Goings On: Republic, Fashion, and More

New York.Martin Scorsese Presents Republic Rediscovered: New Restorations from Paramount Pictures is a two-part series organized by Dave Kehr, a curator in the film department of the Museum of Modern Art, in association with The Film Foundation and Paramount Pictures. As Dade Hayes reports at Deadline, the thirty-film program “begins on February 1 with Alfred Santell’s seldom-seen That Brennan Girl [1946; image above], and continues through February 15; the second installment is scheduled for August 9 to 23. Curated by Scorsese, the program marks a rebirth for the Republic library, which is being restored and returned to wide distribution by Paramount.”

A word from Scorsese: “From the ’30s through the ’50s, the different studio logos at the head of every picture carried their own associations and expectations. And for me, the name Republic over the eagle on the mountain peak meant something special. Republic Pictures was what was known as a ‘poverty row’ studio, but what their pictures lacked in resources and prestige they made up for in inventiveness, surprise, and, in certain cases, true innovation. Among the many ‘B’ pictures produced at Republic in the studio’s heyday, there are so many titles that have been overlooked or forgotten; waiting for decades to be seen again.”

The trailer, which unfortunately can’t be embedded, can be viewed here (2’23”).

More Goings On

On Tuesday, “Light Industry begins its 2018 season with a rare New York screening of The Secret Nation [1989]. Its director, Jorge Sanjinés, stands as one of the most radical filmmakers to emerge from the insurgent new wave of Latin American cinema in the 1960s, an artist who would become involved in every aspect of developing a film culture in Bolivia, from teaching and publishing to exhibition and production.”

The new 4K restoration of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) from Janus Films is screening at Film Forum through Thursday, and we’ve gathered a few critical accolades here.

“To celebrate the release of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s latest excoriating and poignant critique of modern existence in Russia (Loveless), the Museum of Modern Art presents a retrospective of his work,” writes Stephanie Monohan at Screen Slate. “Included in this, of course, is his haunting 2003 debut feature The Return, a road movie-meets-estranged family drama that becomes a violent coming-of-age struggle. It is also a filmmaker’s nascent yet impassioned exploration of his hostile relationship with his homeland, a personal and political conflict he will continue to explore throughout his career.” The Return screens this evening and again on Tuesday.

Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson’s emotionally prickly tale of a mid-century London couturier, has emerged as the most recent arrival in the cinema’s pantheon of fashion-world allure,” writes Abbey Bender in the Village Voice. “With the movie now playing at Brooklyn’s Alamo Drafthouse in glorious 70 mm, staff programmer Cristina Cacioppo has assembled a characteristically playful companion lineup of nine other films that also represent the vast potential of fabulous outfits to captivate audiences.” Fashion in Film is on through January 29.

“In a retrospective that’s simultaneously obscure and universally accessible, the Metrograph celebrates the career of Arne Sucksdorff, a Swedish documentarian most associated with nature films,” notes Ben Kenigsberg in the New York Times. Through Monday. Kenigsberg also spotlights Spectacle’s screening of John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974) on January 24 and the New York Jewish Film Festival, running through January 23.

Ongoing (see the updates): First Look 2018.

Chicago. Kyle A. Westphal in this week’s Cine-List:

Canyon Cinema began as a nomadic screening series that presented a mix of new experimental work, classic features, and random Castle Films flotsam in the backyards of Bruce Baillie and friends across San Francisco, the East Bay, and environs in 1961. Despite its gurgling beginnings in the post-beatnik, pre-hippie cultural wasteland of NorCal, Canyon eventually evolved to encompass a newsletter, a cinematheque, a so-called newsreel production unit, and, most enduringly, a distribution organization incorporated in 1967. Canyon's blissed-out, raunchy, and completely endearing history has been thoroughly documented in Scott MacDonald's invaluable Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor, and the traveling Canyon Cinema 50 series serves as a stellar complement to that book. The Film Studies Center will be hosting four Canyon Cinema 50 programs over the next month, and each is essential.

Rochester, New York. The exhibition Dreaming in Color: The Davide Turconi Collection of Early Cinema, “dedicated to a unique collection of more than 23,000 original nitrate frames of 35mm films from the early years of cinema (1897–1915),” opens tomorrow at the George Eastman Museum and will be on view through June 24.

Park City. Sundance, whose 2018 edition opens next Thursday, has announced a lineup of panels and talks, reports Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro. Among the guests are Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Ava DuVernay, Christine Vachon, Catherine Hardwicke, Justin Lin, Taika Waititi, Danny Elfman, Gus Van Sant—and “a one-night only Jan. 20 performance by Joan Jett and The Blackhearts.”

London. The retrospective Close-Up on Orson Welles opens Monday and runs through January 30.

For Kinoscope, Ela Bittencourt previews the London Short Film Festival, running through January 21, noting that “the shorts range from formally ambitious experiments in storytelling to the more straightforward narrative films, whose main slant is towards vividly observed social angst.”

Prague. More shorts! The thirteenth Prague Short Film Festival runs from Wednesday through January 21.

Paris.Screen’s Melanie Goodfellow previews the twentieth edition of UniFrance’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema, opening Thursday with Jean Becker’s The Red Collar and running through January 22. The event “is billed as the biggest market for French cinema outside of Cannes’ Marché du Film.” And Juliette Binoche will be there to receive this year’s French Cinema Award.

Berlin. To celebrate the seventieth birthday of Heinz Emigholz, the Arsenal will present Streetscapes (Dialogue) (2015–17) on Monday.

Vienna. On Tuesday, Peter Kubelka, co-founder of the Austrian Film Museum, will present a lecture dedicated to the memory of Hans Hurch, the late director of the Viennale who made possible the Museum’s cyclical program Was ist Film (What is Film). “Kubelka will address the situation of analog film today based on examples from the cycle. With examples from works by E.J. Marey, Luis Buñuel, Dziga Vertov, Leni Riefenstahl, Charles Ridley, George Landow, Martin Arnold, Émile Cohl, Stan Brakhage, Karl Valentin, Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas, Günter Zehetner.”

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