Goings On: PTA, Valeska Gert, and More

New York. On Wednesday, HAIM will be screening a new short film shot on 35 mm by Paul Thomas Anderson, Valentine, for a select audience. Michael Nordine has details at IndieWire.

This week, as laid out by Screen Slate:

• Jon Auman on Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll (1956): “Everywhere there is a feeling of hotness and wetness, of dirtiness and dustiness, of things falling apart . . .” Tonight at BAM.
• Tomorrow night, as part of Edgar Wright Presents Heist Society, BAM presents Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991), “not to be missed this Fourth of July,” advises Cosmo Bjorkenheim.
• Tyler Maxin recommends Taking Off (1971), “a road map for [Milos] Forman's vision of the U.S., a country of contradiction which he would spend most of his subsequent career exploring.” It screens on Wednesday, the opening day of the Film Forum series Ford to City: Drop Dead: New York in the 70s.
• Patrick Dahl on Alison Maclean’s Jesus’ Son (1999), based on the collection of stories by the late Denis Johnson and screening Thursday at the Metrograph: “Book and film are fraternal twin masterpieces.”
• On Friday, the BAMcinématek series Southern Gothic features Robert Aldrich’s Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964). Chloe Lizotte: “The genre suits him. When it calls for the macabre, he goes full-throttle.”
• And Edgar Wright’s pick for Saturday at BAM is a 1950 by Joseph H. Lewis. Dana Reinoos: “It’s not hard to see the range of Gun Crazy’s influence from the French New Wave to New Hollywood films like Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde.”

“When the filmmaker George Nierenberg made his documentary No Maps on My Taps, in the late seventies, a lot of people wondered whether tap was finished,” writes Joan Acocella in the New Yorker. But when it was released in 1982, it “helped to start a tap revival . . . The film was shown in festival after festival. Its stars travelled with it and danced, live, after the screenings.” And “now—together with a sequel, About Tap, that Nierenberg made in 1985—it is being restored and rereleased by Milestone Films.” No Maps and About Tap screen together at the Quad, starting Friday.

On Thursday, ISSUE Project Room presents “New York artist Evan Caminiti and San-Francisco-based filmmaker Paul Clipson in an audiovisual collaboration drawing from Caminiti’s most recent album Toxic City Music (Dust Editions 2017) as well as Clipson’s recent 16mm impressions of the ‘charged metabolism’ of city life. The evening also sees Iranian-born, NYC-based producer, violinist, vocalist and multi-media artist SADAF presenting new work.”

On Saturday, and then again on July 16 and 27, Spectacle presents a MUBI Special Discovery, Huang Ya-lim’s award-winning Le Moulin: “Poetry, literature, painting and old film clips converge in this lyrical, unusually designed film essay about Le Moulin, the Taiwanese poets’ collective which protested in the 1930s against the cultural superiority of the Japanese occupier and the domination of realism in poetry.”

Los Angeles. Cindy Sherman’s “witty, fast-paced, thoroughly campy horror-comedy” Office Killer (1997), “co-written with Todd Haynes and others and featuring a stellar, mostly female cast that includes Carol Kane, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Molly Ringwald,” screens Thursday at the Echo Park Film Center, notes Falling James in the LA Weekly.

Pasadena. Every Friday this month, the Norton Simon Museum will present a selection from its series When L.A. Grew Up: Galka Scheyer’s Hollywood on the Eve of World War in conjunction with the exhibition Maven of Modernism: Galka Scheyer in California on view through September 25.

Berkeley. With the series Band of Outsiders: Women Crime Writers on at the Pacific Film Archive through August 17, the Library of America presents a bit of related reading: Megan Abbott on Otto Premingers’s Laura (1944, screening July 21), Carrie Rickey on Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950, August 11), and David Ehrenstein on Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964, August 17).

Portland.David Lynch: A Retrospective opens at the Northwest Film Center on Friday with a quote from the man himself: “It’s beautiful when it’s a shared experience. It’s best on a big screen. That’s the way to go into a world.” Through September 2.

Cambridge. “In this of all years, [Spike Lee’s] Do the Right Thing [1989] is a bitterly ironic way to ring in the Fourth of July,” writes Sean Burns for WBUR. “A 35 mm print will screen Monday night”—that’s tonight!—“as part of the Harvard Film Archive’s summer Cinema of Resistance series, with programmer David Pendleton leading a discussion after the film.”

Berlin. “Dancer, actress, cabaret star, bar owner, and book author Valeska Gert (1892–1978) was ‘one of the most influential artists of the modern era’ (Wolfgang Müller), whose interdisciplinary grasp of art and disdain for standard boundaries were way of ahead of their time.” Starting Thursday, and on through July 27, the Arsenal presents a tribute series. The image at the top of this entry, by the way? Valeska Gert.

Bordeaux.Les Tropicales by Sofilm, Thursday through Sunday.

Perth. The twentieth anniversary edition of the Revelation Perth International Film Festival, opening Thursday and running through July 19, will be “offering virtual reality experiences, night-time hikes where the environment becomes the screen, and taking over a cathedral for an immersive video installation,” notes Simon Miraudo in his preview for the Guardian.

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