Goings On: Garrel, Hutton, and More
New York. From October 12 through 26, the Metrograph will present Philippe Garrel: Part 1, the first half of the most complete retrospective ever to be staged in the U.S. I’m flagging this event early not only because the New York Film Festival will be screening Garrel’s Lover for a Day (which premiered as part of this year’s Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes earlier this year) but also because the Metrograph has posted an essential essay by Philippe Azoury (translated by Nicholas Elliott).
It begins: “A regular lover of the cinema, Philippe Garrel has been making films since he was sixteen years old. He is modernity’s secret child, its little knight. The films he has sent out from 1964 to the present are like deeply intimate letters in which he reports on his travels (or perhaps the more psychedelic word ‘trip’ is better suited here) to the land of modern cinema. This is a place where experience and innocence go hand in hand, where the living can no longer live without being surrounded by their dead.”
The Quad’s series Also Starring Harry Dean Stanton, presented “In Loving Memory,” is on through October 5. Screening on Friday and Sunday is Repo Man (1984) and Stephanie Monohan, writing for Screen Slate, finds that “Alex Cox’s first feature remains as impressive as ever—it’s a trip around dingy, desolate 1980s Los Angeles that hovers slightly above our real world one minute and then slam-dances on the pavement the next before it takes off into outer space.”
On Saturday, it’s Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter (1974), which “plays out with more naturalism and realism than the type of exploitation flicks typically associated with producer Roger Corman,” writes Kazu Watanabe. “‘To my knowledge, no one had ever made a picture about cockfighting,’ Corman recalls in his autobiography. ‘Now I know why. No one wants to see a picture about cockfighting.’ Thankfully, that’s not entirely true and the film has since become something of a cult classic.”
Also at Screen Slate, Jon Dieringer writes about Peter Hyams’s Timecop (1994), in which “Jean-Claude Van Damme plays an agent who stumbles on a plot to illegally use time travel and market manipulation to fill the coffers of a senator attempting to win the presidential election through unlimited ad buys. . . . Hyams is unique as a studio director who works as his own cinematographer, and the moody elixir drunk by his ‘scope frame anticipates the serious tone of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight movies while leaving room for winks toward Demolition Man-style satire. It’s good fun for 100 minutes.”
On Thursday, Filmmakers Coop presents Haphazard Dreams & Eccentric Lives: Works by Tessa Hughes-Freeland at Ludlow House.
Yesterday, I noted that on Tuesday, P. Adams Sitney, who’s edited the reissue of Stan Brakhage’s book Metaphors on Vision, will be giving a talk at Light Industry, “Filmmaker as Film Theorist: Brakhage, Deren, Frampton.” Just wanted to remind you.
Los Angeles. From Thursday through October 8, the UCLA Film & Television Archive presents A City Called Home: 10 x Berlin: “We have deliberately avoided showing familiar classics and have chosen to concentrate on films that have rarely or never been presented in Los Angeles before.”
Beyond Fest opens Friday and runs through October 10. For Katie Rife, where it “really stands out is in its celebrity guests. Everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Dario Argento will be on hand for retrospective screenings (of Predator and The Running Man and Suspiria, respectively), along with Walter Hill and Edgar Wright talking The Driver and Baby Driver, composer Paul Williams looking back at Phantom of the Paradise, Lea Thompson presenting Howard the Duck in 70mm, and Mick Garris paying tribute to late Masters of Horror George Romero and Tobe Hooper.”
“But, who are we to believe?” asks Kim Morgan. “No one, I feel, which makes the story so powerful and unforgettable.” Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) screens on Wednesday at the New Beverly.
Bay Area.Portraits and Protests, a program of films screening Wednesday as part of the Pacific Film Archive series Canyon Cinema 50, features work by Abigail Child, who’ll be there, George Kuchar, Mike Henderson, and Henry Hills.
From Saturday through October 21, BAMPFA presents A Golden Age of Chinese Cinema, 1947–52, “seven rare films imported from the China Film Archive that were produced during what has been called the ‘Second Golden Age’ of Chinese cinema (following the industry’s first flowering in the 1930s), a fertile moment preceding the cultural and aesthetic changes that would come as a result of the Chinese Communist Revolution in October 1949.” And on view at BAMPFA throughout the fall semester is a selection of posters from a recent acquisition, the Paul Kendel Fonoroff Collection at the C. V. Starr East Asian Library at UC Berkeley.
And from Friday through October 1, it’s the seventh annual Hong Kong Cinema program from the San Francisco Film Society.
Boston. “If the moment I started studying with Peter Hutton had a color, it would be cerulean,” writes Tyler Patterson. “I don’t know which other could articulate the curious alloy of surging energy and contagious calm that he brought to his teaching. If I were of a certain persuasion, I would call the ensuing feeling oceanic, and chuckle at the way it loosely evokes imagery from his film At Sea, which blew my mind and those of all of my classmates, but the implicit over-seriousness of describing it as such verges on hero worship, a counterproductive habit that Peter taught me to work beyond.”
On Thursday at the Brattle, “musician and film composer Chris Brokaw will present five of Hutton’s films: Florence (1975), In Titan’s Goblet (1991), Skagadjördur (2004), New York Portrait, Chapter I (1979), and Boston Fire (1979), performing live scores to some of the films while leaving others silent, alternating the evening between the two approaches.”
Then from Friday through October 5, the Brattle presents Mario Bava & the Birth of the Italian Giallo.Michael Roberson: “For 1963’s landmark The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Italian horror legend Mario Bava is credited with pioneering the giallo film, one of the most influential horror subgenres. But with 1971’s A Bay of Blood, Bava mixed the giallo film’s black-gloved point-of-view killers and highly stylized murder scenes with the body count framework of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None to create an even further-reaching subgenre: the slasher film.”
Philadelphia. On Thursday, International House presents The Lens and the Gaze, a program of work by Laura Mulvey, Hermine Freed, and Joan Jonas. This is the first of three programs presented in conjunction with the exhibition project Making/Breaking the Binary: Women, Art & Technology (1968-1985).
London. The Barbican series The Grime and the Glamour: NYC 1976-90 opens Friday and runs through October 5.
Paris. Starting tomorrow, and on into December, a series of exhibitions and screenings will mark the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Jean Rouch.
Even as the Thom Andersen retrospective rolls on in Vienna through October 4, it’s starting up on Friday in Paris as well. The Visible Press, publisher of Slow Writing: Thom Andersen on Cinema, has the full schedule of events at the Centre Georges Pompidou, on through October 4 and including a conversation between Andersen and Noël Burch following the screening of Red Hollywood (1996) on Saturday.
Vienna. “One of the key authors of modern American cinema, Todd Haynes, will visit the Austrian Film Museum for the first time, bringing with him not only his rarely screened early works and his widely celebrated features, but also his most recent film Wonderstruck, a virtuoso piece of cinematic craft and historical (re-)imagination.” Friday through October 8.
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