Retrospectives, Film Series and Outdoor Screenings
TEMPERATURES RISE, leaves appear on once-bare trees and the minds of many New Yorkers turn to the incipient pleasures of summer moviegoing: fireballs, giant tidal waves, surprisingly agile prehistoric beasts. For those with more exotic tastes-or who realize that one Spider-Man is pretty much the same as the next-there is a world of alternative summer offerings on local screens. From retrospectives of cinema auteurs to studies of underappreciated centers of global filmmaking, from overviews of great actors to return engagements of recent films, summer 2004 features something for everyone, presuming that everyone is an obsessive film geek. Aren't they?
In addition to retrospectives of a number of acclaimed filmmakers and a plethora of intriguing series, there's also that New York summer favorite: the outdoor screening. Come the appointed night, thousands of New Yorkers trudge from their offices with a slightly springier step, knowing that there is cinema en plein air to be had. Bryant Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn sponsor outdoor screenings during the summer months, with Bryant Park the most popular (and overcrowded). Your best bet for each is to designate a friend to show up an hour or two early and hold down the fort; otherwise, it may be standing room only.
Bryant Park's Monday-night offerings this year include:
The Thin Man (June 28)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (August 9)
Planet of the Apes (August 16)
The Big Sleep (August 23)
Celebrate Brooklyn!, an arts series running all summer at Prospect Park, includes a number of screenings, such as Buster Keaton's The General (July 15), featuring a new score by the Alloy Orchestra; James Whale's Frankenstein (July 29), with a new score from the BQE Project; and one of the better James Bond films, Thunderball (August 5).
BAMcinematek dedicates June to their annual collaboration with the Village Voice "Best of..." Featuring a pleasing mix of the familiar and obscure, "Best of 2003" provides an opportunity to catch Spellbound (June 15) and Elephant (June 4) if you missed them first time around, or to get a gander of the superb Thai film Blissfully Yours (June 12 & 13), which played to sold-out houses at the Walter Reade early last year. Nicolas Philibert's To Be and To Have (June 6), which got lost in the documentary gold rush of last year, is a gorgeous look at school life in rural France. Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn (June 5), while not up to the level of previous work like The Hole and The River, is a stunningly photographed, mostly dialogue-free evocation of the last screening at a dilapidated Taipei movie theater. Jia Zhangke's Unknown Pleasures (June 8), named for the Joy Division album, is a morose study of disaffected Chinese youth, complete with surprising Pulp Fiction references. Watch for the painfully realistic sequence of a motorcycle unable to climb a small hill-a powerful symbol of the spinning wheels of China's twentysomethings.
In July, BAM brings two retrospectives back for second runs in New York. A series of films by Yasujiro Ozu, without doubt the greatest of the Japanese directors, and a set of works by Rainer Werner Fassbinder are both terrific opportunities to become familiar with two giants of world cinema. Ozu's steady, measured narratives conceal a concern with the powerful engine of societal change. Watch a film like Tokyo Story or Good Morning and see the push and pull between tradition and modernity enacted in the struggle between parents and children. Ozu is primarily understood as a kitchen-sink filmmaker, concerned mainly with familial dynamics, but in engaging with his body of work as a whole, it become clear that Ozu meets the definition of a realist artist in the largest sense: one who documents the changes wrought by encroaching modernity, and whose work serves as a primer on how to live in changing times.
Fassbinder, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Ozu at first glance (conservative, retiring Japanese filmmaker vs. flamboyantly gay, egocentric German), possessed a similar artistic agenda in his short, brilliant career: telling the story of his country's economic miracle of the 1960s and 70s, and its rise from the ashes of World War II defeat. Fassbinder adopted the melodramatic mode as his preferred genre, taking the work of American women's picture master Douglas Sirk as his ur-text. In films like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Fox and His Friends, Fassbinder brought real pathos to the stories of outsiders to narrow-minded German society. Whether woman, gay man or immigrant, Fassbinder remained single-mindedly dedicated to the plight of the outsider. Viewed today, some 20 years after Fassbinder's death, his films have lost little of their vulgarity, their humor or their pungency.
Film Forum dedicates a good chunk of the summer to Ingmar Bergman. The Swedish auteur's aura has dimmed since his 1960s heyday, as his gloomy, psychoanalytic symbolism has lost some of its appeal. Nonetheless, there are many treasures to uncover or rediscover here. If by some bizarre stroke of misfortune you have yet to see The Seventh Seal (June 4 & 5), do yourself a favor and see this maelstrom of dour medieval Christianity.
Running from July 2 to 22 is "Cine Mexico!," a cinematic history of our southern neighbors, running the gamut from Buñuel to Y Tu Mama Tambien director Alfonso Cuaron's first film Love in the Time of Hysteria. Bunuel's classic Los Olvidados will be shown July 9 & 10, complete with its disquieting imagery of maternal sexuality and rotting meat, but for another strong brew of shockingly amoral sensuality and crime, peep the Spanish master's The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (July 21 & 22), in which a half-remembered music-box tune from childhood spurs a respectable burgher toward his true vocation-murder.
Buñuel's Mexican period is often seen as the dull intercession between his phenomenal successes as a silent-era surrealist and as the wise patriarch of world cinema, but seeing Los Olvidados and Archibaldo should go far to dispel this misguided notion. July 22 is an accidental Buñuel doubleheader, with Archibaldo at Film Forum and his first masterpiece Un Chien Andalou playing at Lincoln Center, complete with live accompaniment. Also showing in "Cine Mexico!" is Arturo Ripstein's truly bizarro Hell Without Limits (July 6), starring Roberto Cobo as a drag queen juggling his responsibilities to his art and to his grown daughter, who thoroughly disapproves of his salacious lifestyle.
The Walter Reade begins June with "Open Roads," a series of new Italian films (June 1-10), followed by the annual Human Rights Watch International Film Festival (June 11-24). In past years the Human Rights Watch festival has been overburdened by a focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the exclusion of, I don't know, anything else. This year's series includes the typical array of Jewish-Arab tensions onscreen, including Annemarie Jacir's painfully predictable Like Twenty Impossibles, but it also features a number of highly topical works. Alison Maclean and Tobias Perse's Persons of Interest investigates the fate of post-9/11 detainees, Deadline is an investigative documentary on the fate of Illinois Death Row prisoners, and The Corporation is a satirical look at the multinational, featuring the usual liberal suspects (Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore). Also appealing are retrospectives dedicated to the work of craggy-faced German actor Bruno Ganz, star of Wim Wenders masterworks like Wings of Desire and The American Friend, and French director Maurice Pialat (who died last year), whose Van Gogh is one of the best artist biopics ever made.
Meant to coincide with Film Forum's release of the astonishingly brilliant documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (easily the film of the year to date) on July 28, the American Museum of the Moving Image programs an entire slate of Los Angeles-themed films from July 3 through August 1. See Thom Andersen's stunning movie, packed full of insight into Hollywood, modern architecture, urban life and the relationship between art and life, and then, once you've built up a healthy appetite for the cinematic Los Angeles (trust me, you will), head over to Moving Image.
June at Moving Image is dedicated to Cary Grant, whose centennial is being celebrated this year. Grant was, without doubt, the most charismatic and multi-faceted star in the Hollywood galaxy, and his iconic work with directors Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and George Cukor are marvelous opportunities to see his stellar wit, impressively agile, nervous physical comedy and severely underrated dramatic ability on display. Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, I Was a Male War Bride, Notorious, To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest, The Philadelphia Story, Charade-the list of Grant's best work is a healthy handful of the greatest American films of all time. Among the slightly less well-known fare in the series, be sure to catch Indiscreet (June 26), a wonderfully fizzy romantic comedy with Ingrid Bergman, directed by Stanley Donen.
Rooftop Films, a collective dedicated to "making, watching, and talking about good films in a communal environment," is conducting themed weekly groupings of short films. Screenings take place at Pier 26 in lower Manhattan and the Old American Can Factory in Brooklyn, every Friday night from June 18 to September 3.
The Alliance Française at Florence Gould Hall is running a two-month series on the films of director Alain Corneau (Tous les Matins du Monde, Le Choix des Armes ). On July 15, they premiere Intimate Strangers, a new work by director Patrice Leconte (Ridicule, The Widow of St. Pierre).