(Ronit Avni & Julia Bacha, US 2006, 89 min., Arabic/Hebrew/subtitles)
As violence continues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some of those touched by the bloodshed become advocates for peace. This documentary introduces citizens on both sides whose vow to end conflict has become a personal crusade. Family members of slain Palestinians and Israelis, both military and civilian, share their stories and how they’ve turned their grief into a force for change in the region. Part of George Eastman House’s Human Spirit Series, a nine-program series exploring the individual’s power to make positive contributions to the lives of others. This screening sponsored by Faith to Faith, a group of local Muslims, Jews, and Christians working to educate the community about the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the basis for a just Israeli-Palestinian peace. A panel discussion will follow the screening.
(program running time: 80 min.)
Callie Angell, curator of the Andy Warhol Film Project, will introduce this selection of 20 four-minute, silent film portraits of people who visited Andy Warhol’s Factory, taken from more than 500 Warhol made between 1964 and 1967. Among the many subjects who meet the challenge of staring at the camera differently are Factory superstars Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick, and Paul America; Velvet Underground musicians Lou Reed and Nico; critics Barbara Rose and Susan Sontag; filmmakers Jonas Mekas and Jack Smith; and poet John Ashbury.
Stuntman Mike: You’ve seen a movie where a car gets into some smashup there ain’t no way in hell anybody’s walking away from?
Pam: Yeah.
Stuntman Mike: Well, how do you think they accomplish that?
Pam: CGI?
Stuntman Mike: (laughs) Well, unfortunately Pam, nowadays more often than not, you’re right. But back in the all-or-nothing days, the Vanishing Point days, the Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry days, the White Line Fever days? Real cars smashing into real cars, and real dumb people driving them.
This exchange from Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino’s contribution to the homage-laden Grindhouse,, sums up the idea behind the collection of films in our featured summer series: a salute to the glory days of movie stunt driving in Hollywood features, before the era of computer generated imagery.
There’s something essentially cinematic about the chase sequence, and there’s nothing quite like the thrill of watching a well-shot and well-edited one. The more unusual the location and the more believably dangerous the action is, the more our pulses are likely to join in on the racing. Filmmakers since the silent era have understood this, but our series begins with the original moonshine running movie, Thunder Road (1958), a time when American automobiles had just gotten bigger, and the screens had become wide enough to accommodate them.
Some of the performers featured in these action classics are true movie icons: Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen, Peter Fonda. But the real stars are the spectacularly talented stunt drivers and, of course, the cars themselves: McQueen’s Ford Mustang in Bullitt; the Dodge Challenger R/T in Vanishing Point; and the countless number of Cook County, Illinois, police vehicles in The Blues Brothers.
And cars aren’t the only things on wheels you’ll see racing and crashing on the Dryden’s screen this summer. We’ve included a special “Truck Night” double feature of White Line Fever and Duel, the little movie that made cinephiles first aware of a young director named Steven Spielberg. David Carradine battles an army of “destructocycles” in Deathsport, and Fonda uses his vacation Winnebago to wage war against a score of satanists in Race With the Devil. (Although it’s not an American movie, you probably should also know about the spectacular moped and car chase through the Paris Métro in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva, screening August 22 & 24).
The series and our summer calendar end with a screening of the complete Grindhouse, featuring the sublime and witty Death Proof; evidence that there’s still a smart way to have real cars smashing into real cars. –Jim Healy, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, Motion Picture Department
Screenings:
Thursday, July 3
7 p.m. Trailers on Wheels! & at 8 p.m. THUNDER ROAD
(Arthur Ripley, US 1958, 92 min.)
Sunday, July 6 | 7 p.m.
THE BLUES BROTHERS (John Landis, US 1980, 130 min.)
Thursday, July 10 | 8 p.m.
BULLITT (Peter Hyams, US 1968, 113 min.) & bonus Steve McQueen
footage!
Thursday, July 17 | Double Feature
7 p.m. DEATH RACE 2000 (Paul Bartel, US 1975, 78 min.)
8:30 p.m. DEATHSPORT (Allan Arkush & Henry Suso, US 1978, 82 min.)
Thursday, July 24 | Double Feature
7 p.m. THE DRIVER (Walter Hill, US 1978, 90 min.)
8:45 p.m. VANISHING POINT (Richard Sarafian, US 1971, 107 min.)
Thursday, July 31 | 8 p.m.
THE FRENCH CONNECTION (William Friedkin, US 1971, 104 min.) &
chase sequence from The Seven-Ups (US 1973, 10 min.)
Thursday, August 7 | Truck Night! Double Feature
7 p.m. DUEL (Steven Spielberg, US 1971, 90 min., Digital Projection)
8:45 p.m. WHITE LINE FEVER (Jonathan Kaplan, US 1975, 92 min.)
Thursday, August 14 | Double Feature
7 p.m. THE LAST AMERICAN HERO (Lamont Johnson, US 1973, 100 min.)
9 p.m. A SMALL TOWN IN TEXAS (Jack Starrett, US 1976, 95 min.)
Thursday, August 21 | Double Feature
7 p.m. RACE WITH THE DEVIL (Jack Starrett, US 1975, 88 min.)
8:45 p.m. DIRTY MARY, CRAZY LARRY (John Hough, US 1973, 93 min.)
Sunday, August 31 | 7 p.m.
GRINDHOUSE (Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, US 2007, 191 min.)
In addition to our summer retrospective series, we’re also screening seven new films making their local premieres in the Dryden Theatre.
One of the most critically lauded films of the year, Gus van Sant’s Paranoid Park makes its debut on July 5. This elegant and haunting work of art, the most recent feature from the director of Drugstore Cowboy, Good Will Hunting, and Elephant, is an enigmatic mystery and an observant look at Portland, Oregon’s outsider culture. J. Hoberman of the Village Voice called Van Sant’s latest “wonderfully lucid: It makes confusion something tangible and heartbreak the most natural thing in life.”
On July 18, catch Raoul Ruiz’s Klimt, with the always-inspired John Malkovich bringing to life the famed Austrian artist whose sexually aware and erotically inspired work came to symbolize the art nouveau movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. Told in a series of visions from Klimt’s deathbed, the story veers back and forth between past and present, fantasy and reality, chronicling his battles for artistic freedom, passions for various women, and influential meeting with cinema pioneer Georges Méliès.
Stephen Chow, the zany comic auteur behind Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle, is back with his latest, CJ7, screening on July 26 & 27, a hilarious sci-fi parody about a poor man who brings home a cute but destructive alien creature he finds at a dumpsite. The fantastic CGI effects and Chow’s comic sensibility combine to make a funny and frenetic live-action cartoon.
La France (August 2) is a film best experienced and not read about, but if you must know a little, suffice to say it’s about a strong-willed young woman (Sylvie Testud) who disguises herself as a young man during World War I and becomes an indispensable member of a fighting platoon. The audacious feature directorial debut of Serge Bozon assuredly moves from heartbreaking war scenes to sweet musical numbers. Don’t miss it.
The latest film from Russian master Aleksandr Sokurov is Alexandra (August 8 & 10). Russian opera legend Galina Vishnevskaya stars as an elderly woman visiting her grandson, an officer stationed among the bored, weary troops at a desolate military outpost. Sokurov, whose acclaimed Russian Ark will screen again on August 1, has made a powerful anti-war film in which not a shot is fired.
Giuseppe Tornatore, the man behind Cinema Paradiso, returns with a change of pace, the suspense thriller The Unknown Woman (August 16). A mysterious woman (Xenia Rappoport) uses desperate means in order to be hired as nanny to an upwardly mobile couple’s young daughter. As the story slowly reveals her motives, the woman’s disturbing past comes back to haunt her. Tornatore’s usual composer, Ennio Morricone, contributes another beautiful music score.
Finally, on August 23 & 24, we’ll present John Boorman’s The Tiger’s Tail. The director of Deliverance and Hope and Glory brings us an unusually gripping and witty doppelganger thriller set in contemporary Dublin. The cast is headlined by veteran character actor Brendan Gleeson as a wealthy venture capitalist who finds his world turned upside down when a seemingly malevolent identical lookalike plots to take his place at work and at home with his beautiful but neglected wife (Kim Cattrall). You can also catch Boorman’s masterful Arthurian epic Excalibur on August 17.
The epitome of big-screen class and feminine charm is back for the first three Wednesdays in August when we present the show-stopping Audrey Hepburn in a trio of her most beloved classics. First, she watches Gregory Peck stick his hand into La Bocca della Verità in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (screening August 6). Next up, Ms. Hepburn in her Oscar®-nominated turn in Fred Zinnemann’s spiritual epic, The Nun’s Story (August 13). Then, she’s opposite Fred Astaire and dancing to George Gershwin’s tunes in Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (August 20).
