Goings On: Gialli, Essays, and More
New York. “There could be no better film to open the Flaherty NYC Presents: Out from Under series playing at Anthology Film Archives tonight than A Litany for Survival [1996], the lovely and inspiring portrait on one of the twentieth century’s ultimate warriors: Audre Lorde.” Sonya Redi at Screen Slate: “Directors Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson (who will both be attending tonight’s screening) worked with Lorde closely during the last decade of her life, and it shows, as the film manages to capture not only Lorde’s undeniable brilliance, but her warmth and charisma as well.”
Inquiry Towards the Practice of Secular Magic: Live Film Essays is an evening with Ross Lipman and Courtney Stephens happening on Thursday at UnionDocs. Lipman, the preservationist probably best known at the moment for Notfilm (2016), his essay on Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider’s Film (1965) with Buster Keaton, will present The Book of Paradise Has No Author, “a live documentary based on the first encounters with the Tasaday. In the summer of 1971 Ferdinand Marcos announced the discovery of a tribe of primitive cave dwellers who had lived in complete isolation for thousands of years in the rainforest of Mindanao, the easternmost island of the Philippines. Modernity as we knew it was uprooted.” Stephens’s Contractions offers “a feminist re-contextualization of the idea of periphery.” Both filmmakers will take part in a discussion following the program.
On Friday, the Japan Society presents a twenty-fifth anniversary screening—on 35 mm, with subtitles—of Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso. “This film is timeless precisely because it speaks to our own time, to the alt-right as much as to the Yugoslav Wars,” writes Dylan Pasture at Screen Slate.
Los Angeles. “Tod Browning’s Dracula [image above] was made in 1931, but it feels somehow even older,” finds Witney Seibold. “The film possesses an antediluvian quality, as if it somehow slipped through a membrane in time from a long-forgotten ancient period of eldritch magic, when the separation between the human world and the demon world was less defined.” Wednesday at the New Beverly.
On Tuesday, LACMA presents a 35 mm print of Rupert Julien’s Phantom of the Opera (1925) with Lon Chaney and, in the LA Weekly, Nathaniel Bell advises that “its central pantomimic performance and general opulence makes this a must-see on as large a screen as possible.”
Tonight, Lee Anne Schmitt and Jeff Parker will be at REDCAT to present Purge This Land, whose title is taken from a letter written by abolitionist John Brown in 1859: “I . . . am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”
Saturday is Home Movie Day. “Bring your 8 mm, Super 8, and 16 mm films for archival inspection and projection.”
Chicago. “While generally overlooked among his noirs and his low-budget Val Lewton-produced horror films, Canyon Passage [1946], Jacques Tourneur's first western (as well as his first film shot in color), is one of the most sensual entries in his filmography,” writes Julian Antos at the top of this week’s Cine-File. “It's violent and visceral in a way that his most exciting work is, but it's a lot sweatier.” The Chicago Film Society is presenting a 35 mm print tomorrow evening.
Cambridge. Starting today, and on through October 14, the Harvard Film Archive presents Luminosity – The Films of Jerome Hiler, followed by Nathaniel Dorsky, Songs and Seasons, running from Sunday through October 15.
“For fans of giallo—a genre blending mystery, murder, and psychological elements with that of the slasher genre—Lucio Fulci had been a household name since 1969’s One on Top of the Other,” writes Greg Mucci. “However, his garish visual flare and the sleek stylistic choice of the giallo genre wouldn’t stalk hand-in-hand until Don’t Torture a Duckling [1972,] Fulci’s lambaste of the Catholic Church.” It screens Wednesday at the Brattle with Sergio Martino’s Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972).
On Thursday, the Brattle presents Massimo Dallamano’s What Have You Done to Solange? (1972), which “succeeds at expressing, and even exploiting, the societal obsession with sexual violence directed toward women,” writes Selin Sevinc.
Austin. On Wednesday, Film Society founder and artistic director Richard Linklater, whose Last Flag Flying has opened this year’s New York Film Festival, will open a fresh round of Jewels in the Wasteland. Linklater will introduce and then discuss some of his favorite films from the 1980s.
And starting Thursday, the AFS presents a series of films starring Catherine Deneueve.
London. This evening at the BFI Reuben Library, Catherine Grant, Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and founder of Film Studies for Free, will discuss “The Rise of the Video Essay in Film Studies.”
John Akomfrah’s Purple, on view at the Barbican from Friday through January 7, “is an immersive, six-channel video installation that attempts to evoke the incremental effects of climate change on our planet,” explains Sean O’Hagan in his profile of the artist for the Observer. “Shot in 10 countries and drawing on archive footage, spoken word and music alongside often epic shots of contemporary landscapes that have been altered by global warming and rising temperatures, Purple eschews a linear narrative for an almost overwhelming montage of imagery and sound.”
Close-Up’s series of films by Aki Kaurismäki runs through October 25.
Exeter. Starting Wednesday, photographs from the collection of Pamela Davies, “one of the foremost continuity supervisors in the British film industry, who worked from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s on dozens of movies,” will be on view at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum.
Berlin. Through October 18, the Arsenal is presenting selections from its collection of around 130 Georgian films. Also, throughout October, the “Magical History Tour presents both films that were created in collective working process or have these as their theme, together with ensemble films with suitably starry casts, which forge complex universes in multiple, dynamic mosaics of characters and decentered group pictures.”
Vienna. On Thursday, Michael Haneke will present a masterclass, followed by a screening of The Piano Teacher (2001).
Madrid. From today through November 23, the Museo Reina Sofía presents The Eye in Matter: Dziga Vertov and Early Soviet Cinema. “Part retrospective and part recontextualization, this series presents a number of Vertov’s feature films and selections from his early chronicles, together with little-known Kulturfilme by famous masters like Kuleshov and Pudovkin; with works of contemporaneous non-fiction film-makers such as Esfir Shub and Mikhail Kaufman; with experimental European films that impacted Vertov and that he himself influenced; and with a number of now-forgotten documentaries by Vladimir Erofeev, Roman Karmen, and Vitalii Zhemchuzhnyi, among others, which question the theories set out by the director of Man with a Movie Camera (1929) on filming reality.”
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