August In Theater
AUGUST IN THEATER
Pool Party
opens August 5
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.
SERIES INCLUDES:
Swimming Pool - La Piscine - The Swimmer
Spring Breakers - Eighth Grade
A Bigger Splash - La Ciénaga
Summer of Rohmer
OPENS August 5
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.
SERIES INCLUDES:
The Aviator’s Wife - Boyfriends and Girlfriends - Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle
Isabel Sandoval’s Dream Double Feature
August 6
Metrograph is pleased to announce Isabel Sandoval’s Dream Double Feature, including Alan J. Pakula's Klute and Sandoval's own Señorita, screening in theater on August 6.
A note from the curator:
“Klute came out just two years after Sweet Charity (loosely based on Nights of Cabiria) but their respective worldviews are night and day. Bracingly modern and unflinching, Klute dismantled the tropes and clichés of the movie sex worker as, scene after anxious scene, Fonda unravels a heart of darkness. The specter of Bree Daniels haunts my noirish debut feature Señorita, itself a reimagining of the trans Filipina persona, set during a rural election in the Philippines.”—Isabel Sandoval
SERIES INCLUDES:
Klute - Señorita
THE PROCESS: A TRIBUTE TO ROBERT & IRWIN YOUNG
OPENS AUGUST 12
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.
Series Includes:
Union Maids - Smithereens - Rich Kids
Children of Fate - Short Eyes - In The Soup - Triumph of the Spirit
Girlfriends - Wildrose - Sidewalk Stories - The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One - Harlan County, USA - Ruby in Paradise
Roger and Me - Nothing But a Man - I Like It Like That - Sleepwalk - Alambrista!
Working Girls - Caught - Miller’s Crossing - American Me - Stranger Than Paradise
the kalampag tracking agency
30 years of experimental film & video from the philippines
august 14
Metrograph, Generation Loss, and Los Otros present The Kalampag Tracking Agency, a survey of 30 years of experimental film and video from the Philippines.
“Overcoming institutional and personal lapses to give attention to little-seen works in a variety of formats—some quite recent, some surviving decades of loss and decomposition—this program collects loose parts in motion, a series of bangs, or kalampag in Tagalog, exploring how these 13 films might resonate off each other in the context of a screening program and a contemporary audience. These are some of the most singular, fragile, and striking films and videos from the Philippines and its diaspora from over the past three decades.”—Merv Espina and Shireen Seno, curators
Shorts program includes:
Droga! by Miko Revereza, Once Upon a Time by Melchor Bacani III, ABCD & Johnny Crawl by Rox Lee, Riddle: Shout of Man by RJ Leyran, Very Specific Things at Night by John Torres, Chop-chopped First Lady + Chop-Chopped First Daughter by Yason Banal, The Retrochronological Transfer of Information by Tad Ermitaño, Ars Colonia by Raya Martin, Class Picture by Tito & Tita, Anito by Martha Atienza, the moon is not ours by Jon Lazam, Rust by Cesar Hernando, Eli Guieb III & Jimbo Albano, & A child dies, a child plays, a woman is born, a woman dies, a bird arrives, a bird flies off by Shireen Seno
Saturday Afternoon Cartoons
august 20
Saturday Afternoon Cartoons is New York City’s prime theatrical showcase of early and classic animated cartoons, shown in vintage 16mm film prints from the personal archives of historian Tommy José Stathes. Beginning over 20 years ago as a casual effort to find and see early cartoons that were unavailable on home video, Stathes’s collection has grown to become perhaps one of the largest of its kind. It includes many titles and ‘orphan films’ that are difficult to access or view elsewhere.
Stathes joins us in August with Beach Daze, a selection of early cartoon films featuring fun and fancy-free (maybe!) trips to the shore. Enjoy some sun tanning, swimming, picnicking, fishing, and other assorted summertime shenanigans in classic animated form. Spanning the 1920s through the '50s, this assortment showcases classic characters such as Felix the Cat, Betty Boop, Oswald Rabbit, Farmer Alfalfa, Mutt and Jeff, Little Audrey, and others.
WELCOME TO METROGRAPH A - Z
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. In August we continue Programmer Lydia Ogwang's alphabetical journey through cinema history with stops at Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman and Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess.
AUGUST TITLES include:
Buffalo '66 - Close Up
Everyone Else - A Face In The Crowd
Ganja & Hess - The Headless Woman - Jane B. Par Agnés V.
The Killing - Let There Be Light - The Makioka Sisters
road trip
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 cinema too often seems 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. Buckle up as the road trip continues with rides through the American West and down Highway 1.
AUGUST takes us through the Pacific North West and into California with titles including:
Bronco Billy - Certain Women - The Howling
Trouble in Mind - Property - Deadbeat at Dawn
Streetwise - The Birds - The Fog - Pigs - The Exiles
Chan is Missing - Cutter’s Way - The Misfits - Play Misty For Me
Queen of Diamonds - Runaway Nightmare - Raising Arizona
Petulia - Inherent Vice - The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
The Witch Who Came From the Sea - Hardcore - Last Night At the Alamo
The Hills Have Eyes - Cannibal! The Musical - Slacker - Aspen
LATE NITES: MIAMI HEAT
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.
AUGUST TITLES INCLUDE:
Pain & Gain - Married to the Mob
The Funhouse - Miami Connection
Playtime: bicycles and balloons
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 (Bicycle 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.
AUGUST TITLES Includes:
Pee Wee’s Big Adventure - The Triplets of Belleville
The Kid With a Bike - Up
