Film Society of Lincoln Center to Present Art of the Real & Jim Jarmusch
By: Caryn Robbins Mar. 17, 2014
Film Society of Lincoln Center to present Art of the Real & Jim Jarmusch
April 11-26
Art of the Real, the new documentary-as-art series that will take place April 11-26, featuring premieres of new works and recent restorations as well as a wealth of appearances by notable filmmakers. Opening Night
La última película
Raya Martin & Mark Peranson, Mexico/Canada/Denmark/Philippines, 2013, 35mm, 88m
English and Spanish with English subtitles
In this documentary within a narrative-and vice versa-a grandiose filmmaker (Alex Ross Perry) arrives in the Yucatán to scout locations for his new movie, a production that will involve exposing the last extant celluloid film stock on the eve of the Mayan Apocalypse. Instead, he finds himself waylaid by the formal schizophrenia of the film in which he himself is a character. Simultaneously a tribute to and a critique of The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper's seminal obliteration of the boundary separating life and cinema), La última película engages with the impending death of celluloid through a veritable cyclone of film and video formats, genres, modes, and methods. Martin and Peranson have created an unclassifiable work that mirrors the contortions and leaps of the medium's history and present.
Apr 11 at 6:30pm (Q&A with Mark Peranson and Alex Ross Perry)
The Second Game
Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania, 2014, DCP, 97m
Romanian with English subtitles
In 1988, one year before the revolution that toppled Ceau?escu, Corneliu Porumboiu's father refereed a soccer game between the country's leading teams as heavy snow fell over the playing field and all of Bucharest. In 2013, father and son watched the original television broadcast of the game, providing their own commentary in real time. The static-heavy analogue video images mix with the grain-like flurries of snow to make this rather ordinary game into something altogether more complex and mysterious, as father and son's discussion leads to the pondering of alternate events and different outcomes: what if the ball hadn't hit the crossbar? What if the camera had captured the brief on-field fight? What if the match had taken place a year later? Investigating the slippery middle-ground where personal memory meets historical memory, Corneliu Porumboiu has created an entertaining and disquieting essay on the legacy of the Ceau?escu dictatorship for both Romanian society and his own family.
Apr 11 at 9:15pm (Q&A with Corneliu Porumboiu)
Apr 14 at 7:00pm
Actress
Robert Greene, USA, 2014, DCP, 86m
This thoroughly compelling and at times thoroughly unnerving new film by Robert Greene (Fake It So Real) is a documentary that feels like intimate melodrama. Brandy Burre had a recurring role on HBO's The Wire when she gave up her career to start a family. After a few years of life in the country, she decides to return to acting, and sets the denouement of her relationship in motion. As she comes apart on camera in varying shades of drama, it's never clear at what level this film may simply be the next role. Bloody Beans (Loubia Hamra)
Narimane Mari, Algeria/France, 2013, DCP, 77m
French and Arabic with English subtitles
A group of Algerian children frolic on the beach, but their sunning and roughhousing soon turns into a kind of reenactment of the Algerian War of Independence that plays out as equal parts Lord of the Flies and Les Carabiniers. Roaming the nocturnal streets like a cross between a pack of feral cats and a brigade of revolutionary guerrillas, the kids "capture" a French soldier and force him to put himself in their shoes by eating a plate of their much-despised dietary staple, the titular legumes. Revisiting several signature themes of post-colonial cinema-the costs and benefits of fighting for national independence, the strain that political struggle exerts across all strata of a colonized nation, changes in popular attitudes toward foreigners after successful or failed uprisings-Narimane Mari's exhilarating first feature counts the work of Jean Vigo and Jean Rouch among its key forebears. Winner of the main competition at the 2013 CPH:DOX Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.
Apr 12 at 9:30pm (Q&A with Narimane Mari)
Apr 13 at 4:30pm (Q&A with Narimane Mari) North American Premiere
Castanha
Davi Pretto, Brazil, 2014, DCP, 95m
Portuguese with English subtitles
Davi Pretto's first feature-length film chronicles the daily life of João Carlos Castanha, a middle-aged, single, ailing actor who supports both himself and his live-in mother by working as a cross-dressing nightclub MC. When in drag, Castanha plays the part of a larger-than-life scoundrel, verbally assailing the clientele while also enjoying periodic visits from friends backstage. On the side, Castanha finds work as an extra in film productions and taking bit parts in small plays. His greatest roles, and greatest loves, are in the past, making way for his repressed memories to take over, and finally allowing the line between his experience of reality and fantasy to blur, as the film takes haunting and confounding turns.
Apr 19 at 9:00pm
Apr 23 at 5:00pm U.S. Premiere
Lukas the Strange (Lukas nino)
John Torres, Philippines, 2013, DCP, 85m
Tagalog with English subtitles
"Lukas, in the middle of the film, the actress will pay a visit. You'll fall in love with her. And you'll understand your father. I'll become your memory. I haven't shown you the middle yet." Thus begins John Torres's latest dream of a documentary, a highly experimental, gloriously free-form coming-of-age story. Shortly after the arrival of a film crew that throws his tiny, usually quiet village into a frenzy of commotion, Lukas's father, Mang Basilio, announces that he is a tikbalang, the half-horse, half-man of Filipino folklore. When Mang Basilio disappears, the awkward, baffled Lukas sets out on a journey of self-discovery that will include a "river of forgetting," invisible voices, and a hallucinatory blurring of reality and fantasy. Torres has already carved out an idiosyncratic niche for himself in the thriving world of documentary-fiction hybrids, and this is his most personal and expansive work to date.
Apr 18 at 5:00pm
Apr 20 at 8:30pm Red Hollywood
Thom Andersen & Noël Burch, USA, 1996, digital projection, 120m
Working from extensive original research, this revelatory documentary-an elaboration of Andersen's 1985 essay of the same name-offers a unique perspective on Hollywood filmmaking from the 1930s to the 1950s, when "Red" screenwriters and directors worked within the studio system to make films that challenged issues of class, war, race, and gender. Andersen and Burch use clips from 53 different films spanning numerous genres in order to demonstrate how this network of filmmakers' ideology affected the meaning and reception of their work, as well as interviews with many of the artists (such as Paul Jarrico, Ring Lardner, Jr., Alfred Levitt, and Abraham Polonsky) who were blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Apr 12 at 6:30pm (Q&A with Thom Andersen)
Apr 13 at 2:00pm U.S. Premiere
Time Goes by Like a Roaring Lion (Die Zeit Vergeht Wie Ein Brüllender Löwe)
Philipp Hartmann, Germany, 2013, DCP, 79m
German with English subtitles
A free-associative essay on temporality, mortality, and cinema's capacity to represent both, Philipp Hartmann's autobiographical film is at once affecting and dense with ideas. The filmmaker-narrator has just turned 37, half the average life expectancy of a German man, and his own chronophobia (the fear of time's passage) prompts an increasingly personal and phenomenological investigation into the past. Time Goes by Like a Roaring Lion is captivatingly digressive, taking detours to consider Alzheimer's, an atomic clock in Brauchsweig, and the world's largest salt desert in Bolivia. Despite the loftiness of its subject matter, the film maintains an air of lightness and a spirit of artistic and philosophical experimentalism.
Apr 18 at 9:00pm (Q&A with Philipp Hartmann)
Apr 19 at 2:00pm (Q&A with Philipp Hartmann)
PERMANENT VACATION: THE FILMS OF JIM JARMUSCH
April 2-10
Permanent Vacation: The Films of Jim Jarmusch (April 2-10), is a complete retrospective-including all 11 features and several short films and music videos-set to lead up to the upcoming release of Jarmusch's latest feature, Only Lovers Left Alive, opening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on April 11. DEAD MAN (1995) 121 min
Jarmusch's career took a decisive turn with what has come to be recognized as his masterpiece: a hypnotic, parable-like revisionist Western about the spiritual rebirth of a dying 19th-century accountant (Johnny Depp) named William Blake (no relation-or is there?). Guiding Blake through a treacherous landscape of U.S. Marshals, cannibalistic bounty hunters, shady missionaries, and cross-dressing fur traders is Nobody (Gary Farmer), a Plains Indian who becomes, over the course of the film, one of the most fully realized Native American characters in recent cinema. (Jarmusch peppered the film with in-jokes and untranslated bits of dialogue aimed squarely at Native American viewers.) For all its metaphysical trappings, DEAD MAN doubles as a barbed reflection on America's treatment of its indigenous people and a radical twist on the traditional myth of the American West.
Screening with
Neil Young - Dead Man Score (1995) 5 min
Saturday, April 5 at 9:00PM
Sunday, April 6 at 1:15PM
Wednesday, April 9 at 6:30PM (Q&A with Jim Jarmusch)
Thursday, April 10 at 3:45PM
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center works to recognize established and emerging filmmakers, support important new work, and to enhance the awareness, accessibility, and understanding of the moving image. The Film Society produces the renowned New York Film Festival, a curated selection of the year's most significant new film work, and presents or collaborates on other annual New York City festivals including Dance on Camera, Film Comment Selects, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, LatinBeat, New Directors/New Films, NewFest, New York African Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York Jewish Film Festival, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema and Rendez-Vous With French Cinema. In addition to publishing the award-winning Film Comment magazine, The Film Society recognizes an artist's unique achievement in film with the prestigious Chaplin Award. The Film Society's state-of-the-art Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, located at Lincoln Center, provide a home for year-round programs and the New York City film community. The Film Society receives generous, year-round support from Royal Bank of Canada, Jaeger-LeCoultre, American Airlines, The New York Times, Stella Artois, the Kobal Collection, Trump International Hotel and Tower, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. For more information, visit www.filmlinc.com and follow @filmlinc on Twitter.
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