Wednesday, January 21 at 7pm
Ali: Fear Eats The Soul
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany 1973) 93 min. 35mm. With Brigitte Mira, El Hedi Ben Salem, Irm Hermann. German with English subtitles.
The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmaker’s 1955 All That Heaven Allows. A lonely widow (Mira) meets a much younger Arab worker (El Hedi ben Salem) in a bar during a rainstorm. They fall in love, to their own surprise—and to the outright shock of their families, colleagues, and drinking buddies. In Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder expertly wields the emotional power of classic Hollywood melodrama to expose the racial tensions underlying contemporary German culture.
“The entire movie is constructed, both formally and in its content, around looking. The amazing thing that this does in the movie is that it freezes both parties — the looker and the lookee — in the look and it sets them in these very rigid positions that [Fassbinder] uses both dramatically and aesthetically.”
— Todd Haynes, Criterion interview
Wednesday, January 28 at 7pm
Stella Dallas
King Vidor (U.S. 1937) 105 min. DCP 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).
Wednesday, February 4 at 7pm
IT
Directed by Clarence Badger (U.S. 1927) 72 min. 35MM. With Clara Bow, Antonio Moreno, William Austin, Jacqueline Gadsdon, Gary Cooper.
In her most famous role, Clara Bow stars as a feisty shopgirl with a certain irresistible sex appeal, who falls for – and schemes to capture – her new boss, wealthy department store owner Cyrus Waltham. This effervescent rags-to-riches romance was inspired by a story by Elinor Glyn, who uses the simple pronoun to encapsulate the spirit of the sexually-liberated youth of Prohibition-era America.
Playing with One Week (Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline, U.S. 23 min. 1920, DCP restoration!). Described by Keaton as “only one third as shocking” as Elinor Glyn’s torrid best-seller Three Weeks, Buster and his bride struggle to construct a pre-fab house from purposefully scrambled instructions. Buster’s directorial debut!
Wednesday, February 11 at 7pm
Young Törless
Directed by Volker Schlöndorff (West Germany/France 1966) 87 min. With Matthieu Carrière, Bernd Tischer, Marian Seidowski. German with English subtitles.
At an Austrian boys’ boarding school in the early 1900s, shy, intelligent Törless observes the sadistic behavior of his fellow students, doing nothing to help a victimized classmate—until the torture goes too far. Adapted from Robert Musil’s acclaimed novel, Young Törless launched the New German Cinema movement and garnered the 1966 Cannes Film Festival International Critics’ Prize for first-time director Volker Schlöndorff.
Wednesday, February 18 at 7pm
Blackmail
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock (UK 1929) 85 min. With Anny Ondra, John Longden, Sara Allgood.
From the Master of Suspense, the legendary director of Notorious, Lifeboat, North by Northwest and Psycho comes this thriller about a woman fighting off a sleazy blackmailer. Blackmail was only his second foray into the suspense genre, made and released in both silent and talkie versions.
Wednesday, February 25 at 7pm
Baby Face
Directed by Alfred E. Green (U.S. 1933) 76 min. 35MM. With Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, Donald Cook, Alphonse Ethier.
Perhaps the most notorious pre-Code Hollywood film, Baby Face features Barbara Stanwyck as Lily Powers, a working-class woman who uses men and sex in exchange for material gain during the height of the Depression. Conceived as a feminine equivalent to Warner Bros.’ male gangster, Lily refused to be a victim of her fate and instead fights for her economic survival. Stanwyck’s Warners contract gave her story approval, and she and then-Vice President of Production at Warner Bros., Darryl Zanuck, developed the sex-for-power scenario together in a story conference. Suppressed by the Production Code Administration after 1933, Baby Face was largely unseen until 2004, when the Library of Congress discovered an uncensored print (UCLA notes). 35mm print courtesy Library of Congress.
Wednesday, March 4 at 7pm
Fitzcarraldo
Directed by Werner Herzog (West Germany 1982) 158 min. DCP. With Klaus Kinski, Claudia Cardinale.
Werner Herzog’s infamously arduous productions were already legendary when he outdid himself with Fitzcarraldo, a feat as utterly quixotic and improbable as its protagonist. Klaus Kinski stars as the wild-eyed turn-of-the-century Irishman Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald who, before he can realize his dream of building an opera house in the Peruvian jungle, must complete an equally monumental undertaking: hauling an enormous riverboat across a mountain, a spectacle achieved by Herzog and his crew not with models and special effects but through sheer Herculean will. Graced with images of breathtaking poetic beauty, Fitzcarraldo stands as a monument to the audacity of uncompromising artistic vision.
“One of the great visions of the cinema, and one of the great follies. One would not have been possible without the other.” – Roger Ebert
Wednesday, March 18 at 7pm
The Tingler
Directed by William Castle (U.S. 1959) 82 min. DCP. With Vincent Price, Judith Evelyn, Darryl Hickman.
American director and producer William Castle charmed Hollywood horror audiences throughout the ’50s and ’60s with fun, kitschy delights. The Tingler, his best known film, returned to cinemas in recent years, after the celebration of its 60th anniversary. Castle showed true ’50s showmanship, with purpose-built gimmicks that turned every trip to the cinema into an interactive experience, from dangling skeletons and ghost-viewing glasses to actors planted among audiences, ready to cause a stir…