May at Metrograph
COMING IN MAY
late nites: hong kong goes international
Opens may 5
Hong Kong cinema, by necessity, was made to travel. A city-state only slightly territorially larger than the five boroughs of New York City, Hong Kong boasts a hyperactive film industry that needed to cultivate audiences beyond its borders in order to survive and thrive. As such, its history is one of outreach, making movies that would screen for Chinese diaspora communities and for diverse audiences around the world, with a long record of international co-productions and globe-trotting shoots. Once the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China was decided on in 1984, many residents of the Fragrant Harbor, anxious about the future, started packing their bags. Among those who left town for a while were several of the reckless talents who’d helped to make Hong Kong’s popular cinema internationally renowned—John Woo being perhaps the most famous émigré—and who went to storm Hollywood, and give American movies a much-needed injection of raw energy. A tribute to a regional film culture that changed the face of world cinema, and a gift to film-lovers everywhere.
ALL THEM WITCHES: INSPIRATIONS FOR Lux Æterna selected by gaspar noé
opens MAY 5
Gaspar Noé has never been shy about citing his cinematic inspirations—witness the spines-out stacks of influential books and VHS tapes visible in the opening of his Climax—but for the US theatrical run of Lux Æterna at Metrograph, Noé has gone the extra mile. While introducing American audiences to his cinematic psyche-out—and to its film within a film, which concerns a witch burning—Noé has curated a program made up of the movies which provided kindling to fuel the flames of Lux Æterna, several of them united by the common themes of heresy and bonfires. A roaring blaze of big-screen blasphemy and redemption, with a roster that includes Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922), Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943), Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968), and a whole coven of Dark Arts-infused classics.
In Theater
INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME + INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER
DIRECTED BY KENNETH ANGER
In Theater
LUX ÆTERNA
DIRECTED BY GASPAR NOÉ
Preparing to shoot a film about witchcraft, actresses Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, linger backstage swapping stories about past productions gone awry, sorcery, and burnings at the stake. Ego trips and technical problems lead to psychotic outbreaks on the set of Lux Aeterna’s film within a film, titled God’s Work, as the shoot gradually plunges into chaos—a descent which Noé tracks while employing split-screen effects, stroboscopic psychedelic imagery, and eye-melting neon courtesy of cinematographer Benoît Debie. A madcap comedy, an indictment of the compromises of commercial moviemaking, and an intertitle-laced meditation on filmmaking practice that explodes into a brilliant bonfire of pure, pulsating cinema.
STUMBLING ONTO WILDNESS: COOKIE MUELLER ON FILM
opens MAY 6
Dorothy “Cookie” Mueller was born in Baltimore in 1949, and she died forty year later in New York City; in the short time that she spent on this planet, she unfailingly sniffed out where the action was, and got herself involved with whatever was worth being involved with. A founding member of fellow Charm City native John Waters’ Dreamlanders ensemble, once Cookie made it to New York she became a muse and key collaborator to artists including Nan Goldin, Gary Indiana, and Bette Gordon—and she also became an extraordinary writer, developing a jocular, unsentimental, and hilariously brazen voice. You can encounter that voice in Semiotext(e)’s reprinting of Cookie’s posthumously published 1990 memoir, the riotous Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, which we’ll be celebrating the reappearance of at the Metrograph Bookstore, and in this series of films featuring Mueller, which just happens to include some of the wildest stuff that American independent cinema had to offer over the course of two decades.
IT HAPPENS TO US: abortion in american film
opens MAY 6
"As women’s bodily autonomy is being stripped away by American legislation, the right to a safe and legal abortion is once again a personal and political battleground. Oft considered a ‘taboo’ subject, abortion has in fact been portrayed in film for just about as long as the medium itself. Spanning the silent era to the present day, this series surveys depictions of unintended pregnancy in American narrative cinema, from Josef von Sternberg's dark pre-Code drama An American Tragedy (1931), to the iconic ’80s rom-com Dirty Dancing, to Eliza Hittman’s indie hit Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020). Whether fraught with or free of moral judgment, these stories reflect, and other times oppose, the prevailing politics and mores of their time.”—Emma Myers, series curator
The series will be accompanied by a documentary shorts sidebar, including It Happens to Us by Amalie R. Rothschild, and more.
PLAYTIME: STUDIO GHIBLI
opens MAY 14
Playtime, Metrograph’s weekend matinee series, returns with a tribute to the films of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio that, since its inception in 1985, has charmed audiences the world over with works of meticulous, charming craft, extraordinary imagination, and disarming emotional insight. Screened in the original Japanese-language versions with subtitles on Saturday matinees, and in their dubbed English versions on Sunday, and totally irresistible in any language.
ALEXANDRIA SMITH SELECTS: co-presented with gagosian
opens MAY 20
Artist Alexandria Smith curates a selection of favorite films that have influenced her practice for many years, continuing a programmer-in-residence series co-presented with Gagosian In Theater and At Home.
“During the pandemic, I found myself locked down living abroad in another country for the first time in my life with my spouse, and forced to stay indoors for nearly two years. I was far away from family and friends, and unfamiliar with the new country I was inhabiting, so books and movies became my refuge. The films that I’ve curated for this program are long-time favorites—films I can’t stop thinking about, and that I turn to for a multitude of reasons, from narrative to color inspiration in the studio. Although they span genres, they do share a lot in common, exploring themes of loneliness through the prism of the fantastical; notions of family through spirituality; and deconstructing narrative through the disruption and manipulation of time.”—Alexandria Smith
METROGRAPH A TO Z
opens may 21
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, 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. Programmer-at-Large Nellie Killian continues her guided cinematic tour, taking us from N to Z.
