The Criterion Collection

With digital projection replacing film prints in first-run movie theaters, the landscape of repertory programming is inevitably changing as well. As a way of acknowledging this shift, and of demonstrating the format to the uninitiated (and the unpersuaded), New York’s Film Forum is launching a series this week called This Is DCP. It is a seven-day run of classic titles shown as Digital Cinema Packages: files made from scans of original negatives at a rate so extraordinarily high that the vivid results bear comparison to, and many believe exceed, photochemically produced 35 mm film prints. To present the case for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Film Forum has invited Grover Crisp, executive vice president of asset management, film restoration, and digital mastering at Sony Pictures Entertainment, to conduct side-by-side demonstration of a 35 mm print and a DCP before the screenings (March 3 and 4 ), and to participate in Q&As afterward. A couple of Criterion favorites will also be showcased in the series: Bob Rafelson’s paragon of seventies American existentialism Five Easy Pieces (March 3 and 4) and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s visually revelatory dance extravaganza The Red Shoes (March 6).

Another special event in New York this week is a day with the great Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman at the Museum of the Moving Image. The director, who is in the city this year for a teaching residency at the City University of New York, will be on hand for screenings of two of her films, including the 2000 adaptation of Proust’s The Captive and her poetic 1977 essay film News from Home, in which the director reads aloud letters from her mother in Europe over images of a desolate and alienating Manhattan, where she lives. This uniquely personal film is available in Eclipse Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies. And another admired director making a personal appearance this week is Whit Stillman, who’ll be at the Indiana University Cinema in Bloomington for a lecture and for screenings of his films Metropolitan (March 2) and The Last Days of Disco (March 3).

Other Criterion Collection directors are getting their due as well in the next week at theaters across the U.S. Ingmar Bergman selections show up at the Trylon in Minneapolis, with The Seventh Seal (March 2–4), and at the Aero Theatre in Los Angeles, with a trio of films all starring the late Erland Josephson: Cries and Whispers (March 2), Autumn Sonata (March 2), and Fanny and Alexander (March 4), plus Wild Strawberries (March 8). Playtime, directed by Jacques Tati and featuring his charmingly bumbling alter ego M. Hulot, turns up at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art (March 2), the AFI Silver in Silver Spring, Maryland (March 3 and 4), and the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, New York (March 7). Doc Filmsc in Chicago continues its tribute to Wes Anderson with screenings of The Darjeeling Limited (March 2 and 4), while one of his influences, Hal Ashby, gets a shout-out at the Sunshine Cinema in New York with midnight-movie showings of Harold and Maude (March 2 and 3). Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts shows its Michelangelo Antonioni love with a weekend of Red Desert (March 2–4). The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., continues its series of Robert Bresson films with Pickpocket (March 3), and also features, on March 4, Hollis Frampton’s perhaps most famous work, (nostalgia), which will be available in Criterion’s upcoming set A Hollis Frampton Odyssey, as part of a program of films about the photographic image.

Omaha’s Film Streams looks forward to spring with Kon Ichikawa’s cherry-blossom-strewn The Makioka Sisters (March 3, 4, and 8). The Des Moines Arts Center hits the road with Federico Fellini’s La strada (March 4). If you’re in Ann Arbor, the Maysleses’ Gimme Shelter is just a shot away, at the Michigan Theater (March 5). Ithaca, New York’s Cornell Cinema just wants to make you smile with Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (March 7). Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood spills at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive (March 7). And switching gears: Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times plays at the South Coast Village Regency Theatre in Santa Ana, California (March 7).

In Canada, Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox continues its own Bresson retrospective with Diary of a Country Priest (March 3) and Les dames du Bois de Bologne (March 5). The Calgary Cinematheque takes another stroll with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (March 3). And Vancouver’s Pacific Cinematheque goes south with David Gordon Green’s George Washington (March 4 and 7).

It’s auteurs across the Atlantic as well: A Luis Buñuel bash at the Swedish Film Institute in Stockholm includes The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (March 6) and Belle de jour (March 2 and 4), which is also seducing viewers at the Riverside Studios in London (March 8). A Robert Altman retro at Paris’s Cinémathèque française brings Secret Honor (March 2) and Short Cuts (March 3); the latter is also showing at Vienna’s Austrian Film Museum (March 5), as is Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve (March 7). The Swiss Cinematheque in Lausanne goes to war with Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (March 2) and Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (March 6), and surveys its aftermath with Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (March 6). Zurich’s Filmpodium has a sleepover with Eric Rohmer for My Night at Maud’s (March 2), and London’s BFI Southbank takes a weekend boat trip with Roman Polanski for Knife in the Water (March 4 and 5). Finally, the cinematic riches are indeed embarrassing at Brussels’s Belgian Cinematek: Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (March 2), Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (March 2), Kurosawa’s Rashomon (March 3 and 7), Andrzej Wajda’s Danton (March 3), Terry Jones’s Monty Python’s Life of Brian (March 3), Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon and White Mane (March 4), Christian-Jaque’s Fanfan la tulipe (March 4), Costa-Gavras’s Z (March 4), Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (March 4), Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le corbeau (March 5), and Grand Illusion (March 7 and 8).