Goings On: Fernández, Marker, and More

New York. MoMA’s retrospective El Indio: The Films of Emilio Fernández is on through March 13. “With his longtime artistic comrade, the great cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, Fernández directed the movies that gave arthouse audiences worldwide their vision of post-colonial Mexico carving out its own future, peopled by the stunning likes of Pedro Armendáriz, María Félix, and Dolores del Río,” writes Farran Smith Nehme for the Village Voice. Above: Maclovia (1948).

Film Forum’s Ingmar Bergman retrospective rolls on through March 15, part of the worldwide #Bergman100 celebration of this year’s anniversary. For Vulture, Charles Bramesco calls up Liv Ullmann to talk “about her rich and complicated relationship to Bergman, the eternal relevance of the films they made together, and the dismally boring dinner party that made her stop rewatching her own movies.”

“Eighteen maquettes, restorations of ones fabricated by Jean-Luc Godard as part of a proposal for an exhibition at Paris’s Pompidou Center, are on display at the Miguel Abreu Gallery under the title Memories of Utopia: Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Collages de France’ Models,” writes Amy Taubin for Film Comment. “For anyone interested in Godard’s films, the exhibition is essential.” Through March 11.

The BAMcinématek series Women at Work: Labor Activism starts today and runs through Thursday. “The program opens with Salt of the Earth, an independent production that was controversial in 1954 for having been made by the director Herbert J. Biberman (one of the Hollywood 10) and other blacklisted filmmakers,” writes Ben Kenigsberg for the New York Times. “Cast with a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors—and partly funded by a union that the Congress of Industrial Organizations had expelled for its politics—the film revolves around a New Mexico miners’ strike that requires unity not only among the workers, who begin the movie divided, but also between the miners and their wives, who start picketing in place of their husbands when a court forbids the miners from doing so.”

Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971) starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland screens at the Metrograph on Sunday as part of the ongoing series Visionary Form: Dressing up for the Screen. At Screen Slate, Cosmo Bjorkenheim suggests that “Klute’s main appeal lies in its function as a time-capsule. In 1970, you could still boast to a suburbanite of ‘the sin, the glitter, the wickedness’ of New York City, where harassment by pervs and stalkers came with the territory and Lexington and Eighth Avenues were streetwalkers’ haunts.”

Chicago. Tonight and tomorrow, “the Music Box Theatre will screen Lips of Blood (1975), the first in a three-film series devoted to French exploitation director Jean Rollin (1938–2010),” writes Ben Sachs in the Reader. “Upcoming are The Iron Rose (1973) on March 9 and 10, and Fascination (1979) on March 30 and 31. All three films come highly recommended to purveyors of the macabre, sexploitation freaks, and fans of Jacques Rivette, another French director who specialized in opaque, dreamlike narratives. That’s to say that Rollin is not just an acquired taste, but a fusion of several different acquired tastes.”

Also in the Reader,Ryan Smith recommends Yale Strom’s American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs, now playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center through Thursday.

San Francisco. The San Francisco International Film Festival, whose 2018 edition will run from April 4 through 17, will honor Charlize Theron with a special tribute, followed by a screening of her new film, Jason Reitman’s Tully.

Austin. “The Austin Film Festival & Writers Conference has selected Roger Corman as the recipient of the Extraordinary Contribution to Filmmaking Award,” reports Variety’s Dave McNary. “Corman, a pioneer in the world of independent film, will be presented the award on Oct. 27.”

London. Starting today, and on through March 27, Close-Up will present films by the Dziga Vertov Group, the collective founded by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. The program offers “a crucial glimpse of Godard’s radicalization, and of the aesthetic dialogue between him and Gorin that, in essence, served to invent a modern militant cinema.”

Paris.Chris Marker, les 7 vies d'un cinéaste, the retrospective and exhibition at the Cinémathèque française, won’t open until May 3, but there’s already a high level of anticipation at Daniel L. Potter’s site dedicated to Marker. Along with the Cinémathèque’s two-volume catalogue, we can look forward to a good number of publications next month, including Commentaires I and Commentaires II, “combined and republished in an expanded new edition,” Coréennes, “Marker’s 1959 book on Korea,” and Marker’s novel Le coeur net, “long out of print, is set to be republished by Seuil (his old employer where he worked on the Petite Planète books).” And: “One of the films that always seemed to escape the great anthologies that we do have, in French and in English, was always Si j’avais quatre dromedaires (1966).” Les Mutins de Pangée will be releasing its DVD on April 12.

For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.

You have no items in your shopping cart