Goings On: Hopper, Shepard, and More


New York. “It’s probably pure coincidence that BAM is presenting a week of Sam Shepard films right as the Metrograph screens five days of Dennis Hopper–directed titles,” writes Bilge Ebiri. “No two actors of their generation better expressed the modern iteration of the lonesome cowboy—that dying myth of the all-American wanderer. Their careers regularly threatened to intersect, but the two almost never worked together. (When they did, on 2002’s prison pen-pal drama Leo, Shepard said Hopper was ‘like a crazy brother.’) Maybe that’s understandable, too: They were, in some way, opposites—separate sides of the same coin.” True West: Sam Shepard on Film is on through Thursday, while Directed by Dennis Hopper runs through Wednesday.

Also in the Village Voice,Isaac Butler guesses that Stanisław Lem “is probably best known in the United States for his novel Solaris, which inspired films of the same name by directors on the order of Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh. Had he only done that, dayenu, but Lem’s dozens of novels and short stories have proven massively influential—an influence that’s now on full view at Stanisław Lem on Film, a series of screen adaptations of the author’s work running through November 11 at Anthology.

Los Angeles. John Frankenheimer’s The Train (1964), screening Wednesday afternoon at the New Beverly, “was, remarkably, an assignment he took over after the original director Arthur Penn was let go due to differences with star and producer, [Burt] Lancaster,” writes Kim Morgan. “It neither feels like a movie Frankenheimer took over nor a work for hire—it’s so intricately executed, so demanding an exercise, and at such a scale, that even with all the preparation and time in the world, an almost military precision would be needed to deliver. Frankenheimer and Lancaster worked together with such synchronicity, the actor’s movement, athleticism and physical presence, seamlessly blends with the director’s mobile camera.”

Chicago. This week’s Cine-List features, among other write-ups, Kathleen Sachs on Pietro Germi’s Divorce Italian Style (1961), screening tomorrow at Doc Films; Michael G. Smith on George Stevens’s The More the Merrier (1943), Wednesday at the Northbrook Public Library; Patrick Friel on The Films of Ana Mendieta, a program that the Gene Siskel Film Center is presenting on Thursday; and Ben Sachs on Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff (1954), Thursday at Doc Films.

Boston. The exhibition Annette Lemieux: Mise en Scène is open at the Museum of Fine Arts through March 4. “On view, through bodies of work both new and old, is Lemieux’s timely consideration of the longstanding but increasingly visible political and social divide that’s often characterized between urban and rural Americans,” writes Emily Watlington in the Brooklyn Rail. “The works identify film as a medium that can uniquely serve as common ground for many populaces; it can transport stories and ideas while often locating reference points for diverse audiences, traversing political bubbles. The films, with their discussions of censorship, pathologization, racism, and class division, resonate today almost as if they aren’t, in fact, decades old.”

Toronto.The Crying Game turns twenty-five this year and, on Wednesday, Neil Jordan will be at TIFF Cinematheque to “discuss the making of the film and why it has retained its urgency and currency.”

Also on Wednesday, the MUFF Society’s Reel Girl Talk screening series and Black Women Film! Canada present Canada Short Film Night.

The Reel Asian International Film Festival opens Thursday and runs through November 18.

London. Each Monday throughout November, starting tomorrow, Close-Up and Virginie Sélavy will be presenting a course, Surrealism and Cinema from Luis Buñuel to David Lynch. And Close-Up’s Andrei Tarkovsky retrospective starts Tuesday and runs through November 21.

Writing for Sight & Sound,Geoff Brown notes that, in his autobiography, A Life in Movies, Michael Powell devotes five pages to Caste (1930), “one sign of the film’s personal significance. Even so, most researchers seem to have paid the BFI archive’s 35 mm viewing copy little attention.” Thursday’s screening at the Cinema Museum “in association with the research project British Silent Cinema and the Transition to Sound, could well be the film’s first public airing for over eighty years.”

UK. “Offering 115 screenings of over seventy new films from around the world,” the UK International Jewish Film Festival, opening Thursday and running through November 26, “primarily takes place in venues across London, with events also taking place in Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool and Leeds,” notes Ella Kemp at the top of her preview of some of the highlights for Little White Lies.

Paris.Rouch in the USA is an all-day conference happening at NYU Paris on Thursday. “Founder of the cinéma-vérité movement and pioneer of techniques such as ‘shared anthropology’ and ‘ethno-fiction,’ [Jean] Rouch not only re-defined the landscape of anthropology and cinema in France during the 1950s and sixties, he helped transform Post-Independence African cinema and documentary film practice, writ large. Having made upwards of one hundred films with countless collaborators over the course of a career that spanned six decades and several continents, the story of his complex legacy is just beginning to unfold.”

Le mystère Clouzot, the exhibition devoted to Henri-Georges Clouzot, is on view at the Cinémathèque française from Wednesday through July 29, 2018. And an accompanying films series runs through November 26.

Matías Piñeiro: Pour l’amour du jeu, a retrospective programmed by Piñeiro and Andréa Picard, is on at the Jeu de Paume from Tuesday through November 21.

Brussels. And tomorrow, Piñeiro will be at the Cinematek for a symposium, “Games People Play,” as part of a program focusing on Piñeiro that’s running through the end of the month.

Berlin. Starting Friday and on through Sunday, Serial Germany, a series of discussions about the present and future of television in the country, will focus on “production conditions, the role of the ‘American model,’ but also what serial narration means in both aesthetic and social terms.”

Vienna. An exhibition of photographs by Robert Frank is currently on view at the Albertina through January 21, and the Austrian Film Museum is presenting a full retrospective of film and video works from Friday through November 27.

Odense, Denmark. The exhibition Lars von Trier: The good with the evil is on view at Brandts from Friday through November 29.

Melbourne. From Wednesday through November 22, the Cinémathèque presents Raoul Walsh, the Great Traffic Cop of the Movies.

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