Goings On: Japanese Revivals and More
With revivals of Japanese films being presented in the coming days in New York, Chicago, Berlin, Cologne, and Vienna, a quick reminder: As noted yesterday, the lineups for the New York Asian Film Festival (June 30 through July 13) and Japan Cuts 2017 (July 13 through 23) are now set.
New York. Starting Friday, the Quad presents a new 4K restoration of Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), which Jesse Cataldo, writing for Slant, finds “caught somewhere between freeform sketch comedy, gonzo documentary, and irony-soaked Warholian melodrama, it’s convulsive rhythms reflected in Matsumoto’s oft-anarchic shooting style.”
The film’s “celebration” of “proud freaks . . . ultimately fades to eulogy,” writes Patrick Dahl at Screen Slate, “but Matsumoto can’t help but extravagantly present tragedy as spectacle.” Cinelicious will be putting the new restoration in theaters across North America throughout the summer.
Charles Taylor has a new book out, Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You, and the Quad’s worked with him to put together a series that takes its title from his subtitle, The Shadow Cinema of the American ’70s, running from Friday through Tuesday. At Screen Slate, Chris Shields recommends Michael Ritchie’s Prime Cut (1972): “The coolest of Hollywood tough guys, and himself a bridge between classic Hollywood and the changing American cinema of the late 60s and 70s in films like Point Blank and The Killers, Lee Marvin plays Nick, an Irish mob enforcer sent to Kansas City to collect a debt from good old boy, gangster and meat mogul Mary Ann—played, with typically humanistic detail by Gene Hackman.”
Also at Screen Slate, Karl McCool writes about Radu Gabrea’s “rarely-screened must-see for Fassbinder fans,” A Man Like EVA (1984), screening Friday through Sunday as part of the Anthology Film Archives series Cross-Dressing and Drag on Screen.
Back to the Quad, where you can watch Sam Elliott in three films today and in one more tomorrow. Danny King calls him up for the Village Voice, noting that “he’s an utter paradox on the screen: a soft-spoken character-actor icon whose core traits (that voice, that facial hair) define his roles but also clearly exist outside of them.” And for the Guardian,Simon Abrams talks with Elliott about his starring role in Brett Haley’s The Hero, a hit at Sundance this year.
“In conjunction with its essential exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85, the Brooklyn Museum is showcasing moving image works in every genre and medium by Brooklyn-based artists who are young, black, queer, female-identified, and gender-nonconforming,” writes Benjamin Sutton at Hyperallergic. “The two-hour-and-50-minute film program kicks off this Thursday, June 8, with four screenings throughout the day.”
Los Angeles.John Huston: A Retrospective opens Friday and runs at the Billy Wilder Theater through August 27.
Pasadena. “German-Jewish art collector and dealer Galka Scheyer was an indefatigable promoter of European modernism in California,” writes Matt Stromberg for Hyperallergic. “In conjunction with its exhibition on the influence of Scheyer, the Norton Simon Museum will host a screening of six of [Maya] Deren’s short films, milestones in the history of avant-garde cinema.” Friday evening.
Chicago. “Masahiro Shinoda was only a few years into a remarkable five-decade directing career when he made Pale Flower [1964], his most popular and enduring work and the yakuza film by which all others in the genre would be measured.” The Chicago Film Society presents a 35mm print at the Music Box on Monday.
Cambridge. On Friday, the Harvard Film Archive will launch a retrospective that’ll run through September 1: The Complete Jean Renoir.
And starting Monday, the HFA presents “a monthly series of films animated with the spirit of protest, of pointing out oppression and working towards justice,” Cinema of Resistance.
Vienna.Shōchiku New Wave: Japanese Cinema 1960 runs at the Austrian Film Museum from tomorrow through June 19.
Berlin. On Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, and then again on June 18, 26, and 27, the Arsenal presents three films by Sadao Yamanaka, all “reminiscent of the poetic realism of French cinema of the 1930s and 40s. Created with deep focus, elegance and ease, the imagery is pervaded by a bleak and melancholy view of the world and humanity.”
Cologne. The Japan Foundation’s Roman Porno series runs from Monday through July 27.
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