this week in film and television

NYFF53: FREE FRIDAY

Gene Tierney and Cornel Wilde are looking forward to a day of free screenings at the New York Film Festival

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Amsterdam & Columbus Aves.
Friday, September 25, free,
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org

In conjunction with the twenty-fifth anniversary of preservation specialists the Film Foundation and the Fox centennial, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is featuring free screenings of six restored classics on September 25 as part of the fifty-third New York Film Festival. It’s quite an eclectic lineup, beginning at 1:30 in the Howard Gilman Theater with John Ford’s 1939 Revolutionary War drama, Drums Along the Mohawk, his first Technicolor work, starring Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert. Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road, a bittersweet romance with Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn, is being shown at 3:30 in the Francesca Beale Theater. At 3:30 (HGT), Robert De Niro s stalks Jerry Lewis in one of Martin Scorsese’s true masterpieces, The King of Comedy. At 6:00 (FBT), Elia Kazan’s depression-era drama Wild River, with Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick, will get a rare screening. At 6:30 (HGT), Gene Tierney and Cornel Wilde star in John M. Stahl’s 1945 melodrama, Leave Her to Heaven. And the free day wraps up at 9:00 (FBT) with All That Jazz, Bob Fosse’s semiautobiographical tale highlighted by an electrifying performance by Roy Scheider. In addition, there will be sneak previews of some of the Convergence installations that are part of the festival, which runs September 25 to October 11.

WIM WENDERS — PORTRAITS ALONG THE ROAD: A TRICK OF THE LIGHT

The Skladanowsky brothers attempt to please the demanding Gertrud in Wim Wenders’s affectionate early-cinema tribute, A TRICK OF THE LIGHT

A TRICK OF THE LIGHT (DIE GEBRÜDER SKLADANOWSKY) (Wim Wenders, 1995)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at Third St.
Through September 24
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.wim-wenders.com

German director Wim Wenders pays tribute to the invention of cinema in the charming, delightful, yet bittersweet 1995 film A Trick of the Light, finally getting its long-overdue U.S. theatrical premiere engagement at the IFC Center. Using a vintage 1920s hand-crank camera for the old-fashioned black-and-white silent flashback scenes (shot at eighteen frames per second) that make up the bulk of the film, Wenders and cinematographer Jürgen Jürges iris in and out to tell the story of the real-life Skladanowsky brothers, who were inventing a mechanism to project moving pictures in the late nineteenth century, only to have their work, the bioskop, overshadowed by the Lumière brothers’ cinématographe. The technical genius is Max Skladanowsky (Udo Kier), who films the comic exploits of his brother, Eugen (Christoph Merg), while sibling and ladies’ man Emil (Otto Kuhnle) does the editing and runs the projector. Cheering them on is Max’s demanding young daughter, Gertrud (Nadine Büttner), who wants her father and uncles to capture a more precise depiction of reality. Meanwhile, a spy (Alfred Szczot) keeps a close eye on what they are doing. Working with students from his University of Television and Film Munich class, Wenders occasionally intercuts scenes in almost garish full color in which he interviews Max’s last surviving daughter, ninety-one-year-old Lucie Hürtgen-Skladanowsky, in the same house the family has owned since 1907.

Lucie Hürtgen-Skladanowsky shares fond memories of her father and uncles in A TRICK OF THE LIGHT

Hürtgen-Skladanowsky shares fond memories while examining old photo albums, hand-colored glass plates, and other artifacts from her father’s and uncles’ heyday; she also shares her thoughts on the flashback scenes with Wenders and his small crew. Wenders, Jürges, camera assistant German Kral, soundwoman Barbara Rohm, and sound assistant Florian Gallenberger are shown sitting across the table from Lucie, who entertains them with her comments and recollections. Wenders adds a nostalgic touch by having Gertrud and Eugen occasionally enter the modern-day scenes, turning the film back into black-and-white. Also deserving of praise is Peter Przygodda’s editing and Laurent Petitgand’s lovely carnivalesque score, which help beautifully capture the look, feel, and sound of early cinema. The main film is only about an hour long, but fifteen minutes of credits include fun bonuses. A Trick of the Light, which is “dedicated to the many forgotten pioneers of film,” is part of the IFC Center’s “Wim Wenders: Portraits Along the Road” tribute to the iconoclastic director, playwright, and photographer on the occasion of his seventieth birthday; the series continues through September 24 with such other works as Buena Vista Social Club, Nick’s Film: Lightning over Water, The Soul of a Man, Tokyo-Ga, Pina, and a sneak preview of Every Thing Will Be Fine in 3D.

QUEER/ART/FILM: HUSH . . . HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE

Bette Davis is a scream in cult classic HUSH . . . HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE

HUSH . . . HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (Robert Aldrich, 1964)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at Third St.
Monday, September 21, 8:00
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Hot on the heels of their success with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, director Robert Aldrich and star Bette Davis sought to make a kind of thematic sequel again with Joan Crawford, another campy psychological thriller about jealousy, family, and the wounds of time. Crawford pulled out of the production, but she was replaced by one of Davis’s good friends, Olivia de Havilland, which added a terrific edge to what became another hit, Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte. The film is screening September 21 at 8:00 as part of the monthly IFC Center series “Queer/Art/Film,” curated by Adam Baran and Ira Sachs, consisting of influential works selected by gay artists. Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte was chosen by self-described “actor, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, director, and drag legend” Charles Busch (The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, Die Mommie Die!), who will be on hand for a postfilm discussion. “I had my father take me to the opening day,” Busch says on the IFC Center website. “The stars were there, promoting the film. I was transfixed, studying how a legendary actress behaves.” The film is set on a Louisiana plantation where Charlotte Hollis (Davis) lives as a recluse with her devoted housekeeper, the batty Velma Cruther (Agnes Moorehead). It is 1964, thirty-seven years after Charlotte’s lover, the married John Mayhew (Bruce Dern), was brutally behanded and beheaded at a party thrown by Charlotte’s father, the controlling Big Sam (Victor Buono, who also appeared in Baby Jane). The Hollis mansion must be torn down to make way for a bridge, but Charlotte refuses to leave, causing major headaches for the sheriff (Wesley Addy) and the construction foreman (George Kennedy). Charlotte’s poor cousin, Miriam Deering (de Havilland), arrives to help the deeply tortured Charlotte, but Miriam and family doctor Drew Bayliss (Joseph Cotten) seem to have other plans. Meanwhile, kindly old reporter Harry Willis (Cecil Kellaway) starts poking around, trying to get to the truth behind all the mystery and madness.

Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte is a grisly southern gothic centered on the relationship between the crazed Charlotte and the calm, collected Miriam, allowing Davis and de Havilland to play off each other beautifully, the former chewing up huge swaths of scenery, the latter cleaning it all up neatly with a spritz of cold menace. The supporting cast, which features numerous Twilight Zone veterans and a cameo by Mary Astor in her final role, provides able support as Aldrich (The Dirty Dozen, Kiss Me Deadly) wishes a fond farewell to the Old South in striking black-and-white, courtesy of cinematographer Joseph F. Biroc, who also worked with Aldrich on such diverse films as The Flight of the Phoenix, The Killing of Sister George, and The Longest Yard. Composer Frank De Vol is responsible for the chilling soundtrack. It’s all great fun, with legitimate scares, helping it earn seven Oscar nominations, including for Moorehead, Biroc, and De Vol (as well as for art direction, costume design, editing, and song). It should be quite a blast getting Busch’s take on this cult classic. “Queer/Art/Film” continues October 9 with Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (with K8 Hardy) and November 23 with Alan Parker’s Fame (with Kia LaBeija).

REVOLUTION OF THE EYE: MODERN ART AND THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN TELEVISION

Jewish Museum show explores relationship between early television and modern art (photo by David Heald)

The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Thursday – Tuesday through September 27, $7.50-$15 (children eighteen and under free; free admission Saturday 11:00 am – 5:45 pm, pay-what-you-wish Thursday 5:00 – 8:00)
212-423-3200
thejewishmuseum.org

I am a proud TV baby, born into the first generation that treated television like a cherished member of the family. I actually took great offense that my bonus sibling — it was much more than a mere babysitter to me — was referred to as the boob tube and that many people claimed that watching too much of what I even as a kid considered a legitimate art form was bad for your physical and mental well-being. In Annie Hall, Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) famously explains to his actor pal, Rob (Tony Roberts), and girlfriend, Annie (Diane Keaton), why it’s so clean in California: “They don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.” Which leads me to the Jewish Museum’s fun and fascinating new look at the medium, the informative and entertaining exhibition “Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television,” continuing through September 27. “Rarely is TV discussed in terms of art — and when it is, critics have usually focused on the ways television has influenced high art, or been critiqued and ridiculed by it,” UMBC Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture executive director Symmes Gardner writes in his foreword to the catalog. “Yet as network television now shares the stage with other forms of broadcasting and video dissemination, we can see the ways in which this popular, commercial mechanism aided art, responded to art — and was, many times, itself art.”

Exhibition includes clip of Salvador Dali appearance on WHAT’S MY LINE? (© Fremantle Media)

The multimedia show follows the development of television from the 1940s through the 1970s, tracing the impact that modern art had on the telly, which in turn influenced contemporary American society. Lovingly curated by Maurice Berger — although a bit noisy, with too many of the sounds bouncing off one another — the exhibition explores links between Rod Serling’s anthology series The Twilight Zone and surrealism (including a startling comparison of the opening title sequence to clips of short films by Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, and René Clair), and Ernie Kovacs and Dada (and how the comic master was among the first to exploit the technology of the medium itself while playfully attacking the corporations that sponsored it). The development of television logos, advertising, and title sequences turns out to be quite a tale, involving such cutting-edge graphic designers as Saul Bass and established artists as Ben Shahn. Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In is seen in conjunction with Pop, Op, and psychedelic art, while the tongue-in-cheek Batman series is compared to the comic-book Pop art of Roy Lichtenstein. Even Dinah Shore and Ed Sullivan make the cut, the latter’s mod sets matched with sculptures by Sol Lewitt, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris. The exhibit also has rare clips of artists on television, including Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, John Cage, Duchamp, Shahn, and Lichtenstein, although they are all far too short, but a segment of Aline Saarinen’s Sunday Show with Alberto Giacometti is a real treat. There are also works by Lee Friedlander (mocking the medium), Georgia O’Keeffe, Man Ray, Robert Motherwell, Eero Saarinen (Aline’s husband), Agnes Martin, and others, in addition to sections devoted to Winky Dink and You, which invited kids to be artists using the television screen, and the Museum of Modern Art’s Television Project, which sought to place the medium in a higher art form, something that the Jewish Museum has ably accomplished in this splendid exhibit that justifies my longtime love affair with the boob tube.

THEATER & CINEMA: VENUS IN FUR

The relationship between actor and director becomes an intense psychosexual battle in Roman Polanski’s VENUS IN FUR

CINÉSALON: VENUS IN FUR (LA VÉNUS À LA FOURRURE) (Roman Polanski, 2013)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, September 22, $14, 4:00 & 7:30 (later screening with David Ives Q&A)
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
www.ifcfilms.com

For his third stage adaptation in ten years, following 1994’s Death and the Maiden and 2011’s Carnage, Roman Polanski created a marvelous, multilayered examination of the intricate nature of storytelling, consumed with aspects of doubling. David Ives’s Tony-nominated play, Venus in Fur, is about a cynical theater director, Thomas Novachek, who is auditioning actresses for the lead in his next production, a theatrical version of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s psychosexual novella Venus in Furs (which led to the term “sado-masochism”), itself a man’s retelling of his enslavement by a woman. In the film, as he is packing up and about to head home, Thomas (Matthieu Amalric) is interrupted by Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner), a tall blond who at first appears ditzy and unprepared, practically begging him to let her audition even though she isn’t on the casting sheet, then slowly taking charge as she reveals an intimate knowledge not only of his script but of stagecraft as well. An at-first flummoxed Thomas becomes more and more intrigued as Vanda performs the role of Wanda von Dunayev and he reads the part of Severin von Kushemski, their actor-director relationship intertwining with that of the characters’ dangerous and erotic attraction.

Roman Polanski directs wife Emmanuelle Seigner in thrilling stage adaptation of Tony-winning play

Roman Polanski directs wife Emmanuelle Seigner in thrilling stage adaptation of Tony-nominated play

Ives’s English-language play, which earned Nina Arianda a Tony for Best Actress, was set in an office, but Polanski, who cowrote the screenplay with Ives, has moved this French version to an old theater (the Théâtre Récamier in Paris, rebuilt by designer Jean Rabasse) where a musical production of John Ford’s Stagecoach has recently taken place, with some of the props still onstage, including a rather phallic (and prickly) cactus. Polanski has masterfully used the machinations of cinema to expand on the play while also remaining true to its single setting. One of the world’s finest actors, Amalric, who looks more than a little like a younger Polanski, is spectacular as the pretentious Thomas, his expression-filled eyes and herky-jerky motion defining the evolution of his character’s fascination with Vanda, while Seigner, who is Polanski’s wife, is a dynamo of breathless erotic power and energy, seamlessly weaving in and out of different aspects of Vanda. Venus in Fur was shot in chronological order with one camera by cinematographer Paweł Edelman, who photographed Polanski’s previous five feature films, making it feel like the viewer is onstage, experiencing the events in real time. Alexandre Desplat’s complex, gorgeous score is a character unto itself, beginning with the outdoor establishing shot of the theater. The film also contains elements that recall such previous Polanski works as The Tenant, Bitter Moon, Tess, and The Fearless Vampire Killers, placing it firmly within his impressive canon. Polanski was handed Ives’s script at Cannes in 2012, and this screen version was then shown at Cannes for the 2013 festival, a whirlwind production that is echoed in Seigner’s performance. Venus in Fur kicks off the CinéSalon series “Theater & Cinema” on September 22, with Ives on hand for a Q&A moderated by Nicholas Elliott following the 7:30 screening. The Tuesday festival continues through October 27 with such other stage-related dramas as Jacques Rivette’s Va Savoir, Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria, Arnaud Desplechin’s Esther Kahn, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Games of Love and Chance, and François Truffaut’s The Last Metro. But FIAF is only getting started with Amalric, who will be the subject of a six-week retrospective in November and December; he’ll be in Florence Gould Hall for a Q&A with costar Stéphanie Cléau following the 7:30 screening of The Blue Room on November 3, then will perform in writer-director Cléau’s stage production of Le Moral des Ménages with Anne-Laure Tondu at FIAF on November 4-5.

VITTORIO DE SICA: MARRIAGE ITALIAN STYLE

Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni star as lovers in a rather tempestuous relationship in MARRIAGE ITALIAN STYLE

MARRIAGE ITALIAN STYLE (Vittorio De Sica, 1965)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Sunday, September 20, and Monday, September 21
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren have a blast playing off their reputations in Vittorio De Sica’s Oscar-nominated romantic farce, Marriage Italian Style. The colorful 1964 film is a kind of follow-up to Pietro Germi’s 1961 comedy, Divorce Italian Style, which earned Mastroianni an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. In Marriage, which is based on Eduardo De Filippo’s 1946 play, Filumena Marturano, Mastroianni stars as Domenico Soriano, a well-to-do businessman who takes an instant liking to seventeen-year-old prostitute Filumena (an Oscar-nominated Loren) in a Naples brothel during a WWII air raid. Their relationship secretly blossoms, but when Filumena grows tired of being hidden by Domenico, treated more like a maid than a lover, she decides to take matters into her own hands, with more than a few surprises. Mastroianni is exceptional as the smooth-talking, dapper, and elegant Domenico, who can’t keep away from beautiful young women, while Loren, who previously worked with De Sica in The Gold of Naples and Two Women, winning an Oscar for Best Actress in the latter, is at her fiery best as the hot-blooded hooker trying to raise her station in life. Produced by Carlo Ponti during the brief annulment period in his marriage to Loren, the film, which is told partly in flashback, also features Tecla Scarano as Domenico’s maid, Rosalia, and Aldo Puglisi as Domenico’s right-hand man, Alfredo, who takes quite a shine to Filumena. Armando Trovajoli’s lush, romantic score adds wonderful irony to the comic proceedings. And just wait till you see Loren in that mind-blowing black lingerie. Marriage Italian Style is screening September 20 & 21 as part of Film Forum’s twenty-four-day retrospective of elegant actor-director De Sica, one of the great Italian neorealists; the series continues through October 8 with such other seminal works as Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan, Umberto D., General Della Rovere, Shoeshine, Two Women, and The Earrings of Madame De . . .

BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING

Stephen (Keir Dullea) tries to comfort his sister, Ann (Carol Lynley), in BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING

BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING (Otto Preminger, 1965)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Sunday, September 20, $7, 5:30
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

“I had heard all the rumors about Preminger, but I felt he wouldn’t do that to me. I was wrong, oh so wrong,” Keir Dullea told Foster Hirsch in the 2007 biography Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King, referring to the making of the 1965 psychological noir thriller Bunny Lake Is Missing and Otto Preminger’s notorious treatment of actors. “I was playing a crazy character and the director was driving me crazy. . . . About halfway through the shoot, I began to wonder, Who do you have to f&ck to get off this picture?” On September 20, Dullea and Hirsch will be at Film Forum for a one-time-only screening of the fiftieth anniversary 4K digital restoration of Bunny Lake, which will be introduced by Dullea (2001: A Space Odyssey, David and Lisa) and followed by a Q&A with the actor, moderated by Hirsch. In the intensely creepy film, loosely based on the novel by Merriam Modell (under the pseudonym Evelyn Piper), Carol Lynley stars as Ann Lake, a young woman who has just moved to London from New York. She drops off her daughter, Bunny, for her first day of school, but when she returns later to pick her up, there is no evidence that the girl was ever there. When Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) and his right-hand man, Sergeant Andrews (Clive Revill), begin investigating the case, they are soon wondering whether Bunny really exists, more than hinting that she might be a figment of Ann’s imagination.

Television veteran Lynley, who seemed on the verge of stardom after appearing in such films as Return to Peyton Place, Bunny Lake Is Missing, Shock Treatment, and The Poseidon Adventure but never quite reached that next level, gives one of her best performances as Ann, a tortured woman who is determined to stop her world from unraveling around her. Dullea is a model of efficiency as the cold, direct Stephen, a character invented by Preminger and screenwriters John and Penelope Mortimer. Shot in black-and-white by Denys N. Coop on location in London, the film also features cameos by longtime English actors Martita Hunt, Anna Massey, and Finlay Currie as well as the rock group the Zombies and Noël Coward, who plays Ann’s very kooky landlord, Horatio Wilson. Saul Bass’s titles, in which a hand tears paper as if the story is being ripped from the headlines, set the tense mood right from the start. The ending offers some neat twists but is far too abrupt. “No actor ever peaked with him. How could you?” Dullea added to Hirsch about Preminger (Laura, Stalag 17). “The subtlety that I felt I was able to give to my work in 2001, because Stanley Kubrick created a safe atmosphere where actors were not afraid to be foolish or wrong, was missing on Otto’s set. I don’t hate him; it’s too long ago. But the experience was the most unpleasant I ever had.” It should be quite fascinating to hear more from Dullea and Hirsch at Film Forum on September 20.