January | February 2012

Riso amaro, 1949, Giuseppe De Santis

January 7 to February 8, 2012

Giuseppe De Santis

To celebrate Giuseppe De Santis today also means to celebrate a certain stance: He stood for a truly popular, epic and communist cinema. He believed in peasants and workers, in their common sense and organizational skills - a belief that reaches its fullest expression in his monumental and lyrical film about an act of civil disobedience, La strada lunga un anno (The Year-Long Road, 1958). He believed that people watch movies in order to reach a different understanding about their lives and the society in which they live. Because, at the movies, we are not alone with our issues; in the darkness we search collectively for answers.[...]

In the Loop, 2009, Armando Iannucci

In the Loop draws a picture of Anglo-American relations on the eve of the Iraq war and the world of the respective "courtiers" of the political-media complex. In the midst of all the comedy, a sort of media-horror film rears its head: in an era of continuous "spin," language and information have become the weapons of evil. Shot vérité-style and partially improvised, the film relies on Iannucci's outstanding team of actors, two of which shall be spotlighted here: Peter Capaldi  and James Gandolfini.[...]

What is Film

Programme 50-54

Films by Stan Brakhage, Peter Hutton, Joris Ivens & Mannus Franken, George Kuchar, Richard Leacock, Gregory J. Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas, Karl Valentin[...]

Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto, 1970, Elio Petri

January 7 to February 9, 2012

Elio Petri

During his lifetime, Giuseppe De Santis' master student, Elio Petri, was far better received abroad than at home: the leading Italian intellectuals of the new left did not know what to make of his baroque-sardonic, Pop Art vision of Brecht’s “theatre of the people” - even as Petri remained so close to them politically, as a scourge of the Christian Democrats. After his death, many of these writers confessed: we were wrong, we had blinders on; he was one of the greatest Italian filmmakers of the 1960s and 70s. Like De Santis, Elio Petri came from humble beginnings: born in Rome in 1929, he grew up as the son of a coppersmith in a working-class suburb.[...]

Sunset Boulevard, 1950, Billy Wilder

January 19 to February 9, 2012

Hall of Mirrors
Hollywood on Hollywood, 1950-62

In the nineteen-fifties, the American film industry discovered a major new theme: itself. This is not to suggest that there had not previously been examples of films about fallen stars or the glamour of the California "film colony," but rather that the enormous increase in films about these subjects after 1950 marks a striking dividing line - and mirrors the dusk of the "Golden Age" of Hollywood cinema. When undertaking this self-reflection of its own history and conflict-ridden present, Hollywood remained faithful to its most reliable genres.[...]

The Utopia of Film

Chapter 60

Films by Jacques Demy, Jean-Luc Godard, Ernst Lubitsch, Jean Renoir, Rudolf Thome[...]