MONDAY, MARCH 1

The Twentieth Century**
Exclusive streaming premiere

Short + Feature: Black on the Bayou
Boneshaker and Cane River

Two films imbued with a rich sense of Louisiana’s landscapes and culture explore the complexities of race, religion, and tradition on the bayou.

Double Feature: Boys to Men
The Last Tree and The 400 Blows

Black Westerns
Featuring an introduction by guest programmer and film scholar Mia Mask

As the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s, leading filmmakers and stars sought to reshape the myths of the Hollywood western. Sidney Poitier, Gordon Parks, and even John Ford were among the directors who drew on the historical experiences of African American and Native American people to tell unexplored stories. In the decades that followed, Black actors from Woody Strode and Poitier (who broke with his urbane image in his thrilling directorial debut Buck and the Preacher) to Vonetta McGee and Ving Rhames would repeatedly play key roles as cattle rustlers, cavalrymen, outlaws, and bounty hunters in bold revisions of the genre. Featuring works by Mario van Peebles, John Singleton, and Gordon Parks Jr., this selection curated by guest programmer Mia Mask shows how the western aged and changed. It incorporated Blaxploitation (Thomasine and Bushrod), documentary (Black Rodeo), historical drama (Rosewood), and the coming-of-age film (The Learning Tree) as new generations of artists sought to broaden our understanding of the old frontier.

Featuring: Sergeant Rutledge (1960), Duel at Diablo (1966), The Learning Tree (1969), El Condor (1970)*, Skin Game (1971), Black Rodeo (1972), Buck and the Preacher (1972), The Legend of Black Charley (1972), Thomasine and Bushrod (1974), Posse (1993), Buffalo Soldiers (1997)**, Rosewood (1997)

Please be advised: some of the films contain offensive racist language and racial stereotypes directed against Black and Native American people.

Women Make Film
Presented with a selection of films referenced in the documentary

Short + Feature: Life of a Salesman
Man Rots from the Head and Salesman

Creative Marriages: Jean-Luc Godard & Anna Karina
Featuring a new introduction by critic Michael Sragow

Double Feature: Commedia alla Pietrangeli
The Visitor and I Knew Her Well

From capitalism to patriotism to politics to marriage, there was virtually no pillar of American life that escaped unscathed during screwball auteur Preston Sturges’s whirlwind heyday in the 1940s. One of the first Hollywood filmmakers to write and direct his own scripts (a deal he negotiated by selling his Oscar-winning screenplay for The Great McGinty to Paramount for just $10), Sturges took screwball comedy to new heights of sublime absurdity with his elegantly cockeyed dialogue, free-form approach to narrative, and subversive skewering of conventional morality. These immortal comedy classics—including the Barbara Stanwyck sizzler The Lady Eve, the everyman ode Sullivan’s Travels, and the Production Code–defying jaw-dropper The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek—were the result of a brief but dazzling run of creativity that remains virtually unmatched in Hollywood history.

Featuring: The Great McGinty (1940), Christmas in July (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), Unfaithfully Yours (1948)

Films by Rodney Evans
Featuring a new introduction by the filmmaker

New York City–based filmmaker Rodney Evans celebrates triumphs over adversity in his beautifully crafted, deeply personal works, which draw from his own experiences as a Black, queer, and disabled artist. Starring Anthony Mackie in his breakthrough role, Evans’s acclaimed feature debut Brother to Brother is an ode to queer African American creativity across generations—from the Harlem Renaissance to the present day. Fifteen years later, Evans—confronting the deterioration of his sight due to a genetic condition—turned the camera on himself and three other blind/visually impaired artists in Vision Portraits, a profound philosophical rumination on what it means to truly see.

Featuring: Brother to Brother (2004), Vision Portraits (2019)

While documentary work has defined the visual language of Hawai‘i cinema for decades, a rise in narrative filmmaking in recent years signals an evolution in Hawai‘i-based storytelling—helmed by a burgeoning generation of filmmakers actively engaged in collective world-building through narrative fiction, particularly from a Native Hawaiian lens. Selected by Doris Duke Theatre programmer Taylour Chang, these short films are just a few examples of a growing community of artists nurturing a visual language for Hawai‘i cinema that is rooted to the land that inspires it. The inspirations seeded in these films continue to open exciting new horizons for narrative storytelling in Hawai‘i. Also: don’t miss our Art-House America profile of the Doris Duke Theatre, featuring another selection of Hawaiian films by Chang.

Featuring: Lāhainā Noon (2014), Kalewa (2018), The Moon and the Night (2018), Other People (2018), The Pit Where We Were Born (2018), Down on the Sidewalk in Waikīkī (2019), Moloka‘i Bound (2019)

Sex, power, and rebellion are at the heart of the feminist cinema of Nelly Kaplan, the unsung iconoclast who passed away in November 2020. Born in Argentina to a Russian Jewish family, Kaplan relocated to Paris at age seventeen, where she became an assistant to legendary director Abel Gance before directing her first (and still best-known) feature, the caustic antipatriarchal revenge comedy A Very Curious Girl. Transgressive, satirical, and surreal, Kaplan’s films are defined by their proactive female protagonists—complex, empowered women who, in Kaplan’s world, are always in charge.

Featuring: A Very Curious Girl (1969), Papa the Little Boats (1971), Charles and Lucie (1979), The Pleasure of Love (1991)

Charlie Chaplin: The Mutual Comedies
Featuring the documentaries Chaplin’s Goliath and The Birth of the Tramp

In the two-reel comedies Charlie Chaplin created for the Mutual Film Corporation between 1916 and 1917, the slapstick virtuoso sometimes played an inebriate, a fireman, or a prop man in a movie studio; but most of all, he further explored and developed the Little Tramp character who would come to stand as one of cinema’s most immortal comic creations. The Little Tramp of these films became arguably the most famous and recognizable character in the world, while Chaplin himself became the highest-paid filmmaker of his time. In these twelve definitive classics of silent screen comedy, Chaplin perfected what would become his trademark themes and techniques and created what many critics and enthusiasts regard as his finest work.

Featuring: The Floorwalker (1916), The Fireman (1916), The Vagabond (1916), One A.M. (1916), The Count (1916), The Pawnshop (1916), Behind the Screen (1916), The Rink (1916), Easy Street (1917), The Cure (1917), The Immigrant (1917), The Adventurer (1917)

Double Feature: Reading, Writing, and Rebellion
Cooley High and Rock ’n’ Roll High School

The inexhaustibly imaginative magician of early cinema, Georges Méliès created some of the medium’s very first fantasies through his revolutionary use of trick photography, special effects, and exquisite hand-painted color. Beautifully restored by Lobster Films, these whimsical wonders—including science-fiction landmark A Trip to the Moon, gorgeous dreamscape The Kingdom of Fairies, and the Jules Verne-inspired The Impossible Voyage—continue to delight and enchant more than one hundred years after their creation.

Featuring: The Pillar of Fire (1899), Joan of Arc (1900), A Trip to the Moon (1902), Robinson Crusoe (1903), The Kingdom of Fairies (1903), The Infernal Cauldron (1903), The Impossible Voyage (1904), Rip’s Dream (1905), The Inventor Crazybrains and His Wonderful Airship (1905), The Merry Frolics of Satan (1906), The Witch (1906), The Diabolic Tenant (1906), Whimsical Illusions (1910)

A pioneer of India’s Parallel Cinema, Bimal Roy brought a new level of realism to his country’s film industry with his landmark breakthrough Do bigha zamin, a heartrending portrait of an ordinary family’s everyday struggle for survival, inspired by the Italian neorealist movement. Both a master visual stylist and an empathetic champion of the oppressed, Roy skillfully straddled the line between art and commercial cinema, tackling issues of poverty, caste discrimination, and the subjugation of women through his moving melodramas and earthy romances.

Featuring: Do bigha zamin (1953), Devdas (1955), Madhumati (1958), Sujata (1960), Bandini (1963)

Don’t Blink – Robert Frank

Essential Fellini

A century after his birth, Federico Fellini still stands apart as a giant of the cinema. The Italian maestro is defined by his dualities: the sacred and the profane, the masculine and the feminine, the provincial and the urbane. He began his career working in the slice-of-life poetry of neorealism, and though he soon spun off on his own freewheeling creative axis, he never lost that grounding, evoking his dreams, memories, and obsessions in increasingly grand productions teeming with carnivalesque imagery and flights of phantasmagoric surrealism while maintaining an earthy, embodied connection to humanity. Featuring a selection of beautifully restored classics, this tribute celebrates a titan who conjured a cinematic universe all his own: a vision of the world as a three-ring circus in which his innermost infatuations, fears, and fantasies take center stage.

Featuring: Variety Lights (1950), The White Sheik (1952), I vitelloni (1953), La strada (1954), Il bidone (1955), Nights of Cabiria (1957), 8½ (1963), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Amarcord (1973), City of Women (1980), And the Ship Sails On (1983), Intervista (1987)

Double Feature: Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets
The Blue Angel and Lola

Though his pretty-boy good looks first propelled him to fame as a British matinee idol, there was always something edgy and intriguingly unwholesome lurking beneath Dirk Bogarde’s debonair surface: a complex, neurotic soul that, in his extraordinary later career, he bared before the cameras of iconoclastic auteurs like Joseph Losey, Luchino Visconti, Liliana Cavani, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Through his brilliant performances in frequently controversial art-house provocations such as Victim, The Servant, Death in Venice, and The Night Porter, Bogarde became something of an emblem of transgressive sexuality, moral corruption, and decadence—an actorly embodiment of postwar Europe’s bourgeois malaise. The fearlessness with which Bogarde took on these risky roles and the intelligence that he brought to them has ensured that, one hundred years after his birth, he endures as one of cinema’s most captivating performers.

Featuring: The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1954), Cast a Dark Shadow (1955), Victim (1961), The Servant (1963), Darling (1965), Accident (1967), The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), The Night Porter (1974), Despair (1978), Daddy Nostalgia (1990)

Short + Feature: Gone Girls
Mary Last Seen and The Vanishing

Working with cinematographer (and regular Claire Denis collaborator) Agnès Godard,  French-Swiss filmmaker Ursula Meier has made two singular features to date, each the product of a distinctive vision that applies a fable-like sensibility to their view of life on the margins of contemporary Europe. Starring Isabelle Huppert and Olivier Gourmet, her first feature, Home, is an offbeat, tragicomic allegory in which a happy but highly unconventional family finds their hermetic existence upended by the construction of a highway right outside their house. Meier blends heartrending naturalism with fairy-tale elements in her follow-up, Sister, starring Léa Seydoux and Kacey Mottet Klein as a pair of impoverished siblings living in the shadow of a luxury ski resort who resort to desperate measures to survive.

Featuring: Home (2008)**, Sister (2012)**