COMING IN FEBRUARY
JOHN M. STAHL
FEB 4 – 8
Today the name of John M. Stahl may be less familiar than the titles of some of his films-Imitation of Life, Magnificent Obsession-which are better known for the versions that Douglas Sirk made from the same source material in the 1950s. But years before Sirk emerged in Hollywood, Stahl was one of the undisputed masters of American melodrama, at the peak of his powers producing a remarkable string of films. In a program of rare prints-including little-seen pre-Code drama Seed-and elevated emotions, come discover one of the treasures of Golden Age Hollywood.
In Theater
MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
In Theater
LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
In Theater
THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
In Theater
WHEN TOMORROW COMES
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
In Theater
HOLY MATRIMONY
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
In Theater
ONLY YESTERDAY
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
In Theater
IMITATION OF LIFE
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
In Theater
BACK STREET
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
In Theater
SEED
DIRECTED BY JOHN M. STAHL
ALIENATING RESURRECTIONS:
DANIEL SCHMIDT SELECTS RETURNS
FEB 11 – 17
Filmmaker Daniel Schmidt writes, “For the past 15 years my recurrent dreams are those in which I encounter dead familiars: people seemingly and repeatedly resurrected, but estranged both from their former selves and from me. I am left with conflicted feelings of happiness to be afforded the opportunity to see alive again people I love, and also sadness, frustration, and fear at having this reunion be so alienating. This is a collection of films that explicitly and implicitly concern alienating resurrections. Most have at their centers the emotional narratives of people who experience a sort of demise and a sort of revival. While some elaborate on their initial deaths-the central concern is of the problems and possibilities wrought by their rebirths, both for themselves and the living whom they encounter. These are films populated with phantoms who often lack direct motivations and are mired in existential confusion, perhaps seeking identity, or perhaps freedom from it.”
In Theater
THE HOUSE ON TELEGRAPH HILL
DIRECTED BY ROBERT WISE
In Theater
THE INTERVIEW + QUICKENERS
DIRECTED BY ANRI SALA, JEREMY SHAW
In Theater
LAKE MUNGO
DIRECTED BY JOEL ANDERSON
In Theater
KUICHISAN
DIRECTED BY MAIKO ENDO
In Theater
BIRTH
DIRECTED BY JONATHAN GLAZER
In Theater
HAPPY AS LAZZARO
DIRECTED BY ALICE ROHRWACHER
In Theater
THE LAKE HOUSE
DIRECTED BY ALEJANDRO AGRESTI
More Than Just a Story About Women
FEB 9 – 28
Collectives were an integral part of the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s-both in political organization and in creating new artforms. The rapid advances of video technology opened new filmmaking possibilities, and new forms of collective mobilizations. Examples of resulting work from all around the world can be found in this program, which includes South Korea’s Kaidu Club’s rather psychedelic The Hole; a collaboration with Hyderabad-based women’s rights group by the Yugantar Film Collective; and Give Us a Smile, a film about everyday harassment by the Leeds Animation Workshop, made in response to violence being committed against women by the so-called Yorkshire Ripper in the late ’70s. A showing of the strength-and inspiration-that comes with numbers.
This short film program was curated by Julian Ross and Inge de Leeuw for Singapore Film Festival 2021 and is now modified for Metrograph At Home.
At Home
Is This Just a Story?
DIRECTED BY YUGANTAR
At Home
GIVE US A SMILE
DIRECTED BY LEEDS ANIMATION WORKSHOP
At Home
THE PROSTITUTES OF LYON SPEAK
DIRECTED BY CAROLE ROUSSOPOULOS
TECHNICOLOR ROMANCE
FEB 11 – 17
Because nothing says “I love you” like three-strip Technicolor, Metrograph celebrates Valentine’s Day with a bouquet of emerald greens, pastel pinks, cerulean blues, and a whole rainbow of other super saturated colors which lend a lavish, lapidary, and altogether otherworldly quality to these classic romances, including cherished standbys from the likes of Ernst Lubitsch, Vincente Minnelli, and Jean Renoir. In an era of dishwater drab “dark” modern blockbusters, give yourself (and perhaps a special someone) the gift of glowing stained glass grandeur, in a program of films that offer a glimpse of how the world ought to look.
In Theater
AN AMERICAN IN PARIS
DIRECTED BY VINCENTE MINNELLI
In Theater
HEAVEN CAN WAIT
DIRECTED BY ERNST LUBITSCH
In Theater
THE RIVER
DIRECTED BY JEAN RENOIR
In Theater
PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN
DIRECTED BY ALBERT LEWIN
In Theater
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
DIRECTED BY MICHAEL POWELL & EMERIC PRESSBURGER
MILTON MOSES GINSBERG X 2
Feb 13
Ginsberg, a New York filmmaking legend who died in spring of 2021, was a friend of Metrograph from our earliest days, so it only seemed appropriate to give him a belated send-off by showing the features on which his legacy rests: 1969’s Coming Apart, a harrowing experimental psychodrama of sexual obsession and dysfunction starring Rip Torn at his most unhinged (which is saying something); and 1973’s The Werewolf of Washington, a horror satire burlesquing the Nixon administration that features Dean Stockwell-also recently departed-as a White House press secretary who returns from assignment in Hungary with a nasty case of lycanthropy. Watch both and we’re sure you’ll agree: there’ll never be another like Milton.
In Theater
COMING APART
DIRECTED BY MILTON MOSES GINSBERG
In Theater
THE WEREWOLF OF WASHINGTON
DIRECTED BY MILTON MOSES GINSBERG
LOWLANDS ’70s and ’80s
Feb 18-24
Bringing together films from Belgium and the Netherlands, Lowlands ’70s & ’80s is a reminder as to what a fecund scene of cinematic invention and daring the so-called Low Countries were during the years when such talents as Chantal Akerman, Harry Kümel, and Paul Verhoeven were working at the height of their powers and provocative perversity. Anchored by a selection of newly restored films by the unjustly obscure Dutch feminist filmmaker Nouchka van Brakel (1979’s A Woman Like Eve, 1982’s The Cool Lakes of Death), and with work by all of the above named, it’s a crash course in the high-wire art of the Lowlands.
At Home & In Theater
A Woman Like Eve
DIRECTED BY NOUCHKA VAN BRAKEL
At Home & In Theater
The Debut
DIRECTED BY NOUCHKA VAN BRAKEL
At Home & In Theater
The Cool Lakes of Death
DIRECTED BY NOUCHKA VAN BRAKEL
In Theater
DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS
DIRECTED BY HARRY KÜMEL
In Theater
Je, tu, il, elle
DIRECTED BY CHANTAL AKERMAN
In Theater
One Sings, the Other Doesn’t
DIRECTED BY AGNÉS VARDA
staff picks: kim’s video
Feb 25-27
The Kim’s Video empire started out in an enterprising immigrant hustler’s East Village laundromat on Avenue A, a joint that ran a dodgy sideline renting VHS tapes out of cardboard boxes and laundry baskets. It became a legendary New York City institution-a discount film school, with outlets as far as exotic Jersey City and a multi-story flagship located in a former bathhouse on St. Mark’s Place, famous for cranky behind-the-counter attitudes, dismal wages, and a mind-boggling selection. After the closing of its final location in 2014, Kim’s faded into the mists of legend: an exceptional place, but also representative of a broader international video store culture that’s long hovered on the brink of extinction. Kim’s is gone but far from forgotten, and so Metrograph salutes the esoteric eclecticism of Kim’s Video with a series made up of film selections and introductions by a number of former store clerks who’ve gone on to better things still branded for life by their time, as well as the mysterious Mr. Kim himself.
At Home
Reflections of Evil
DIRECTED BY DAMON PACKARD
COMING SOON
In Theater
STATE OF THINGS
DIRECTED BY WIM WENDERS
COMING SOON
In Theater
White of the Eye
DIRECTED BY DONALD CAMMELL
COMING SOON
In Theater
Dr. Strangelove
DIRECTED BY STANLEY KUBRICK
COMING SOON
In Theater
Modern Times
DIRECTED BY CHARLIE CHAPLIN
COMING SOON
RUNS
At Home & In Theater
FABIAN: GOING TO THE DOGS
DIRECTED BY DOMINIK GRAF
Graf recreates the world of Weimar Germany in this sprawling adaptation of a 1931 novel by Erich Kästner, starring Tom Schilling in the title role of a charmingly cynical, hedonistic aspiring novelist whose life of dissipation is interrupted when he falls for would-be film starlet Saskia Rosendahl.
At Home & In Theater
FRIENDS AND STRANGERS
DIRECTED BY JAMES VAUGHAN
A startlingly work located somewhere at the intersection of screwball and cringe comedy, Antonioniesque alienation, and Rohmerian ravishment, and an exemplary work of art that calls into question the value of art in a modern world that has reduced it to nothing more than a marker of social status.
COMING SOON
At Home & In Theater
BIX: “AIN’T NONE THEM PLAY LIKE HIM YET”
DIRECTED BY BRIGITTE BERMAN
Berman’s legendary film, now visible in an immaculate new restoration, uses incredible archival footage and interviews with Beiderbecke’s contemporaries to craft an intimate portrait of an unlikely jazz star.
In Theater
THE SOUVENIR
DIRECTED BY JOANNA HOGG
A keenly observed portrayal of toxic romance set in ’80s Britain, starring Honor Swinton Byrne as Julie, an aspiring filmmaker who begins a relationship with Anthony , a slightly older man whose attractive intelligence and worldliness can’t compensate for the fact that he is a natural manipulator.
In Theater
THE SOUVENIR: PART II
DIRECTED BY JOANNA HOGG
Picking up with Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), her wealthy mother (Honor’s real-life mother, Tilda), and her classmates (including a hilarious Richard Ayoade) shortly after the events of 2019’s The Souvenir, Hogg follows her student filmmaker protagonist/alter-ego’s progress as a developing artist.
JAMAA FANAKA X4
Feb 25 – MARCH 02
While many of his Black UCLA film school classmates who would likewise be associated with the L.A. Rebellion movement gravitated towards a film language that was something like African American neorealism, Jamaa Fanaka marched to his own drum, seeking to reflect Black American experience in the form of genre films made for popular audiences. This ambition was already clear in Fanaka’s Emma Mae-made when he was still in film school, and eventually picked up for theatrical distribution-and to accompany our run of that film, we’re presenting three more of Fanaka’s finest, including the first two entries in his criminally enjoyable Penitentiary series. Tackling incarceration, systematic racism, and other hot-button issues within the framework of genre, these films prove Fanaka, though a born entertainer with an eye for the drive-in crowd, was no less a conscientious artist than his more highbrow Rebellion contemporaries.
At Home & In Theater
EMMA MAE
DIRECTED BY JAMAA FANAKA
In Theater
PENTITENTIARY
DIRECTED BY JAMAA FANAKA
In Theater
PENTITENTIARY 2
DIRECTED BY JAMAA FANAKA
In Theater
WELCOME HOME, BROTHER CHARLES
DIRECTED BY JAMAA FANAKA