As many cinephiles know, “Pre-Code” movies — that is, films produced before the strict enforcement of the film industry’s self-censoring Hays Code — weren’t at all shy about including adult content. Sex, booze, crime, and licentiousness were common currency, not returning to circulation until after WWII, as the rise of independent producers and art houses and the decreased threat of government regulation began to relax standards.

Ironically, it was an act of restriction that finally gave Hollywood the license to really cut loose. Spurred on by films like The Pawnbroker and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the MPAA instituted a rating system in November 1968, marking certain titles with an “X” and barring admission to persons under 16. Without having to worry about offending the mores of general audiences, filmmakers could now appeal to “adults only,” ushering in a new era of controversy, indulgence, and experimentation.

This April, we’ll be taking a quick look at this fascinating period, beginning with John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, the only X-rated film to win an Oscar® for Best Picture. Beginning a long tradition for the MPAA, a strange moral disconnect between sex and violence was exposed by its handling of Sam Peckinpah’s notoriously bloody The Wild Bunch, which finally received a reduced R rating after long and protracted negotiations with the ratings board.

Our series continues with Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, an uncompromising work about violence and its restriction that remains the director’s most controversial film. We’ll then conclude with Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Confrontational on multiple levels — sexual, political, and racial — Sweetback is a groundbreaking work of black independent cinema that, as the tagline read, was “Rated X by an all-white jury.” — L. D.


Saturday, April 7, 8 p.m..
Midnight Cowboy
(John Schlesinger, US 1969, 113 min.)

Saturday, April 14, 8 p.m.
The Wild Bunch
(Sam Peckinpah, US 1969, 143 min.)

Saturday, April 28, 8 p.m.
A Clockwork Orange
(Stanley Kubrick, UK 1971, 137 min.)

Friday, May 4, 8 p.m. and Sunday, May 6, 5 p.m.
Sweet Sweetback Baadasssss Song
(Melvin Van Peebles, US 1971, 97 min.)

I happen to know how the script for The Turin Horse was written, and if you come to the Dryden on May 5 and 6, I’ll tell you about its strange, fascinating genesis. Follow my advice — if you’re remotely interested in this film, please do not look at the clips on YouTube (what a silly idea). Hungarian-born director Béla Tarr deserves better than that. He is just 57 years old, but said he won’t make another film after The Turin Horse. He made eight features before this one, and the seven-hour epic Sátántangó (1994) is widely considered his masterpiece. The Turin Horse is “only” 2 hours and 26 minutes long, but you’ll have to fasten the seat belts of your visual stamina to fully appreciate what the film has to offer.

Have I warned you enough? No matter what you’ll think of The Turin Horse, two things are certain. It takes a great deal of guts to produce a film like this, so, my kudos to the producers. And, this may be one of your last chances to see this kind of Cinema (note the capital “C”) on a big screen, where this film belongs. Mark your calendar.

— Paolo Cherchi Usai, Senior Curator, Motion Picture Department


Wednesday, April 4, 8 p.m..
The Turin Horse
(A Torinói ló, Béla Tarr, Hungary/France/Germany/Switzerland/US 2011, 146 min., Hungarian w/subtitles)

In April, the Dryden features The Naked Island (1960) and Onibaba (1964), directed by Japan’s longest-working film director, Kaneto Shindō. Shindō turns 100 this year, and his 49th film, The Postcard, was Japan’s submission to the Best Foreign Film category of this year’s Academy Awards. Shindō’s remarkable 75-year career parallels the entire history of Japanese cinema since the standardization of sound. After forging a reputation alongside Kenji Mizoguchi, his mentor, and Kozaburo Yoshimura in the 1940s, Shindō became a pioneering independent in the early 1950s when he and Yoshimura established the Eiga Geijutsu Kyokai production company. After the highly acclaimed Children of Hiroshima (1952), Shindō continued directing and writing scripts for other notable figures like Keisuke Kinoshita, Kon Ichikawa, and Seijun Suzuki.

He achieved international recognition in the early 1960s after winning the Moscow International Film Festival Gran Prix for The Naked Island, a portrait of rural poverty that was a striking contrast to the New Wave focus on disenfranchised urban youth. In addition to his work as a director, Shindō is a world-renowned screenwriter (he’s written more than 200, including his own) and the author of more than 70 books on subjects ranging from his experience as a filmmaker to screenwriting history and technique. — Joanne Bernardi, Associate Professor, Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Rochester


Wednesday, April 18, 8 p.m..
The Naked Island
(Hadaka no shima, Kaneto Shindō, Japan 1960, 96 min.)

Wednesday, April 25, 8 p.m..
Onibaba
(Kaneto Shindō, Japan 1964, 103 min.)

The Dryden Theatre is pleased to welcome back filmmaker and two-time Oscar®-winner Robin Lehman at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 24. The program presents a crosssection of Lehman’s documentary work. His scope ranges from territorial disputes between underwater crustaceans to nothing less than the entire geography, ecology, and culture of Ethiopia. Lehman will introduce the films Sea Creatures (1974, 12 min.), Manimals (1978, 29 min.), and Ethiopia (1985, 28 min.), and talk with the audience after the screenings.

Sunday, April 15, 2 p.m.

Award-winning filmmaker Amy Greenfield came to cinema through earlier explorations of dance. For her, it was the motion picture camera that truly captured the eloquence of human motion with all the energy and meaning she desired. Her highly original use of the nude as a cinematic art form focuses not on the body’s surface but on what lies beneath — all that motivates her protagonists’ struggles with nature and their pursuit of identity and joy. Robert Haller, director of Library Collections and Special Projects at Anthology Film Archives, explores Greenfield’s work in his new book, Flesh Into Light: The Films of Amy Greenfield (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press).

Greenfield and Haller will be present at this special selection of her films.
Robert Haller, director of Library Collections and Special Projects at Anthology Film Archives, explores Greenfield’s work in his new book, Flesh Into Light: The Films of Amy Greenfield (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press). Greenfield and Haller will be present at this special selection of her films.

Over the course of a six-decade career, French filmmaker Robert Bresson made only 13 features. Actually, this is an abundance, as each film seems to distill a lifetime of concentration and feeling: every shot is precise and perfect, every cut conveys meaning, and every emotion is earned. Long recognized as one of the greatest and most influential of filmmakers, Bresson’s work has been difficult to see on screen, a situation the Dryden is pleased to redress with a selection of the master’s films this March and April.

Born in 1901, Bresson did not turn to filmmaking full-time until 1943, after an early career as a painter and photographer and a year spent in a German POW camp. Though his first two features were comparatively conventional, his style soon became increasingly unique, moving toward an approach that the director labeled as “emotional, not representational.” To that effect, his visual style became sparer and more controlled, his sound design more layered, and his actors entirely non-professional.

Like fellow master Ingmar Bergman, his themes were often spiritual and his characters on the precipice of despair, but the director’s consummate craft and insight into the human condition produce a rare kind of exaltation. These people live in this world and caress every corner of it. Their bodies are beautiful in their imperfections, their attitudes self-effacing, anxious, cocky, and innocent in all the recognizable ways. Above all, Bresson is a social filmmaker. If his early work earned praise for its humanist values, then his ’60s and ’70s output is messier, awkwardly lurching through a violent political landscape. Continually, Bresson pursues a radical empathy, forcing us to engage and experience the world around us. This approach influenced filmmakers from Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader (their Taxi Driver bears heavy traces of Pickpocket) to Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (L’enfant, Lorna’s Silence).

These eight Bresson films, presented in conjunction with a nationally touring retrospective, include several that have been imported from France and cannot be screened easily or often. Don’t bet on seeing them again any time soon. — Lori Donnelly, Dryden Film Programmer, and Kyle Westphal, Chief Projectionist


Tuesday, March 6, 8 p.m Members Movie Night!.
A Man Escaped
(Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut, Robert Bresson, France 1956, 99 min., French w/subtitles)

Tuesday, March 13, 8 p.m.
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
(Robert Bresson, France 1945, 84 min., French w/subtitles)

Tuesday, March 20, 8 p.m.
Pickpocket
(Robert Bresson, France 1959, 75 min., French w/subtitles)

Tuesday, April 3, 8 p.m.
Au Hasard Balthazar
(Robert Bresson, France 1966, 95 min., French w/subtitles)

Tuesday, April 10, 8 p.m.
Four Nights of a Dreamer
(Quatre nuits d’un rêveur, Robert Bresson, France 1971, 87 min., French w/subtitles)

Tuesday, April 17, 8 p.m.
The Devil, Probably
(Le diable probablement, Robert Bresson, France 1971, 87 min., French w/subtitles)

Tuesday, April 24, 8 p.m.
L’Argent
(Robert Bresson, France 1983, 83 min., French w/subtitles)

Film noir remains a vibrant area of study 70 years after Humphrey Bogart first sought The Maltese Falcon. It has influenced generations of writers and filmmakers who find their characters tempted to cross moral, ethical and criminal lines, exploring the darker aspects of human nature, and caught in downward-spiraling webs of nihilism and fatalism. The reason these films remain vital today is the modernity of these protagonists — everyday people searching for the American promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of their own happiness.

In March, the Dryden continues to find new substance and commentary in film noir, screening five films throughout the month. It kicks off with a brand-new restoration of Otto Preminger’s Laura. The series continues with the under-seen Humphrey Bogart film Dead Reckoning, followed by noir scholars Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards talking about the film which will be recorded live for the podcast Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir. The series culminates with three consecutive Wednesdays given over to noir with screenings of Payment Deferred, Scarlet Street, and The Big Combo. — Jared Case, Head of Cataloging, Motion Picture Department

While photographs and motion pictures can be used to recreate memories, only films can do so in real time, allowing directors to relive memories and audiences to explore the lives of perfect strangers through a most intimate point of view. This March, we’ll screen five films that exemplify and explore the idea of movie-as-memoir.

We begin with Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, screening in collaboration with Writers & Books as a companion to this year’s “If All of Rochester Read the Same Book” selection, Debra Dean’s Madonnas of Leningrad. One of the director’s most evocative works, The Mirror constructs itself in a poetic, dreamlike fashion around the achronological memories of a character whose life and search for meaning strongly suggest Tarkovsky’s own.

From another legendary director comes Fellini’s Intervista, a playful puzzlebox of a movie that finds the maestro leading a Japanese TV crew on a tour of Italy’s Cinecitta studio (and, in flashback, his early filmmaking career) while preparing to mount a highly problematic adaptation of Kafka’s Amerika. Then, the most New York of New York filmmakers — Spike Lee and Woody Allen — revisit their childhoods in Crooklyn and Radio Days, respectively, before we conclude with Hirokazu Koreeda’s imaginative After Life. Set in a gentle purgatory in which the newly deceased have their happiest memory filmed for all eternity, and based around nostalgic interviews with non-professional actors, After Life is one of the best films ever made about life, memory, and the power of the movies, and a fitting end to a series about the same. — L.D.


Wednesday, March 1, 8 p.m.
The Mirror
(Zerkalo, Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR 1975, 107 min., Russian w/subtitles)

Wednesday, March 8, 8 p.m. Members Movie Night!
Crooklyn
(Spike Lee, US 1994, 115 min.)

Wednesday, March 15, 8 p.m.
Intervista
(Federico Fellini, Italy 1987, 105 min.)

Wednesday, Feb. 21, 8 p.m.
Radio Days
(Woody Allen, US 1987, 85 min.)

Wednesday, March 29, 8 p.m.
After Life
(Wandâfuru raifu, Hirokazu Koreeda, Japan 1998, 118 min., Japanese w/subtitles)

Before Carole Lombard was Carole Lombard, she was Jane Peters, a bit player struggling away in forgettable B pictures until the legendary Mack Sennett cast her as one of his madcap players and helped her develop a keen sense of comic timing. Lombard’s star continued to rise through the early 1930s, but her first big break came in 1934 when Howard Hawks, charmed by her verve at a party, invited her to test for his latest film, Twentieth Century. More than holding her own opposite John Barrymore, the film was a critical and box office smash, and Carole Lombard suddenly, surprisingly found herself as Hollywood’s new “it” girl.

Luckily for Lombard, her rise to the upper echelon of Hollywood coincided with the development of screwball comedy. Defined by wit, sexiness, and accessibility, this new genre proved to be a perfect fit for Lombard’s talents and screen presence: she was strikingly pretty, but in a roughhousing, girl-next-door sort of way; she was elegant, but could sling double entendres with the best of them (her real-life nickname was “the profane angel”); and her comic timing was impeccable. She charmed not only all of America, but also a who’s who of Hollywood’s leading men including William Powell and Clark Gable.

Unfortunately, her reign was short-lived: when the US entered World War II, Lombard, at the request of new husband Clark Gable, undertook to help him in his new role as chairman of the Hollywood Victory Committee. She would tour the country selling war bonds, and the tour would culminate in her home state of Indiana. Eager to return home to Gable, she fatefully chartered a plane that crashed in Las Vegas. Her life was cut tragically short at the age of 33, and her final film, To Be or Not to Be, was released posthumously in tribute to her too brief but brilliant career. — L. D.


Thursday, April 5, 8 p.m..
Twentieth Century
(Howard Hawks, US 1934, 91 min.)

Thursday, April 12, 8 p.m.
Nothing Sacred
(William A. Wellman, US 1937, 77 min.)

Thursday, April 19, 8 p.m.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
(Alfred Hitchcock, US 1941, 95 min.)

Thursday, April 26, 8 p.m.
To Be or Not to Be
(Ernst Lubitsch, US 1942, 99 min.)

Sunday, March 11, 2 p.m.

Morgan Atkinson is a Louisville, KY-based producer-director whose work focuses on dimensions of community, particularly as seen in his home state. Eight of his documentaries have been broadcast on PBS, and Atkinson has produced many other commissioned works. The Dryden Theatre is pleased to welcome him to for a screening of his films Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton and Uncommon Vision: The Life and Times of John Howard Griffin.

Atkinson will be joined by Nazareth College professors Dr. Christine Bochenand Monica Weis, SSJ, to discuss the life and works of Merton, whose writings examined spirituality and the plight of the individual in the post-modern world. John Howard Griffin, a friend and mentor to Merton, changed his appearance to that of an African-American in 1959 and wrote about his experiences in the groundbreaking book Black Like Me.

This event is co-sponsored by the William H. Shannon Chair in Catholic Studies at Nazareth College, the Religious Studies Department at Nazareth College, and the Thomas Merton Society of Rochester.