Goings On: Klein, Stahl, and More
New York. “The New York street (and fashion) photographer turned New Left filmmaker gets a ninetieth birthday fête with The Eyes of William Klein,” writes J. Hoberman for the New York Review of Books. “Klein made his most political work in France, contributing, along with Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker, to the anthology film Far From Vietnam (1967) and making two cartoonish travesties, Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966), a pseudo cinema vérité send-up of Parisian haute couture, and Mr. Freedom (1968), in which an American costumed superhero sets off to save France from itself.” Wednesday through March 13 at the Quad.
Sally Potter’s The Gold Diggers (1983), screening tonight as part of the BAMcinématek series Women at Work: Labor Activism, “is both an avant-garde musical and surreal silent melodrama, tackling philosophical issues with a surprising sense of play,” writes Sonya Redi.
Also at Screen Slate, Bedatri Datta Choudhury: “For a lot of us, Jackie Chan entered our lives hanging from a bus window with an umbrella and never left. In Police Story (1985), director/star Chan plays cop Chan Ka-Kui, who arrests a crime lord but finds himself defending false charges of a murder. As a glorious example of classic Hong Kong cinema, Chan’s film is replete with highly stylized action sequences featuring broken glass doors, massacred cars, and mighty punches.” Friday through Sunday at the Metrograph.
This year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema opens on Thursday and runs through March 18 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Cambridge. From Friday through March 19, the Harvard Film Archive presents Caught in the Net. The Early Internet in the Paranoid Imagination, a series charting “both the consistency of Internet-related fears and the ways that these fears have shifted over time, from the Military Industrial Complex to Edward Snowden.”
Boulder. The fourteenth Brakhage Center Symposium takes place at the University of Colorado on Saturday and Sunday.
London. With the Girlfriends season on at BFI Southbank through March 20, Hannah McGill writes in Sight & Sound: “Films that centralize friendship between women and girls are . . . always doing something slightly radical, whatever their other themes and content. They repudiate the message that women are adjuncts to men; they emphasize the fact that women and girls still exist when there are no men or boys in the room.”
On Sunday, Pamela Hutchinson will introduce a screening of a 35 mm print of John M. Stahl’s The Woman Under Oath (1919), presented with live piano accompaniment by Cyrus Gabrysch. At Silent London, Hutchinson calls Woman “a bold and brilliant film, which hinges on perceptions and misperceptions in the way that many of the very best silent films do.”
Paris. Saturday night is Russ Meyer night at the Cinémathèque française.
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