this week in film and television

THE COMPLETE HITCHCOCK / THE HITCHCOCK 9: BLACKMAIL

BLACKMAIL (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Friday, February 21, 7:00; Sunday, March 2, 4:10; Thursday, March 6, with Murder!; Friday, March 21, 10:30; Saturday, May 3, 3:30
The Complete Hitchcock: February 21 – March 27
The Hitchcock 9: February 21 – May 4
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Last summer, BAMcinématek presented restored versions of all nine of Alfred Hitchcock’s surviving silent works, and now “The Hitchcock 9” will be shown at Film Forum from February 21 through May 4 in conjunction with the larger series “The Complete Hitchcock,” which includes all of the Master of Suspense’s films, along with a few surprises. Both series begin Friday with the silent version of Blackmail, accompanied by Steve Sterner on the piano. Based on the play by Charles Bennett, Hitchcock’s 1929 thriller is both his last silent picture as well as his first sound film. The transition is evident from the very beginning, eight glorious minutes of a police arrest with incidental music only, highlighted by an unforgettable mirror shot (courtesy of cinematographer Jack E. Cox) as the cops close in on their suspect. After those opening moments, the film switches to a talkie in the nonsilent version, as New Scotland Yard detective Frank Webber (John Longden) gets into a fight with his girlfriend, Alice White (Anny Ondra, later to become the longtime Mrs. Max Schmeling), who goes off on a secret rendezvous with a slick artist named Crewe (Cyril Ritchard). When things go horribly wrong at Crewe’s studio, Frank assures Alice that he will help her, but slimy ex-con Tracy (Donald Calthrop) has other ideas, thinking he can use some inside information to make a small killing. After shooting the picture with sound — including having Ondra’s dialogue spoken off-screen by Joan Barry because Ondra’s Eastern European accent was too thick — Sir Alfred filmed some scenes over again in silence, resulting in two versions of this splendid psychological thriller, both laced with elements of German Expressionism and early film noir as well as flashes of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Look for Hitch as the man on the subway being menaced by a young boy.

Early thriller, shot with and without sound, features classic Hitchcock touches

The silent version is being shown at Film Forum on February 21, March 2, and May 3, while the sound picture will screen March 6 in a double feature with Murder! and by itself on March 21. “The Hitchcock 9” continues through May 4 with The Lodger, The Pleasure Garden, Easy Virtue, Champagne, The Farmer’s Wife, The Ring, Downhill, and The Manxman (all featuring Sterner on piano), while “The Complete Hitchcock” gets off to a rousing start with North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief, and The Wrong Man and such double features as Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Rich and Strange, The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, Secret Agent and Young and Innocent, and The Trouble with Harry and Family Plot. In addition, the Paley Center will be hosting “The Complete Hitchcock: Television” on March 29-30 and April 5-6, consisting of all episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that the master directed, as well as documentaries, interviews, and other bonuses.

CHILD’S POSE

Luminița Gheorghiu plays a controlling, domineering mother in Călin Peter Netzer’s award-winning CHILD’S POSE

CHILD’S POSE (POZITIA COPILULUI) (Călin Peter Netzer, 2013)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
February 19 – March 4
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.zeitgeistfilms.com/childspose

Luminita Gheorghiu, grand dame of the Romanian New Wave, was nominated for Best Actress at the European Film Awards for her devastating portrayal of a domineering mother in Călin Peter Netzer’s Child’s Pose. Gheorghiu (The Death of Mister Lazarescu; 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) stars as Cornelia Kerenes, an elegant, cigarette-smoking architect who immediately jumps into action when her son, Barbu (Bogdan Dumitrache), is involved in a terrible car accident, killing a child. Despite their recent estrangement — Cornelia and Barbu have rarely spoken since he married Carmen (Ilinca Goia) — Cornelia starts constructing a scenario, like designing one of her buildings, to keep Barbu out of jail. She and her surgeon husband, Reli (Florin Zamfirescu), along with her sister, Olga (Nataşa Raab), start calling in favors and doling out bribes while showing a stunning lack of concern for the family of the boy who Barbu killed. As the child’s funeral approaches, relationships come together and fall apart as parents try to deal with what has happened to their children. Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, Child’s Pose is a searing examination of class, corruption, and power. Reminiscent of Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman, in which María Onetto gives a mesmerizing performance as an Argentine upper-class wife and mother who looks the other way when it appears that she might have run over a local boy, Child’s Pose is a penetrating character study that centers around the wide gap between the rich and the poor. Early on in the film, Cornelia, who her husband at one point calls “Controlia,” sits down with her dour cleaning woman and offers her a pair of used shoes, expecting her to rejoice in such wonderful charity. The scene sets the stage for what occurs later, as Cornelia believes money is the primary route to Barbu’s freedom, but it’s a path littered with more than just one young child’s body. The taut, razor-sharp script was written by Netzer (Maria, Medal of Honor) and Răzvan Rădulescu, who has worked on such other Romanian New Wave films as The Death of Mister Lazarescu, Stuff and Dough, and Tuesday, After Christmas. In Cornelia, they have created a woman worthy of joining the pantheon of classic domineering cinematic mothers.

AN AUTEURIST HISTORY OF FILM: WOMAN IN THE DUNES

Hiroshi Teshigahara’s WOMAN IN THE DUNES examines the meaninglessness of human existence

WOMAN IN THE DUNES (SUNNA NO ONNA) (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building
4 West 54th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
February 19-21, 1:30
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

On an insect-gathering expedition across a vast landscape of desert sand by the ocean, an entomologist (Eiji Okada) suddenly finds himself trapped in a kind of Sisyphean hell in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Kafka-esque Woman in the Dunes, based on Kōbō Abe’s marvelous novel. The man — his name is given only at the very end — is tricked into moving in with a woman (Kyōko Kishida) who is living in a ramshackle house built deep in a sand dune; the only way out is via a rope ladder that local villagers use to give them their sparse supplies. At first the man thinks it’s all some kind of joke, but as he discovers that there’s no way out — trying to climb the walls of sand just makes more work for him and the woman — he has to reevaluate his surreal situation. Woman in the Dunes is a brutal statement on the futility, desperation, and emptiness of simple human existence. The man is reduced to one of the insects he collects in jars — glass is made of sand, of course — while the woman, whose husband and son died in this ditch, does the cooking and cleaning, their unique identities gone, stripped away by their pointless toil. They are left with seemingly no purpose in life except to serve the strange villagers who occasionally peer down at them as if they were animals in a zoo. “Are you shoveling to survive, or surviving to shovel?” the man asks the woman, who has clearly resigned herself to her fate. Cinematographer Hiroshi Segawa often shoots the black-and-white film in near darkness, the characters virtually disappearing for brief periods of time, while Tōru Takemitsu’s ominous avant-garde score adds to the intensity. Abe and Teshigahara also collaborated on The Pitfall, The Ruined Map, and The Face of Another, but Woman in the Dunes is their masterwork, a shattering look at the meaninglessness of life. The 123-minute version of Woman in the Dunes (there’s also a recently restored 147-minute director’s cut) is screening February 19-21 at 1:30 as part of MoMA’s ongoing series “An Auteurist History of Film,” which continues February 26-28 with Peter Emmanuel Goldman’s Echoes of Silence and March 5-7 with Joseph Losey’s The Servant.

RICHIE’S FANTASTIC FIVE — KUROSAWA, MIZOGUCHI, OZU, YANAGIMACHI & KORE-EDA: AFTER LIFE

Guides interview the deceased in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s AFTER LIFE

AFTER LIFE (WANDÂFURU RAIFU) (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1998)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Wednesday, February 19, $12, 7:00
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Japan Society’s five-film, five-month, five-director tribute to writer, critic, scholar, curator, and filmmaker Donald Richie, who died on February 19, 2013, at the age of eighty-eight, comes to a close on the one-year anniversary of his passing in appropriate fashion, with a screening of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s second narrative feature, After Life, Kore-eda’s eminently thoughtful film about two of his recurring themes: death and memory. Every Monday, the deceased arrive at a way station where they have three days to decide on a single memory they can bring with them into heaven. Once chosen, the memory is re-created on film, and the person goes on to the next step of his or her journey, to be replaced by a new batch of souls. The way station is staffed by guides, including Takashi Mochizuki (Arata), Shiori Satonaka (Erika Oda), and Satoru Kawashima (Susumu Terajima), whose job it is to interview the new arrivals and help them select a memory and then bring it to life on-screen. Some want to take with them an idyllic moment from childhood, others a remembrance of a lost love, but a few are either unable to or refuse to come up with one, which challenges the staff. Twenty-one-year-old Yūsuke Iseya declares, “I have no intention of choosing. None,” while seventy-year-old Ichiro Watanabe (Taketoshi Naito) is having difficulty deciding on the exact moment, reevaluating and reflecting on the life he led. (Ichiro’s wife is played by Kyōko Kagawa, who has also appeared in films by Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, and Kenji Mizoguchi, three seminal directors whose work was previously shown in the Japan Society series.) As the week continues, the guides look back on their lives as well, sharing intimate details, one of which leads to an emotional finale.

AFTER LIFE explores life, death, memory, heaven, and the art of filmmaking

Kore-eda, who previously examined memory loss in the documentary Without Memory and explored a family’s reaction to death in the brilliant Still Walking, interviewed some five hundred people about what memory they would take with them to heaven, and some of those nonprofessional actors are in the final cut of After Life, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. After Life is also very much about the art of filmmaking itself, as each memory is turned into a short movie created on a set and watched in a screening room. In fact, the film was inspired by Kore-eda’s memories of his grandfather’s battle with what would later be identified as Alzheimer’s disease; the director has also cited Ernst Lubitsch’s 1943 comedy, Heaven Can Wait, as an influence, and the Japanese title, Wandâfuru raifu, means “Wonderful Life,” evoking Frank Capra’s holiday classic. But Kore-eda never gets maudlin about life or death in the film, instead painting a memorable portrait of human existence and those simple moments that make it all worthwhile — and will have viewers contemplating which memory they would take with them. After Life is screening at Japan Society on February 19 at 7:00, concluding “Richie’s Fantastic Five: Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Yanagimachi & Kore-eda,” and will be introduced by Yale professor Aaron Gerow. (In addition, Kore-eda’s latest film, the masterful Like Father, Like Son, has been extended at the IFC Center.)

REMASTERED AND RESTORED — TREASURES OF FRENCH CINEMA: LOLA MONTES

Ringmaster Peter Ustinov promises “Rumour! Scandal! Passion!” in presenting story of Lola Montès (Martine Carol)

CINÉSALON: LOLA MONTÈS (Max Ophüls, 1955)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 18, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through March 18
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

“And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for!” announces the monocled, whip-snapping Mammoth Circus ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) as Max Ophüls’s 1955 CinemaScope masterpiece, Lola Montès, begins. “The most sensational act of the century!” he continues, the camera following him in a breathtaking tracking shot as he introduces “a creature a hundred times more wild than any beast in our menagerie! A monster of cruelty . . . with the eyes of an angel!” Then, with much fanfare, Lola Montès (Martine Carol) arrives like a queen — albeit a circus queen — as the ringmaster tells the audience that they (we) are about to witness “the whole truth of the extraordinary life of Lola Montès.” What follows is not necessarily the true tale of the famed courtesan and entertainer who gained more notoriety for her scandalous love affairs and hourglass body than for her abilities as an actress and dancer. Lola’s story is told in a series of flashbacks showing her with Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg), Lt. Thomas James (Ivan Desny), conductor Claudio Pirotto (Claude Pinoteau), a young student (Oskar Werner), and, most critically, King Ludwig I of Bavaria (a dashing Anton Walbrook). The episodes reveal her to be both loved and reviled as she struggles to succeed in her career, which ends up taking second place to the men in her life. Ophüls barely shows the cigar-loving Lola performing, instead letting the camera slowly dance around her, often depicting her through window frames, screens, and curtains as if she is a caged animal, all leading to a dangerous grand finale.

Lola (Martine Carol) dreams of a better life in Max Ophüls’s CinemaScope masterpiece

Lola Montès is filled with visual splendor; Jean d’Eaubonne and Willy Schatz’s sets are lush and elegant, and Georges Annenkov’s and Marcel Escoffier’s costumes are beautiful and appropriately extravagant, while cinematographer Christian Matras creates an emotionally powerful palette, bathing Ophüls’s first and only color film in bold reds and blues. (The director of such previous classics as La Ronde, Le Plaisir, and Letter from an Unknown Woman died in 1957 at the age of fifty-four while making Les Amants de Montparnasse.) It’s a dazzling cinematic achievement, one that was initially met with derision, then chopped up by the producers, but finally restored to its exquisite original version, a 35mm print of which will be screening February 18 at 4:00 & 7:30 as part of the FIAF CinéSalon series “Remastered & Restored: Treasures of French Cinema”; the later screening will be presented by painter Lola Montes Schnabel, and both shows will be followed by a wine reception. The three-month festival continues with such other recently restored French classics as Claude Chabrol’s The Color of Lies (costar Jacques Gamblin will no longer introduce the film), Claire Denis’s Chocolat (introduced by Mahen Bonetti), and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Two Men in Manhattan (introduced by Phillip Lopate).

JIMMY P.: PSYCHOTHERAPY OF A PLAINS INDIAN

Georges Devereux (Mathieu Amalric) and James Picard (Benicio del Toro) are both looking for answers in Arnaud Desplechin’s JIMMY P.

JIMMY P.: PSYCHOTHERAPY OF A PLAINS INDIAN (Arnaud Desplechin, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
February 14-20
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
www.ifcfilms.com

Based on a true story documented in Georges Devereux’s 1951 book, Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, which features an introduction by Margaret Mead, Palme d’Or nominee Jimmy P. details the fascinating relationship between French-Hungarian ethnologist, anthropologist, and psychoanalyst Devereux (Mathieu Amalric) and Native American Blackfoot James Picard (Benicio del Toro). A WWII veteran living in Montana in 1948, Picard is taken to Topeka Winter Hospital after suffering from debilitating headaches and temporary blindness. When doctors Menninger (Larry Pine), Holt (Joseph Cross), Braatoy (Ricky Wayne), and Jokl (Elya Baskin) can’t find anything physically wrong with Picard — and wonder whether their unfamiliarity with Indians is limiting their understanding of his problems — Menninger calls in his colleague Devereux, a Freudian who is having difficulty getting a full-time position because of some of the unusual methods he employs. An excited Devereux immerses himself in Picard’s case, getting the direct, not-very-talkative Blackfoot to soon start opening up about his personal life, share his dreams, and discuss his military experiences. While the other doctors disagree with one another on what Devereux is doing, he and Jimmy develop a unique friendship, two very different men trying to find their place in life. Director Arnaud Desplechin wrote the screenplay (with Julie Peyr and Kent Jones) specifically for Amalric and del Toro, and it’s a terrific pairing, the former, who has previously starred in Desplechin’s
A Christmas Tale and Kings and Queen, playing Devereux with a childlike, wide-eyed wonder, the latter portraying Jimmy with dark, brooding, penetrating eyes while also exuding an inner peace and poetry. The film slows down and gets off track when it strays from its main storyline, particularly when Devereux is visited by his married girlfriend, Madeleine (Gina McKee), and the reenacted dream sequences and past memories are hit or miss, some boasting a surreal beauty, others unnecessarily confusing, but when Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and del Toro (Traffic) are on-screen together, Jimmy P. is mesmerizing.

AMERICAN HUSTLERS — GRIFTERS, SWINDLERS, SCAMMERS & CHEATS: DOUBLE INDEMNITY

Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck get caught up in murder and deception in DOUBLE INDEMNITY

DOUBLE INDEMNITY (Billy Wilder, 1944)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
February 14-17, 11:00 am
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

The IFC Center is offering a wonderful way to celebrate Valentine’s Day with four screenings of that endlessly romantic noir classic, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. Three years after a brunette Barbara Stanwyck tried to swindle Henry Fonda in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, a blonde Stanwyck is looking for a way out of her loveless marriage when opportunity knocks in the form of acerbic insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray). Stanwyck plays alluring, tough-talking femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson, who falls for Neff and soon convinces him that they should do away with her husband (Tom Powers). They’re both in it “straight down the line,” as she repeats throughout the film, but insurance fraud investigator Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) isn’t so sure that Mr. Dietrichson’s death was an accident. John F. Seitz’s inventive black-and-white cinematography — watch for those Venetian blind shadows — set the standard for the genre. MacMurray, who had to be convinced by Wilder to take the part because he thought he’d be awful in the role, is sensational as Neff, oh-so-cool as he recites his cynical dialogue and lights matches with one hand. He might think he’s tough, but he’s no match for Stanwyck, who rules the roost. Both Stanwyck and MacMurray would go on to successful careers in television in the 1960s, he in My Three Sons, she in The Big Valley. Directed by Wilder from a script he wrote with Raymond Chandler based on a pulp novel by James Cain, with music by Miklós Rózsa — how’s that for a pedigree? — Double Indemnity, which was nominated for seven Oscars and won none, is screening February 14-17 at 11:00 am at the IFC Center, kicking off the “American Hustlers: Grifters, Swindlers, Scammers & Cheats” series, which continues through May 4 with such other tricky fare as George Roy Hill’s The Sting, David Mamet’s House of Games, Charles Crichton’s A Fish Called Wanda, and Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon.