
Wednesday, February 5 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 12 at 7pm
GEORGE WASHINGTON
Directed by David Gordon Green (U.S. 2000) 90 min. 35MM. With Candace Evanofski, Curtis Cotton III, Donald Holden.
Over the course of one hot summer, a group of children in the decaying rural South must confront a tangle of difficult choices. An ambitiously constructed, elegantly photographed meditation on adolescence, the first full-length film by director David Gordon Green features remarkable performances from an award-winning ensemble cast. George Washington is a startling and distinct work of contemporary American independent cinema.

Wednesday, February 26 at 7pm
IVAN THE TERRIBLE, Part 1
Sergei Eisenstein (USSR 1944) 103 min. 35MM. With Nikolai Cherkasov, Ludmila Tselikovskaya, Mikhail Zharov. Russian with English subtitles.
Navigating the deadly waters of Stalinist politics, Eisenstein was able to film two parts of his planned trilogy about the troubled sixteenth-century tsar who united Russia. Visually stunning and powerfully acted, Ivan the Terrible charts the rise to power and descent into terror of this veritable dictator. Though pleased with the first installment, Stalin detected the portrait in the second film, with its summary executions and secret police, and promptly banned it.

Wednesday, March 5 at 7pm
Breaking Away
Peter Yates (U.S. 1979) 101 min. DCP. With Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern.
Both a coming of age drama and a bicycle race thriller, Breaking Away was a touchstone for many young Americans in the 80s, and its endearing appeal persists. In a 2011 reappraisal, written in the wake of the death of the film’s director Pete Yates, NPR writer Linda Holmes, describes the movie as “a sweet, smart, enormously warm comedy” that is “also a very thoughtful story about social class… But the way the movie handles cycling, which isn’t one of cinema’s more heavily covered sports, introduces another entire dimension and transforms Breaking Away from a nice character piece to a literally breathtaking story – as in, ‘at times, one stops breathing.’”