Winter 19 National Gallery of Art Film
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National Gallery of Art Film Winter 19 Special Events 13 The Films of Gordon Parks 23 Jean Vigo 31 From Vault to Screen: Portugal 35 Hollywood’s Poverty Row Preserved by UCLA 41 Breaking the Frame p17 The winter 2019 film season at the National Gallery of Art features a retrospective of films by Amer- ican photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks presented in conjunction with the Gallery’s special exhibition Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940 – 1950. A series of special events in the winter season encompasses, among others, the Wash- ington premieres of Gray House by Austin Jack Lynch and Matthew Booth and The Image Book by Jean-Luc Godard. There are also several new docu- mentaries: On the Wings of Brancusi, Breaking the Frame, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, Acid Forest, and More Art Upstairs. New restorations include Jean- Pierre Melville’s When You Read This Letter from the mid-1950s and Ishmael Reed and Bill Gunn’s extraor- dinary Personal Problems (1980), attended by Ish- mael Reed in person. Other series during the winter months include a complete retrospective of French filmmaker Jean Vigo; the occasional series From Vault to Screen, this season focusing on the classic cinema of Portugal in archival prints from Cine- mateca Portuguesa; and Hollywood’s Poverty Row Preserved by UCLA, a look at the B-movie producers of the Golden Age in Hollywood and their offbeat, low-budget works that ultimately sparked the indie film movement of the 1950s and 1960s. 2Gray House p13 3 January 2 Wed 12:30 On the Wings of Brancusi p13 4 Fri 12:30 On the Wings of Brancusi p13 5 Sat 2:30 Gray House p13 6 Sun 4:00 Personal Problems p14 10 Thur 12:30 On the Wings of Brancusi p13 11 Fri 1:00 Rosenwald p15 12 Sat 1:00 Gordon Parks: Films of the New Deal p23 3:30 Gordon Parks: Louisiana Story p23 13 Sun 4:00 Gordon Parks: Early Documentaries p24 19 Sat 1:00 Rosenwald p15 4:00 Gordon Parks: The Learning Tree p24 26 Sat 2:00 Gordon Parks: Shaft p25 4:00 Gordon Parks: Shaft’s Big Score p25 27 Sun 4:30 Godard’s The Image Book p15 Films are shown in the East Building Auditorium, in original formats whenever possible. Seating for all events is on a first-come, first- seated basis unless otherwise noted. Doors open thirty minutes before showtime. For more information, visit nga.gov/film, email [email protected], or call (202) 842-6799. 4Gray House p13 5 February 2 Sat 2:00 Gordon Parks: Leadbelly p26 3 Sun 4:00 Gordon Parks: Solomon Northup’s Odyssey p26 9 Sat 2:00 Gordon Parks: The Weapons of Gordon Parks; Half Past Autumn p27 10 Sun 4:00 Gordon Parks: Martin; Moments without Proper Names p27 16 Sat 2:00 Jean Vigo: À propos de Nice; Jean Taris, champion de France; Zéro de conduite p31 4:00 Jean Vigo: L’Atalante p32 17 Sun 2:00 Hip-Hop’s Great Day: Gordon Parks and a Legacy of Photographic Inspiration p16 5:00 When You Read This Letter p16 23 Sat 2:00 Vault to Screen Portugal: Douro, Faina Fluvial; Aniki-Bóbó p35 4:00 Vault to Screen Portugal: Os Verdes Anos (The Green Years) p36 24 Sun 4:00 Vault to Screen Portugal: A Revolução de Maio (Revolution in May) p36 Films are shown in the East Building Auditorium, in original formats whenever possible. Seating for all events is on a first-come, first- seated basis unless otherwise noted. Doors open thirty minutes before showtime. For more information, visit nga.gov/film, email [email protected], or call (202) 842-6799. 6 Gordon Parks p23 7 When You Read This Letter p16 March 2 Sat 2:00 Vault to Screen Portugal: Belarmino p37 4:00 Vault to Screen Portugal: Ossos p37 3 Sun 5:00 Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor; Breaking the Frame p17 9 Sat 2:00 Hollywood’s Poverty Row: Hearst Metrotone News; Jack Frost; The Vampire Bat p41 4:00 Vault to Screen Portugal: Tabu p38 10 Sun 4:30 Hollywood’s Poverty Row: Hearst Metrotone News; Balloon Land; The Sin of Nora Moran p42 16 Sat 2:00 Hollywood’s Poverty Row: Hearst Metrotone News; Snow White; False Faces p42 4:00 Hollywood’s Poverty Row: Hearst Metrotone News; Dancing on the Moon; Damaged Lives p42 17 Sun 4:30 Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda p17 23 Sat 12:00 Hollywood’s Poverty Row: Hearst Metrotone News; Me and the Boys; Mamba p43 2:30 Black Dreams at Sea: The Sardine Fisherman’s Funeral; An Opera of the World p18 24 Sun 4:30 Acid Forest p18 30 Sat 1:00 More Art Upstairs p19 4:00 Hollywood’s Poverty Row: News of the Day, Grampy’s Indoor Outing; Strange Illusion p43 31 Sun 4:30 Hollywood’s Poverty Row: Hollow Triumph p44 Films are shown in the East Building Auditorium, in original formats whenever possible. Seating for all events is on a first-come, first- seated basis unless otherwise noted. Doors open thirty minutes before showtime. For more information, visit nga.gov/film, email [email protected], or call (202) 842-6799. 8 9 10Breaking the Frame p17 11 Special Events Jan 2 – Mar 30 On the Wings of Brancusi American premiere Wed Jan 2, Fri Jan 4, Thur Jan 10 (12:30) Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876 – 1957) has been an enduring influence on a generation of American artists. Insights into Brancusi’s legacy are presented by artists Carl Andre, Lynda Benglis, Ellsworth Kelly, Martin Puryear, Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and others. Locations include the recreated Brancusi studio at the Centre Pompidou, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Brancusi gallery, and studios and exhibitions of the artists. Anne d’Harnoncourt (director emeritus of the Philadelphia Museum of Art), Margit Rowell and Ann Temkin (cocurators of the 1995 Brancusi retrospective), critics Robert Storr and Richard Woodward, and others offer interpretive commentary. (Edgar Howard and Susan Wald, 2018, 52 minutes) Gray House Washington premiere Austin Jack Lynch and Matthew Booth in person Sat Jan 5 (2:30) A striking synthesis of sound and image in a hybrid documentary/ fictional form, Gray House by filmmaker Austin Jack Lynch (son 12On the Wings of Brancusi p13 13 of David Lynch) and photographer Matthew Booth is, at times, Perlin, who carried a copy to Lincoln Center and BAMcinématek purposefully mysterious. Shifting between the natural world and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Now, in a new restoration from architectural spaces, using both real and simulated settings, the Kino Lorber, Personal Problems is “a startling, totally idiosyncratic film is a meditation on landscape, loss, loneliness, and human work of art” — Nick Pinkerton, Artforum. (Ishmael Reed and Bill need. “A lot of the structure of the film and the specific subject Gunn, 1980, 165 minutes) matter of this location [versus] that location evolved in an intuitive way, almost like painting. You move through these environments Rosenwald in a certain way . the shrimp boat in Texas, the community in Aviva Kempner in person Virginia. There was just naturally a world of really interesting Fri Jan 11 (1:00) complex sound, and so you had to try and create a [soundscape] Sat Jan 19 (1:00) for the film that was as immersive as the pictures. The music is Rosenwald documents the remarkable collaborations between composed by Alvin Lucier. His work is structural and predeter- businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, author and edu- mined, somewhere between what you think of as music and what cator Booker T. Washington, and African American communities you think of as action itself” — Austin Jack Lynch. (Austin Jack in the South. Together they built over five thousand schools during Lynch and Matthew Booth, 2017, 75 minutes) the Jim Crow era, a time when few African Americans received any public education at all. In addition Julius Rosenwald established Personal Problems a fund that awarded grants primarily to unusually talented African Ishmael Reed in person American artists and intellectuals. Fellowships were awarded to Sun Jan 6 (4:00) Marian Anderson, Ralph Bunche, W. E. B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, Dr. Charles Drew, John Hope Franklin, Zora Neale Hurston, Gordon Parks, James Baldwin, Jacob Lawrence, and Woody Guthrie, among others. (Aviva Kempner, 2015, 95 minutes) Godard’s The Image Book Sun Jan 27 (4:30) From 1979 to 1981, with little money but exceptional talent, a group of avant-garde artists assembled in New York to produce what American poet, playwright, artist, and essayist Ishmael Reed calls an “experimental soap opera” with a largely African American cast and crew. Their leader was the late Bill Gunn, whose film Ganga and Hess has been hailed as a horror classic. Unusual in the history of cinema, the actors in Personal Problems define themselves and The reclusive eighty-eight-year-old Jean-Luc Godard (the only their roles, and they largely improvise, thereby avoiding the stereo- French New Wave director still living) continues to practice his types offered up by Hollywood. After a flurry of showings in 1981, the enigmatic art. In this most recent work, The Image Book, he probes remaining fifty-four video copies of Personal Problems lay in Reed’s the topics that have preoccupied his late work — the state of film attic for three decades until they were rediscovered by curator Jake aesthetics, the discourse between history and cinema, the borders 14 15 between filmmaking and other forms of image making — forming Breaking the Frame a broad philosophical inquiry into the state of the modern world.