Frontality and Time
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The Criterion Mobile Closet is heading to Los Angeles! The first stop will be Vidiots, the city’s storied rental outlet and screening venue, and you’ll find us there on April 26 and 27. Then, on June 6 and 7, we will be at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica as the American Cinematheque presents the fourth iteration of its immensely popular series Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair.
The series will expand this summer to seven additional cities in the U.S. before wrapping with a run in London. Everyone will have their own explanations as to how bleak has become the new chic, but some of the most engagingly dispiriting films ever made will screen in LA and Chicago from June 1 through 7; in Portland and Minneapolis from June 5 through 12; in New York, Boston, and Dallas from June 8 through 14; and at the Prince Charles Cinema—#SaveThePCC!—from June 15 through 21.
Before turning to this week’s highlights, we need to take a moment to remember Jean Marsh, the cocreator and star of the landmark British series Upstairs, Downstairs who also appeared in Cleopatra (1963), Frenzy (1972), and Willow (1988); Nora Aunor, a massive star in the Philippines who won over a fresh wave of new admirers around the world following the recent revival of Lino Brocka’s Bona (1980); Nicky Katt, who appeared with Gena Rowlands in a stage production of Love Streams directed by John Cassavetes and in films by Richard Linklater, Gregg Araki, Kathryn Bigelow, and Christopher Nolan; and Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel Prize–winning giant of Latin American literature who saw several of his novels adapted as films—and even codirected a movie, Pantaleon (1976), with José María Gutiérrez Santos.
- Charles Burnett turned eighty-one this past Sunday, and new restorations of his first feature, Killer of Sheep (1977), and The Annihilation of Fish (1999) are currently in theaters. In a magnificent conversation with Barry Jenkins at Interview, Burnett recalls growing up in Los Angeles “in a community where everyone was from the South—Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas . . . We didn’t really leave the South because the South followed us out here.” Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger (1990) will screen as part of the Film at Lincoln Center series L.A. Rebellion: Then and Now (April 25 through May 4), and at Letterboxd, Adesola Thomas gets Burnett talking about the origins of the movement. “Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Ben Caldwell, and Alile Larkin—we used to argue all day, all night long about what we should be doing as filmmakers,” Burnett recalls. “We worked on each other’s films constantly. It was like we ate and talked film.”
- 1975: Fifty Is the New Hollywood, a series running at the Egyptian Theatre in LA from May 5 through 26, will celebrate the golden anniversaries of such classics as Robert Altman’s Nashville and Hal Ashby’s Shampoo. You probably won’t have noticed, but a couple of films have been left out of the program, intentionally or not. In the Guardian, Michael Hann tells the story behind Slade in Flame, which is decidedly “not the fun-packed adventures of a happy-go-lucky glam rock foursome, but a dour, downbeat film about being chewed up and spat out by the music industry.” And Richard Beymer’s 1975 cut of The Innerview, newly restored, opens today at Anthology Film Archives in New York. “No matter how fatiguing its eighty-nine minutes,” writes Melissa Anderson at 4Columns, “this freaky curio maintains an ineradicable appeal.”
- There probably won’t be much overlap between the Austin Film Society’s series This Nation’s Saving Grace: Discoveries from the Golden Age of British Cinema (May 6 through 31) and the Locarno retrospective Great Expectations: British Postwar Cinema, 1945–1960 (August 6 through 16). There’s a fair chance, too, that none of the films BFI curator Josephine Botting writes about in her terrific series “Rarities of British Cinema” will appear in either program. Herbert Wilcox’s Limelight (1936) “gives a fascinating insight both into backstage life in London’s theater world and the developing career of a major British stage and screen personality,” Anna Neagle. Then there’s Bob Compton Bennett’s It Started in Paradise (1952), shot in Technicolor by Jack Cardiff; Bernard Knowles’s The Lost People (1949), with Richard Attenborough and Mai Zetterling; and Service for Ladies (1932): “There are quota films and then there are Alexander Korda quota films: the Rolls Royce of the form.”
- Next month, we’ll be showcasing three films starring Joan Chen on the Criterion Channel. A star in China in her teens, Chen broke through internationally when she played the opium-addicted empress in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987) and solidified her fame playing mill owner Josie Packard in Twin Peaks. Now Chen is “in the midst of a career revival that began with her Independent Spirit Award–nominated performance in [Sean Wang’s] Didi (2024),” writes Esther Zuckerman in her profile for the New York Times. In Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet, she’s the mother of the character Ang Lee wanted her to play in his 1993 original, and she’ll soon appear alongside Michelle Pfeiffer in Michael Showalter’s Christmas comedy, Oh. What. Fun. “I’m, in a way, becoming a character actor,” says Chen. “These were parts that I never thought about when I was younger. I always was a tragic person.”
- Let’s wrap not with a long read but with a viewing recommendation. For about an hour, Sight and Sound managing editor Isabel Stevens talks with Céline Sciamma (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Petite maman) about Chantal Akerman. Clips from La captive (2000) and Je tu il elle (1975) lead to discussions about the “joy of ideas,” how a film can be built around a corridor, and Akerman’s “braveness with frontality and time.” Sciamma recalls that while working on Portrait with cinematographer Claire Mathon, “we would just say, ‘Yeah, this is like full Chantal,’ or ‘This is like mini Chantal’ . . . And it’s beautiful also that it’s easy to do, because cinema is easier than you think.”
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