PFA: Il posto (The Sound of Trumpets) and I fidanzati (The Fiances).
This is a marvelous double bill by Ermanno Olmi, master of late period neo-realist aesthetic. The black and white cinematography of both films is devastating.
YERBA BUENA: The Man Who Lies
Any interest in high-art cinema techniques as applied to S&M onanism? This is just the stuff for you. I have every intention of being at this show myself. The previous three films have been simultaneously gorgeous, sexy, brilliant, mystifying, inspiring, sometimes funny, and--all-important for the hard-core cinephile--fantastically rare. What more can be asked for? Did Alain Robbe-Grillet have to die so that new 35mm prints of his films would be made and sent to our shores? Sometimes this is what it takes...
PFA: ...All the Marbles and Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
Can a movie about a troupe of female mud-wrestlers starring Peter Falk be a serious work of cinema? Silly question! This is a Robert Aldrich film!! And his swan song... I've only seen it once, years ago on video, but I remember it as, by turns, charming, elegiac, and sensitive to the painful realities of working-class existence.
The terms "surrealist" and "expressionist" are thrown about a bit casually, and, as there's nothing to stop me, I'm going to get in this game too: Elio Petri's Investigation qualifies as both, and is beautifully shot, amusingly paranoid (or, why do you think I'm so damned funny?!!?) and fairly brilliant. Music by... Morricone?
SFMOMA: Viva Las Vegas and Showgirls
Please check out my sfmoma OPEN SPACE blog regarding these, respectively, great and major works.
Full disclosure: I'm scheduled to project both these films. Afterwards, I'll be shuttling over to:
PFA: Zabriskie Point and Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte
Antonioni's greatest film (and top candidate for greatest film ever made) will be capping my mad smorgasbord of the insulted and injured (and, oh, so unfairly--but there will be justice!) widescreen ecstatic (not sure if this conceptualization is possible, but there it is)... I fully expect, by the end of Zabriskie's explosively ecstatic climax, for my head, like that of the fellow in the opening sequence of Scanners, to explode like a watermelon... PFA janitorial dept. be warned!
So I won't be staying for Aldrich's marvelous Sweet Charlotte (for me, nothing follows the ultimate statement of Zabriskie). Too bad, it's a film I've missed more than once recently, and to judge by the homage in Gods of the Plague, one of Fassbinder's favorite Aldrichs. Beautiful, gothic, paranoid, mad! Remember, sometimes they really are out to get you!
To my (limited) knowledge, there are no more worthwhile films scheduled until the new year (OK, La Dolce Sunday - yawn...)--and then, it's Akerman and von Sternberg! 2009 promises much promise. Until then...
PS: Sorry if this is posted by Carl Martin too late for Thurs! Computer "whizzes"?! HA!!