NOVEMBER IN THEATER
Satyajit Ray x6
opens November 4
“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.
SERIES INCLUDES:
Devi – Aparajito – Apu SansarPather Panchali – The Music Room – The Chess Players
Love Meetings: Pasolini & Contemporary Cinema
OPENS November 4
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.
SERIES INCLUDES:
Arabian Nights – Extraordinary Stories – Mamma Roma – Illinois Parables + Ray’s BirdsWhat You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? – Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom – Afterwater
Teorema – Afternoon – The Decameron – Anatomy of Hell – The Hawks and the Sparrows
Dream Life
opens november 4
The first female-directed narrative fiction feature to come out of Quebec, Dansereau’s sensual and beguiling Dream Life centers on Isabelle and Virginie (Liliane Lemaître-Auger and Véronique Le Flaguais), two single young women who meet through their work at a Montreal film production company and become fast friends, sharing their romantic fantasies and disillusions, and setting out together to conduct a sort of field study in desire. Punctuating her story with visions of memories and daydreams, Dansereau creates an intimate interior double portrait, exploring the tricky relationship between Women’s Liberation and the prison of yearning.
Starring Tang Wei
opens november 11
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.
Series Includes:
Blackhat – Lust, Caution – OfficeLong Day’s Journey Into Night – Decision to Leave
My First Film with Zia Anger
Saturday, November 12
“From memoirs to director’s commentary, there is a long tradition of self-reflective cinema. Self-reflection serves as a means for a director to further explain the significance of their work. In many cases, it functions as a distancing tactic-creating a dissonance between the filmmaker at present and their naïve former self. However, these reflections on the finished work are often as polished as the film itself, rendering the director’s ideas practiced and stale.
My First Film repeatedly examines my first, and only, feature-length narrative film through an interactive live cinema performance. Each rendition contains new revelations and nuanced narrative shifts that build on both the original work and its accumulating commentary. The audience is encouraged to reconsider the formal limits of where a film begins and ends, to see that a film is only as fixed as the world around it.”-Zia Anger
The Trace: Theaster Gates Selects
co-presented with gagosian
OPENS November 16
Artist Theaster Gates presents his Metrograph film series The Trace, with a special in-conversation event with Dr. Christina Kiaer at the theater on November 16.
“Film has long been a medium that has allowed me to understand how the world works. Filmmakers have become allies for our collective imagination and for the expansion of our understanding of visual literacy, political and emotional power, and cinematic possibility.
“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
Series Includes:
Killer of Sheep – Immortality for All: A Film Trilogy on Russian Cosmism – Andrei RublevDaughters of the Dust – The Defiant Ones – Aquarela – Show Boat
flaming ears
opens november 18
A mind-melting laser blast of “cyberdyke” avant-garde science fiction shot on Super 8 and then blown up to 16mm, the dazzlingly grungy, proudly low-rent Flaming Ears sets its scene in the year 2700 in the burnt-out, all-lesbian city of Asche, where the overlapping tales of three women unfold: comic book artist Spy (Susana Helmayr); pyromaniac pervert performance artist Volly (co-director Pürrer); and utterly amoral, reptile revering alien Nun (co-director Scheirl). Storytelling takes a backseat to visual bravado here in this atmospheric, anarchic film of ornate dialogues and homespun SFX that has drawn comparisons to Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames-and to almost nothing else. “Imagine the film that J.G. Ballard might have made if he’d been born an Austrian dyke, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.”-B. Ruby Rich
ace presents the ice storm with editor tim squyres
Friday, November 18
For one night only, The Ice Storm editor Tim Squyres, ACE, joins Metrograph, in conversation with Kyle Turner.
Rick Moody’s novel of the same name, about two upper-crust families in New Canaan, Connecticut, negotiating suburban ennui, early winter weather, and the social upheavals of the 1970s, is brought to the screen with subtlety and acerbic humor by Lee and a once-in-a-lifetime cast that includes Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Christina Ricci, Tobey Maguire, and Elijah Wood. Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, where James Schamus’s literate, artful screenplay was also rewarded.
leonor will never die
OPENS november 25
A festival favorite, Escobar’s debut feature offers a surreal, self-reflexive tribute to Filipino action cinema. Retired screenwriter Leonor Reyes (Sheila Francisco) lays comatose in a hospital after a collision between her skull and a television set-but while her body doesn’t move, in her mind she’s been transported into one of her own unfinished films, confronted with the larger-than-life heroes and villains of her invention, as well as the unhappy memories of their real-life inspirations. An ingeniously layered narrative with serious insights into Pinoy pop movies, that’s also seriously funny.
sutherland tales
opens november 25
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.
series Includes:
M*A*S*H – Don’t Look Now – Space CowboysKelly’s Heroes – Fellini’s Casanova – Klute
Invasion of the Body Snatchers – Ordinary People
SCOTT COOPER X CHRISTIAN BALE
opens november 25
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 Eye, 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.
series Includes:
The Deer Hunter – Out of the FurnaceThe Searchers – Hostiles – The Pale Blue Eye