In the myth of the New Hollywood of the 1970s, all the heroes are men. Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, Robert Altman, and the rest are often thought to have rescued both the art and the business of American cinema, wresting control from a moribund studio system to create their personal visions. With the BAMcinématek series now running in New York through May 20, programmer Jesse Trussell presents a counter-narrative, one that puts unsung women filmmakers front and center.
In the New York Times,Manohla Dargis argues that this series, A Different Picture: Women Filmmakers in the New Hollywood Era, 1967-1980, “is at once an act of cine-activism and of historical revisionism.” Her article zeroes in on such directors as Elaine May, Barbara Loden, Joan Micklin Silver, and Claudia Weill.
Carmen Gray, at the Village Voice, writes about some of these same filmmakers but also about Cinda Firestone, whose documentary Attica (1974) is “a searing indictment of a jail system rife with routine power abuse,” and Kate Millett and Susan Kleckner, whose Three Lives (1971) features “a trio of candid autobiographical interviews with women who broke free from traps of socialization into more self-governed, purposeful existences at a time when the Women’s Lib movement was only just beginning.”
For the Museum of the Moving Image, Nellie Killian has programmed Panorama Europe 2018, “an eclectic overview of the current European film scene” running through May 31. “There are certain themes of migration, displacement, looking to historical (or even mythic) narratives to make sense of contemporary situations, that tie some of the films together,” Killian tells Michael Sicinski in the Village Voice. For Sierra Pettengill at Screen Slate, Ziad Kalthoum’s Taste of Cement is “one of the most formally audacious—and politically potent—documentaries of the last year.”
Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs, an exhibition on view at the Museum of the City of New York through October 28 with a catalog published by Taschen, is generously sampled in the NYT with background from Arthur Lubow on Kubrick’s career as a photographer for Look in the late 1940s.
Los Angeles.The Season of Bergman, currently running at the Egyptian and Aero Theatres through May 20, will be accompanied by a series of Tuesday matinees at LACMA throughout the month. For highlights, see Nathaniel Bell (LA Weekly), Jordan Cronk (Hollywood Reporter), and Susan King.
Cronk also spotlights Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943), playing at the Royal Theater in Santa Monica through Thursday; the North American premiere of Jean-Marie Straub’s new short, Gens du Lac (People of the Lake), presented by Kino Slang at the Echo Park Film Center on May 20 with Jean Grémillon’s The Sixth of June at Dawn (1944–45); new restorations of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s A Cuban Fight Against the Demons (1972) and The Survivors (1979) at the Linwood Dunn Theater on Friday; and The British Raj between Page and Screen, a series of free screenings each Friday this month at the Norton Simon Museum.
Chicago. The sixth annual Chicago Critics Film Festival is on through Thursday at the Music Box Theatre. Newcity’s Ray Pride talks with festival co-producer Brian Tallerico, who’s also posted notes on several highlights at RogerEbert.com.
San Francisco. The complete program for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, running from May 30 through June 3 at the Castro Theatre, is now online. Twenty-three programs in all, with live musical accompaniment.
Also out now is the lineup for Crossroads 2018, presented by the San Francisco Cinematheque and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with the Canyon Cinema Foundation from June 7 through 10.
Sky Hopinka will host a Canyon Cinema Salon on Friday.
San Rafael. The Rafael Film Club will be focusing on international films of the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s from Thursday through June 7.
Portland. The Northwest Film Center’s series Oscilloscope at Ten, celebrating Oscilloscope Pictures, is on through May 26. And the New Czech Cinema series opens on Friday to run through the weekend.
Cambridge. Tom Vick introduces Umetsugu Inoue, Japan’s Music Man, running at the Harvard Film Archive through Sunday: “Though this retrospective includes just a handful of the more than one hundred movies he made in his career, it features three newly subtitled classics, a restored print of a film he made using the rare Konicolor process and one of his standout Hong Kong efforts.”
And on Sunday and Monday, the HFA presents Luchino Visconti’s Sandra (1966) with Claudia Cardinale ahead of this summer’s Visconti retrospective.
Austin. The Film Society launches the inaugural edition of a new annual celebration of new non-fiction films, Doc Days, from Thursday through Sunday.
London. May’s a big month at the Close-Up Film Centre, with a Pier Paolo Pasolini retrospective now on through May 29 and a Jean Luc-Godard program running through May 25.
With Uprising: The Spirit of ’68 on at BFI Southbank throughout the month, Adam Scovell takes a look at a set of rare photographs taken of Godard and the Rolling Stones during the making of One Plus One, also known as Sympathy for the Devil.
Also running all month at the BFI Southbank is Lost in America: The Other Side of Reagan’s 80s and, writing for Sight & Sound,Christina Newland argues that “Dennis Hopper, David Lynch, Penelope Spheeris, Joyce Chopra, and the like would reconsider the contours of American youth and shine a revealing light on the troubles, poverty and generational conflict within.”
Madrid. The fifteenth edition of Documentamadrid runs through Sunday.
Berlin. Through June 30, Wolf Kino is presenting a complete retrospective of the work of Peter Watkins. “Through introductions, lectures, an exhibition, a workshop, and a side program of films from other directors, we hope to open a space for discussion of issues contained within and around his diverse work.”
The Arsenal will be spotlighting Production Design throughout the month.
San Sebastián.Lost Lessons of Andréi Tarkovski “makes fresh use of the cinema lectures which the filmmaker gave at different places around the Soviet Union between 1975 and 1981.” The second part of the program takes place at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola on Saturday.
