A Great Movie Weekend Begins Now

Faye Dunaway in a publicity photo for Jerry Schatzberg’s Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970)

While Sundance rolls on through Sunday and Rotterdam opens today, a slew of events in the States and Europe make this a terrific weekend for going to the movies. And it begins tonight.

At the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, Nick Newman’s Amnesiascope series will present two films from Directors Company, a production house founded in 1982 by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Shinji Somai, Gakuryu Ishii, and several other filmmakers looking to break out of Japan’s studio system. That year gave adventurous audiences Ryudo Uzaki’s Farewell Love: Rock Is Sex, cowritten with Kurosawa, and Shigeru Izumiya’s Harlem Valentine: Blood Is Sex. As Newman writes at the Film Stage, “Time in the trenches with lesser-seen Japanese cinema doesn’t prepare one for either experience—a medley of sex, violence, pathos, terror, and plainly startling images.”

Starting Friday, New Yorkers’ options will be dauntingly plentiful. Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution, a retrospective featuring new restorations the great documentarian has overseen himself, will open at Film at Lincoln Center and run through March 5. And we should mention that the retrospective in Chicago that we took a look at a few weeks ago is still on through February 5.

“The earliest films are muckraking,” wrote Matt Prigge in the introduction to his 2018 interview with Wiseman for Filmmaker.Titicut Follies—his grainy, gritty, hellish 1967 exposé of Massachusetts’s Bridgewater State Hospital, where the ‘criminally insane’ were shown undergoing endless depravities—belies his previous life: He was an unhappy lawyer who happily stumbled into a medium that had only recently been democratized, thanks to newly affordable and portable gear.” Later films “focused on education (High School, Basic Training), assistance (Hospital, Welfare), consumerism (Meat, The Store), religion (Essene), and science (Primate). Each showed America (and occasionally elsewhere, as in the Panama-set Canal Zone) as a Jenga tower made of institutions, always on the brink of collapse yet never quite crashing to the earth.”

“To total a group of movies together shows a wide variety and range of human behavior, and that’s what interests me,” Wiseman told Annabel Brady-Brown in the Notebook. “I’m not interested in showing all good, all bad. I’m interested in the complexity of human behavior.”

On Saturday, the Museum of the Moving Image will throw its spotlight on actors who probably should have won an Oscar but were never even nominated. John Cazale (Dog Day Afternoon), for example, or two more Johns, Goodman and Turturro (Barton Fink). How about Kim Novak (Vertigo), Rita Hayworth (The Lady from Shanghai), or Donald Sutherland (Don’t Look Now)? Snubbed Forever runs through March 9. Also beginning on Saturday, MoMI will screen four selections from Kino Lorber’s collection Pioneers of African American Cinema.

The Paris Theater will celebrate producers Pascal Caucheteux and Grégoire Sorlat and their company, Why Not Productions, with a series running from Saturday through February 12. Why Not Cinema?! opens with Claire Denis’s White Material (2009), includes two films by Arnaud Desplechin, and wraps with Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here (2017).

Two Photographers

Weegee: Society of the Spectacle, an exhibition currently on view at the International Center of Photography through May 5, showcases two sides of the work by the man born Arthur Fellig in 1899: “Celebrated for his sensationalist images of crime scenes, fires, car crashes, and the onlookers who witnessed these harrowing events across New York City in the 1930s and ’40s, Weegee also spent time in his career documenting the joyful crowds, premieres, and celebrities of Hollywood.” From Friday through next Thursday, ICP and Anthology Film Archives will present Weegee’s Camera Magic, a series that includes Anthology’s new preservations of five shorts as well as other films Weegee directed or worked on as an actor, consultant, special effects designer, or set photographer.

Jerry Schatzberg, who famously shot the portrait that landed on the cover of Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde as well as the image of Faye Dunaway that graced the poster for the 2011 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, directed his first feature, Puzzle of a Downfall Child, starring Dunaway, in 1970. “What goes into a Schatzberg shot is a Bazinian impulse to record unfettered life transmogrified by the holy everyday,” wrote Carlos Valladares for Gagosian Quarterly in 2019, “whether in long takes ([Meryl] Streep’s and Alan Alda’s electrifying kiss in The Seduction of Joe Tynan [1979]) or in shards of montage (the memory-recalling bursts of Puzzle).”

The Museum of Modern Art’s comprehensive retrospective opens on Friday, runs through February 9, and naturally features the film Valladares calls “Schatzberg’s magnum opus,” Scarecrow (1973), starring Al Pacino and Gene Hackman. Valladares: “Even established screen presences whom you think you’re sure of (Dunaway, Streep, Pacino) have layers that they’ve only exhibited in Schatzberg’s sensitively felt universe.”

In Other States

Sergei Loznitsa’s ten-day residency at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive begins today. Loznitsa will introduce or discuss his fictional features In the Fog (2012), A Gentle Creature (2017), and Donbass (2018) as well as the nonfiction work he’s probably better known for: State Funeral (2019), documenting Soviet coverage of the burial ceremony for Joseph Stalin; Babi Yar. Context (2021), an account of the 1941 massacre of 33,771 Jews in a ravine near Kyiv; The Natural History of Destruction (2022), inspired by W. G. Sebald’s essay; and The Invasion (2024), a collective portrait of Ukrainians resisting the ongoing Russian invasion.

The Illusory Tableaux of Georges Méliès opens on Saturday at the Harvard Film Archive and runs through February 9. “Influenced by his background as an illusionist, his landmark trick films of the late 1800s and early 1900s were among the first moving images to not simply depict everyday experiences, but also to celebrate cinema’s magical possibilities,” writes curator Alexandra Vasile.

Up North

From Friday through February 26, TIFF Cinematheque in Toronto will present Compassionate Light: Stories of Tibet by Pema Tseden, a retrospective of work by the filmmaker who died too young in 2023. He was only fifty-three when his heart failed him. Tseden “revolutionized the representation of Tibet and Tibetans and shared his visions of authentic Tibetan life with the entire filmgoing world by reimagining how narrative cinematic fiction could operate within so-called ‘Chinese minority cinema,’” writes curator Shelly Kraicer. “His alternative formal strategies and narrative framings were inspired by the contemporary lived experience of Tibetans, centering in his works their culture, language, religion, and ways of inhabiting and interpreting their world.”

In Vancouver, the VIFF Centre will celebrate Black History Month with an exhibition, lots of live music, and screenings of several films including Andrew Dosunmu’s Mother of George (2013), Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019), Ephraim Asili’s The Inheritance (2020), and C. J. “Fiery” Obasi’s Mami Wata (2023).

Across the Atlantic

Saturday sees the openings of Chantal Akerman seasons at Watershed in Bristol and BFI Southbank in London, where the Institut français’s salute to Akerman opens on Wednesday and Close-Up Film Centre’s series begins on February 7. Included in the Watershed and BFI lineups is the new restoration of Toute une nuit (1982), which will also land on the Criterion Channel on Saturday.

In a series of fleeting vignettes, dozens of characters cross paths one sultry summer night in Brussels. “Despite the anonymity of her dramatis personae,” writes Melissa Anderson at 4Columns, “Akerman brilliantly conjures a sense of narrative tension throughout every chapter—the viewer is invited to fill in backstory where none is overtly presented and to imagine what happens next after a scene ends. Surprises abound.”

The BFI’s two other February seasons are Conversations with a Friend: The Films of Edward Yang and Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western. The Institute of Contemporary Arts, in the meantime, will present films by Michael Snow on Saturday and Sunday: “As part of the structural film movement in which form was prioritized over content, he saw framing, sound, and duration as tools for reinventing the language of the medium, saying that ‘to shape time seems to me to be the quintessence of cinema.’”

An enticing exhibition, A Kind of Language: Storyboards and Other Renderings for Cinema, opens today at the Fondazione Prada in Milan before heading to Shanghai in November. On view through September 8 and accompanied by a screening series, the show features mood boards, drawings, scrapbooks, annotated scripts, and of course, actual storyboards by more than fifty filmmakers including Pedro Almodóvar, Wes Anderson, Ingmar Bergman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Luis Buñuel, Charlie Chaplin, Sofia Coppola, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Jia Zhangke, Akira Kurosawa, Hayao Miyazaki, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Satyajit Ray, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Agnès Varda, and Wim Wenders.

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