Associate
Editor (Restorations and Revivals) Simon Taaffe has come across the following
screenings and other information. Click on the links for times, more detail etc
where indicated.
A new season at the Art Gallery of NSW features
films from China Taiwan and Iran. As per usual with the AGNSW, the season has
to chime in with something else happening at the Gallery. On this occasion the
season takes place in association with the exhibition Beyond words: calligraphic traditions of
Asia, on display until April 2017.
The films to be shown are all 35mm prints which has its own
point of interest. In a number of cases the copies will be those lodged with
the National Film & Sound Archive by the former commercial rights holder after
the rights have expired. The copies will have been made in the year of
production and thus will have been subject to wear and tear and to any fading
of the print over time.
The arthouse cinema strikes back. At New York’s Anthology Film Archives,
the first anti-Trump seasons of films. To coincide with Trump’s inauguration
the institution announced “several
different cinematic methods of coping with the inauguration. We’ll mark the
weekend with a variety of politically-relevant films, including dystopic
alternate-reality or cautionary tales such as IT HAPPENED HERE, PUNISHMENT
PARK, and A FACE IN THE CROWD; a special presentation of the seminal
underground compilation film, FOR LIFE, AGAINST THE WAR (commissioned in 1967
for a festival organized in opposition to the Vietnam War); and rare screenings
of Stan Brakhage’s 23RD PSALM BRANCH and THE GOVERNOR, the first a
(Vietnam-inspired) meditation on war, the second the result of Brakhage’s
experiences touring Colorado with the state’s then-governor.
“Now that the
alternate reality of a certain strand of ‘paranoid’ political films has, to a
degree few of us thought possible, come to pass, perhaps it’s time to re-watch these
films from our new, disillusioned perspective. Along with other films embodying
various strategies of political opposition, they serve to remind us that the
struggle to maintain a humanist, progressive society is a perpetual one, that
civil liberties and social justice are ever-fragile, and that the cinema
represents an important means of grappling with, creating a dialogue around,
and at least striving to change the status quo.
“For further,
and more contemporary, explorations of the cinema’s capacity to embody
political protest and resistance, see details about the series DISRUPTIVE FILM:
EVERYDAY RESISTANCE TO POWER, taking place February 15-17.
 |
| Alberto Sordi, Il Vigile |
At the Lyon Institute
Lumiere three commercial Italian films including two from the golden age of Italian comedy. I don’t think any of the three had a ‘commercial’ release here
but almost certainly they played in the Italian cinemas that screened unsubtitled
Italian, and other, films to the Italian immigrant community for quite some
years. Among those operating these venues long ago was Antonio Zeccola now the head of
the Palace cinema chain
Il Vigile (Luigi Zampa, Italy, 1960)
with Alberto Sordi Vittorio
de Sica, Marisa Merlini, Mara Berni, Nando Bruno, Riccardo Garrone
La
donna della domenica, (Luigi
Comencini, Italy, 1975), with Marcello Mastroianni, Jean-Louis Trintignant,
Jacqueline Bisset, Maria Teresa Albani, Aldo Reggiani
Poveri
milionari, (Dino Risi,
Italy, 1959, with Maurizio Arena, Renato Salvatori, Lorella De Luca, Sylvia
Koscina, Fred Biscagline
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.