Wednesday, August 28 at 7pm
Shallow Hal
Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly(2001, U.S.) 114 min. 35MM. With Gwyneth Paltrow and Jack Black.
Nearly a quarter of a century since its release , the Farrelly brothers’ romantic comedy “has retained a revealing currency. It has expanded its reach through streaming services, where it is popular and even beloved. And it speaks to a culture that still interprets fatness as a condition that deserves whatever mockery it might get” (The Atlantic). Directors of one of the biggest popular hits of the 90s (There’s Something About Mary), the Farrellys excel at humor so puerile that some can’t decide whether it really is (or should be) hilarious – indeed, its tastelessness begs the question of whether it is still daring (for better or for worse). As for Shallow Hal, “the most shocking thing about it may be its unabashed sincerity. There are enough moments of demented comedy to make you aspirate your popcorn, but by the end you may find yourself, with some amazement, sniffing back tears” (A.O. Scott, The New York Times).
Wednesday, September 4th at 7pm
STELLA DALLAS – New Print!
King Vidor (U.S. 1937) 105 min. 35MM. With Barbara Stanwyck, John Boles, Anne Shirley.
In Stella Dallas, Barbara Stanwyck created one of the most indelible heroines of Hollywood’s Golden Age: a rough-around-the-edges millworker’s daughter who, even after she schemes her way up a peg on the social ladder, can’t quite shake her working-class ways as she does whatever it takes to give her daughter (Shirley) a better life. This is 100-proof melodrama in its purest, most undistilled form, ruthlessly wringing pathos from its nerve-touching themes of class, motherhood, and self-sacrifice. Through it all, Stanwyck is a miracle, pouring every ounce of Brooklyn brass and just-below-the-surface vulnerability she’s got into the endearingly crude Stella, before going in for the kill with the titanic heartbreak of the impossible-to-forget ending (Film at Lincoln Center program notes). New print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
Wednesday, September 11th at 7pm
GASLIGHT
George Cukor (U.S. 1944) 114 min. 35MM. With Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten.
A young opera singer haunted by the memory of her aunt’s murder marries a handsome pianist and settles down in her relative’s long-abandoned, overstuffed London mansion, where footsteps echo in the attic, gaslights dim, and secrets come to light… George Cukor’s celebrated noir-melodrama is a deeply ambiguous study of psychological abuse, anchored by a terrific cast (including an 18-year-old Angela Lansbury in her first film role) and suffused with a sense of creeping dread. At its famous last-act reversal of power, Gaslight transforms from a masterful woman-in-trouble melodrama into something much more haunting: a reflection on the origins of emotional violence, marked by a rare degree of sympathy for the abuser as well as the abused (Film at Lincoln Center program notes).
Wednesday, September 25th at 7pm
SORRY, WRONG NUMBER
Anatole Litvak (U.S. 1948) 90 min. 35MM. With Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster, Ann Richards.
Heiress Leona Stevenson (Stanwyck), bedridden by psychosomatic symptoms, hears through crossed telephone wires of a murder being planned. She tries to alert the police, to no avail, and grows frantic as she gradually realizes she is the intended victim. Stanwyck gives a tour de force, Oscar-nominated performance in this engrossing and densely layered extension of Lucile Flectcher’s legendary 22-minute radio drama. Too often dismissed as a gimmicky “women’s picture,” the film is a pitch-black noir, tracking an ill-fated romance that spirals into bitterness, deceit, and death. Featuring Burt Lancaster in one of his earliest roles, mesmerizing direction by Anatole Litvak, and astoundingly atmospheric camerawork by the great Sol Polito. Famous … yet still underrated (Music Box notes). Presented in 35mm courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Wednesday, October 9th at 7pm
THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH
Billy Wilder (U.S. 1945) 105 min. DCP. With Marilyn Monroe, Tom Ewell, Evelyn Keyes.
With the dog days already melting the asphalt, Tom Ewell packs the wife and kid off to Maine, while he holds the fort in sweltering NYC to work at his publishing job, turning literary classics into vintagely lurid 25-cent paperbacks. But when the summer widower’s next project, “Repressed Urges in the Middle-Aged Male,” coincides with the arrival of a new upstairs neighbor — TV toothpaste pitchwoman and “art” photo model Marilyn Monroe (!) — it’s time to scratch that old “seven year itch.” If Rachmaninoff doesn’t do the trick (“That’s classical music, isn’t it?” she asks. “I can tell because there are no vocals”), at least there’s the thrill of watching her cool off over a subway grate on a sultry summer night. And when klutzy would-be Casanova Ewell confesses “Nothing like this ever happened to me in all my life, Marilyn ingenuously replies, “That’s funny. Happens to me all the time.” This Eisenhower era sex comedy is the apotheosis of Marilyn Monroe, and, in her white-dressed pose above the subway, not only her own most iconic moment, but one of the most enduring images in movie history (adapted from Film Forum notes).
Wednesday, October 23rd 7pm
A Sixth Part of the World
Dziga Vertov (U.S.S.R. 1926) 60 min. Silent.
When the Soviet Union’s State Trading Organization commissioned Vertov to make a promotional film about its operations, he dispatched expeditions of cameramen to points as distant as the Russian Far East and Western Europe. Vertov crafted from his material a Walt Whitmanesque ode to the diversity of his country, a development of his theory of Kino-Pravda (film truth) and a poetic visualization of the revolutionary filmmaker’s quest for a cinema that was at once a “Communist decoding of world relations,” and the means of establishing “a visual bond between the workers of the whole world”. Presented in connection with the Bucknell Humanities Center themed programming, “Narrating Russia’s Empires: Eurasian Resistance/s.”
Wednesday, November 6th 7pm
Fuses
Carolee Schneemann (U.S. 1967) 30 min. 16MM.
In the midst of developing my kinetic theater works, I began an erotic film, Fuses (1965), because no one else had dealt with the image of lovemakmg as a core of spontaneous gesture and movement. I hesitated to suddenly teach myself a complex and demand medium, but I was compelled to make this film myself, much as I had been compelled as a painter to increasingly incorporate dimensional materials: to structure found film footage and slides, to compose sounds, design electronic systems, and to train performers for my theater and environmental pieces.
Stan Brakhage’s birth film of his first child, Window Water Baby Moving, was made with and of his wife, Jane. Still, it was a masculine authentication of the primal act-of-life unique to women, the result of our underlying sexual realities, which remained closeted: a dark genital mystery instead of the luminous center of our life expression.
Fuses was made as an homage to a relationship of ten years—to a man with whom I lived and worked as an equal. We are perceived through the eyes of our cat. By visualizing the cat’s point of view I was able to present our coupled images in the contexts of the rectangles and the seasons surrounding us. I also wanted to transmit fragments of a present to future time—in which the nature of the film would be constantly reappraised.
I did the filming even while I was participant in the action. There were no aspects of lovemaking which I would avoid; as a painter I had never accepted the visual and tactile taboos concerning specific parts of the body. And as a painter I was free to examine the celluloid itself: burning, baking, cutting, and painting it, dipping my footage in acid, and building dense layers of collage and complex A- and B-rolls held together with paper clips. I filmed over a period of three years using borrowed, wind-up Bolexes.
There is precise cutting between close-ups of the female and male genitals. I wanted viewers to confront identifications and attitudes toward their own and the other’s gender. Perhaps because it was made of her own life by a woman, Fuses is both a sensuous and equitable interchange; neither lover is “subject” or “object.”
After one of the first screenings of Fuses, a young woman thanked me for the film. She said she had never looked at her own genitals, never seen another woman’s, that Fuses let her feel her own sexual curiosity as something natural, and that she now thought she might begin to experience her own psychical integrity in ways she had longed for. That was in 1967. (Adapted from the filmmaker’s 1971 notes about he film).
Wednesday, November 13 7pm
Deep Throat
Gerard Damiano (U.S. 1972) 62 min. DCP. With Linda Lovelace, Carol Connors, Harry Reems.
“It was only with the explosion of hardcore features preceding and following Deep Throat that pornography became available to mixed audiences in public movie theaters. And not until the summer of 1973 did I see real unsimulated sex acts on a movie screen. Now that moving-image pornography is familiar fare on the smaller screens of computers and televisions viewed primarily in the home, it is hard to understand the impact of mass American culture’s first encounter with graphic sex in movies. To do so we have to again recognize, as with Thomas Edison’s projection of the first screen kiss, the power of big-screen magnification before a public audience. […] Deep Throat is about Linda (played by Linda Lovelace, originally Linda Boreman), an ordinary young woman with wholesome – not what would later become known as stereotypically pornographic – good looks. She is a typical product of the 1960s sexual revolution. She considers sexual pleasure important to her self-fulfillment, but has missed out so far. […] After experimenting with a number of men to no avail, she goes to a doctor (Harry Reams) who informs her that her clitoris is deep in her throat (one early possible title for the film was The Sword Swallower). Deep-throat fellatio is the ‘cure’ immediately performed on the doctor. Putting aside the many analyses that have been subsequently spun around this film, my own included, what I most remember about this screening was what most people remember about pornography when they first see it in a social group: how much we laughed. It would be a mistake to underestimate the function of this film’s sophomoric brand of humor in making feature-length, publicly screened pornography palatable to its initial audience. The film reassured us with the option of laughing rather than panting; or, if we did pant, the laughter helped disguise it. […] The very title Deep Throat, even before its Watergate resonance, added a sense of mystery and sophistication that lifted the film out of the Times Square circuit into a brief era of porno chic. Deep Throat would prove to be the largest-grossing independent film of all time.” – Linda Williams, Screening Sex, Duke University Press, Durham-London 2008
Wednesday, December 4 7pm
Two Weeks in Another Town
Vincente Minnelli (U.S. 1962) 107 min. 35MM. With Kirk Douglas, Cyd Charisse and Edward G. Robinson.
On the advice of his psychiatrist, actor Jack Andrus (Douglas) leaves the sanitarium he’s called home since a career-ending breakdown to accept a part in the troubled Italian production of the egoist director (Robinson) who once betrayed him. It’s a journey from asylum to madhouse. Minnelli’s final collaboration with producer John Houseman, the film proved controversial from first draft to final cut. Minnelli was pleased to be shooting in Rome and hoped that his vision of a group of starlets, neurotics and petulant celebrities in marital, psychological, financial and aesthetic crisis might be a fitting American counterpart to Fellini and Antonioni. The film climaxes with Minnelli’s version of La Dolce Vita’s jet-setting orgy, although much of the sequence was cut by MGM. Regardless, the film is perhaps Minnelli’s most underappreciated, a searing portrait of the old Hollywood order in the throes of collapse (Harvard Film Aachive Notes).