March In Theater 2024
MARCH IN THEATER
Bad Actress
opens March 1
To say an actress “loses herself in a role” is usually applied as a compliment… but this series is comprised of movies where it might be used as an expression of concern. Bad Actress collects an all-star stock company of performers caught in the midst of mental breaks: sometimes chemically induced, as in R. W. Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss; sometimes driven by public abandonment, as in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard; and sometimes attributable to more mysterious causes, as in David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. After careers of performing for others, these actresses are acting out for themselves—and the result is the (often harrowing) performances of their lifetimes.
Series Includes:
All About Eve - An Actor’s Revenge - Clouds of Sils Maria
In Front of Your Face - Madeline’s Madeline - Mulholland Dr.
Nina Wu - On the Beach at Night Alone - Opening Night
Persona - Sunset Boulevard - Veronika Voss - What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Forever Young
opens March 1
The eternal rebellion of youth against established order and the adult compromises it represents is a phenomenon that recognizes no national borders, as proven by this program of films featuring insubordinate teenagers from around the globe. Pictures as diverse as Luis Buñuel’s slum-surrealist Los Olvidados, Bertrand Bonello’s materialist Millennial terror thriller Nocturama, and Edward Yang’s teeming canvas depiction of 1960s Taiwanese adolescence, A Brighter Summer Day, are united by the hormone-driven mayhem and the righteous rage of juvenile revolt. Stop in, and see why the kids aren’t alright.
Series Includes:
A Brighter Summer Day - A Clockwork Orange - American Honey
As Tears Go By - Cruel Intentions - Cry-Baby - Dazed and Confused
Ghost World - La Haine - Los Olvidados - Masculin Féminin
Nocturama - Rebel Without a Cause - Rebels of the Neon God - Rumble Fish
Remember Every Frame: Edited by Dede Allen
OPENS March 1
Beginning her career in the film industry as a college sophomore on the Columbia Studios lot back in 1943, Dede Allen eventually learned the editor’s craft under the tutelage of Citizen Kane cutter-cum-director Robert Wise—whose 1959 Odds Against Tomorrow was her first major work—and in the decade to come she would emerge as one of the preeminent editors in Hollywood, a crucial force in introducing techniques like the jump cut and the audio overlap to American moviemaking, as well as moving past the strictures of studio era continuity cutting to a more limber, modern cutting style. An homage to an innovator in an often invisible art, featuring highlights from seven decades of Allen’s extraordinary career.
Series Includes:
The Addams Family - Bonnie and Clyde - Odds Against Tomorrow
Reds - Slap Shot - Slaughterhouse-Five
Mad House or Mad World
opens March 1
“I’m not crazy / You’re the one that’s crazy!” This bellowed assertion—from Suicidal Tendencies’ 1983 thrash classic “Institutionalized”—encapsulates the dilemma at the center of the films in Mad House or Mad World, movies in which the casually accepted insanity of the “normal” world is juxtaposed with the behavior of those whom that world has deemed mentally unwell. Including the attempted asylum insurrection of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Frederick Wiseman’s harrowing depiction of institutional abuse in Titicut Follies, and much more, this series of provocative films asks viewers to question the behaviors that an aberrant society deems abnormal, and to wonder if we aren’t all of us living in Bedlam already.
Series Includes:
Bronson - Girl, Interrupted - I'm a Cyborg, But That’s OK
King of Hearts - Marat/Sade - One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Titicut Follies
Animal Farm: Pigs
Opens March 1
In the latest installment of our Animal Farm series we’ve gone rooting for cinematic truffles to highlight the vital roles played by porkers of all sizes and temperaments in the Seventh Art. From the big, bad outback boar of Razorback, the “Terrific” livestock hog Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web, to the swinish totalitarian Napoleon of Animal Farm and beyond, come wallow in our tribute to the distinguished onscreen legacy of The Other White Meat.
Series Includes:
Animal Farm - Babe - Charlotte’s Web
Delicatessen - Fritz the Cat - The Great Muppet Caper
Porky Pig Showcase - Razorback - Snatch - Unforgiven
Also Starring... John Cazale
Opens March 2
John Cazale’s too-brief career is the very definition of quality over quantity; before his tragic death of lung cancer in 1978 at age 42, the Massachusetts native appeared in exactly five films, every one of them part of the canon of New Hollywood cinema, every one nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. We’re playing all five—The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter—so come out and see this intense, arresting character actor with a body of work that’s the cinematic equivalent of a Royal Flush. “It is the lives and works of people like John Cazale that make filmgoing worthwhile.”—David Thomson
Series Includes:
The Conversation - The Deer Hunter - Dog Day Afternoon
The Godfather - The Godfather Part II
A Touch of Wang Hongwei
Opens March 8
A classmate of director Jia Zhangke at the Beijing Film Academy, Wang Hongwei would become one of the mainstays of Jia’s cinema from their student days onward—an archaeologist sifting through the debris of a vanished Fengjie in Still Life, an abusive massage parlor customer in A Touch of Sin, the lead in Jia’s 1997 breakthrough Xiao Wu (Pickpocket)… Sometimes considered Jia’s onscreen “alter ego” and a part of his recurring “troupe” of actors that also includes Zhao Tao and Han Sanming, Wang’s performances—for Jia, as well as filmmakers like Johnny Ma and Zhang Lü—are distinguished by focused intensity and a total lack of actorly affect. As Jean-Pierre Léaud was to the French New Wave, so Wang is to the Sixth Generation of Mainland Chinese cinema, an actor whose every appearance is freighted with symbolic significance, as well as an artist of significant ingenuity and resourcefulness, long overdue a spotlighting tribute of his own—as he gets here, to accompany Metrograph’s runs of The Shadowless Tower, in which he stars, and Art College 1994, in which Wang voices a character.
Series Includes:
A Touch of Sin - Crosscurrent - Old Stone
The Shadowless Tower - Still Life - Xiao Wu
This Long Century Presents: An Evening with AG Rojas
March 9
Artist, curator, and founder of online art archive This Long Century, Jason Evans comes to Metrograph to join in conversation with an eclectic array of interdisciplinary creators and visionaries working in or adjacent to moving image-based art in this screening/artist talk series. A stimulating survey of artist-facing close reads, This Long Century Presents probes into the creative visions of the sort of smartly curated selection of polymathic modern luminaries that This Long Century has been bringing together since its founding in 2008.
Members Event
Anna May Wong: Not Your China Doll
March 14
Anna May Wong, the preeminent Chinese American movie star of her day. After rising to stardom in Douglas Fairbanks’s blockbuster The Thief of Bagdad (1924), and performing in acclaimed films in Berlin, Paris, and London, she returned to Hollywood, where she spoke out about the industry’s racism, and used her new stature to reshape Asian American representation in film. To celebrate the publication of Katie Gee Salisbury’s debut biography Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong, which showcases the vibrant, radical life of this groundbreaking artist, join Salisbury and New Yorker writer Mayukh Sen for an extended introduction before a screening of Robert Florey’s 1937 Wong-showcase Daughter of Shanghai.
A trio of films featuring Wong—Chu Chin Chow, Piccadilly, and The Toll of the Sea—will also stream on Metrograph At Home from March 1-April 1 with special video introductions from Salisbury.
The Shadowless Tower
Opens march 15
A delicately shaded film about the compromises and unexpected beauties of growing old, The Shadowless Tower stars Xin Baiqing as Gu Wentong, a divorced middle-aged writer who has turned his back on poetry for the prosaic job of food criticism, his well-worn routine disturbed by an encounter with a young photographer (Huang Yao) whose influence prompts him to take stock of both his past and present. Set in Beijing’s Xicheng district, Lu’s film is both a rich character study and a keenly observed portrayal of everyday life in contemporary China, featuring exquisite performances from both leads, from lauded Fifth Generation filmmaker Tian Zhuangzhuang, in the role of Gu’s estranged father, and Wang Hongwei in the role of Xin’s brother-in-law.
My Heart is That Eternal Rose
Opens march 22
Patrick Tam, perhaps the Hong Kong New Wave’s most daring cine-modernist and a crucial influence on Wong Kar-wai, teams with DP Chris Doyle, a regular Wong collaborator, for a high-style “heroic bloodshed” melodrama starring Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Kenny Bee, and Joey Wong as three friends bound together by ties both criminal and romantic. With shamelessly pulpy plotting, a synth-heavy score, luxuriously expressionistic imagery, and a climactic bloodbath for the ages, My Heart is That Eternal Rose exists somewhere at the intersection between Wong’s cinema of longing and John Woo’s cinema of wrathful vengeance. One of the unheralded masterworks of Hong Kong filmmaking.
Divine Intervention
Opens March 22
They say with good reason that getting any film made is a small miracle… but some films are more miraculous than others. A program of works—by Wim Wenders, Glauber Rocha, Vittorio De Sica, Shôhei Imamura, and other powerhouse auteurs from all over the globe—in which the worlds of God(s), angels, and men intermingle, with spectacular (and, in some cases, sardonically anti-clerical) effects. Featuring dei ex machina and Buñuelian Bible stories you won’t remember from Sunday school, it’s nothing less than a blessing.
Series Includes:
The Ballad of Narayama - Black God, White Devil - The Milky Way
Miracle in Milan - The Sacrifice - Time of the Gypsies - Wings of Desire
Divine Intervention
Opens March 22
Artist Anna Weyant has curated a selection of films as part of an ongoing series copresented by Gagosian and Metrograph.
Weyant comments, “The experience of watching each of these films is markedly different with respect to their individual style, storytelling, aesthetic, and dialogue. When I consider what it is about these stories that resonates with me, I am repeatedly drawn to their through lines of the power dynamics, complexities, and deceptions in relationships (and society), the uneasiness that comes from not fully knowing one’s surroundings (or the company one keeps) and our inherent desires for connection in an increasingly isolating world.”
Series Includes:
Anna Weyant on Lost in Translation - Gone Girl
Lost in Translation - Parasite (B&W Version)
Savannah Leaf Selects
March 29
British American filmmaker Savanah Leaf joins Metrograph theater for one night only, presenting both her Sundance acclaimed debut feature Earth Mama (2023) and a film important to her: Ossos (1997), the first title in Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas trilogy.
Fireflies Press Presents
La Captive + Vertigo
March 30
Join Metrograph on Saturday, March 30 for the NYC launch of author and critic Christine Smallwood’s La Captive. Her lyrical monograph on Chantal Akerman’s film of the same name—an icy, absorbing study of monomaniacal erotic fixation, adapting the fifth volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—is the latest title in Fireflies Press’ Decadent Editions series. Smallwood joins Metrograph for one night only, participating in a Q&A following a screening of Akerman’s newly restored film, and a Lobby Bar reception, where books will be available to be signed, before she introduces Alfred Hitchock’s Vertigo, a film which, in Smallwood’s words, “haunts every frame” of Akerman’s drama.