Tuesday, August 27th at 7pm
HIGH AND LOW
Akira Kurosawa (Japan 1963) 143 min. 35MM. With Toshirō Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Kyōko Kagawa. In Japanese with English subtitles.
Toshiro Mifune is unforgettable as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy industrialist whose family becomes the target of a cold-blooded kidnapper in High and Low (Tengoku to jigoku), the highly influential domestic drama and police procedural from director Akira Kurosawa. Adapting Ed McBain’s American pulp crime novel King’s Ransom, Kurosawa moves effortlessly from compelling race-against-time thriller to exacting social commentary, creating a diabolical treatise on contemporary Japanese society.
4K digital restoration by University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and The Film Foundation from the original negatives, funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Additional support provided by Peter Conheim, Cinema Preservation Alliance; courtesy Milestone Films and Kino Lorber.
“A thriller flush with needle-spiking tensions and bullet-train exhilarations… The existing literature is rich with praise for High and Low’s screw-tightening first hour, as Gondo, a group of zealous cops, and Kurosawa’s anamorphic lens remain locked in the mansion’s living room, fielding the kidnapper’s phoned-in demands. It’s an astonishing episode, built on elaborate permutations of group- and individual-formation, mixing two-shots and seven-shots into icy cameos and exponentially enervated group portraits. But once it shifts into its investigatory second hour, the film’s true flowers unfold… “ – Chuck Stephens, Criterion Current
Tuesday, September 3rd at 7pm
WATERMELON MAN – New Restoration!
Melvin Van Peebles (U.S. 1970) 97 min. DCP. With Godfrey Cambridge, Estelle Parson, Howard Caine.
Per Melvin Donaldson, in his book Black Directors in Hollywood, “it may be difficult to measure the extent to which Melvin Van Peebles shaped Black filmmaking, and perhaps even more difficult to assess to what degree Van Peebles has inspired African American artists in general… At the very least, Van Peebles represents a pioneering independent vision that forced Hollywood studios to be aware of a new approach to the cinematic renditions of African Americans.” Watermelon Man, the director’s second feature, is “a subversive lampoon of race relations starring prominent Black comedian Godfrey Cambridge. Cambridge—initially in whiteface!—plays bigoted insurance salesman Jeff Gerber, married to the more liberal Althea (Parson). When Gerber wakes up one morning and discovers, to his horror, that he has inexplicably become a Black man, it upends his world—and, ultimately, transforms his politics. Van Peebles’s provocative romp, all bright colors and broad comedy, offers a biting satire of White racism while pursuing, with relish, themes of Black empowerment and radicalization” (The Cinematheque, Vancouver). Presented in connection with the class Blaxploitation N the ‘Hood, and introduced by Jaye Austin Williams, Professor of Performance Studies, Critical Black Studies, and Theatre & Dance.
“A cunning subversion of Hollywood and television conventions … A truly remarkable film, whose major themes—White privilege, Black subjectivity, liberal White racism—feel just as relevant today as they did in 1970.”
– Racquel Gates, Film Quarterly
Tuesday, September 10th at 7pm
THE SETTLERS – Conversation with the Director!
Felipe Gálvez (Chile & Argentina, 2023) 100 min. DCP. With Alfredo Castro, Mark Stanley, Benjamin Westfall. Spanish with English subtitles.
Writer-director Felipe Gálvez emerged as a startling new voice in Latin American cinema with this searing revisionist western, which was an official selection at the Cannes Film Festival. Capturing majestic landscapes with a painterly eye, Chile’s official Oscar entry is a singularly immersive reckoning with national myth-making and its attendant violence. Presented in connection with the following courses: Inventing the Global South (taught by Bret Leraul), Memory, Camera, Human Rights (taught by Fernando Blanco), Introduction to Sociology (taught by Apollonya Porcelli), and Racism(s) Across the Americas (taught by David Rojas). Sponsored by the Bucknell Humanities Center. The pre-film virtual conversation with the director will be led by Comparative & Digital Humanities Professor Bret Leraul.
“Gálvez’s work here is by turns blunt and subtle, and very assured… As the camera sticks close to its [young, sharp-shooting mestizo], a question mark of a character and uneasy moral compass, the story progresses elliptically with pockets of quiet, naturalistic dialogue and a sense of mounting outrage.” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
Tuesday, September 17th at 7pm
THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES
Sergei Parajanov (Soviet Union, 1969) 78 min. DCP. With Sofiko Chiaureli, Melkon Alekian, Vilen Galustian, Georgi Gegechkori. Armenian with English subtitles.
A breathtaking fusion of poetry, ethnography, and cinema, Sergei Parajanov’s masterwork overflows with unforgettable images and sounds. In a series of tableaux that blend the tactile with the abstract, The Color of Pomegranates revives the splendors of Armenian culture through the story of the eighteenth-century troubadour Sayat-Nova, charting his intellectual, artistic, and spiritual growth through iconographic compositions rather than traditional narrative. The film’s tapestry of folklore and metaphor departed from the realism that dominated the Soviet cinema of its era, leading authorities to block its distribution, with rare underground screenings presenting it in a restructured form. This edition features the cut closest to Parajanov’s original vision, in a restoration that brings new life to one of cinema’s most enigmatic meditations on art and beauty. Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and the Cineteca di Bologna, in association with the National Cinema Centre of Armenia and Gosfilmofond of Russia, and funded by the Material World Charitable Foundation. Presented in connection with the Bucknell Humanities Center themed programming, “Narrating Russia’s Empires: Eurasian Resistance/s.” Introduction and an after-film Q&A moderated by professors Zukhra Kasimova (History), Lenora Murphy (Russian Studies), and Amanda Wooden (Environmental Studies & Sciences).
“When the film first appeared in the West, few outside the Soviet Union had heard of its subject, so we had to take on trust that the vivid visuals bore some relation to the verse. But now that translations of some of Sayat-Nova’s lyrics are readily available, it has become clear that daggers, silks and brocades, and wandering in sackcloth and ashes are indeed the stuff of his love poetry. What Parajanov did was to stylize the poet’s world, literally visualizing his imagery, radically simplifying the story of his life, and totally dispensing with any framing or narration. In some ways, this approach could be compared with that of Ken Russell’s astonishing television arts documentaries of the sixties… But in Parajanov’s hands, the effect was as rich and strange as any film by Kenneth Anger or Derek Jarman. ” – Ian Christie, Criterion Current
Tuesday, September 24th at 7pm
JAPANESE PAPER FILMS – Special Presentation with Live Musical Accompaniment!
On the heels of his sold-out program at New York City’s venerable Light Industry, film scholar and Bucknell Film/Media Studies professor Eric Faden will present his latest archival research, a remarkable rescue and resuscitation of otherwise hidden and endangered Japanese cinema.
In the 1930s, several Japanese companies produced films made on paper (called kami firumu, 紙フィルム) instead of celluloid. The films were often in color and some films had synchronized sound tracks on 78 rpm records. Given the short period of production, the varying paper quality, and WWII’s devastation, very few paper film prints survive. Those prints that do survive are too fragile to play on their original projectors and thus, most films haven’t been seen in over 85 years. The Japanese Paper Film Project started at Bucknell University in 2019 and is dedicated to preserving the surviving films.
Our program this evening features a wide-ranging collection of these digitized Japanese paper films: documentary, abridged versions of live-action Japanese and international feature films (some now lost), plus lots of anime. Animated paper films give us a peek into the origins of contemporary anime, with films that celebrate various historical and fictional samurais, rōnin, and ninjas. Several popular 1930s manga characters—Norakuro and Sutakora Sacchan, amongst others—also appear in paper films. Here, long before Miyazaki, we find fairy tales about Shinto gods and mythological creatures.
The screening, a little over an hour in length, will include both silent and sound paper films, with each piece running 1-4 minutes. For those films without a soundtrack, Duo Yumeno (Yoko Reikano Kimura on koto and Hikaru Tamaki on cello) will provide live musical accompaniment.
“There is something uncanny about watching the visibly worn sprocket holes, abstract dirt marks and stains, and folded creases that appear and disappear on the paper as the animations play. Rather than distract from the content, they magnify the sense that the paper itself is coming to life as it rapidly changes on-screen right before viewers’ eyes; meanwhile, the printed characters in the images seem not to take any notice of what mortality surrounds them. Whether or not the moving content appears realistically ‘alive,’ it’s impossible to ignore that the material plane very much is—and decaying—as captured in the Kyōrinrin recordings. These Japanese paper films are stark reminders of cinema’s material history, and how that history is being brought into the present for the sake of the future. ” – Shelby Shaw, Screen Slate
Tuesday, October 1st at 7pm
SEVEN SAMURAI – 70th Anniversary Restoration!
Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1954) 207 min. DCP. With Toshirō Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Daisuke Katō, Isao Kimura, Minoru Chiaki, Seiji Miyaguchi, Yoshio Inaba. Japanese with English subtitles.
One of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, Seven Samurai tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to protect them from invading bandits. This three-hour ride from Akira Kurosawa — featuring legendary actors Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura — seamlessly weaves philosophy and entertainment, delicate human emotions and relentless action, into a rich, evocative, and unforgettable tale of courage and hope.
“The finest Japanese film ever made.” – Donald Richie