Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart encounter some difficulties in Beverly Hills in Nicholas Ray’s IN A LONELY PLACE
IN A LONELY PLACE (Nicholas Ray, 1950)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Saturday, November 29, 2:00 & 7:00
Series runs November 26 – December 9
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
Humphrey Bogart stars in Nicholas Ray’s powerful, intense film about a cynical Hollywood screenwriter with a violent side. Dixon Steele (Bogart, in one of his strongest performances) is asked to write a screenplay based on a pulpy romance he has little interest in, so he brings home a coat-check girl (Martha Stewart) who has read the book so she can tell him the story. The girl turns up dead, and Steele, known for his drunken forays and abuse of women, is the main suspect. Aspiring star Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), who has recently moved into the same Beverly Hills apartment complex, supplies an alibi for Steele, but she might have ulterior motives for doing so. Ray’s moody, introspective gem keeps you guessing until the very end. Ray (They Live by Night, Rebel Without a Cause) was briefly married to Grahame (The Bad and the Beautiful, Oklahoma!); they divorced when she had an affair with Ray’s teenage son, whom she later wed and had two children with. In a Lonely Place is screening November 29 at 2:00 & 7:00 as part of the BAMcinématek series “Sunshine Noir,” a two-week festival being held in conjunction with the Next Wave Festival presentation of Gabriel Kahane’s The Ambassador, a visual and musical exploration of Los Angeles, directed by John Tiffany. The film series runs November 26 – December 9 and includes such other L.A.-set works as Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Brian De Palma’s Body Double, Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey, Joseph Losey’s remake of M, and Robert Mulligan’s The Nickel Ride.
From 1973 until her death in 2009, legendary dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch ran Tanztheater Wuppertal, the German company that changed the face of dance theater forever with such seminal productions as Rite of Spring, Café Müller, Danzón, Masurca Fogo, and so many others, many of which had their U.S. premieres at BAM. In 1978 she staged Kontakthof, collaborating with Rolf Borzik, Marion Cito, and Hans Pop, set to music by Juan Llossas, Charlie Chaplin, Anton Karas, Sibelius, and other composers. In 2000, she revisited the piece with a cast of senior citizens, and eight years later she turned the roles over to a group of Wuppertal high schoolers, most of whom had never heard of her and had never danced before. Director Anne Linsel and cinematographer Rainer Hoffmann follow the development of this very different production in Dancing Dreams, speaking with the eager, nervous participants, who talk openly and honestly about their hopes and desires, as well as with rehearsal directors Jo-Ann Endicott and Bénédicte Billet, who do not treat the teens with kid gloves but instead are trying to get them to reach deep inside of themselves and hold nothing back. When Bausch shows up to choose the final cast, telling the teenagers that she doesn’t bite, the tension mounts. Dancing Dreams is an intimate look at the creative process, about dedication and determination and what it takes to be an artist. It suffers at times from feeling too much like a reality television show, mixing American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance with the fictional Glee, but it also offers a last glimpse at Bausch, whose final interview is captured in the film. “You might think I’ve had enough of Kontakhtof,” she says at one point. “But every time it’s a new thing.” Dancing Dreams is screening October 27 at 7:30 in conjunction with the current production of 
Thirty-three years after screening at the New York Film Festival, Manfred Kirchheimer’s Stations of the Elevated is finally getting its official U.S. theatrical release, in a gorgeous new restoration showing at BAMcinématek October 17-23. In 1977, Manfred Kirchheimer, whose family escaped Nazi Germany in 1936, went to the Bronx and filmed graffiti-covered subway cars at the train depot and rushing across the elevated tracks, kids playing in a burned-out housing project, and giant billboards advertising hamburgers, cigarettes, alcohol, and suntan lotion. Shot on 16mm reversal stock, Stations of the Elevated is more than just a captivating document of a bygone era; it is a deeply poetic socioeconomic journey into class, race, art, and freedom of expression, told without a single word of narration or onscreen text. Instead, producer, director, editor, and photographer Kirchheimer (Colossus on the River, Bridge High with Walter Hess) shifts from the natural sound of the environment to a superb jazz score by Charles Mingus while cutting between shots of trains covered in tags and illustrations (and such phrases as “Heaven Is Life,” “Invasion of the Earth,” “Never Die,” and “Earth Is Hell”) by such seminal figures as Blade, Daze, Lee, Pusher, Shadow, and Slave and views of colorful billboards filmed peeking through the geometric architecture of the elevated railways and set against bright blue skies. Most often, the camera focuses on the painted eyes in the ads, looking right back at the viewer as they dominate the scene, evoking the optician’s ad in that famous novel of American class, The Great Gatsby. (The concentration on the eyes also predicts how Madison Ave. was watching the graffiti movement, eventually coopting the imagery into mainstream advertising.) Through this dichotomy of meaning and execution, Kirchheimer reveals similarities in artistic styles and how the elements influenced each other; a particularly telling moment occurs when a man is shown hand painting a billboard who could have just as well been spray painting a subway car. 
