September In Theater
SEPTEMBER IN THEATER
An Anthology of Cinema
opens September 2
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.
SERIES INCLUDES:
The Portrait of a Lady - Leave Her to Heaven - Black Girl
The Age of Innocence - All By Myself: The Eartha Kitt Story - The Fountainhead
Daughters of the Dust - Ten Minutes to Live - Land of Silence and Darkness
Welcome to Metrograph: a to z
OPENS September 3
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. Now that our booklet is back, we have relaunched A to Z. Every four months, one of our programmers 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. Continuing this fall, Programmer Lydia Ogwang takes us from N-Z, including stops at Med Hondo’s Soleil Ô, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Quai des orfèvres, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss.
SERIES INCLUDES:
Orpheus - Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom - Quai Des Orfèvres
Reason Over Passion - Soleil Ô - Top of the Heap
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives - Veronika Voss - Woman in the Dunes
Xiao Wu - Yourself and Yours - A Zed & Two Noughts
LATE NITES: HIP HOP ICONS
OPENS SEPTEMBER 3
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.
SERIES INCLUDES:
Juice - House Party - Poetic Justice
Friday - Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai - Belly
Paid in Full - Boyz n the Hood - New Jack City
Baby Boy - Set It Off - Gang Related
’70S PLAY THE ’30S
OPENS SEPTEMBER 9
There’s no simple explanation as to what drives nostalgia cycles, but in the United States 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 we can say that the movies that came from it are begging to be screened.
Series Includes:
Bound For Glory - The Sting - Bloody Mama
Chinatown - Hard Times - The Last Tycoon
Emperor of the North - Paper Moon - The Cat and the Canary
Thieves Like Us - Boxcar Bertha
Metrograph selects: Box Office Team
opens september 10
Select films, chosen specially by Metrograph staff. For the latest iteration of our recurring series, members of the Metrograph box office staff—Harry Kroessler, Clare Maceda, Justice Sanders, Cece Vargas, and Kristine Veras—each pick a personal favorite film. Special guests are attached to the films they’ve chosen, including editor Andrew Weisblum, and filmmakers Eliza Hittman and Ken Jacobs.
Series Includes:
Fantastic Mr. Fox - Nobody’s Watching - It Felt Like Love
The Big Animal - It Felt Like Love - The Warriors
Midlengths: Daily Life & The Afterlife
Opens September 11
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 instalment, 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.
Series Includes:
Mekong Hotel - Heaven Is Still Far Away + Touching the Skin of Eeriness - Diamonds of the Night
The Experience - Ode - Journey to the West - A Day In The Country - The Punishment
Saturday Afternoon Cartoons
september 17
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.
Whit stillman in person
september 17
The writer-director Whit Stillman graces Metrograph theater for one night only, presenting Metropolitan and Barcelona, the first two installments in his trilogy of sophisticated satires detailing the lives of beautiful, young, affluent city-dwellers.
“The writing of Barcelona and Metropolitan overlapped—I had started the Barcelona script while I was still repping Spanish films and getting small parts as the ‘foolish American’ character. I saw that shooting abroad would be too hard for a first film, though, so I shifted to the minimalist Metropolitan.”—Whit Stillman
just one more thing...
Opens September 23
The cult program Columbo, starring John Cassavetes go-to Peter Falk as rumpled, tenacious, deceptively discombobulated-seeming 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.
Series Includes:
Big Trouble - Husbands - The Brink’s Job - Wings of Desire - The Eiger Sanction
The Sugarland Express - Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice - Scanners - Chinatown
The films of sylvia kristel
Opens September 23
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.
Series Includes:
Mati Hari - Emmanuelle - Julia
Playing With Fire - Pastorale 1943 - Naked Over the Fence
