Goings On: West Germans and More
New York. “Largely terra incognita, West German cinema before Fassbinder was distinguished by films made by returning exiles, Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak, as well as a number of strong, critical movies, some of them international hits, by Helmut Käutner, who began his career under the Nazis,” writes J. Hoberman for the New York Review of Books, flagging The Lost Years of German Cinema: 1946-1963, a series running at the Film Society of Lincoln Center from Wednesday through November 23. “The major rediscovery of this series may be Käutner’s corrosive and controversial Black Gravel (1962), a melodrama set in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat, which has been recently restored.” Above: Peter Lorre in The Lost One (1951).
“Nearly every movie in Generation Wealth, a series at Anthology Film Archives about conspicuous consumption and the pathologies of turbo-capitalism, both gluts and depletes at the same time,” writes Melissa Anderson for 4Columns. “The paradoxical metabolic response is often prompted by the mind-numbing inventories, with their surfeit of goods, both high and low, so prevalent in these films.” Friday through November 30.
“Two interrelated nightmares run through Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 play Rhinoceros,” writes Patrick Dahl at Screen Slate: “fascism’s centripetal force and its degradation of language. One at a time, and then all at once, people transform into rhinoceroses. The most learned are as susceptible as the least. Bewilderment curdles to indignation before resignation subsides to acceptance. The metaphor is, putting it mildly, bald. Ionesco sustains the pat message with a sarcastic bombardment of zingers and cliches issuing from his de-psychologized characters. Fascism has done its work when its subjects no longer say anything they haven’t heard before.” Tom O’Horgan’s 1974 adaptation with Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel screens Thursday and on November 21 as part of the Quad’s program, Screen Play: The American Film Theatre.
Rialto Pictures: 20 Films for 20 Years is a series running at the Museum of the Moving Image from Friday through December 29, and Rialto’s bringing its new 4K restoration of Jean Renoir’s The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936) to Film Forum for a week-long run, also starting Friday.
Every Tuesday, starting tomorrow, through December 19, a film selected by Lambert Wilson starring his idol, Yves Montand, will screen at the French Institute Alliance Français.
Tomorrow, Emily Witt will be at n+1 HQ in Brooklyn to discuss her new book, Nollywood: The Making of a Film Empire, with A. S. Hamrah.
Los Angeles. The New Beverly is presenting an I.B. Technicolor print of Frank Tashlin’s Susan Slept Here (1954) on Thursday. “It may not be the most comfortable film that Tashlin ever directed,” writes Ariel Schudson, “but it is subversive as hell. A satire based on the play by Steve Fisher and Alex Gottlieb, the film deconstructs Hollywood, the industry ‘image,’ and playfully reveals the male inclination towards sexism, ignorance and poor communication, especially when it comes to romantic partnership.”
Bay Area. As part of the Canyon Cinema 50 series at the Pacific Film Archive running through November 29, David Sherman presents Coding and Decoding, a program of films by Dominic Angerame, Greta Snider, and Michael Wallin as well as his own To Re-edit the World (2002) on Wednesday.
Austin. The UCLA Festival of Preservation arrives at the AFS Cinema on Friday and runs through December 17. And the Film Society wraps its Catherine Deneuve series with Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale (2008), screening Thursday through Saturday.
Amsterdam. The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam opens Wednesday and runs through November 26.
Vienna. On Wednesday and Thursday, the Austrian Film Museum presents films by Claudio Caldini and Pablo Marín. “These works show a high degree of autonomy despite prominent references to the avant-garde traditions of the 1920s and the New American Cinema, oscillating between the poles of lyrical and structural film.”
Paris. The second season of American Fringe is on at the Cinémathèque française from Friday through Sunday.
Warsaw. “This year’s Five Flavours retrospective is devoted to Ann Hui, one of the most renowned female directors in Asia,” writes Emilia Skiba for VCinema. “Her films has been portraying the changes in Hong Kong society for nearly 50 years.” On Wednesday, Hui’s latest, Our Time Will Come, will open the eleventh edition, which runs through November 22.
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