Events
There’s no simple explanation as to what drives nostalgia cycles, but stateside, the 1970s had a few different reasons to be looking in the rearview mirror at the 1930s. Maybe the era of “stagflation” felt some kinship with that of the Great Depression, and a similar disillusion with the American Dream; maybe it was a matter of rediscovering the glamor of Art Deco and Old Hollywood fashion in a time of anonymous corporate architecture and polyester—whatever the reason, three decades later the ’30s were back in a major way, from Three Stooges movies on UHF television to a flotilla of films from some of the finest directors working in so-called “New Hollywood”: Roberts Altman and Aldrich, Peter Bogdanovich, Roman Polanski, Walter Hill, and many more. We can’t explain the affinity that existed between the heydays of hot jazz and disco, but the movies that came from it are begging to be screened.
In this master class moderated by Kent Jones, prolific actor and author Françoise Lebrun (THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE) will discuss her pivotal role in the cinema of the “Second New Wave."
“In the late 1980s, after I quit engineering at university to study art, the cineclub Estação Botafogo in Rio de Janeiro was my classroom and film became my artistic universe. I immersed myself in the films of the period from many different countries, including my own.
For the Metrograph program, I am taking a poetic approach, bringing together some of the films that have opened doors in my own art.
My selection might seem eclectic but there are discernible themes and genres—eroticism, excess, science-fiction fatalism—that connect to my own work. I am attracted to the science fiction genre because it is possible to abandon linear temporality and the political and scientific limitations of the present. The baroque aesthetic, with which I so strongly identify, connects with the idea of artificiality, of excess for pure pleasure, and the creation of other possible realities. These aspects are present in my own art in the representations of flesh, in the historical parodies, in the saunas that reveal themselves to be imagined environments rather than real. My program also includes some more recent remarkable Brazilian productions that resonate with my own thinking.”—Adriana Varejão
Alfreda’s Cinema screens films that tell Black/POC stories that resonate with depth and love, the richness and culture of our history, our dynamics, our shapes, our colors, and our truth. Programmed by Melissa Lyde, Alfreda's Cinema is a bi-monthly series at Metrograph with programs, talks, and special appearances that aspire to bridge communities.
Born and raised in New Jersey to working-class Italian American parents, Joe Pesci had been a barber, a singing waiter on Arthur Ave. in the Bronx, and a stage comedian before he found his way into the movies, starring with comedy partner Frank Vincent in the 1976 low-budget crime thriller The Death Collector, which caught the eye of a up-and-coming director named Martin Scorsese. What Scorsese saw in Pesci, presumably, are the qualities that have riveted audiences since then any time that he’s on-screen: a stand-up’s sense of comic timing combined with a total natural’s absence of actorly affect, which among other things has allowed Pesci to play some genuinely frightening short-stack heavies. (Standing under 5 ½ feet tall, he’s a throwback to bantam bruisers like Edward G. Robinson and Jimmy Cagney.) Is he a clown? Does he amuse you? All that, and a helluva lot else.
Many moviegoers got their first striking glimpse of Karen Black in Dennis Hopper’s 1969 Easy Rider, playing an employee of a New Orleans brothel who goes on a wild LSD trip with “Captain America” and Billy. This breakout role would mark the beginning of an extraordinary run of collaborations with the most innovative directors of so-called New Hollywood, including Robert Altman, Bob Rafelson, and Ivan Passer. Whether playing a Bakersfield hash-slinger, a glamorous Nashville diva, or a transwoman returning to her Texas hometown, Black was a potent, piquant, and unforgettable presence in most every film she appeared in, earning her an ardent cult following who will have reason to rejoice with our selection of some of Black’s finest roles.
In conjunction with The Costume Institute’s “In America: An Anthology of Fashion” exhibition at The Met, Metrograph has invited filmmakers who created fictional tableaux for the show to screen films that inspired their contributions—a line-up that includes selections from Radha Blank, Janicza Bravo, Sofia Coppola, Julie Dash, Martin Scorsese, and Chloé Zhao, alongside picks from Met curators Andrew Bolton and Sylvia Yount. “Film is one of the enduring purveyors of American fashion, including the legacy of Golden Age costume designers like Adrian and Edith Head. By aligning fashion with American characters and stereotypes, film continues to be an extraordinary vehicle through which American style is disseminated internationally.”—Andrew Bolton, Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A vivacious cinematic journey through history that provides insights into the interrelationship of clothing, culture, and character, and a happy meeting between The Met and The Metrograph.
The surprise arthouse hit of last year, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, invented its own revolutionary visual language to, among other things, show viewers the world as seen through the eyes of a donkey. Skolimowski cites Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar and its donkey protagonist as a key inspiration for his film, and we in turn were inspired to go a little deeper into the humble jackass and its glorious history in cinema, from Bresson to Jacques Demy to, yes, Shrek—which, much like EO, was in competition for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Giddy-up!
One of today’s most prolific French filmmakers, Christophe Honoré joins Metrograph this March to present a curated selection of his most personal films, alongside titles that have deeply influenced his autofictional work. “As a queer auteur and a grandchild of the French New Wave, Christophe Honoré has challenged audiences with his genuine representations and explorations of family, death, and sexual desire, always putting the sheer joy of filmmaking at the heart of his cinema. Whether based on real-life events or memories of them, Honoré’s films act as fictionalized echoes of his own emotions, and at the same time they offer ways to overcome these emotions through the fiction-making process. This program, created in partnership with Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, reveals how life and cinema have, for over two decades, nurtured Honoré’s artistic process, and draws an intimate portrait of the filmmaker at work.”—Series curator Adeline Monzier
Series curated and all program notes written by Adeline Monzier.
Presented with the support of Unifrance and Villa Albertine
This collection of award-winning short documentaries by fellows in the UnionDocs Collaborative Studio take in the local flavors of the Southside neighborhood of contemporary Williamsburg, Brooklyn today and were inspired by Diego Echeverria’s 1984 documentary Los Sures.
Born in the tumult and immediate aftermath of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-’76), the filmmakers of Mainland China’s “Sixth Generation” have witnessed their country’s transformation from a relatively isolated semi-agrarian nation to an international economic force dotted with teeming super-cities. They have responded to these unprecedented times with unprecedented approaches to making movies, frequently working independent of government oversight and bringing a new spirit of formal experimentation to Chinese cinema, all to reflect the true face of the changing country to their fellow citizens and the wider world. Accompanying Metrograph’s run of Suzhou River by Lou Ye, and including films by Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai, and Zhang Yuan, this program celebrates a generation of filmmakers working to get a better view of the revolutionary change the state has wrought in everyday life.
“Dans Le Labyrinthe,” which derives its title from a novel by master of narrative games Alain Robbe-Grillet, is a program exploring the myriad ways filmmakers have used the formal properties of their medium to construct cinematic variants of the labyrinth, manifolds of time and space which lure the spectator along their winding corridors and branching paths. Each work in the series, curated by Sam Ishii-Gonzales and Jaime Levinas, offers its own distinct approach, and not all of them offer a clear exit. Their intricate twists and turns are the source of both their pleasure and their danger. The deeper you go, the more is revealed—and the further you may be from ever finding your way home. With films by David Lynch, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Bi Gan, Alain Resnais, and other expert maze-builders, getting lost has never looked so alluring as it does here.
Stephen Dwoskin arrived in London from New York in 1964, aged 25, with a trunk of 16mm films shot in the milieu of Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas. He became known for a series of films in which the camera’s unblinking gaze is returned by his female subjects. Laura Mulvey wrote that he ‘opened a completely new perspective for me on cinematic voyeurism’. In the mid-70s, Dwoskin turned his gaze on his own body, disabled in childhood by polio, before making a number of personal documentaries about disability and diaspora. In the 2000s, with his mobility severely impaired, he embraced the possibilities of digital technology to return to the underground and the erotic obsessions that powered his extraordinary 50-year career.
Edward Berger’s Netflix production All Quiet on the Western Front isn’t the first movie to set out to show that war is hell; it isn’t even the first adaptation of WWI veteran Erich Maria Remarque’s 1928 novel of the same name. But the tragic fact is that anti-war stories have never been obsolete, and so Berger’s harrowing depiction of the terrors of the trenches—and of the deceitful appeals to patriotic duty that led men into them—has plenty to say to our own bellicose times. Along with showings of Berger’s much-celebrated film, Metrograph screens a program of the works that preceded and inspired it—movies which give the lie to the pernicious myth of the “good war.”
For the folks who’ve had it up to here with treacly tributes to the magic of moviemaking, we’ve put together a series about the menace of moviemaking—films in which camera crews find themselves implicated in the unsavory acts that they’re recording, and even run the risk of becoming part of a gruesome spectacle themselves. No dry dissertations on the ethics of nonfiction filmmaking here, just some harrowing handheld cautionary tales about the dangers of sticking your lens where it doesn’t belong, including bleak Belgian mockumentary Man Bites Dog, Oliver Stone’s media-saturation satire Natural Born Killers, and the movie that launched a new cycle of found-footage horror, The Blair Witch Project.
One of today’s most sought after cinematographers, Louisville-born Bradford Young, ASC comes to 7 Ludlow, presenting three films that showcase his sensitive, striking lens work together with three of his personal filmic inspirations.
After first making a name as a prolific and distinctive cinematographer, Reed Morano proved herself to also be a gifted director with her searing 2015 drama Meadowland. Equally adept and acclaimed in her film and television work, which includes the Emmy-winning pilot of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, there’s no limit to what Morano may yet do; in the meantime, we’re happy to celebrate the remarkable things she’s done so far, inviting her to screen some of her most exemplary works as both DP and director, as well as some films that have inspired her in her meteoric, multifaceted career.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s lyrical cinema is steeped in the folk tales of Thailand’s rural northeast, and though his latest, the Colombia-shot Memoria, strikes out for territory new to his filmography, in conjunction with its Metrograph run, we’ll be conjuring up a few favorite cinematic specters and assorted otherworldly beings to haunt our screens. An opportunity for uncanny encounters with the spirit-shaman of Apichatpong’s Tropical Malady, the assorted Japanese apparitions of Kwaidan, and the heady blend of traditional folklore and experimental storytelling in Woo Ming Jin’s recent festival favorite Stone Turtle, among other visitors from the beyond.
A barrage of youthful energy, anti-authoritarian rage, and go-for-broke moviemaking, Hachimiri Madness sifts through the blast zone rubble of this creative explosion to present some of the most pungent examples of jishu filmmaking, accompanying Metrograph’s runs of Yamamoto’s What’s Up Connection and Robinson’s Garden, and Suwa’s 2/Duo.
Obsession is at the heart of horror cinema, a cinema of monomaniacal maniacs, recurring nightmares, and slumbering ancient evils awakened thanks to insatiable curiosity. It only stands to reason, then, that certain horror films would themselves be the product of obsession: Anna Biller involved herself in every step of the elaborate production design of The Love Witch, and because of this you can almost feel her fingerprints on every frame of the film, which appears every bit as painstakingly fussed over and meticulously designed as the Quay Brothers’ dark, atmospheric stop-motion productions. A series celebrating horror films born of the pursuit of an all-consuming vision and made with a hands-on attention to the smallest detail that’s downright… horrifying!
In conjunction with Metrograph’s run of Human Flowers of Flesh, German director/cinematographer Helena Wittmann’s astonishing, elemental, meditative new feature, we’re taking the opportunity to look back over the impressive body of work—and the truly astonishing images—she’s already created in her young career. With her hypnotic, ravishing 2017 feature Drift, an in-theater hybrid-lecture performance from Wittmann inspired by Éric Rohmer’s The Green Ray, and a selection of Wittmann’s shorts, this small retrospective is an ideal introduction to a massive force in contemporary European cinema.
One of the best-kept secrets of Japanese genre filmmaking in the 1960s and ’70s, Hideo Gosha began his studio career in 1964 and quickly emerged as a peerless specialist in chambara (samurai) films. A few years later, a contemporary twist on the chambara formula appeared in the form of the yakuza film, and Gosha proved equally adept with modern dress action. Whether the weapons of choice were swords or snub-nose revolvers, few could match Gosha at his best for economic storytelling and sheer velocity—and these are three of his very best.
Writer Hunter Harris comes to 7 Ludlow on January 13 to present two of her selects, Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and Spike Lee’s Inside Man.
“The original Taking of Pelham One Two Three, one of the most iconic movies about New York City, and Spike Lee’s big-budget cop thriller, Inside Man: maybe I just have the same taste in movies as a divorced father of two, or whoever’s programming midday movies on TNT. (My other ideas were The Departed and Frances Ha—both movies about friendship, when you really think about it.)
“These are movies about cops and criminals, movies that make me root for the good guys and bad guys in equal measure. There’s an engine in both, a real momentum that I can’t resist. They are deft crowd-pleasers with sly tricks. Both let a cop and a criminal collide, and then let us decide who comes out the victor; civil bureaucracy, particularly in New York, is its own hermetically sealed subculture. The final bemused smile from Walter Matthau! The year Clive Owen was Spike Lee’s white boy of the month! I’m drawn to the duality there, that maybe, on a different day, both pairs of cops and robbers could have traded places. These are big, raucous movies bursting at the seams with noise and action and life. I never get tired of watching them.”—Hunter Harris
We lost one of the last living giants of the heroic age of the Czech New Wave in 2020 with the death of 82-year-old Jiří Menzel, more responsible than any other single director for announcing Czech cinema’s arrival on the world stage when his tender, tragic Closely Watched Trains, an international arthouse phenomenon based on a Bohumil Hrabal novel, won Best Foreign Language Film at the 1967 Academy Awards. This two-film tribute of recent Menzel restorations pairs that beloved title with another, lesser-known Hrabel adaptation, Menzel’s biting 1969 satire Larks on a String—lesser-known only because it was suppressed by government censors until the Velvet Revolution of 1990, when audiences could finally see a “new” film from Menzel at the peak of his powers, when gentle, humane artistry could seem to the authoritarian state like an imminent threat.
The cult program Columbo, starring John Cassavetes go-to Peter Falk as rumpled, tenacious, deceptively discombobulated LAPD detective Frank Columbo, sporadically aired new episodes between 1968 to 2002. Shot with a single camera and running around feature-film length, Columbo’s 69 episodes were more “cinematic” than many cinema releases, directed by real filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and Jonathan Demme, and featuring casts packed with some of the finest working character actors. Being a movie theater, Metrograph can’t in good conscience screen episodes of Columbo, but what we can do is roll out a program of films by directors and performers—including, naturally, a heaping helping of Falk—who helped create the particular magic of Columbo, a TV show with links to the best in American cinema. Just one more thing… there ain’t a dud in the line-up.
After two decades of increasing popular and critical success, South Korean cinema today seems to have conquered the world—but those breakthroughs of recent years didn’t just come out of nowhere, and there’s a long winding road lined with excellent films that leads to Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook. One period especially ripe for rediscovery is the golden age of 1960s South Korean cinema, when Pyongyang-born Kim Ki-young was among the most consistently inventive, stylistically sophisticated, and psychologically acute working directors, turning out intense psychodramas like the sultry, noir-inflected The Housemaid—one of Bong’s inspirations for Parasite—and Goryoejang, the devastating tale of a peasant farmer’s rebellion against tradition. Both will be at Metrograph, and offer a perfect introduction to the filmmaker that Cahiers du cinéma’s Jean-Michel Frodon called “a truly extraordinary image maker.”
By virtue of being accustomed to the stage, quite a few musicians have successfully made the leap to film acting—even legitimate stardom. In this mic drop of a series, we’re looking at silver screen stars with platinum plaques who came out of the world of hip-hop, with the likes of Tupac Shakur (a one-time acting student at the Baltimore School for the Arts), Queen Latifah, and Ice Cube in stellar roles. With some of the finest American films of the last 30+ years to choose from, Hip-Hop Icons is a series that’s got bars for weeks.
Hong Kong cinema, by necessity, was made to travel. A city-state only slightly territorially larger than the five boroughs of New York City, Hong Kong boasts a hyperactive film industry that needed to cultivate audiences beyond its borders in order to survive and thrive. As such, its history is one of outreach, making movies that would screen for Chinese diaspora communities and for diverse audiences around the world, with a long record of international co-productions and globe-trotting shoots. Once the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China was decided on in 1984, many residents of the Fragrant Harbor, anxious about the future, started packing their bags. Among those who left town for a while were several of the reckless talents who’d helped to make Hong Kong’s popular cinema internationally renowned—John Woo being perhaps the most famous émigré—and who went to storm Hollywood, and give American movies a much-needed injection of raw energy. A tribute to a regional film culture that changed the face of world cinema, and a gift to film-lovers everywhere.
Calling all mojito fiends! Metrograph’s summer Road Trip is criss-crossing the whole of the continental USA, but we’re spending a little extra time down in the city of sun, sand, and fun that happens to be the backdrop to a helluva lot of superb pop cinema. Extend your beach hours into the night, or enjoy the heat and air conditioning at the same time with this selection of movies from the Magic City.
The first American-born female action star, one of the pre-eminent sex symbols of the 1970s, and an actor who brought the same sensitivity and intelligence to her early genre projects as she did to her “comeback” showcase, Jackie Brown, North Carolina native Pam Grier’s screen persona was a remarkable combination of toughness and tenderness that made her the undisputed queen of the blaxploitation boom. Bringing together the crown jewels of her reign, this Late Nites tribute shows Grier at her best and most merciless, putting the fear of God into drug pushers, political assassins, prison guards, and a voodoo vampire, and doing it with style. The poster for Coffy says it all: “The baddest One-Chick Hit-Squad that ever hit town!”
It’s impossible to imagine the films of Ursula Meier, subject of her own Metrograph retrospective, without the contribution of cinematographer Agnès Godard—but you could say this about just about any film that Godard ever worked on. Very arguably the pre-eminent French DP of her generation and a crucial player in developing the tactile, intimate style of longtime confederate Claire Denis, Godard has played a crucial part in producing a startling number of the most indelible images produced in cinema since 1991, when she had her first feature credit on Agnès Varda’s Jacquot de Nantes. Presented alongside the Meier series, take this opportunity to take a closer look at the products of an infallible eye.
The chambara, or samurai film, has much the same relationship to Japan as the Western does to the United States. Both are historical genres that allow artists in their respective countries of origin—or in other countries, in the case of the Italian “Spaghetti Western”—to create a rich body of modern folklore, explore issues pertaining to their national character and neuroses, and mine grand drama out of the clash between the individual and the community (or, in the case of the chambara, the clan.) Bringing together the swinging katanas and blazing six-shooters, Live by the Sword, Die by the Gun reveals the many shared affinities—and even shared plot elements—of two grand cinematic traditions born an ocean apart from one another. Squaring off certified classics from both, this is one climactic showdown where everybody wins.
Marking the 100th anniversary of Pasolini’s birth year, a gorgeous new book from Fireflies Press, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper, explores the iconoclastic artist’s enduring legacy almost 50 years after his murder, bringing together responses to Pasolini’s work from some of the finest contemporary filmmakers, including Catherine Breillat, Angela Schanelec, Mike Leigh, Mariano Llinás, Luc Moullet, and many, many others. In conjunction with the launch of Writing on Burning Paper through the Metrograph Bookstore, this series, curated by Fireflies Press, pairs Pasolini films with films by some of his present-day peers, extending the book’s dialogue between Pasolini’s galvanizing, prodigious genius and film culture today.
The Lunar New Year blockbuster rollout is a treasured holiday tradition in multiplexes from Hong Kong to Shanghai to Taipei, but over at Metrograph we’re taking the occasion to celebrate the other side of Chinese cinema—films that challenge narrative convention and turn a critical eye on a changing society. Included in the series are favorites by Jia Zhangke, perhaps the greatest of the “Sixth Generation” Mainland filmmakers; Liu Jiayin’s two-part “home movie” epic Oxhide, shot in her family’s Beijing apartment; and Lixin Fan’s documentary Last Train Home, which depicts, through the microcosm of one family’s journey, the massive annual homeward-bound migration of Chinese workers for the New Year. There’s no place like home for the holidays… but a movie theater isn’t a bad substitute.
The Lunar New Year blockbuster rollout is a treasured holiday tradition in multiplexes from Hong Kong to Shanghai to Taipei, but over at Metrograph we’re taking the occasion to celebrate the other side of Chinese cinema—films that challenge narrative convention and turn a critical eye on a changing society. Included in the series are favorites by Jia Zhangke, perhaps the greatest of the “Sixth Generation” Mainland filmmakers; Liu Jiayin’s two-part “home movie” epic Oxhide, shot in her family’s Beijing apartment; and Lixin Fan’s documentary Last Train Home, which depicts, through the microcosm of one family’s journey, the massive annual homeward-bound migration of Chinese workers for the New Year. There’s no place like home for the holidays… but a movie theater isn’t a bad substitute.
Spend a day with the boys. Magic Mike, Steven Soderbergh’s cheeky yet sophisticated story of male strippers scraping by in Tampa, and Gregory Jacobs’s buoyantly comic sequel, Magic Mike XXL, are among the smartest studio films of recent years, tales from the working-class that offer no shortage of visual pleasure. Experience them as they ought to be seen: in a theater, with an audience, on glistening 35mm.
Beginning with breakthrough films by Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, and Corneliu Porumboiu, the sudden appearance of a Romanian New Wave in the mid-aughts was one of the great stories of 21st-century film culture—and in the years since, startling new talents have continued to emerge from this fecund national cinema. Playing as part of the 17th Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema Festival, this program showcases some of the most exciting to appear on the scene, with the work of Monica Stan, George Chiper, and Victor Canache revealing how contemporary Romanian cinema continues to evolve from its neo-neorealist origins, finding new ways to challenge and surprise audiences.
Making Waves 17 is presented by Insula 42, in partnership with Metrograph, Roxy Cinema New York, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema, and Film Forum. With lead funding from the Trust for Mutual Understanding and the support of Dacin Sara, the Romanian Filmmakers Union, Blue Heron Foundation, Mastercard, the Romanian National Film Center, and individual donors.
In Herbaria, Leandro Listorti’s second feature, the filmmaker and archivist draws an extended parallel between the world of cinema and the world of botany, exploring the urgent work of preservation in both, and how plant life can persevere through the moving image. Listorti’s lovely film, and its thoughtful entwining of cinema and flora, planted the proverbial seed for “Botanical Imprints,” a program of eclectic works—including a lobby installation of Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s 2013 single-channel video Landscape #1 and a selection of shorts curated by the Counter-Encounters collective—that encourage the viewer to think more deeply about the plant kingdom in all its diversity, beauty, and vulnerability.
When Metrograph opened its doors in 2016, we did so with Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z, a way to introduce moviegoers to our particular take on cinema history. Every four months, a new programmer will create their own idiosyncratic alphabet: one film per letter, neither canon nor anti-canon, but rather a selection of favorite films that serve as life-changing revelations or enduring personal passions, and ultimately films of which Metrograph exists to spread the gospel. Starting this winter, Head Programmer Inge de Leeuw takes us from A-M, including stops at Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, and Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues.
Select films, chosen specially by Metrograph staff. For the latest iteration of our recurring series, Metrograph Marketing Coordinator Graham Carter picks some of his personal favorites, In Theater and on Metrograph At Home. .
“Of course all the films I chose are special to me, but two in particular changed my life—Eagle Pennell’s The Whole Shootin’ Match and Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax. Truly independent films from Austin. The star and co-author of Shootin’ Match, Sonny Carl Davis would later star in my first feature film, and Bujalski would become my professor at University of Texas at Austin. I hope New Yorkers like them too.”—Graham Carter
The midlength movie—not quite a short, not quite a feature. The French, being more than usually serious about cinema as an artform, have a word for them: the moyen métrage. And to make one means being serious about cinema as an artform, because the midlength movie has no place in cinema as commerce. This means there is an abundance of midlength movies of exceptional quality and ambition, but you’ll rarely see them screened—something that this series intends to address, while allowing you to catch a movie on a Sunday or a weeknight and still make it home in time to put the kids to bed. The first installment, appropriately, focuses on quotidian rituals of youth, as well as the ghosts and other-worldly creatures who are very much part of our own; themes that intersect in not-quite shorts from the likes of Tsai Ming-liang, Abbas Kiarostami, Kelly Reichardt, and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi.
Before you fill up your Oscar ballot, catch up with a few exceptional films going for the big prize that may have gotten past you: Sara Dosa’s Best Documentary nominee Fire of Love, following the life and work of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft; Santiago Mitre’s Best International Feature nominee Argentina, 1985, a gripping legal drama about the trial of members of the cruel military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983; and Dean Fleischer Camp’s Best Animated Feature nominee Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, a poignant 21st-century comic fable combining live-action and stop-motion animation.
With her first theatrically released feature, the 2008 Isabelle Huppert vehicle Home, French Swiss director and screenwriter Ursula Meier established herself as a filmmaker with a singular ability to describe complicated family dynamics and the delicate relationship between environment and psychology. A rural utopia threatened by a new highway in Home; a housing project in a luxe ski resort in Sister; a family home surrounded by a do-not-cross boundary in The Line—Meier explores the strange energy and dramatic potential of liminal settings in her boundary-obsessed films, which can’t be fenced in by simple description.
A rich and multi-faceted celebration of the groundbreaking contribution to American cinema made by visionary queer artists, Pioneers of Queer Cinema resurrects some now little-known and under-seen queer films and moving images documenting the LGBTQ+ community, and puts them in conversation with a number of landmark works—the latter group ranging from Kenneth Anger’s delirious homoerotic dreamscape Fireworks (1947) to some of the audacious ’90s fare that made up the movement film scholar and historian B. Ruby Rich dubbed “New Queer Cinema” in 1992. Films that offer often radical explorations of sexual orientation and gender identity, brimming with heartache, humor, and lust.
Why bicycles and balloons? Well, both are gentler, more leisurely modes of transport that recall a road not taken in this hurried world of the automobile and the jet engine, and both suggest a lightness and buoyancy and free-floating liberation that’s rarely experienced when traveling chartered courses in boxes of steel and fiberglass. More crucial to our considerations, they’re both at the center of some very lovely films, movies that deal with the pleasures of unconfined movement, as well as the agony of having that emancipation curtailed. A few obvious kinships can be found in this series (The Wizard of Oz and Up), a few perhaps less so (Bicycles Thieves and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure), and throughout it remains a model of truth-in-advertising: there are a lot of bicycles and balloons here.
As the city swelters, leave your floaties at home and cool off with our selection of pool-centric cinema, including Jaques Deray’s classic sun-drenched drama La Piscine, Jack Hazan’s flirty David Hockney biopic A Bigger Splash, or Harmony Korine’s voyage into the gaping hellmouth of “Woooo” party culture, Spring Breakers, featuring a poolside rendition of Britney Spears’s “Everytime” for the ages.
Curated by Shannon Lyons, 2022 Metrograph Programming Fellow.
With her cult documentary Outfitumentary screening at Metrograph, New York-based artist and filmmaker K8 Hardy shares some of her filmic inspirations, spotlighting a suite of cinema’s most rebellious fashion iconoclasts and idols.
This summer you can hit the open road without ever leaving NYC (or getting gouged on gas) by getting in on Metrograph’s Road Trip, a retrospective series that charts a course through the lower 48 states, taking in the locally shot cinematic attractions as it goes. American movies too often seem to give the impression that the country is comprised of nothing but New York and Los Angeles, but the U.S.A. is a mighty big place, and our Road Trip aims to see just about all of it, both city and countryside, including some rollicking detours taken Up Highway One and into the creepy hinterlands of Regional Horror. Buckle up, cinema tourists—we’ve got a long ride ahead.
“I am not conscious of being a humanist,” Satyajit Ray once declared, “It’s simply that I am interested in human beings.” This modest statement of purpose stands behind a body of work that has few equals in terms of its impact on a national cinema—Ray, a native of Bengal based in Kolkata, not only introduced a new level of realism to Indian movies, but the distinguished international profile of his films, particularly his lauded Apu Trilogy, introduced Indian cinema to the world. This program, which includes the Apu triptych, brings together six films which show precisely what made Ray a unique force: his compassionate regard for his characters, his deep sense for Indian history, and the feeling of poetry that pervades every frame of his best work. The attention to the subtleties of human behavior creates films as vivid as life, and his simple interest in people compels our enduring fascination with Satyajit Ray.
It should come as no surprise that Scott Cooper began his career in cinema as an actor, because he has a preternatural gift for eliciting great performances in the films he’s made as a director—his first, 2009’s Crazy Heart, earned star Jeff Bridges an Academy Award for Best Actor. And because Cooper gets the best from his actors, it’s equally unsurprising that Christian Bale, a committed, chameleonic performer in constant pursuit of greatness, keeps coming back to work for Cooper. To mark the forthcoming release of the third and latest collaboration between actor and director, The Pale Blue Eyes, we’re looking at the movies that came out of this serendipitous meeting of talents, and also screening films that inspired them—the kind of well-crafted, intelligent mainstream movies that have become an endangered species, and the same kind of movies that Cooper and Bale are doing their best to keep alive.
Beth B made an immediate and meteoric impact on the New York City’s art scene after graduating from the School of Visual Arts in 1977, producing Super 8 films with partner Scott B that invented a cinematic analog to the No Wave avant-garde in music. Her uncompromising innovative work as a solo artist has accelerated and expanded through time, as is proven by this cross-section of her extraordinarily prolific career to date, which includes her two provocative narrative features, Salvation! (1987) and Two Small Bodies (1993); a selection of her sui generis documentary feature films; and several short films—like Thanatopsis (1991), one of several collaborations with Lydia Lunch—that bring together aspects of fiction and non-fiction. A long-overdue Downtown showcase for a true Downtown legend.
Chosen from a sea of 10,000 auditioning actresses for the lead role in Ang Lee’s 2007 Lust, Caution, Hangzhou-born Tang Wei became a celebrity almost overnight—and also infamous, blackballed from the mainstream Chinese film industry due to her participation in the movie’s multiple sex scenes. With the passing of time, however, Tang’s enormous charisma proved more powerful than the ban, and she would go on to be an essential player in films by a diverse group of top international filmmakers including Johnnie To, Michael Mann, Bi Gan, and Park Chan-wook. This series offers a selection of Tang in a few of her finest roles, celebrating an actress who has always been fearless in her career choices, and is never less than captivating when on-screen.
“To commemorate Black History Month, Strange Fruit collects a handful of unusual, eclectic and incendiary movies that, for one reason or several, hardly feel like they should exist. From a long-lost movie about lynching to Depression-era Christianist propaganda as high camp, a forgotten blackface-ridden sequel to the first abolitionist lit classic, and a Midwestern American Negro’s paean to Second City alienation as translated by a Frenchman in Argentina, these are movies that normally don’t make the Black Exceptionalist highlight reel but should.”—Brandon Harris, author of Making Rent in Bed-Stuy, Amazon Studios refugee, producer of things at I’d Watch That.
Éric Rohmer is a filmmaker for all seasons, but there’s a particular pleasure to Rohmer in the summertime. This isn’t just a matter of his films favoring the warm months—of the trio playing in our “Summer of Rohmer,” two could be called partly “summery,” though he scarcely limits himself to filming people on holidays. It speaks instead to some tonic quality in his cinema: the crispness of his dialogues; the airy cleanliness of his images; the unhurried way he has of letting characters stretch out and reveal themselves instead of rushing them along to accommodate a narrative timetable, as though they have all the time in the world. Rohmer is refreshing, restorative, bracing, a tall glass of ice water for a wilting mind and spirit. And that’s nice anytime, but in the summer, it’s doubly nice.
A Canadian national who started his screen career in the UK, Donald Sutherland emerged as a bona fide star at the tail end of the ’60s, a period that was unusually receptive to eccentric leading men. A looming presence at 6′4″, with a long, lean face equally suited to comedy and pathos, and a unique, reedy delivery, Sutherland brought a contemporary counterculture sensibility to two period war films of 1970—Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H and Brian G. Hutton’s Kelly’s Heroes—and he hasn’t been long out of work since, racking up a list of credits that’s rich with classic films and unforgettable performances. At the age of 87, he’s still going strong, so we’re taking a look back over some of the turns in the long, strange trip that has been Sutherland’s career.
Taipei’s history—at least as a teeming metropolis—is not long; the city’s population exploded after 1949, when the Kuomintang government arrived in flight from Mainland China after losing the Civil War. Perhaps because of this relative youth, many Taiwanese filmmakers depicting Taipei seem to dwell on the aspects of city life that we regard as distinctly contemporary conditions: the atomization of community, the disappearance of tradition, the impersonality of faceless corporate architecture. (The title of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 1989 film A City of Sadness is revealing.) None of these conditions, of course, are unique to Taipei—we are all in Cities of Sadness, now—it’s just that certain Taiwanese filmmakers understood them earlier, and more eloquently. And while the films in this series may depict the cruelty of life in Taipei, their careful documentation of the city and compassionate regard for its people betrays a complicated affection that goes much deeper than civic boosterism.
This new documentary reveals the real Nina Simone through over 50 intimate interviews with those who best knew the artistry and intentions of one of America's true musical geniuses.
Screening in a recently unearthed 35mm print, James Toback’s long-unavailable The Big Bang is a study of New Yorkers, most of them the director’s friends and acquaintances, at the end of the eighties.
An acidic requiem for the aging North Brooklyn “hipster” of the aughts, The Comedy stars Tim Heidecker as Swanson, a thirtysomething Williamsburg wastrel killing time while waiting on his father’s death and a windfall inheritance. When passing empty days playing venomous games with his irony poisoned pals (Eric Wareheim, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, and Heidecker’s On Cinema at the Cinema co-star Gregg Turkington) is no longer enough of a thrill, Swanson begins to take his deadpan performed provocations out into the world of working stiffs, as though daring someone to puncture his coddled confidence with a punch—boundary-pushing scenes that crackle with a sense of the potential for real danger. Join Heidecker and director Alverson for a 10th anniversary screening of their great and grating address to their generation.
Born in the Netherlands in 1952, Sylvia Maria Kristel will forever be linked to the character that she made a household name: Emmanuelle, the sexually adventurous heroine of Just Jaeckin’s eponymous 1974 softcore adaptation of the erotica classic. Kristel would go on to play Emmanuelle in six more features, the last released in 1993, but there’s more to Kristel than just Emmanuelle, as this series, corresponding to the publication of Cult Epics’ gorgeous new volume Sylvia Kristel: From Emmanuelle to Chabrol, decisively proves. A striking beauty radiant with sensuality, as well as an uncompromising artist projecting a touching vulnerability, Kristel was sought after by top international directors including Claude Chabrol, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Curtis Harrington, building a uniquely seductive filmography—in spite of an often troubled personal life—up until her untimely death in 2012. She’s not just Emmanuelle and she’s not just a sex symbol: she’s the one and only Sylvia Kristel.
‘Tis the season for traditions, and this year we’ve got plenty of cinematic goodies under the tree for the discerning moviegoer, as our established canon of seasonal classics (Carol, Eyes Wide Shut, Phantom Thread) return alongside festive chestnuts by Billy Wilder, Éric Rohmer, and Wong Kar-wai.
A celebration of cinema and wine in Metrograph's theaters and Commissary.
The Young Brothers were insiders in the film industry—their father, Al, founded the New York City film processing lab DuArt in 1922—but in the careers they pursued, they consistently put themselves on the side of society’s outsiders. Robert, who co-wrote the screenplay for pioneering portrait of Black life in America Nothing but a Man, continued to focus on marginalized subjects in his own work as a director. Irwin, who died earlier this year at age 94, picked up his father’s duties at DuArt, in 1960, where his policy of prioritizing projects by passionate but cash-strapped independent filmmakers—as well as in his work as a patron to filmmakers and an accidental archivist—helped to cultivate the culture of indie cinema in NYC. Focusing on the lives of poor people and the films of poor filmmakers, together the Young Brothers made American cinema inestimably richer.
“This film series, The Trace, presented in tandem with my exhibition Young Lords and Their Traces at the New Museum, has offered me an opportunity to share a set of filmic relationships that, until now, were underexplored by me. These films live in different genres and across several decades. “With the support of dear friends at the University of Chicago, we have conceived of a set of films that begin to lay out the origins of Russian engagement with black American labor movements and analogous cinematic projects. The series, in this sense, is a commentary on my exhibition and the history of the Soviet Project. Taking a strong cue from Russian and early black American cinema, the series creates connections between the American Anti-Imperialist League and the Jamaican Red Guards; the all-race conference and the American committee for the defense of Puerto Rican political prisoners; the Executive Committee of the Communist International and the Ku Klux Klan; the Confederation of Mexican Workers, anti-racist struggles in the British West Indies, labor movements in the Jim Crow South, and the ways in which black and Russian film cope, critique, and propagandize political struggle, complexion, white power and equality throughout the United States. “Special thanks to Christina Kiaer, William Nickell and Leah Feldman for their tremendous contributions to my research and this film series. Thank you to my studio team for their unwavering support.” —Theaster Gates
With the Capulet and Montague kids rendered in high ’90s pop style by Baz Luhrmann, an absurdist look at coupling in a dystopic near-future from Yorgos Lanthimos, and two lush, ravishing romances from Wong Kar-wai—the amour fou of Happy Together and the muted longing of In the Mood for Love—we’ve got just about every kind of star-crossed affair you could ask for lined up for Valentine’s Day at Metrograph. A perfect date for a special someone, someones, or just your own special self, with the intimate confines of the Commissary and a cozy date with cocktails just a few steps away once the movie’s over.
A leading figure of the New German Cinema who stands far outside of any “movement”; a master in both documentary and fiction; a narrator with a unique voice and far-out perspective… Werner Herzog is among the most iconic living filmmakers, a mad maestro who has never fully disappeared from the public eye since first appearing on the scene. The “consummate poet of doom,” per The New York Times, the Munich-born director/producer/writer of over 60 features made his first short work at age 19 and is still fearlessly forging ahead at 79, with a drive as intense as that of the many obsessive characters he’s brought to the screen. In conjunction with Metrograph’s run of the stunning Sepa: Our Lord of Miracles, the lone film directed by Herzog’s longtime producer Walter Saxer, we present some of Herzog’s most celebrated and awe-inspiring films. “He is a pure artist and maniac and there will never be another one like Herzog.”—Harmony Korine
Few filmmakers can do it all in the way that pioneering British filmmaker Sally Potter can, having at various times acted as director, writer, performer, composer, and choreographer on her movies. With the release of Potter’s new short film, Look at Me, starring Javier Bardem and Chris Rock, and the appearance of a new restoration of perhaps her best-known film, 1992’s time-traveling, gender-bending Orlando, based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, we’re revisiting some of the highlights of a remarkable, eclectic career that encompasses experimental shorts, documentaries, and sumptuous period pieces, united by their innovations with form, sensitive performances, provocative subject matters, and conceptual rigor. An opportunity to encounter the artist Artforum’s Amy Taubin praised for her “brilliant eye for framing and camera placement, her ear for music, and the extremely moving ongoing conflict between her romantic sensibility and her analytic mind.”
With her boundary-pushing, de-glamorized, stripped-down approach to modern dance, Rainer was already established as one of the most innovative forces in choreography before she’d started to make her first standalone films in 1972, bringing the same spirit of invention to this new medium. Inspired by developments in contemporary feminist film theory and her own developing lesbian identity, Rainer would create a cinematic oeuvre that revolutionized the depiction of dance on screen, while also posing a challenge to traditional filmic representations of the female body. This retrospective provides a chance to sample the transformative motion picture works of this remarkable multi-hyphenate artist, still active in the world of dance today at age 88.
All films newly restored in 4K by The Museum of Modern Art and the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation, courtesy of Zeitgeist Films in association with Kino Lorber.
