Recent Restorations at BAM

When the films of the Three Colors trilogy rolled out in relatively rapid succession—Blue (1993) in Venice, White (1993) in Berlin, and Red (1994) in Cannes—Kieślowski “dominated art cinema as no one ever had, or likely ever will again,” wrote Colin MacCabe, also in 2011. With this trilogy, financed by French and Swiss companies and produced by Romanian-born Marin Karmitz, the Polish director “composed the hymn to Europe that provides such an important plotline in Blue.”

The European project is viewed with a more critical eye in the film that opens BAM’s series. “What’s most remarkable” about Chocolat (1998), the quasi-autobiographical debut feature from Claire Denis, “is the degree to which her superb command of the sensuous is already apparent,” wrote Melissa Anderson in the Village Voice in 2015. Also set to screen over the weekend are Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo (2001), a rave of a film that “acknowledges the allure of the artificial, the intoxication of toxicity,” as Simon Reynolds writes for Metrograph Journal; Masashi Yamamoto’s Robinson’s Garden (1987), an anti-consumerist No Wave landmark shot by Tom DiCillo; and Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962), which we’ll be releasing on Blu-ray and 4K UHD in September.

Monday brings Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000), in which a petty criminal meets the spitting image of his long lost love. “She could be Kim Novak in Vertigo, hijacked into a James M. Cain plot and photographed in the grainy, high-contrast glamour of a Wong Kar-wai romance,” wrote Richard Corliss for Time in 2001. “Lou Ye lays out a ravishing wasteland of femmes fatales and lovelorn tough guys—all in seventy-nine minutes.” The evening will be topped off with Yvonne Rainer’s Privilege (1990), a film “on the front lines of intersectionality (a term coined in 1989 by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw) in its connection of the struggles for the rights of women, African-Americans, homosexuals, the aged, the disabled, and the poor,” as the New Yorker’s Richard Brody wrote in 2017. Privilege is “also aesthetically intersectional in its fusion of cinematic styles.”

Tuesday is a stunner, with its presentations of Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970). For Sebastián Lelio, Wenders’s Palme d’Or winner is “incredibly moving, and a great example of how extreme stylization and artifice can be combined with pure, genuine feeling.” Writing in the Village Voice in 2016, Bilge Ebiri suggested that The Conformist “could be thought of as a Citizen Kane for the second half of the twentieth century, the movie that united the preceding decades’ achievements in technique all in one film.”

Melissa Anderson, now the film editor at 4Columns, calls Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso (1998), screening on Wednesday, “at once an affectionate art-school razz; a study of an offbeat female friendship; a reflection on gender, race, and violence; a murder mystery; and a portrait of Oakland.” The series wraps on Thursday with Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), which “established the Welsh filmmaker’s penchants for carefully staged tableaus, fearless eroticism, baroque violence, and a devilish sense of humor,” as Dan Schindel wrote when he interviewed Greenaway for the Notebook last year.