Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier play lovers haunted by the past in REBECCA
CABARET CINEMA: REBECCA (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, March 18, $10, 9:30
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” The opening line of Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock’s first Hollywood picture, instantly sends chills down the spine of anyone who has seen the film or read the book on which it is based, Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel of the same name. The line is spoken in voice-over by the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine), so haunted by the first Mrs. de Winter, the recently deceased Rebecca, that she never even gets a first name, depriving her of her own identity. While serving as a paid companion to snooty wealthy matron Edythe Van Hopper (Florence Bates) on a trip to Monte Carlo, the orphaned young woman meets the dapper but dark Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), an elegant widower who takes a liking to her. Following a whirlwind courtship, they are married, and Maxim takes his mousey bride to his castlelike Cornwall estate, Manderley, where she is constantly compared to and overshadowed by the ghost of Rebecca, idolized as the perfect woman by the large staff, in particular the grim housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), who relentlessly tortures the second Mrs. de Winter. “You wouldn’t think she’d been gone so long, would you?” Mrs. Danvers tells her. “Sometimes, when I walk along the corridor, I fancy I hear her just behind me. That quick light step, I couldn’t mistake it anywhere. It’s not only in this room, it’s in all the rooms in the house. I can almost hear it now.” But just as the second Mrs. de Winter finally tries to establish herself — “I am Mrs. de Winter now” she declares to Mrs. Danvers — Maxim shares a shocking truth about the first Mrs. de Winter that turns her world inside out.
The second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine) is mercilessly tortured by Manderley housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson)
Nominated for eleven Oscars and winner of two (for Best Picture and Best Black and White Cinematography, by George Barnes), Rebecca is a gripping Gothic thriller about fear, obsession, love, identity, and memory. Although the film is filled with Hitchcockian touches, producer David O. Selznick had a large hand in the final version, reediting and supervising several reshoots to keep closer to du Maurier’s novel. From the script, written by Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison based on Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan’s adaptation, to Franz Waxman’s dramatic score, Joseph B. Platt and Howard Bristol’s interiors, and the uncredited costumes, Rebecca is a masterpiece of precision, with fascinating undertones of incest (Olivier is more like a father to Fontaine than a lover; George Sanders plays a cad who is supposedly a cousin of Rebecca’s) and lesbianism (Mrs. Danvers’s devotion to Rebecca appears to be more than just that of a loyal employee). It’s also hard not to watch it today without thinking of such later 1940s films as Gaslight and Citizen Kane, especially that ending. An oft-delayed, financially troubled Broadway musical version has been in the works for several years, promising “the Manderley Experience,” but it’s going to be tough to top du Maurier’s book and Hitchcock’s film when it comes to telling this multilayered story of mystery and romance. Rebecca, which also stars Nigel Bruce as Maxim’s brother, Giles, Gladys Cooper as Giles’s wife, Beatrice, Reginald Denny as the manager of Manderley, and Leo G. Carroll as Rebecca’s doctor, is screening March 18 at 9:30 in the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Emotions / Emoticons” and will be introduced by Caitlin Leffel and Jacob Lehman, authors of The Best Things to Do in New York: 1001 Ideas. The nine-week festival is being held in conjunction with the Brainwave series “Emotion,” with each film focused on a different state of mind. Rebecca is happiness (happiness?!?); future screenings include Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour (anger), Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (love), Charles Chaplin’s The Kid (sadness), and David Lynch’s Eraserhead (disgust).
Experimental director Marie Losier tells a very different kind of love story in the intimate documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, her debut feature-length film. In 1993, British industrial music legend Genesis P-Orridge, the founder of such highly influential groups as Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle, and COUM Transmissions (and who changed his name from Neil Andrew Megson in 1971), married Jacqueline Mary Breyer, a nurse and singer who then changed her name to Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. The two artists were so madly in love that they decided to become a single “pandrogynous” unit known as Breyer P-Orridge, undergoing various forms of plastic surgery to look more alike. Both their life and their music were influenced by the literary cut-up style developed by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, but the film itself has the feel that it too was cut up and randomly put back together, resulting in a seriously flawed and fractured narrative that has fascinating individual moments that don’t form a cohesive whole. Mixing in home movies, staged reenactments, archival concert footage, voice-over narration by Genesis, and new interviews (with such friends and colleagues as Tony Conrad, Marti Domination, Lili Chopra, and Peaches), Losier never quite gets to the heart of the matter. Much of the film feels as if something’s missing, as if the director got too close to her subjects and assumed the audience can fill in certain gaps. As she says in the project’s production notes, “The film will attempt to present the incredible complexity of Genesis’ personality from many different angles, most especially my subjective point of view. From my earliest films, my feeling has been that when shooting real life subjects, my very presence changes the reality of what I am filming. Therefore, I am not a neutral participant, but one equally engaged and inspired by what is happening in front of my camera.” As personal and revealing as the film gets at times, much of it also seems forced and overly arty. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is screening at various days and times through April 3 at the Rubin Museum in conjunction with the new site-specific interactive-exchange exhibition 
An orgy doesn’t go quite as planned in Yann Gonzalez’s dark, lurid, and silly directorial debut, You and the Night. The erotic tragicomedy evokes the films of Derek Jarman along with Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and, primarily, Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus as seven characters gather one evening for a night of debauchery in the name of love, desperate to fill the gaps in their sad lives. “It’s our secret vice. A little break from the eternal, maddening class struggle,” the Star (Fabienne Babe) tells a pair of cops who show up looking for a runaway boy. The party is hosted by trans gypsy maid Udo (Nicolas Maury); the other guests are Ali (Kate Moran), an older woman joined by her younger lover, Matthias (Niels Schneider); the Stud (soccer star Éric Cantona), who boasts of his enormous manhood (and then proves it); the Teen (Alain Fabien Delon, son of French screen idol Alain Delon), who has not developed his own identity yet; and the Slut (Julie Brémond), who can’t wait to do anyone and everyone. Over the course of the night, they share their dreams, relate their pasts, and search for love, set to a score by French electronic band M83, which is led by Anthony Gonzalez, Yann’s brother. The movie’s supposed to be dreamy and poetic, but instead it’s cold and artificial, often bathed in an unfeeling blue light that furthers the distance between the characters and the audience. It’s often hard to tell what’s supposed to be “real” and what’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek, although Béatrice Dalle’s cameo as a whip-touting commissioner is, well, it just is. You and the Night is screening in FIAF’s “EDM Anthems: French Touch on Film” series on March 15 at 4:00 and 7:30; the series continues on Tuesdays through April 26 with such other films as Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, and Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood, which are either set in the club scene or feature EDM-based soundtracks.
Although production designers play a critical role in the making of a film, it’s something that the public tends to take for granted; the best of the best are not exactly household names. The Museum of the Moving Image seeks to rectify that in at least one case with its new series, “See It Big! Jack Fisk,” a celebration of the work of Oscar-nominated production designer, art director, and carpenter Jack Fisk. The fifteen-film series runs March 11 to April 1, kicking off with Terence Malick’s The New World. At the time the film was released in 2005, the iconoclastic American auteur had directed a mere four films in his forty-year career, each a gem in its own way — 1973’s Badlands, 1978’s Days of Heaven, 1998’s The Thin Red Line, and 2005’s The New World, and all of which Fisk worked on. Spectacularly photographed by cinematographer Emanuel Luzbeki (who has won three consecutive Oscars as of the 2016 Academy Awards), The New World reimagines the story of Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher) as an epic tale of unrequited desire, a fiercely passionate, if not completely accurate, love story for the ages. In 1607, a crew led by Captain Christopher Newport (Christopher Plummer) has landed in what will come to be known as Jamestown. The disgraced Smith, who was nearly hanged for mutiny, is ordered to meet with “the naturals” in order to develop a favorable relationship. But Smith falls deeply for Pocahontas, Chief Powhatan’s (August Schellenberg) beautiful young daughter, who shares his feelings, leading to a dangerous love that threatens to leave death and destruction in its wake. Large stretches of the film feature no dialogue, instead consisting of gorgeously framed shots with gentle, poetic narration from Smith, Pocahontas, and, later, John Rolfe (Christian Bale). The scenes between Farrell and Kilcher nearly ignite the screen, their eyes burning into each other. Malick and Luzbeki focus on lush, rolling fields and rushing rivers that are more than just beautiful scenery; the gorgeous landscape of this new world is filled with promise, with hope, even though we know what eventually, tragically happens. The film, which experienced well-documented casting, editing, and distribution dilemmas, bogs down considerably when Smith’s place in the newly named Rebecca’s life is taken over by Rolfe, but it all builds to a heart-wrenching conclusion. The New World is screening March 11 at 7:00; the series is being held in conjunction with the upcoming release of Malick’s latest film, Knight of Cups, which is being shown April 1 and on which Fisk, who has worked on every one of Malick’s feature films, served as production designer.
One of the best films of 2008, A Christmas Tale is yet another extraordinary work from French post-New Wave filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin (La Sentinelle, Esther Kahn). Desplechin, who examined family dysfunction in the masterful