Goings On: Browning, Monteiro, Chahine, and More

Directed by former circus performer and sideshow barker Tod Browning, The Unknown (1927) was the filmmaker’s sixth collaboration with Chaney, “and it all came together in this one,” writes Farran Smith Nehme, “the carnival background, the sociopathic criminals, the body horror, the sublimated sex.” Nick Newman runs a series he calls Amnesiascope, and he’s put together a new score for Browning’s recently revived silent classic.

In Newman’s “radical reimagining, Dylan’s music—from fan favorites to his deepest cuts—expand[s] Browning’s vision: in conversation with, juxtaposing, and contradicting the tale of a carnival performer (Chaney) and his merciless attempt to win the heart of a fellow star (Joan Crawford).” Tuesday’s screening went so well that he’s presenting an encore on Saturday at the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research.

Starting today in New York, the Museum of Modern Art presents João César Monteiro: Symphonies of a Libertine, a complete retrospective featuring new restorations and a good handful of films by some of the Portuguese director’s influences, including F. W. Murnau, Jean-Luc Godard, and Kenji Mizoguchi. When he died in 2003, Monteiro left behind “a sensuous, richly intertextual body of films that developed in singular opposition to fascism and bourgeois democracy alike,” writes Benjamin Crais for Screen Slate. “Encountered today, when cinephilia is routinely confused with the mere chronic consumption of films, Monteiro’s work presents us with a vital example of cinema as a way of being in and against the world.”

Metrograph will launch several tantalizing series on Friday, including one dedicated to the work of the masterful editor and sound designer Walter Murch, another built around the new restoration of Isao Fujisawa’s Bye Bye Love (1974), and Memories of Vietnamese Cinema, guest programmed by Minh Nguyen, the author of Memorial Park: Revisiting Vietnam. Metrograph will also host the New York premieres of nine new restorations of landmark works by Youssef Chahine.

“Emerging in the early 1950s, during the golden age of Egyptian cinema, Chahine immediately revealed himself to be a highly confident artist with a talent for infusing standard Hollywood-style entertainments with an unmistakably Egyptian spirit,” writes Joseph Fahim. “Later that decade and throughout the ’60s, he experimented more radically with Western genres—Italian neorealism, sociological noir, historical epic—creating hybrid films unique for their striking Egyptian iconography and socialist-leaning themes. These works cemented his reputation as one of the most authentic, creative voices in Arab cinema, a status he maintained for the rest of his career—even when he ventured into more politically confrontational films in the ’70s, before moving inward, tackling autobiographical and existential concerns in the ’80s, and then outward again, with his hugely popular epics at the turn of the century.”

The Criterion Mobile Closet will open its doors in Lincoln Park during this first weekend of the Chicago International Film Festival, while Sitges rages on in Barcelona through Sunday. The Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum are copresenting an extensive series of films by Jean Epstein, whose star was rising in the Parisian literary scene when he began making films in 1922. “For Epstein,” wrote Stuart Liebman for Artforum in 2016, “the camera and its related techniques were not simply tools to create art as paintbrushes were for painters. Rather, the camera’s ‘metal brain’ was an instrument of revelation; like a telescope or a microscope, it provided access to realms of insight and knowledge beyond normal human ken.”

Major Frederick Wiseman retrospectives will open in Berkeley on Saturday and in London on Monday, both running well into next year. The BFI will also raise the curtain on Love, Sex, Religion, Death: The Complete Films of Terence Davies on Monday. And on Monday evening in Los Angeles, Acropolis Cinema will host an evening with Kevin Jerome Everson and David Dominique, who has composed the score for Everson’s new medium-length film, When the Sun Is Eaten, which captures the 2024 solar eclipse as it was seen in Mazatlán, Mexico; Carbondale, Illinois; and Cleveland, Ohio.