Monday, January 22 at 7pm
Public Enemies
Michael Mann (U.S. 2009) 160 min. DCP. With Christian Bale, Johnny Depp, Christian Stolte.
Mann takes the possibilities of digital moviemaking to breathtaking new heights in this white-hot gangster saga about a federal lawman (Bale)’s pursuit of notorious bank robber John Dillinger (a devastatingly cool Depp). Moody, hyper-real imagery, and a painstaking recreation of Depression-era America, Public Enemies is Dillinger’s short, violent ride with his lover (Marion Cotillard) to nowhere. Comic book pulp elevated to visual poetry (BAMcinématek Program Notes).
Monday, January 29 at 7pm
Racetrack
Directed by Frederick Wiseman (U.S. 1985) 114 min. 16MM.
Our annual Wiseman film from the legendary documentarian is about the Belmont Race Track, one of the world’s leading race tracks for thoroughbred racing. Everyday occurrences are shown: in the backstretch — the grooming, feeding, shoeing, and caring for horses and the preparation for races; at the practice track the various aspects of training, exercising, and timing the horses; at the paddock — the pre-race presentation of the horses; and in the grandstand — betting and watching the races. Always thorough, ever fascinated by labor, Wiseman shows the variety of work done by trainers, jockeys, jockey agents, grooms, hot walkers, stable hands, and veterinarians.
“Beginning with the birth of a thoroughbred and running through to the conclusion of the 1981 Belmont Stakes in which Summing upset heavily-favored Pleasant Colony, Racetrack makes all other movies about horse races, including the few cute ones look like a ride on a cute little merry-go-round.” – Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune
Monday, February 5 at 7pm
NED RIFLE
Hal Hartley (U.S. 2014) 85 min. DCP. With Liam Aiken, Martin Donovan, Aubrey Plaza, Parker Posey, Thomas Jay Ryan, James Urbaniak.
Proto-indie filmmaker Hal Hartley announced his arrival in 1989, when The Unbelievable Truth outlined his singular blend of humor, attitude and a formal rigor that has been compared to Jean Luc-Godard. A decade later came Henry Fool (1997), one of the director’s most well known films, and the first in what came to be known as “The Grim Trilogy.” In the closing chapter about the fractured Grim family’s misadventures, young son Ned (Aiken) embarks on a quest to kill his father for wrecking his mom’s life. But a winsome graduate student (a Parks and Recreation-era Aubrey Plaza) interferes with his plan…
Monday, February 12 at 7pm
THE GIRL FROM CHICAGO
Oscar Micheaux (U.S. 1932) 70 min. With Carl Mahon, Starr Calloway, Alice B. Russell.
A pioneer of African-American cinema, Oscar Micheaux directed many “race films,” produced outside the Hollywood system, against all odds, in the first decades of the 20th century. These films had all black casts and were made for black audiences. The Girl From Chicago is a remake of Micheaux’s now-lost 1926 silent film The Spider’s Web, another of Micheaux’s explorations of the cultural rift between the urban and the rural, it is set in both Harlem and Batesburg, Mississippi. As had become his forte, Micheaux punctuates dramatic scenes with musical numbers, set both in domestic parlors and the lively “The Radium Club.”
PLAYING WITH
BLOOD BELOW THE SKIN
Jennifer Reeder (Canada 2015) 33 min. With Kelsey Ashby-Middleton, Morgan S. Reesh, Marissa Castillo.
Jennifer Reeder ‘s innovative films constructs personal fiction films about relationships, trauma, and coping, building narratives from a range of forms, including after-school specials, amateur music videos, and magical realism. Here, the countdown to prom night is actually a countdown to irreversible change for three girls. While two of them fall in love with each other against all expectations, the third is forced to mother her own mother in the wake of her father’s disappearance.
Monday, February 19 at 7pm
INTERLUDE – Rare Technicolor Print!
Douglas Sirk (U.S. 1957) 90 min. 35MM. With June Allyson, Rossano Brazzi, Marianne Koch.
The aptly titled infidelity drama Interlude failed to receive its fair due. Were it to become readily available, New York Times critic Richard Brody commented, “(it) would quickly be catapulted into the canonical orbit.” Shot with a methodical suppleness in lavishly mirror-filled decors, the rosily transcontinental affair is based on John M. Stahl’s romantic drama When Tomorrow Comes, loosely borrowing from John M. Cain’s 1951 novel The Root of His Evil. Sirk’s Cinemascope reworking is premised on young Philadelphia native Helen Banning (a breathily dignified Allyson), who moves to Munich for a new job as a librarian at the America House, and begins a romantic relationship with renowned symphony conductor Tonio Fisher (a prideful, brooding Brazzi). Little does she know that Tonio is married to the estranged, mentally ill Reni (Koch in a classically tortured avatar). Scored ornately by Frank Skinner, the film has also been read as a World War II allegory of US–Germany relations. Akin to Yash Chopra’s Silsila, Sirk’s overlooked romance echoes its thematic crux in a searing dialogue: “It’s horrible what happens when you want something too much.” (TIFF Bell Lightbox program notes). Print courtesy of Chicago Film Society collection at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center.
Monday, February 26 at 7pm
CONTACT
Robert Zemeckis (U.S. 1997) 150 min. 35MM. With Jodi Foster, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Skerritt.
In this spiritual sci-fi Jodie Foster plays an extraterrestrial-obsessed scientist, an atheist who believes wholeheartedly in the inherent value of research even when it doesn’t glean profit or power. The film circles the drain of wonderment and the follies of human exceptionalism by following her team as they work tirelessly to maintain funding from the powers that be to execute their mission of discovery. One of Zemeckis’ most angered and starry-eyed outings, Contact takes square aim at the absurd hypocrisies embedded within American politics and its undying devotion to the ruthless Military Industrial Complex. Using Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s story as a jumping off point, Zemeckis crafted a film so ruthlessly critical of the current hegemonic overlords that the Military stepped in to demand certain excisions… Perhaps because the filmmaking on display was of a truly astonishing level, the seething critiques scattered throughout the film rarely get discussed, instead bowing to the wonderment of the journey to the stars that did or didn’t happen (adapted from Music Box program notes).
Monday, March 4 at 7pm
YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE
Lynne Ramsay (UK/France 2017) 89 min. DCP. With Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alex Manette.
Scottish auteur Lynne Ramsay roared back into the spotlight with the release of her first feature in six years, the thriller You Were Never Really Here. Joaquin Phoenix plays a hitman dealing with PTSD and his own death drive as he undertakes a dangerous mission to rescue a kidnapped girl. With daring editing and her typically intricate sound design (including a bravura Jonny Greenwood score), Ramsay crafts a gut-punching spectacle that doubles as a psychic X-ray of a scarred mind. Hallucinatory and raw, this was one of the most distinctive films of 2017. (Adapted from BAM notes.)
Monday, March 18 at 7pm
THE DEVIL, PROBABLY
Robert Bresson (France 1977) 93 min. 35MM. With Antoine Monnier, Tina Irissari, Henri de Maublanc. French with English subtitles.
“Constructed as a flashback from news reports of a young man’s suspicious suicide, Robert Bresson’s splenetic 1977 drama puts the post-1968 world on trial and judges it unlivable. Charles (Monnier), a quietly imperious sensualist of blazing intelligence, lives idly in a bare garret and does little but brazenly chase women. Essaying the gamut of modern pursuits — politics, religion, education, drugs, psychoanalysis — he finds them all pointless, and his despair is deepened by atrocious documentary footage of dire pollution that he watches at the home of the writer and environmentalist Michel (Henri de Maublanc), whose girlfriend he steals. Bresson’s chilling visions of daily life—including a brilliant sequence aboard a bus that depicts the mechanical world as a horror—suggest its hostility to the passions of youth. The film, however, offers a near-parody of the tamped-down spiritual universe of Bresson’s earlier work: these children of the revolution tremble with uncertainty, and their loose gestures and shambling ways conflict with his precise images. Both the world and Bresson’s cinema are in disarray, and the signs of his inner conflict are deeply troubling and tremendously moving.” – Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Monday, March 25 at 7pm
BRIGADOON
Vincente Minnelli (U.S. 1955) 108 min. 35MM. With Gene Kelly, Van Johnson, Cyd Charisse, Barry Jones.
Vincente Minnelli’s fame is grounded in the numerous musicals he directed, many of which are celebrated as milestones in the history of the genre. Brigadoon is one such highlight, an “exercise in reality abandonment, [wherein] the hero slips into a fantastical dream world (here, a mythical Scottish village) to the music of Lerner & Loewe” (i-Italy). Expressively shot in Technicolor, Brigadoon finds two Americans, a wistful Gene Kelly and his pragmatic friend, Van Johnson, wandering through the Scottish hills when they discover a charmed village. Cyd Charisse lives there, a local lass with a dream of her own…
Monday, April 1 at 7pm
THE SWAMP
Lucretia Martel (Argentina 2001) 103 min. 35MM. With Martín Adjemián, Diego Baenas, Leonora Balcarce. Spanish with English subtitles.
The release of Lucrecia Martel’s The Swamp (La Ciénaga) heralded the arrival of an astonishingly vital and original voice in Argentine cinema. With a radical and disturbing take on narrative, beautiful cinematography, and a highly sophisticated use of on- and offscreen sound, Martel turns her tale of a dissolute bourgeois extended family, whiling away the hours of one sweaty, sticky summer, into a cinematic marvel. This visceral take on class, nature, sexuality, and the ways that political turmoil and social stagnation can manifest in human relationships is a drama of extraordinary tactility, and one of the great contemporary film debuts.
Monday, April 8 at 7pm
PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE
Paul Thomas Anderson (U.S. 2002) 96 min. 35MM. With Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Fueled by a baroque-futurist score by Jon Brion, the Cannes-award-winning Punch-Drunk Love channels the spirit of classic Hollywood and the whimsy of Jacques Tati into an idiosyncratic ode to the delirium of new romance. [Per Roger Ebert,] “Punch-Drunk Love is above all a portrait of a personality type. Barry Egan [Sandler] has been damaged, perhaps beyond repair… The film is exhilarating to watch because Sandler, liberated from the constraints of [predictable comedy] formula, reveals unexpected depths as an actor. Watching this film, you can imagine him in Dennis Hopper roles. He has darkness, obsession and power. His world is hedged around with mystery and challenge” (The Grand Illusion Cinema notes).
Monday, April 15 at 7pm
TWENTYNINE PALMS
Bruno Dumont (France/Germany/U.S. 2003) 119 min. With Yekaterina Golubeva, David Wissak. In French and English with English subtitles.
An American and his French-speaking Russian girlfriend wander through the Southwest (including a strikingly photographed Joshua Tree National Park), fornicating more than talking. Dumont has called this an “experimental horror film,” and he sets a tense mood through long, atmospheric sequences in which the couple drive through the desert, leading up to an eventual explosion of underlying violence. With this minimalist exercise, Dumont extends the European-director-in-America tradition of such films as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. (Harvard Film Archive notes).
“My thinking was that today’s spectator is so well-versed in film language that all theories about suspense, as argued by Dreyer and Hitchcock, on what makes you scared in cinema, can be ditched. It’s the spectator, finally, who’s going to construct the menace and the fear. In Twentynine Palms, because supposedly nothing is happening, it’s impossible, something has to happen. What I discovered during the editing was that a dramatic tension emerged [between the scenes] that hadn’t been there during the shooting.” – Bruno Dumont
Monday, April 22 at 7pm
GRAND ILLUSION
Jean Renoir (France 1937) 114 min. 35mm. With Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay, Erich von Stroheim, Marcel Dalio. French with English subtitles.
One of the very first prison escape movies, Renoir’s anti-war masterpiece was partly inspired by stories of the air ace who saved the director’s life during the Great War. A celebration of the brotherhood of man, across class and frontiers, as well a kind of elegy for an international aristocracy, the film stars Gabin and Fresnay as French soldiers held in a World War I German prison camp, and Erich von Stroheim as the unforgettable Captain von Rauffenstein.
Monday, April 29 at 7pm
Student Film Showcase!
Join us for the spring unveiling of a new batch of short films made by Bucknell students. World premieres for these young artists, these films convey the anxiety, humor and joy of living in the 21st century.