Tuesday, January 20 at 7pm
Safe – 30th Anniversary Restoration Screening!
Directed by Todd Haynes (U.S., 1995) 119 min. DCP. With Julianne Moore, Peter Friedman, Xander Berkeley.
Before May December (2023), Carol (2015), Far From Heaven (2002), and many other seminal films, Todd Haynes began his artistic partnership with Julianne Moore when he directed Safe, the unnerving story of a woman’s descent into malady that now reverberates uncannily as a tale of two plagues – one that preceded the film (AIDS) and another that came decades later (COVID). Moore gives an astonishing performance as Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife whose affluent environment turns against her in the form of an inexplicable illness. What begins as sudden allergic reactions to everyday chemicals, fragrances and fumes turns increasingly violent, transforming the laminated safety of Carol’s existence into a terror of everyday life. When she is diagnosed with an immunity disorder called “Twentieth Century Disease,” and sets off to New Mexico in search of treatment, Carol’s journey turns inward. And, in the crisis of identity that results, Safe reveals the ways in which disease infests our basic sense of who we are.
“Seductive… Scarily confident, beautifully acted. It will seize any viewer who dares to surrender to its spell. Feel free to laugh or scream.” -Richard Corliss, Time Magazine
Tuesday, January 27 at 7pm
Queen Kelly – New Digital Reconstruction and Restoration!
Directed by Erich von Stroheim (U.S., 1929) 101 min. DCP. With Gloria Swanson, Walter Byron, Seena Owen, Tully Marshall.
It should have been a dream collaboration: a glamorous world-famous movie star (Swanson) and her financier lover (Joseph P. Kennedy) hire the most celebrated director of the time (Erich von Stroheim) to make a groundbreaking independent film. Instead, Queen Kelly was canceled mid-production. The movie was shot in sequence and after filming just a few of the scandalous African sequences, Gloria Swanson, the film’s star and producer, shut it down. This unfinished film — like Erich von Stroheim’s desecrated Greed —became Hollywood legend. Basing his reconstruction on von Stroheim’s original scripts, Dennis Doros, of Milestone Films, has employed multiple techniques to recreate the film’s dénouement.
This “decadent late-silent masterpiece, Erich von Stroheim’s epic unfinished swan song pulls no punches. His characters contend with whippings, suicide, a German East African bordello and more in this story of a prince, the orphan girl he falls in love with, and the mad queen whose jealousy wreaks havoc on everyone involved. The great silent film star Gloria Swanson plays Patricia Kelly, the convent orphan whose life is turned upside down when Prince “Wild” Wolfram (Walter Byron) becomes obsessed with her, angering his betrothed queen” (Film at Lincoln Center).
“This new restoration may just be everything that Swanson dreamed of for her lovechild Queen Kelly” – The Guardian