Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen) discovers a whole new life once she steps behind the camera in EVERLASTING MOMENTS
EVERLASTING MOMENTS (MARIA LARSSONS EVIGA ÖGONBLICK) (Jan Troell, 2008)
Cabaret Cinema, Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, August 24, free with $7 bar minimum, 9:30
212-620-5000
www.rmanyc.org
Inspired by a book written by his wife, Agneta Ulfsäter-Troell, based on part of her family history, Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments captures a pivotal time of change in Sweden. In a small town in 1907, Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen) is struggling to keep her growing family together as her brutish oaf of a husband, Sigge (Mikael Persbrandt), regularly comes home drunk, cheats on her, and goes on strike with the rest of the local dockworkers. Maria scrubs floors and sews for extra money, but she dreams of her own independence and freedom. When she enters Mr. Pedersen’s (Jesper Christensen) photography studio one day, she has every intention of selling a camera that she had won in a lottery years before. But Pedersen instead convinces her to try out the camera first, and she is soon documenting the world around her. As Sigge becomes more and more ornery — and more and more dangerous, threatening the future of the family — Maria has discovered a whole new way of looking at things, both literally and figuratively, but still needs to find the inner strength to improve her lot. Seen through the eyes of eldest daughter Maja (first played by Nellie Almgren, then by Callin Öhrvall), Everlasting Moments is a beautiful, bittersweet personal tale told by one of Sweden’s greatest filmmakers. In his late seventies at the time, director Troell (The Emigrants, Hamsun) also cowrote the script with his wife and Niklas Rådström and served as cinematographer with Mischa Gavrjusjov; the film was nominated for a Golden Globe and won five Guldbagge (Golden Beetle) Awards from the Swedish Film Institute, including Best Film, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Special Achievement (composer Matti Bye). Everlasting Moments is screening August 24 at 9:30 as part of the Rubin Museum series “Women and Their Cameras,” in conjunction with the exhibition “Candid,” and will be introduced by photographer Victoria Sambunaris. Admission to the Rubin is free on Friday nights, so you should also check out such other exhibitions as “Illuminated,” “Modernist Art from India,” and the outstanding “Casting the Divine.” The series concludes August 31 with Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, introduced by Sophie Elgort.
Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin might be a seminal silent classic that changed the nature of filmmaking, but it is also still a vastly entertaining movie regardless of its cinematic influence and worldwide importance. Divided into five episodes — Men and Maggots, Drama at the Harbour, A Dead Man Calls for Justice, The Odessa Staircase, and The Rendez-vous with a Squadron — the film tells the based-on-fact story of a mutiny on board a sailing vessel, the result of unfair treatment of the workers, a microcosm of the Russian Revolution of 1905 that later led to the bigger revolution of 1917. The film is like an editing primer, its approach to montage causing its own revolution at the time, particularly during the unforgettable Odessa Steps sequence, in which Eisenstein’s cuts manipulate the action in powerful, emotional ways that were new to cinema. The film also features the best mustaches in the history of movies. Battleship Potemkin is screening on August 23 at 7:30 as part of Anthology Film Archives’ Essential Cinema series, which will also be showing such other Eisenstein films as Strike on August 24, October and Old and New on August 25, and both parts of Ivan the Terrible on August 26.
In conjunction with the eightieth anniversary of the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Ron Honsa has made Never Stand Still, a documentary that celebrates the long history of the national historic landmark dedicated to the art of movement. Narrated by 
When a pair of disaffected Parisians, Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and Franz (Sami Frey), meet an adorable young woman, Odile (Anna Karina), in English class, they decide to team up and steal a ton of money from a man living in Odile’s aunt’s house. As they meander through the streets of cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s black-and-white Paris, they talk about English and wealth, dance in a cafe while director Jean-Luc Godard breaks in with voice-over narration about their character, run through the Louvre in record time, and pause for a near-moment of pure silence. Godard throws in plenty of commentary on politics, the cinema, and the bourgeoisie in the midst of some genuinely funny scenes. Band of Outsiders is no ordinary heist movie; based on Dolores Hitchens’s novel Fool’s Gold, it is the story of three offbeat individuals who just happen to decide to attempt a robbery while living their strange existence, as if they were outside from the rest of the world. The trio of ne’er-do-wells might remind Jim Jarmusch fans of the main threesome from Stranger Than Paradise (1984), except Godard’s characters are more aggressively persistent. One of Godard’s most accessible films, Band of Outsiders is screening August 18 and 22 as part of the MoMA series “Gaumont Thrillers: From Fantômas to A Gang Story,” which continues with such Gaumont-produced films as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Murderer Lives at 21, Jules Dassin’s Riffifi, and Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita and The Professional.