Goings On: Guitry, Miyagawa, and More

New York. The Tribeca Film Festival opens on Wednesday, and later in the week, we’ll be taking a look at two series opening on Friday, The Puppet Master: The Complete Jiri Trnka at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Mahamat-Saleh Haroun: Modern Griot at BAM.

Today, though, we begin with Craig Keller asking, “Who was Sacha Guitry? . . . With an aim to dispel some of the mystery, Spectacle Theater this April hosts Guitry Gang, a mini-retrospective dedicated to the director—and a cause for celebration. Across three of Guitry’s most exemplary films dating from the annus mirabilis of 1936, the moviegoing public will be able to discover this most urbane of directors, something of a French analog to Ernst Lubitsch.”

Also in the Village Voice,Alan Scherstuhl: “For its last two weeks of screenings before closing for two months for renovations, Film Forum offers a sublimely poisoned feast: new 4K restorations of early thrillers from Henri-Georges Clouzot.” Le Corbeau (1943), opening Friday and screening through May 1, “exposes a village’s worth of shocking secrets, suggesting French life is rife with adultery, drug addiction, and a generalized ambient horribleness.” And already screening through Thursday is Quai des Orfèvres (1947), an “urbane police procedural, a cracking whodunnit, a Gold Diggers–style sex comedy, and a stealth backstage musical.”

The series Kazuo Miyagawa: Japan’s Greatest Cinematographer is on at Japan Society through April 28 and at the Museum of Modern Art through April 29, and in the Voice,Bilge Ebiri argues that Miyagawa “clearly understood, better than perhaps anyone, the psychological properties of light, using that knowledge in service to a wide variety of directorial visions.” Among them would be Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Kon Ichikawa, and Masahiro Shinoda. Film Comment has posted Neo Sora’s translation of the epilogue, appearing in English for the first time, to Miyagawa’s autobiography, One Generation of Cameraman, first published in 1985. “Encounters with talented directors, or forming new relationships with directors,” he writes, “these are the two things I consciously sought after and established for myself, which is perhaps why I was able to shoot as many as 132 films over sixty years.”

“To celebrate one year of showing movies in its sleekly renovated incarnation, the Quad is holding encore showings of noteworthy titles from the past twelve months,” writes Ben Kenigsberg in the New York Times.Quadrophilia: First Anniversary 21-Film Salute! is on through April 23.

And the new 4K restoration of Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky (1982) is still at the Quad through Thursday. “Upon its release, that film was hailed as an instant New York masterpiece, an unsparing field report from the open hell-pit currently referred to as Times Square,” writes Charles Bramesco at Vulture. And now? “Go to any bar in north Brooklyn on a Saturday night, and you’ll find crowds who have spent hundreds trying to look as poor as the flamboyantly attired extras that Slava drafted from the street.” Bramesco talks with Tsukerman and, for the Los Angeles Review of Books, so does Sasha Razor—with Tsukerman as well as with costume and set designer Marina Levikova and cinematographer and special effects supervisor Yuri Neyman.

Beyond Morricone: Piero Piccone and Friends is on at Anthology Film Archives through Sunday, and tomorrow sees a screening of Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano (1962). “Like a great philosopher or sociologist, Rosi gives form to the invisible forces that influence our lives and political destinies,” writes Chris Shields.

Also at Screen Slate, Mark Lukenbill picks out a highlight, Michael Robinson’s Circle in the Sand (2012), from the Anthology series The Cinema of Gender Transgression: Trans Film, opening on Wednesday and running through April 24. “Programmers (and filmmakers) Joey Carducci, Madsen Minax, and S. H. Varino shy about as far away from standard, canonical queer and trans representation as possible in favor of work that’s unruly, rarely seen in theatrical spaces, and blissfully full of actual genderqueer and trans bodies both on and behind camera.”

On Thursday, Columbia Maison Française presents Le Cinéma de Mai 68, a selection of short documentaries shot in France during that landmark summer.

Los Angeles.For the Love of Godard opens tonight and runs through April 27 at the Aero Theatre. “His films—more than almost any other filmmaker of his stature—reflect his interests, concerns, and desires right at the moment of their making,” writes Scott Nye.

Chicago. This week’s Cine-List features John Dickson on Vincente Minnelli’s Yolanda and the Thief (1945), which the Chicago Film Society is presenting in 35 mm on Wednesday; Ben Sachs on the work of Joan Jonas, who’ll be at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Thursday; Kian Bergstrom on Brian De Palma’s Sisters, screening Thursday at Doc Films; highlights from the Chicago Latino Film Festival, running through Thursday; and more.

Austin. Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968) with Jane Fonda screens Friday at the AFS Cinema.

Cambridge. “In conjunction with Inventur: Art in Germany, 1943–55, the groundbreaking exhibition at the Harvard Art Museum examining “the highly charged artistic landscape” in Germany from the mid-1940s to mid-1950s, the Harvard Film Archive is screening five complementary German films from the period.” The Management of Shattered Identity: German Films, 1945–1957 opens Friday and runs through Monday.

Toronto. On Wednesday, National Canadian Film Day, director Patricia Rozema will be at the Revue Cinema to take part in a Q&A following a screening of I've Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987) hosted by cléo journal.

London.Frames of Representation: New Visions for Cinema 2018 opens on Friday at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and runs through April 28. “Returning for its third edition, this year's festival explores the multifaceted concept of Landscape.

Erase and Forget (2017) is a documentary portrait of James “Bo” Gritz, the inspiration for Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo, and it screens on Friday at the London Review Bookshop. Director Andrea Luka Zimmerman will be on hand for a talk with David Neiwert, author of Alt-America: the Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump.

The East End Film Festival is on through April 29.

Berlin. “In her work over the last three decades, Austrian filmmaker Ruth Beckermann (recognized most recently for the luminous epistolary drama The Dreamed Ones) has consistently merged the personal and the political through a variety of docu-fiction devices,” writes Jordan Cronk, introducing his interview for Film Comment. The Arsenal will present a retrospective of her work from Thursday through Saturday.

Vienna. “Two thousand seventeen was a milestone year for the irrepressible Barbara Hammer,” writes Rachel Churner before listing a slew of retrospectives and shows in Artforum. “All this current attention—and the richly deserved accolades—demands the question: How can we make the most of, as she likes to call it, ‘Hammer Time’?” Corina Copp has interviewed Hammer for BOMB and, at one point in the conversation, Agnès Varda comes up: “I met her in 1978, when we were both in the Festival de Filmes de Femmes de Paris. It’s in Creteil now. I followed her around like a little puppy dog and asked, ‘Can I be your assistant?’ She said, ‘Well, why?’ ‘I want to learn how to make films.’ And she said, ‘Just go make them.’ So I did. And it was great advice.” From Thursday through Sunday, the Austrian Film Museum will present nearly two dozen of her films.

Udine. “Hong Kong film icon Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia, who is rarely seen in public these days, will be on hand to open the twentieth edition of the Far East Film Festival,” reports Patrick Frater for Variety. “She will also receive the festival’s lifetime award, the Golden Mulberry.” The festival, opening on Friday and running through April 28, will present “films from eleven East Asian territories, five world premieres and a trio of restored titles. Among the classics is Johnnie To’s Throw Down [2004], brought back to life by the Italo-Hong Kong company L’Immagine Ritrovata.”

Padua. “Sirio Luginbühl was a man who saw cinema as an intimate act,” writes Thea Hawlin for AnOther: “‘To a filmmaker a movie is like a son, it is always the result of an act of love, a cinematographic orgasm.’ After graduating in sciences from Padua, the Veronese filmmaker fell hard for the arts in the electric energy of the 60s, and soon found himself at the centre of Italy’s neo-avant-garde, drinking with the Novissimi poets and directing the literary section of the Enne Studio.” Sirio Luginbühl: Experimental Films. The Years of Protest is on through July 15 at Fondazione Palazzo Pretorio.

Tokyo. The exhibition Kurosawa Travels around the World: The Masterworks in Posters from the Collection of Toshifumi Makita opens tomorrow at the National Museum of Modern Art to remain on view through September 23. Posteritati presents a preview.

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