Radha Blank’s Netflix hit The 40-Year-Old Version opens the renovated Paris Theater
THE PARIS THEATER
4 West Fifty-Eighth St. at Fifth Ave.
Reopens August 6
www.paristheaternyc.com
To slightly misquote Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca, “We’ll always have the Paris.” Following the pandemic lockdown and a major renovation, the Paris Theater, New York City’s historic single-screen cinema, is officially reopening on August 6 with special programming. The longest-running arthouse in the Big Apple has been presenting films since 1948, when it showed Jean Delannoy’s La Symphonie pastorale; over the years it has screened classic works by such international auteurs as Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Marcel Pagnol, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Demy, Agnieszka Holland, and Bernardo Bertolucci.
The Arte Moderne theater was purchased by Netflix in November 2019 to keep it from closing; to celebrate its reopening, the Paris will be hosting the New York City theatrical premiere of Radha Blank’s Netflix hit, The Forty-Year-Old Version, the Williamsburg native’s breakthrough autobiographical film about a struggling playwright that she wrote, directed, produced, and stars in, accompanied by a selection of hip-hop videos.
“I made Forty-Year-Old Version in 35mm black and white in the spirit of the many great films that informed my love of cinema” Blank said in a statement. “I’m excited to show the film in 35mm as intended and alongside potent films by fearless filmmakers who inspired my development as a storyteller and expanded my vision of what’s possible in the landscape of cinema. That Forty-Year-Old Version gets to screen alongside them at the Paris Theater, a New York beacon for cinema, makes it all the more special.”
Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon will help open the doors of the renovated Paris Theater
In conjunction with the August 6-12 run of her film, Blank, who will be on hand to talk about the movie at the 8:00 screening on opening night, has selected nine repertory works that have had an impact on her, a stellar collection that ranges from John Cassavetes’s Shadows, Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, and Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman to Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, Nick Castle’s Tap, and Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail. A screening of the late Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground will be followed by a discussion with Collins’s daughter, Nina Collins, while there will be a video conversation with Robert Townsend after a showing of his 1987 smash, Hollywood Shuffle.
But that is only the beginning. Also on the 545-seat theater’s agenda is “The Paris Is for Lovers,” a two-week retrospective of thirty-one films chosen by master programmer David Schwartz that premiered at the Paris, reaching deep into the venue’s history. It’s a veritable crash course in cinema studies, consisting of such seminal films as Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, Bertrand Blier’s Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (with Stillman in person), the Maysles brothers’ Grey Gardens, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, Ira Deutchman’s Searching for Mr. Rugoff (with Deutchman in person), Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear, Todd Haynes’s Carol (with cinematographer Ed Lachman in person), and Just Jaeckin’s Emmanuelle.
To slightly misquote a key conversation from Wilder’s Sabrina, the title character, portrayed by Audrey Hepburn, says to Linus (Bogart), “Maybe you should go to the Paris, Linus.” He replies, “To the Paris?” She explains, “It helped me a lot. . . . It’s for changing your outlook, for . . . for throwing open the windows and letting in . . . letting in la vie en rose.”