieh, Abdollah Alimorad, Vadjollah Fard Moghadam, Ali Akbar Sadeghi and Noureddin Zarrinkelk, through to the current generation of talented emerging artists, including Morteza Ahadi, Laleh Khorramian, Omid Khoshnazar, Mashallah Mohammadi, Moin Samadi, Farkhondeh Torabi, and others.

Many animations in The Cypress and the Crow: 50 Years of Iranian Animation feature animal figures-the crow, mouse, fox, goat, and many more-which have literary and symbolic associations, and may be alter-egos for humanity. The crow appears frequently in literature and animation as an animal which exhibits the baser human traits-selfishness, suspicion and greed-but is also crafty and intelligent. The cypress, sacred in Iran, is associated with the tree of life. In the Islamic tradition, the tree of life is found in heaven and harbours brightly coloured birds, representing the souls of the faithful; it may also represent the human body and aspirations to the divine. Infinitely varied in their reworking of cultural forms, animations from Iran express historical lineages and geographical relationships to create extraordinary visual worlds and produce new identities and forms.

Featured Works:

More than 100 films

Program information:

The Cypress and the Crow: 50 Years of Iranian Animation

The 1960s saw two of the most popular stars of Japanese post-WWII cinema grace movie screens.

Like a strange but wonderful hybrid of Charlie Chaplin, Robert Mitchum, Wallace Beery, and Clint Eastwood, Shintaro Katsu started out at Daiei Studios in the mid-1950s and labored pretty much unrecognized in period action movies and the occasional more serious "arthouse" film until 1962. That was the year he starred as a wandering blind masseur tired of being picked on who learns to wield a sword in Tale of Zatoichi (Zatoichi Monogatari) directed by unsung master Kenji Misumi. It was popular enough to warrant a sequel, and Katsu's real-life brother Tomisaburo Wakayama played Zatoichi's estranged brother and nemesis in the action-packed follow-up, The Tale of Zatoichi Continues (Zoku Zatoichi Monogatari). After that, with the box office breaking records, Daiei developed the character into a series of films. Katsu continued to portray the beloved blind swordsman in 26 movies as well as over 100 episodes on television. His last appearance as the humble, wisecracking anti-hero was in 1989 in Zatoichi (a film Katsu also directed). Katsu also starred in several of nouvelle vague director Yasuzo Masumura's most memorable pictures, including Hoodlum Soldier (Heitai Yakuza) and Yakuza Masterpiece (Yakuza Zessho). In the late 1960s, Katsu formed his own production company, going on to produce most of the later Zatoichi films as well as all six of the Lone Wolf and Cub series (once again starring his brother, Tomisaburo Wakayama).

Now imagine Montgomery Clift as an action star, and you get a faint idea of the image of Katsu's Daiei Studios' colleague, Raizo Ichikawa. Descended from a long line of kabuki performers, he started his movie career around the same time as Katsu in the mid-1950s, making period drama and action films as well as more "serious" pictures for directors like Kenji Mizoguchi (New Tales of the Taira Clan) and Kon Ichikawa (Enjo). But his most famous role remains Kyoshiro Nemuri, a misanthropic, half-breed samurai with God and women issues whose lady-in-waiting mother had been raped by a Portuguese missionary during a Black Mass, thus resulting in his birth. The film series featuring the Nemuri character-known in English-speaking countries as Sleepy Eyes of Death/Son of the Black Mass-grew gradually more existential and macabre as the series progressed, and the Nemuri character had his coldblooded side, conflicted within by both benevolent and misanthropic impulses. Ichikawa also appeared in the loosely linked Sword (Ken) trilogy directed by Kenji Misumi-all of them masterpieces: Destiny's Son (Kiru), Sword (Ken), and Sword Devil (Ken Ki). The second-to-last picture starring Ichikawa, Castle Menagerie (Nemuri Kyoshiro Akujo Gari) was his last appearance as Nemuri. Ichikawa died of cancer in July of 1969 at the age of 37, mere days before the completion of his final movie, Gambler's Life (Bakuto Ichidai). Because of his tragic death at a young age as well as his astounding charisma onscreen, Ichikawa continues to enjoy a burgeoning cult status and has often been described as the Japanese James Dean.

Both actors shared a sublime ability to transcend genre stereotypes, creating action heroes who were wounded, soul-searching individuals. Join us for this retrospective tribute honoring two legends of Japanese cinema!

Featured Works:

Samurai Vendetta: A Chronicle of Pale Cherry Blossoms (Hakuoki, Kazuo Mori, 1959); Scar Yosaburo (Kirare Yosaburo, Daisuke Ito, 1960); Destiny's Son (Kiru, Kenji Misumi, 1962, pictured); New Tale of Zatoichi (Shin Zatoichi monogatari, Tokuzo Tanaka, 1963); Zatoichi On the Road: Fighting Journey (Zatoichi kenka-tabi, Kimiyoshi Yasuda, 1963); Zatoichi, the Fugitive (Zatoichi kyojo-tabi, Tokuzo Tanaka, 1963); Nemuri Kyoshiro at Bay: The Sword of Seduction (Nemuri Kyoshiro Joyo Ken, Kazuo Ikehiro, 1964); The Lone Stalker (Hitori Okami, Kazuo Ikehiro, 1968); The Devil's Temple (Oni no Sumu Yakata, Kenji Misumi, 1969)

Program information:

The Double-Edged Sword: The Films of Shintaro Katsu & Raizo Ichikawa

Nagisa Oshima, Yoshishige Yoshida, and Masahiro Shinoda all made stunning debuts in 1959 and 1960. They drew much attention as the flag-bearers of Shochiku Nouvelle Vague, and continued to lead Japanese cinema throughout their careers. The consecutive retrospectives will showcase their achievements.  

Program information:

Nagisa Oshima, Yoshishige Yoshida, and Masahiro Shinoda Retrospective

For more than four decades, Wiseman has used a lightweight 16mm camera and portable sound equipment to study human behavior in all its contradictory and unpredictable manifestations, particularly in institutional or regimented situations where authority creates an imbalance of power, or where democracy is at work. Like the great novelists of the 19th century, Wiseman combines epic narrative with intimate portraiture. His films comprise a grand panorama of American life (and more recently, the cultural life of Paris)-a kind of modern-day comédie humaine that, quite astonishingly, never loses its vitality or its currency. And though Wiseman approaches his subjects-doctors, ballet dancers, soldiers, students, welfare recipients, factory workers, fashion models, zookeepers, victims of domestic violence, Benedictine monks, the terminally ill-with a minimum of intrusion or influence, he brings a sensitive but trustworthy eye, a lawyer's penetrating skepticism, and the dramatic impulses of a storyteller to arrive at what Eugène Ionesco, one of his favorite playwrights, called an "imaginative truth." All films are directed, edited, and produced by Wiseman and from the U.S.

Featured Works:

To celebrate the recent acquisition of newly struck prints of 36 films by Frederick Wiseman (b. 1930, Boston), the Museum of Modern Art presents a comprehensive retrospective of the director's work. Featuring three to four films each month, this yearlong survey opens with Basic Training (1971, pictured), followed by a conversation with Wiseman and curator Josh Siegel, and spans his entire career, from Titicut Follies (1967) to his two most recent projects, La Danse-The Paris Opera Ballet (2009) and Boxing Gym (2010).  

Program information:

Frederick Wiseman

The films of Rithy Panh center on life in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia and the struggle to reconcile the country's traumatic history with contemporary urban and rural experiences. Panh and his family experienced the mass evacuation of Phnom Penh in 1975, witnessing family members die from exhaustion and starvation in a remote Cambodian labour camp before fleeing to a refugee camp in Thailand. Working across documentary and dramatic features, Panh's filmmaking practice explores individual and collective stories that give an emotional and material texture to the history and experiences of the Cambodian people. Panh migrated to France and in his early 20s and studied filmmaking at the prestigious Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies) in Paris. He returned to Cambodia in 1990 and established Bophana: Audio Visual Resource Centre in Phnom Penh, which aims to preserve and develop Cambodia's film, photography, and audio heritage.

Featured Works:

Site 2 aux abords des frontières (Rithy Panh, 1989); Neak Sre (Rithy Panh, 1994); Bophana: une tragédie cambodgienne (Rithy Panh, 1996); Un soir après la guerre (Rithy Panh, 1998); La Terre des âmes errantes (Rithy Panh, 1999); Les Gens d'Angkor (Rithy Panh, 2003); S-21, la machine de mort Khmère rouge (Rithy Panh, 2003); Les Artistes du Théâtre Brûlé (Rithy Panh, 2005); Le papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise (Rithy Panh, 2007); Un barrage contre le Pacifique (Rithy Panh, 2008, pictured)  

Program information:

Rithy Panh

Gene Siskel Film Center offer a series of 14 programs entitled Inside Hollywood, with weekly lecture/discussions by Virginia Wright Wexman, Professor Emerita of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of numerous writings on cinema including A History of Film. This film/lecture series will look at the history of the Hollywood studio system from all angles, uncovering the forces that shape movies from behind the scenes, including cutthroat business practices, financial desperation, technological upheaval, labor strife, sex and censorship, political pressure, and more recent factors such as digital technology, marketing blitzes, and globalization.

Featured Works:

Queen Kelly (Erich von Stroheim, 1929); American Madness (Frank Capra, 1932); 42^nd St. (Lloyd Bacon, 1933); Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933); A Star Is Born (William A. Wellman, 1937); Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950); Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952); On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954); River of No Return (Otto Preminger, 1954); Nickelodeon (Peter Bogdanovich, 1976, pictured); The Player (Robert Altman, 1992); Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000); Timecode (Mike Figgis, 2000) 

Program information: 

Inside Hollywood

The towering figure of John Ford (1894-1973) casts a long and irrefutable shadow across the history of the American cinema. Yet the breadth and measure of Ford's major contributions to the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema, and to film language in general, remains somewhat difficult to discern-obscured both by the sheer magnitude of his incredibly prolific 60-year career and by the persistent image of Ford, fixed late in his career, as an anachronous and often cantankerous artist clinging stubbornly to the Western genre. Rarely recognized in full are Ford's great achievements as a consummate visual stylist and master storyteller. Crafted in close collaboration with many of the greatest cinematographers of the studio era-William Clothier, Bert Glennon, and Gregg Toland among them-and channeling European and especially American painterly traditions, Ford's cinema is aesthetically sophisticated and varied. Beginning with the moody Expressionism of his late silent and '30s films, Ford's oeuvre underwent a series of rich stylistic transformations, giving way to the expressive realism of his '40s work that, in turn, gradually shifted to the stark classicism of his late films in the 1950s and 1960s. Echoing the notable stylistic diversity of Ford's cinema is the equally impressive range of genres in which he successfully worked, over and beyond the Westerns for which he is still best known. Between the extraordinarily prolific years of 1926 to 1945, it must be noted, Ford actually directed only one Western, Stagecoach (1939). Ford's career is, in fact, distinguished by his singular, often quite idiosyncratic, approaches to popular genres-the brisk adventure narratives of The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936) and Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), the leisurely paced small-town comedies Steamboat Round the Bend (1933) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953), the erotically charged safari-romance Mogambo (1953), the deeply melancholy films of war, like The Long Voyage Home (1940) and Rio Grande (1950)-more concerned with the ritualized quotidian spaces between the battles than the fighting itself. Ford's interpretative approach to genre filmmaking informs his eventual return to his earliest roots as a director of Westerns and the series of ruminative and increasingly mournful Westerns that began with My Darling Clementine (1946) and led to his dark masterpiece, The Searchers (1956).

Ford's incredibly unflagging talents and rare ability to harness the complex studio apparatus to make genuine works of art eventually drew the attention of critics, historians and critics-turned-filmmakers Lindsay Anderson and Peter Bogdanovich. Ford was, in fact, among the very first Hollywood directors to be recognized as an auteur whose films shared a vivid personal signature and concern for certain dominant themes. One of the most important overriding themes of Ford's cinema is American history and, more specifically, the shaping forces and strong-willed individuals who have defined the U.S. as a nation and an idea. Ford's lifelong fascination with such legendary figures from American history as Wyatt Earp and Abraham Lincoln drew his films frequently back into the distant past to explore the myths and legends firmly rooted in both the popular imagination and official history. Intermingled with Ford's concern for the myths of history-or perhaps, one could say, the history of myths-is his deep and abiding love of the West as the cradle of American civilization and as a potent quintessence of the American psyche. Ford's cinema offers one of the most important and sustained mediations on the West in American popular culture. In such works as My Darling Clementine, Wagon Master, Fort Apache and The Searchers, the distinct landscapes and culture of the late 19th century West-including the Native Americans who figure increasingly prominently in Ford's late work-are given such vivid shape that they remain among the most influential and lasting representations of this absolutely formative period in our nation's history.

This multi-part retrospective begins with an expanded selection of Ford's most enduring works, including a number of lesser known major films-Mogambo, Prisoner of Shark Island, Wagon Master-and featuring visits from distinguished experts on Ford's cinema Tom Doherty and Tom Conley.

Featured Works:

The Iron Horse (John Ford, 1924); Air Mail (John Ford, 1932); Steamboat Round the Bend (John Ford, 1935); The Informer (John Ford, 1935);  The Prisoner of Shark Island (John Ford, 1936); Drums Along the Mohawk (John Ford, 1939); Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939, pictured); Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford; 1939); The Long Voyage Home (John Ford, 1940); The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940); How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941); My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946); The Fugitive (John Ford, 1947); Fort Apache (John ford, 1948); 3 Godfathers (John Ford, 1949); She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford, 1949); Rio Grande (John Ford, 1950); Wagon Master (John Ford, 1950);  The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952); Mogambo (John Ford, 1953); The Sun Shines Bright (John Ford, 1953);  The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)

Program information:

Classic Ford: A John Ford Retrospective, Part I

The cycle examines the character of the father in film, sometimes a role-model and a protector, sometimes a violent, quiet, absent, or destructive person. With the ongoing radical transformations of the traditional image of the family, fatherhood is undergoing serious changes, inseparable from the redefinition of manhood.

Featured Works:

Various themes: the patriarch, the evil father, how to become a father.

Program information:

Cycle: Fatherhood

Featured Works:

The Discipline of D.E. (Gus Van Sant, 1982); Mala Noche (Gus Van Sant, 1985); Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969); My New Friend (Gus Van Sant, 1987); Five Ways to Kill Yourself (Gus Van Sant, 1987); Ken Death Gets Out of Jail (Gus Van Sant, 1987); Drugstore Cowboy (Gus Van Sant, 1989); The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949); Paris, je t'aime (Gus Van Sant, segment "Le Marais", 2006); Chacun son cinéma (Gus Van Sant, segment "First Kiss", 2007); My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991); Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965); Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Gus Van Sant, 1993); Lonesome Cowboys (Andy Warhol, 1968); To Die For (Gus Van Sant, 1995); Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1997); The Last of England (Derek Jarman, 1988); The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939); Finding Forrester (Gus Van Sant, 2000); Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960); Psycho (Gus Van Sant, 1998); Werckmeister harmóniák (Béla Tarr, 2000); Gerry (Gus Van Sant, 2002); La Cicatrice intérieure (Philippe Garrel, 1972); D'Est (Chantal Akerman, 1993); Elephant (Alan Clarke, 1989); Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003, pictured); Last Days (Gus Van Sant, 2005); Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995); Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972); Wassup Rockers (Larry Clark, 2005); 8 (Gus Van Sant, segment "Mansion on the Hill", 2008); Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, 2007); The Times of Harvey Milk (Robert Epstein, 1984); Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008)

Program information:

The Universe of Gus Van Sant   

Born in Tehran, Bahman Farmanara is one of the founding figures of the Iranian New Wave of the 1970s. As well as being an acclaimed director, he is an influential screenwriter, producer, and distributor who is responsible for bringing many key international films to our shores. During his stay as the JBFC International Filmmaker-in-Residence, he will present six of his own works and a selection of documentaries about his homeland.

Featured Works:

Prince Ehtejab (Bahman Farmanara, 1974); Tall Shadows of the Wind (Bahman Farmanara, 1979); Saffron (Ebrahim Mokhtari, 1992); Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine (Bahman Farmanara, 2000); Zinat, One Special Day (Ebrahim Mokhtari, 2000); A House Built on Water (Bahman Farmanara, 2002); The River Still Has Fish (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, 2002); A Little Kiss (Bahman Farmanara, 2005, pictured); Earthbound (Bahman Farmanara, 2008); Statues of Tehran (Bahman Kiarostami, 2008); We Are Half a Nation (Rakhshan Bani-E'temad, 2009)  

Program information:

Bahman Farmanara and Iran

This cycle, which should have been titled "Howard Hawks and Eric Rohmer," was curated before the news of the death of Rohmer. This unfortunate event forced the Cinemateca Uruguaya to slightly change the approach and emphasis of the program, but the central idea remained the same: to draw a parallel between Howard Hawks and Eric Rohmer, to detect the influences that the American filmmaker drew from the European, and to explain the persistent admiration shown by Rohmer for the author of Red River and Rio Bravo. When Hawks' last film premiered in Paris in 1959, the then film critic Rohmer was the only writer from the Cahiers du Cinéma who awarded the film five asterisks, the maximum score. He also said (and continued to claim repeatedly): "Someone who does not like Hawks does not like cinema."

Featured Works:

Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938); Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939); His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940); Red River (Howard Hawks, 1947); Monkey Business (Howard Hawks, 1952); Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959, pictured); Ma nuit chez Maud (Eric Rohmer, 1969); Le Beau marriage (Eric Rohmer, 1982); Pauline à la plage (1983); L'Ami de mon amie (Eric Rohmer, 1987); Conte de printemps (Eric Rohmer, 1990); Conte d'hiver (Eric Rohmer, 1992); Cinéma, de notre temps ("Eric Rohmer, Preuves à l'appui", André S. Labarthe and Jean Douchet, 1994); Conte d'été (Eric Rohmer; 1996); Conte d'automne (Eric Rohmer, 1998); L'Anglaise et le duc (Eric Rohmer, 2001); Triple agent (Eric Rohmer, 2004)

Program information:

Eric and Howard: A Tribute to Rohmer

An infinitely enigmatic and profound gaze. Strategic charms, looks as a weapon. A body language explicitly seductive, simultaneously a caricature and a perpetuation of the feminine mystique. What is the modern sphinx after? Would she rather be a perverse and perfidious praying mantis than a supporting role? V as in Vampire. V as in Vengeance. The Cinematek introduces 20 or so femmes fatales, sex symbols of silent films.

Featured Works:

More than 20 films  

Program information:  

Vamp Fatale

The Cinémathèque presents a series of films set in the Antiquity: Homerian adventures, tragedies, and contemporary transposition of Racine, Hölderlin, or Kleist. The films adaptations are diverse: sometimes they are very faithful to the original text, sometimes they pastiche it, or make it more modern.

Featured Works:

More than 20 films           

Program information:

Greek Dramas

Sergei Paradjanov's extraordinary career was a game of two halves. We could label them "pre-Tarkovsky" and "post-Tarkovsky." For his first 10 years as a director (1954-64), he tried to meet the demands of his communist masters with a string of folksy, politically correct movies, most of them with a strong musical element. They were full of signs of distinctive talent, however constrained. But toward the end of that period he saw Tarkovsky's debut feature Ivan's Childhood-and realised that his natural instinct to break the rules could be set free.

In 1964 he made the world-conquering Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors and after that he never looked back, not even during the five years he spent in prison for various ‘crimes' or during the 16 years when he wasn't allowed to direct at all. A smuggled print of his banned masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates, widely shown to promote the international campaign for his release from a labor camp, cemented his reputation as one of the masters of modern cinema. But he completed only two more features before his death from cancer at the age of 66.

Paradjanov was a child of the Caucasus, born to Armenian parents in Georgia, and the roots of his dissidence lay in his sense that his region had a cultural-historical identity very different from Mother Russia's. His last three features, set in Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan respectively, amount to a Caucasus trilogy that explores, celebrates and, crucially, interprets the region's Christian and Muslim cultures. In this, he was guided by the example of the Ukrainian Alexander Dovzhenko, under whose aegis he'd become a director in Kiev. His dissidence had another important root in his 'deviant' sexuality: he first served time for a homosexual act (with a KGB officer!) in 1948, and his later work boldly flaunts his bisexuality.

Paradjanov was certainly indebted to Dovzhenko and Tarkovsky for setting precedents, but his art was individual and unique. A lover of color, icons, and Pasolini's films, he turned his back on "socialist realism" to produce gorgeous filmic tapestries with tableau compositions, exquisite costumes, and brilliant choreography. This first-ever chance to scan his career in its entirety shows his steady progress toward the sublime.

Featured Works:

Andriesh (Sergei Parajanov, 1954); The First Lad (Sergei Parajanov, 1959); Ukrainian Rhapsody (Sergei Parajanov, 1961); Flower on the Stone (Sergei Parajanov, 1962); Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (Sergei Parajanov, 1964); The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov, 1968, pictured); The Legend of Suram Fortress (Sergei Parajanov, 1984); Ashik Kerib (Sergei Parajanov, 1988); I Died in Childhood (Georgy Paradjanov, 2004)

Program information: 

Sergei Paradjanov

Examining the complex and magical relationship between still and moving images, this series reflects on films structured around the still photograph and how they address the perception of time and memory, and the nature of cinema.

Featured Works:

Including work by Jean Eustache, Hollis Frampton, Dryden Goodwin, Chris Marker, Nagisa Oshima, Sean Snyder, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, and many more. An associated conference will relate photofilms to the wider discourses on stillness and movement in contemporary culture.

Program information:

PhotoFilm

Jia Zhangke (b. 1970, Fenyang, Shanxi, China) has emerged as the leading figure of the sixth generation of Chinese filmmakers and one of international cinema's most celebrated artists. Merging gritty realism with elegance and originality, he tackles contemporary subject matter in both documentary and fiction projects-and often fuses the two approaches to great effect. In little more than a decade he has created a body of work that reflects the enormous changes of the past fifty years of Chinese society. Much admired by critics and an inspiration to fellow filmmakers, Jia has developed an original, ever-evolving style marked by fluid camera movement and a porous, symbiotic relationship between the real and the imagined. His films-characterized by their plainspoken directness and postmodern aesthetic and peopled with amateurs as well as professional actors-illuminate the transformations taking place in China's environment, architecture, and society by placing everyday people in the midst of a landscape in turmoil. Aiming to restore the concrete memory of place and to evoke individual history in a rapidly modernizing society, the filmmaker recovers the immediate past in order to imagine the future. His films reflect reality truthfully, while simultaneously using fantasy and a distinct aesthetic to pose existential questions about life and status in a society in flux. Through rigorous specificity, his art attains universal scope and appeal.

Featured Works:

Spring in a Small Town (Xiao Cheng Zhi Chun, Fei Mu, 1948); Xiao Shan Going Home (Xiao Shan Hui Jia, Jia Zhangke, 1995); Pickpocket (Xiao Wu, Jia Zhangke, 1997); Platform (Zhan Tai, Jia Zhangke, 2000); In Public (Gong Gong Chang Suo, Jia Zhangke, 2001); The Condition of Dogs (Gou De Zhuang Kuang, Jia Zhangke, 2001); Unknown Pleasures (Ren Xiao Yao, Jia Zhangke, 2002); The World (Shi Jie, Jia Zhangke, 2004, pictured); East (Dong, Jia Zhangke, 2006); Still Life (San Xia Hao Ren, Jia Zhangke, 2006); Useless (Wu Yong, Jia Zhangke, 2007); 24 City (Er Shi Si Cheng Ji, Jia Zhangke, 2008); Black Breakfast (Jia Zhangke, 2008); Cry Me a River (He Shang De Ai Qing, Jia Zhangke, 2008)  

Program information:

Jia Zhangke: A Retrospective

To propose a "different" history of German cinema is by necessity experimental. The revisionist attempt at hand treats existing traditions as a kind of quarry and abandons any hope of proposing a rounded whole. Germany in the Night, on the one hand, challenges the German film canon which (in spite of several important rediscoveries), has become even more sedentary during the last decade. On the other hand, the fragile, ambiguous images of history that appear in many films of the retrospective may also serve as a modest antidote to the myth-making prevalent in German television and cinema today. Critical memory vs. somnambulant conformity; unfettered gestures of cinematic thoughtfulness and presence vs. the self-assured "know-it-all" position toward history as embodied by German blockbusters such as Downfall or The Baader Meinhof Complex.

German cinema: a nocturne, a passage through gray areas and various states that were all Germany: the Weimar Republic, the "Third Reich," the Federal Republic of Germany, the GDR. A cozy feeling of home cannot take hold, rather there is a sense of alienation or an increasingly obsessive longing. The tangled threads brought together in this program may perhaps join up in the ever-present anxiety and failure of reconciliation also felt by Heinrich Heine, exiled in Paris: "Should I think of Germany at night / it puts all thought of sleep to flight."

Established masters such as Fritz Lang or F.W. Murnau, and icons of the New German Cinema such as Fassbinder, Kluge, Herzog, and Schroeter have as much vested in this restlessness as those flickering figures that each succeeding generation discovers anew, and often returns to oblivion: Phil Jutzi, Frank Wysbar, Peter Pewas, or Roland Klick. Those who returned from exile after the war-Peter Lorre, John Brahm, or Robert Siodmak-as well as the foreigners who worked in Germany during the seventies and eighties, such as Sohrab Shahid Saless or Želimir Žilnik. Those, whose radical view of Germany came ‘from the outside' (such as Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet) and those like Herbert Achternbusch, who cast an ‘insider's stare' until their homeland would take notice. The unredeemed families (Veit and Thomas Harlan) and those who counter them-through a belated late remake (Christoph Schlingensief's paraphrase of Opfergang) or through self-reflexive parallel action (Robert Kramer's Unser Nazi, commissioned by Thomas Harlan as a mirror-film to his own Wundkanal). And in between: outsider films made by well-known directors, such as Helmut Käutner's Schwarzer Kies (1961), which drew the collective hatred of film critics at the time, and whose "moment" only arrived 40 years later.

Featured Works:

In an analogue to Romuald Karmakar's oeuvre, the program devotes as much space to documentary and essay films as to narrative cinema. Two key films from East and West Germany about the reality of genocide will be presented, films with a ‘canonical' reputation but hardly seen: Eberhard Fechner's Der Prozess (1975-84) and Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann's Der lachende Mann (1966). Germany at Night unearths small treasures of left-wing Weimar film culture (by Albrecht Viktor Blum and Ella Bergmann-Michel) and brings to light works which were actively suppressed at the time of their completion, such as Thomas Heise's Volkpolizei (1985) or Želimir Žilniks Öffentliche Hinrichtung (1979) by Klaus Volkenborn, Johann Feindt and Karl Siebig. This film examines two parallel German lives: that of a Nazi general who continued in his job during the democratic era and a communist bricklayer who could hardly make ends meet after the war. Both had fought in the Spanish Civil War, but their stories can't be merged; the audience gazes into a wound that will not heal. (1974). The program also pays tribute to another key document: Unversöhnliche Erinnerungen

Some of the works selected are direct references to Romuald Karmakar: Peter Lorre's Der Verlorene and Fassbinder's Händler der vier Jahreszeiten are among his favorite films; Siodmak's Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam and Utopia by Sohrab Shahid Saless were studied by Karmakar and his creative team during preparation for Der Totmacher and Ramses. In other cases the relationships are more speculative: nothing in Karmakar's work indicates an interest in Georg Büchner, yet watching his films, the poor soldier Woyzeck might appear as a distant relative. Groups and couples of films-such as the two selected Woyzeck films-structure the selection, and sometimes the associations reveal an entire network. The volcano at the end of Achternbusch's Das letze Loch leads perhaps to Hölderlin's Tod des Empedokles as adapted by Straub/Huillet; Hölderlin and Straub, in turn, might lead to Christian Geissler, one of the great forgotten figures of German literature, and to his teleplay Wilhelmsburger Freitag, directed by Egon Monk in 1964: one day in the life of a couple, with a radical ending-a strange mirror of Karmakar's Die Nacht singt ihre Lieder.

This program is designed in a fragmentary manner-no monuments shall be erected. It is more about process, dialogue, questions than any definitive answers. It intends to evoke the rich culture that German cinema represented once upon a time, including all the personalities that did not quite "fit in" (or fit too well). A few shards of this culture are gathered here.  

Program information:

Germany in the Night. A Film History

An immensely important development in the history of the documentary film took place here in New York between the years 1931 and 1942. During that period, through the work of a large group of radical filmmakers, the modern documentary was born. In the hands of the members of the Workers Film and Photo League, then Nykino, and later, Frontier Films, the social documentary grew to its first maturity. Among the members of that group of filmmakers, Leo Hurwitz stands out, both for his films and his leadership. His film Native Land, photographed by Paul Strand, is finally being recognized as the crowning work in the early period of the American documentary. Along with other important documentary makers, such as Strand, Willard Van Dyke, Ralph Steiner, Sidney Meyers, and even Elia Kazan, Hurwitz pioneered the creation of a new documentary narrative form. These filmmakers-along with those they trained-prepared the way first for the television documentary and then for the rebirth of American non-fiction filmmaking in the 1960s and 70s. Ironically, due to their left-wing politics and the Red-Scare persecutions of the 1950s, the work of these artists and their important place in film has been virtually written out of most academic histories of the documentary. Centering on the films of Leo Hurwitz, whose work was perhaps the most influential of this group of filmmakers, our retrospective will trace the production of the New York Documentary School from its beginnings in the early 1930s, through the flourishing of the political documentary in the early 1940s. It will continue with Hurwitz's films during the drought of the repressive 1950s, his influence on the beginnings of cinéma vérité, and his profound, masterful, and always original later work.

Featured Works:

A Bronx Morning (Jay Leyda, 1931); The National Hunger March (Leo Hurwitz, 1931); Workers Newsreel Unemployment Special (Leo Hurwitz, 1931); America Today and the World in Review (Leo Hurwitz, 1932-34); Bonus March (Leo Hurwitz, 1932); Detroit Workers News Special (Leo Hurwitz, 1932); Hunger: The National Hunger March to Washington (Leo Hurwitz, 1932); Pie in the Sky (Ralph Steiner, 1935); The Plow That Broke the Plains (Pare Lorentz, 1936); The Wave (Paul Strand & Fred Zinnemann, 1936); China Strikes Back (Harry Dunham, 1937); Heart of Spain (Leo Hurwitz & Paul Strand, 1937); People of the Cumberland (Sidney Meyers & Jay Leyda, 1938); The City (Ralph Steiner & Willard Van Dyke, 1939); Valley Town (Willard Van Dyke, 1940); Native Land (Leo Hurwitz & Paul Strand, 1942, pictured); The Bridge (Willard Van Dyke & Ben Maddow, 1944); Strange Victory (Leo Hurwitz, 1948); Emergency Ward (Leo Hurwitz & Fons Iannelli, 1952); The Young Fighter (Leo Hurwitz, 1953); Toby and the Tall Corn (Ricky Leacock, 1953); Jazz Dance (Roger Tilton, 1954); The Museum and the Fury (Leo Hurwitz, 1956); Here at the Water's Edge (Leo Hurwitz & Charles Pratt, 1962); An Essay on Death: A Memorial to John F. Kennedy (Leo Hurwitz, 1964); In Search of Hart Crane (Leo Hurwitz, 1966); The Sun and Richard Lippold (Leo Hurwitz, 1966); Journey into a Painting (Leo Hurwitz & Peggy Lawson, 1970); Light and the City (Leo Hurwitz & Peggy Lawson, 1970); The Island (Leo Hurwitz & Peggy Lawson, 1970); Dialogue with a Woman Departed (Leo Hurwitz, 1980)

Program information:

Leo Hurwitz and the New York School of Documentary Film

Discover the legendary universe of the studios and the film sets when movie production was still the work of artisans. Paris, Berlin, and Hollywood were the three major capitals for cinema and it wasn't unusual to have filmmakers travel from one country to the other to shoot, or even to emigrate. Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Robert Siodmak, and more made that choice, sometimes stopping in Paris before going to Hollywood. From silent films to the talkies, these photographs show us the magic of filmmaking in process and what happens behind the screen. The technology evolved but the mystery of the film sets remained intact.

Featured Works:

69 films and 200 photographs  

Program information:  

On the Film Sets: Paris-Berlin-Hollywood, 1910-1939

The prototype for the handsome, brooding leading man later embodied by James Dean and Marlon Brando. Montgomery Clift's sensitive and soulful screen persona redefined masculinity in the 1950s and brought method acting into vogue. Though his tragic career-marked by a disfiguring car accident, struggle with alcoholism, and untimely death at age 45-has become the stuff of Hollywood legend, Clift's stunningly modern, emotionally layered performances only resonate more with time.

Featured Works:

Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948); The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949); The Big Lift (George Seaton, 1950); A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951); From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953); I Confess (Alfred Hitchcock, 1953); Lonelyhearts (Vincent J. Donehue, 1958); The Young Lions (Edward Dmytryk, 1958); Suddenly, Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959); Wild River (Elia Kazan, 1960); The Misfits (John Huston, 1961, pictured); Freud (John Huston, 1962)

Program information: 

That's Montgomery Clift, Honey!

Melancholy is not an emotion that we usually associate with comedies, at least not in the laugh-a-minute, chortle-every-10-seconds type of movies that most audiences have come to expect from the genre. It takes a rare type of film artist to discover the almost inexpressible wistful sadness and small sense of loss behind the laughter and triumphs of comedic characters. Such an artist is the Scottish writer and director Bill Forsyth, whose sublime brand of filmmaking will be on display in the Dryden during March and April, when we present the first complete North American retrospective of his features. Forsyth will join us in person for screenings of his lovely movies, Local Hero and Housekeeping.

Beginning his career in documentaries, Forsyth made his feature debut in 1980 with a low-budget comedy about a group of Glaswegian teenagers (played by members of Glasgow Youth Theatre) who relieve their boredom by stealing sinks and plumbing supplies. The four main actors in That Sinking Feeling (which wasn't released in the U.S. until 1984) were all cast in Forsyth's sophomore effort, Gregory's Girl, the story of a teenage boy's fixation on the first female member of his school's soccer team. These decidedly quirky first two features are youth comedies populated by unusually wise, even philosophical, youngsters, who make the bittersweet discovery that you can't always get what you want.

The international success of Gregory's Girl paved the way for Forsyth's next-and best-loved-movie, Local Hero. Though produced with support from Warner Bros. and starring two American actors (Peter Riegert and Burt Lancaster), Local Hero is remembered today for its unique Scottish-ness and a subtle but ahead-of-its-time message on protecting our natural environment (it's Al Gore's favorite movie). Like Mac, the humbled oil executive hero of Local Hero, radio d.j. Dicky Bird in Comfort and Joy is another foiled romantic who finds himself embroiled in a misadventure; specifically, a war between Glasgow ice cream vendors.

When the producer of Local Hero, David Putnam, was briefly named head of Columbia Pictures, he provided Forsyth the opportunity to make his first American movie. The result was the haunting and criminally neglected masterpiece Housekeeping, starring Christine Lahti as the eccentric guardian of two orphaned girls. Forsyth completed two more wonderful and underseen comedies in the U.S., Breaking In, starring Burt Reynolds and Casey Siemaszko as a professional burglar and his inexperienced protégé, and Being Human, featuring Robin Williams as five characters (or is it just one?) who learn through 10,000 years of history and heartbreak what it means to be alive.

It's been more than a decade since Forsyth completed his last feature, Gregory's 2Girls, a sequel to one of his earlier successes that returned him to filming in Scotland. His body of work reminds us that there's a lot of comfort and joy and beautiful melancholy to be derived from life's ordinariness. Some might say there's no room for his subtle, quiet style of storytelling in a world dominated by increasingly bombastic popular culture, but seeing these films just might remind you that we need Bill Forsyth now more than ever.

Featured Works:

That Sinking Feeling (Bill Forsyth, 1979); Gregory's Girl (Bill Forsyth, 1981); Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983, pictured); Comfort and Joy (Bill Forsyth, 1984); Housekeeping (Bill Forsyth, 1987); Breaking In (Bill Forsyth, 1989); Being Human (Bill Forsyth, 1994); Gregory's 2Girls (Bill Forsyth, 1999)

Program information:

Comfort and Joy: The Bittersweet Comedies of Bill Forsyth

Takeshi Kitano started as a stand-up comedian, became a politically incorrect TV personality, a film and a TV actor. He is also an intuitive and genius filmmaker who directed sober gangster films (Sonatine, Hana-bi), an adolescent romance (A Scene At the Sea), a comedy obsessed with sex (Getting Any?), a melodramatic tale (Dolls), a sword film (Zatôichi), self-mocking comedies (Kikujirô no natsu, Takeshis'). He is also a painter, novelist, editor, and singer. His double signature, "Beat Takeshi" for TV and comedy and "Takeshi Kitano" for film and serious creation, is not enough to organize his multiple identities. He is the only artist who pushes the limits of experimenting contraries so far and who puts so relentlessly his creation, his image, and his sanity on the line.

Featured Works:

Along with the exhibition "Beat Takeshi Kitano, Gosse de peintre" that the artist conceived for the Fondation Cartier, the Centre Pompidou will screen 40 feature films, films made for TV, and documents: the most complete retrospective to date on Kitano as a director and actor, in his presence.

Program information:

Takeshi Kitano, the iconoclast

Son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean Renoir was born in Paris in 1894 and died a naturalized U.S. citizen in Beverly Hills in 1979. During a career stretching from 1924 to 1970, Renoir directed over 40 films encompassing a wide variety of subjects, a rich body of work that has had an enduring influence on cinema universally and on French directors in particular.  Embraced as the spiritual father of the New Wave by the young Cahiers du cinéma critics turned filmmakers, his voice can be heard in many of that period's most important films, among them Jules and Jim, Stolen Kisses, Pierrot le fou, and Celine and Julie Go Boating.

As a young man in 1920s Paris, Renoir was exposed to the avant-garde films made by artists and inspired by their experiments with the medium. With the coming of sound, a time when most films were dialogue-driven and directors relied on cuts and close-ups to create drama, Renoir was composing long takes that allowed him to reveal his characters through their physical interaction in real time, and to connect them visually to the larger world. A consummate technician, Renoir peppered his work with bravura passages of pure filmmaking, and his films still vibrate with the intensity of the moment.

By the late '30s Renoir had two popular hits, Grand Illusion and La bête humaine, both starring Jean Gabin, and one legendary flop: The Rules of the Game, a film ridiculed by the audience at its Paris opening, cut and recut by the producers, and finally withdrawn from exhibition to remain unseen for 20 years. Despondent over the failure of his most ambitious film and concerned for his safety in Nazi-occupied France, Renoir and his wife, armed with a US visa courtesy of documentarian Robert Flaherty, sailed from Marseille to New York City bound for Hollywood. Under contract to Fox, Renoir overcame the objections of Daryl F. Zanuck and shot Swamp Water on location in Georgia; but despite the film's success, his first studio job made him wary of "the industry." Four more films followed, the most notable being the independently produced The Southerner, which earned Renoir an Oscar nomination for Best Director, but his final endeavor, RKO's The Woman on the Beach, was released in a cut version and failed miserably. Acknowledging that neither his sensibility nor his talent was compatible with the studio system, Renoir opened a third chapter in his career when he travelled to India in 1949 to direct The River. Shot in breathtaking color by his nephew Claude Renoir, this film set the stage for French Cancan, The Golden Coach, and Elena et les hommes, three films that explore the relationship between life and art while demonstrating Renoir's effortless command of cinematic artifice.

An empathy with loners and social misfits, the use of documentary in a fictional film, a preference for naturalism over melodrama, an openness to improvisation by the actors, and a love for the theatrical tradition: are all hallmarks of a Renoir film. Flowing through and uniting all Renoir's films are two branches of one magisterial theme: the struggle for freedom, and the struggle to find one's place in the group. It has been remarked that there are no villains in Renoir, that in the words of Octave/Renoir in The Rules of the Game, "everyone has their reasons." Renoir's genius as a filmmaker and his measure as a man is that he can communicate the joy of living while depicting the forces that threaten it.

Featured Works:

Nana (1926); La Chienne (1931); Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932); Toni (1935); A Day in the Country (1936); Grand Illusion (1937); La Bête humaine (1938); La Marseillaise (1938); The Rules of the Game (1939, pictured); Swamp Water (1941); The Southerner (1945); Diary of a Chambermaid (1946); The Woman on the Beach (1947); The River (1951); The Golden Coach (1952); French Cancan (1954); Elena et les homes (1956); The Testament of Doctor Cordelier (1959); The Elusive Corporal (1962)

Program information:

The Films of Jean Renoir

Of course, he's not Jean Renoir, but even Jean Renoir isn't always Jean Renoir, whereas Julien Duvivier is always Julien Duvivier: a director true to himself, and never the same. He directed only films that didn't reflect each other, so that they didn't reflect him. He was criticized for what was considered a weakness: he stayed away from style in order to explore all of the genres. Diversity was his only rule.

Featured Works:

60 films        

Program information:

Julien Duvivier

Romuald Karmakar, born in 1965, is one of the towering figures produced by the German cinema. His consistently exciting analysis of life in Germany and his formal precision have secured him a unique position in European film. The response to his work in other countries (and in other artistic disciplines) seems to be stronger than at home where the official film industry has remained suspicious of his non-conformism. Karmakar, who spent his school years at the German School in Athens and his military service in the French army, feels more in tune with the exiles and "foreign legionnaires" of German cinema (or with American mavericks like John Cassavetes and Monte Hellman) than with the established film business of the Berlin Republic.

Karmakar's first feature, Eine Freundschaft in Deutschland (1985), starts with a phrase that can be applied to the entirety of his work: "In this film, everything that is documentary is true, and everything that is fiction is not necessarily false." Traditional boundaries between modes of film are less important to him than the passionate quest for repressed or neglected themes-and the development of a sharpened and resistant form. Applying his deep-drill machinery to many sensitive areas, Karmakar has created some of the key films in the last two decades. Das Himmler-Projekt (2000) is a prime example. The actor Manfred Zapatka recites a notorious three-hour speech by Heinrich Himmler, but there is no attempt at historicist "reconstruction". Instead, the audience becomes part of a re-concretization of history-a performative act that places the film squarely in opposition to the prevailing discourse about the Nazi era (as well as the "Bonn Republic" that followed).

Karmakar's early work-Eine Freundschaft in Deutschland (with Karmakar playing Adolf Hitler), or the auto-erotic apotheosis Candy Girl (1984)-already shows a highly independent aesthetic, his main interests at the time being punk music, soccer, and the history of cinema. The following three shorts made his name: Coup de boule, Gallodrome, and Hunde aus Samt und Stahl (1987-89) triggered a very public debate over Karmakar's preference for "intolerable" subjects and characters. With his epic documentary Warheads (1992), this confrontation reached an early climax: For the more pedagogically minded parts of his audience, Karmakar's unbiased portrayal of two soldiers of fortune was hard to accept. The people he films are not "pre-classified" via commentary or written text, and are not relegated to easy moral or political categories. Which is exactly what makes his work so rich: Karmakar forces himself to look at the world with wide-open eyes and allows himself to be led astray-not by evil but by the profusion and the contradictions of lives lived under a different set of ethics.

It is precisely this refusal to prejudge his subjects which also characterizes Karmakar as a fiction filmmaker. The chamber-piece Der Totmacher (1995) about an imprisoned serial killer in the 1920s is emblematic of his work with historical sources-and of his understanding of the actor's role: a probe that can be lowered into the text. Karmakar's ethos of filmic construction makes no distinction between the underlying materials: literary texts are worked through and staged with the same meticulousness as archival documents. Das Frankfurter Kreuz (1998), an adaptation of Jörg Fauser's radio play, and Manila (2000), his masterful collaboration with the writer Bodo Kirchhoff, are equally strong examples. With Manila, Karmakar presents a choral tragicomedy about air travelers in a state of waiting and wasting away-a disturbing cross section of German society at the dawn of the millennium. This was followed by Die Nacht singt ihre Lieder (2004): a dance of death between two people frozen with alienation. Adapted from a play by Jon Fosse, the film represents a high-water mark of Karmakar's lifelong preoccupation with language and/as music.

The Himmler project allowed the director to free himself from the constraints and delays of the film subsidy system: since then, he has almost single-handedly produced a steady series of challenging digital documentaries. Hamburger Lektionen (2006) extends the methods used in the Himmler film: Manfred Zapatka's performance now reveals the deadly rhetoric in the "lectures" of an influential Imam, given in a Hamburg mosque where some of the 9/11 perpetrators-to-be were regular visitors. Land der Vernichtung (2004), which resulted from Karmakar's research for a fiction film about Nazi war crimes, delivers a harrowing essay on memory and its denial-in the year when Downfall made the headlines. In a parallel movement, the director has followed his passion for techno and electronic music, exploring this cinematically uncharted terrain with a groundbreaking trilogy. 196 bpm (2002), Between the Devil and the Wide Blue Sea (2005) and Villalobos (2009) give us a direct and unapologetic representation of how music is produced, performed, and experienced. Like everything in Karmakar's cinema, these films reveal unexpected truths as they listen to a world which might otherwise have remained closed.

The retrospective will be held in cooperation with the Diagonale in Graz, where a selection of Karmakar's work will be presented. Romuald Karmakar and Manfred Zapatka will be guests in Vienna and Graz. They will offer workshops, lectures and introduce films.

Featured Works:

Adelheid und Konrad (1984); Candy Girl (1984); Eine Freundschaft in Deutschland (1985); Coup de boule (1988); Hellman Rider (1988); Der Tyrann von Turin (1989-94/2001); Gallodrome (1989); Hunde aus Samt und Stahl (1989); Sam Shaw on John Cassavetes (1989-93); Warheads (1989-92); München - Berlin - München: Der Filmkritiker Michael Althen (1991); Demontage IX - Unternehmen; Stahlglocke (1992); Infight (1994); Der Totmacher (1995); Das Frankfurter Kreuz (1998); Das Himmler-Projekt (2000); Manila (2000); 196 bpm (2002); Die Nacht von Yokohama (2003); Die Nacht singt ihre Lieder (2004, pictured); Land der Vernichtung (2004); Between the Devil and the Wide Blue Sea (2005); Hamburger Lektionen (2006); Ramses (2009); Villalobos (2009) 

Program information:

Romuald Karmakar

In May, the National Theater is hosting the first part of a trilogy directed by the Groupov entitled Fare Thee Well Tovaritch Homo Sapiens, whose subject-the possible destruction or mutation of our species-is familiar to cinema.

Featured Works:

More than 20 films  

Program information:

Farewell Homo Sapiens

Coinciding with the major exhibition at MAMbo, a complete retrospective of Fellini, the director-magician who gave his films the size of an infinite dream.

Featured Works:

In addition to his work as a filmmaker, the exhibition will present a selection of feature films in which he worked as a designer, writer or actor, an anthology of his interviews and other rare and unreleased footage.  

Program information:

Fellini. From Italy to the Moon

The Orphan Film Symposium will bring together a culturally diverse array of films and artists, professionals, as well as movie lovers of all varieties, from across the globe for its 7th biennial gathering, fittingly titled "Moving Images Around the World." Hosted by New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and its Department of Cinema Studies, the symposium convenes at the newly renovated SVA Theatre at 333 West 23rd Street.

Since its inception at the University of South Carolina in 1999, the Orphan Film Symposium, under the direction of Dan Streible, has become an international summit for those interested in the study, preservation, and exhibition of "orphan films." Narrowly defined, an orphan film is a motion picture abandoned by its owner. More generally, the term refers to all manner of films outside of the commercial mainstream: silent and sponsored films, independent, industrial and avant garde work, home movies, advertisements, and other ephemeral moving images. The films on display are rediscovered gems, orphans that have been adopted and saved from neglect and deterioration.

More than 70 presenters from 16 countries will converge to exhibit 80 works (film, video, and digital) dating from 1894 to 2010. and to address this year's theme of "Moving Images Around the World." Topics to be discussed include: film repatriation; mobility, distribution, and travel; national, regional, local, and transnational cinemas; and neglected archival material that sheds light on international aspects of history and archiving.

Featured Works:

Highlights of "Orphans 7" include:

-Gustav Deutsch's Film ist. a Girl and a Gun (2009), a narrative collage constructed using fragments from several European film archives, as well as the Kinsey Institute

-The premiere of Anthology Film Archives' restoration of the landmark independent documentary The Cry of Jazz (1959), with filmmaker Edward O. Bland

-With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain (1938), the first film by noted photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, presumed lost until recently rediscovered in NYU's Tamiment Library

-From Argentina, film archivist-curators Paula Félix-Didier and Fernando Peña (discoverers of the complete 1927 version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis) unveil previously unseen cinema from the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires

-The premiere of Andy Warhol's Uptight #3-David Susskind (1966), newly preserved by the Museum of Modern Art and the Warhol Museum

-The premiere of a never-released film, The Velvet Underground Rehearses (1965), shot by Danny Williams, a member of Warhol's Factory, shortly before his mysterious disappearance at age 27

-Orson Welles' Sketch Book (1955), a rare program made for British television and housed at the Munich Film Museum

-This year's Helen Hill Award-named in honor of the late animator and Orphan Film Symposium supporter-goes to two independent filmmakers, Danielle Ash and Jodie Mack. Both will present recent works, selected because they uphold the spirit and tradition of Hill's own hand-made films.  

Program information:

Orphan Film Symposium