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THE LOSS OF CHILDHOOD INNOCENSE EXAMINED IN FILM EXHIBITION

For Immediate Release September 2000

The Lost Childhood October 5–December 14, 2000 The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters 1 and 2

Childhood has been a favorite subject of filmmakers since the beginning of cinema. The Lost Childhood explores the period from 1955 to the present, when the nineteenth-century’s romanticized notion of the virginal, visionary child, so prevalent in films made before World War II, gave way to images of children hardened by war and harsh circumstances. This exhibition features approximately 50 feature films, shorts, experimental films, documentaries, and videos, from countries as far ranging as Brazil, Bulgaria, , , , , and Mexico, and includes a diversity of genres, from horror to comedy, to the coming of age story and the fairy tale. The series is on view in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters 1 and 2 from October 5 through December 14, 2000. The Lost Childhood is a part of Open Ends, the final cycle of MoMA2000, and is organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Video.

In the films and videos of The Lost Childhood, which takes its name from a short story by Graham Greene, adults are seen as either abusive and unloving, or immaturely self-absorbed, and therefore incapable of providing children with the comfort and protection they need. Home is seen as a place of violence and betrayal, not sanctuary, and so children are compelled to take flight in their dreams or take to the open road. Whether in a reform school (Tattooed Tears [1978], Nicholas Broomfield and Joan Churchill), a mental institution (Family Life (Wednesday’s Child) [1971], Ken Loach), on the battlefield of Iwo Jima (Eternal Cause [1972], Tadashi Imai) or on the mean streets of Saõ Paulo ( [1981], Hector Babenco), children are thrust into a chaotic world where they have to fend for themselves. Children and adolescents are also portrayed as sexual and aggressive, desirous and desirable, wildly volatile and perhaps ultimately unknowable—evident, for example, in ’s (1956), ’s Lolita (1962), Andy Warhol’s Imitation of Christ (1970), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Wildweschsel (Jail Bait) (1972).

The film program also acts as a compliment to the gallery exhibition Innocence and Experience. The exhibition addresses the shift in recent years from a positive, hopeful vision of childhood purity and power to counter-imagery of youth threatened or corrupted. Works include Mona Hatoum’s Silence (1994), Jeff Koons’s Rabbit (1986), and Charles Ray’s Family Romance (1993).

SPONSORSHIP Open Ends is part of MoMA2000, which is made possible by The Starr

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Foundation. Generous support is provided by Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro in memory of Louise Reinhardt Smith. The Museum gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Contemporary Exhibition Fund of The Museum of Modern Art, established with gifts from Lily Auchincloss, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, and Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder. Additional funding is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, Mrs. Melville Wakeman Hall, Sarah-Ann and Werner H. Kramarsky, Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, Joann and Gifford Phillips, NEC Technologies, Inc., and by The Contemporary Arts Council and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art. Education programs accompanying MoMA2000 are made possible by BNP Paribas. The publication Modern Contemporary: Art at MoMA Since 1980 is made possible by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art. The interactive environment of Open Ends is supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Film and video programs during Open Ends are supported by Company Foundation. Web/kiosk content management software is provided by SohoNet.

The Lost Childhood Screening Schedule

Thursday, October 5, 2:00 p.m.; Sunday, October 8, 1:00 p.m. T1

The Night of the Hunter. 1955. USA. Directed by Charles Laughton. Screenplay by James Agee, based on the novel by Davis Grubb. Cinematography by Stanley Cortez. Edited by Robert Golden. Music by Walter Schumann. With Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, Evelyn Varden, Peter Graves, Don Beddoe. All that can be known of innocence and experience is contained within The Night of the Hunter, an allegory of good and evil about two children who fall prey to the bloodlust and greed of a backwoods preacher, an unregenerate killer in pursuit of a rag-doll filled with money. Stalked by Death on horseback down the ghostly Ohio River, the children eventually find sanctuary at the farmhouse of Lillian Gish, a wise old woman who shelters them as she has sheltered other orphans from the storm. The Night of the Hunter is an American folk tale, set in the heart of Appalachia in the depths of the Depression, in which false prophecy, adult betrayal, and cold-blooded murder are redeemed by the spiritual powers of song. 93 min.

Thursday, October 5, 6:00 p.m.; Tuesday, October 26, 2:00 p.m. T1

Valse Triste. 1977. USA. Directed by Bruce Conner. Music by Sibelius. A experimental short with the vernacular look of a Farm Security Administration photograph, Valse Triste is, in Conner’s words, “a nostalgic recreation of dreamland Kansas 1947,” the place of his boyhood. Nestled in his midwestern bedroom, a small boy drifts asleep, vaguely aroused by sepia-toned images of a woman’s soft hands folding clean white sheets, an orchid’s petals unfolding, a funereal caravan of black sedans filing across a flooded road, a charging steam locomotive, and a quarry wall of rocks tumbling into a pool below. Scenes of rural America fading into history are the stuff of a child’s dreams. 5 min. La Hora de los Niños (The Children’s Hour). 1969. Mexico. Produced and directed by Arturo Ripstein. Screenplay by Ripstein and Pedro Fernández Miret, based on the story “El Narrador” by Miret. Cinematography by Alexis Grivas. Edited by Rafael Castanedo. With Savage, Bebi Pecanins, Carlos Nieto, Marta Zamora. Going out for the evening, a rich couple hires a clown to amuse their son and put him to sleep. As soon as they leave, the clown drops his playful demeanor and turns gruff with the boy, abandoning him to the oppressive loneliness of his bedroom. At first intrigued, then unnerved by this man’s strange transformation, the boy

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insists on a bedtime story, and the clown begrudgingly obliges by inventing a newspaper article about the sinking of a cruise ship whose crew and passengers are all babies. In Spanish, with English subtitles. 65 min.

Friday, October 6, 2:00 p.m.; Tuesday, October 31, 2:00 p.m. T1

The Company of Wolves. 1984. Great Britain. Directed by . Screenplay by Angela Carter and Jordan, based on a story by Carter. Cinematography by Bryan Loftus. Edited by Rodney Holland. Music by George Fenton. With , Sarah Patterson, David Warner, Stephen Rea. Movie genres, like fables, endure repeated tellings. Often the pleasure lies in peeling away hidden layers of meaning. The Company of Wolves (1984), based on a story by Angela Carter, is a feminist attempt to deconstruct the morphology of the Little Red Riding Hood folktale. The film asks what it means for a girl to disobey her family by straying from the path. Are her parents and grandmother prudently cautioning her against the violent loss of innocence through rape, or betraying the ancient fear that a girl will acquire knowledge and independence through sexual power? 95 min.

Friday, October 6, 6:00 p.m. T1; Saturday, November 4, 5:00 p.m. T2

Family Life (Wednesday’s Child). 1971. Great Britain. Directed by Ken Loach. Written by David Mercer, based on his television play In Two Minds. Cinematography by Charles Stewart. With Sandy Ratcliff, Bill Dean, Grace Cave, Malcolm Tierney, and Hilary Martyn. A young woman suffering from schizophrenia is institutionalized by her parents. Through the nurturing therapeutic practices of an unusually sympathetic doctor, she is forced to confront her mother’s complicity in her illness. Within Loach’s fierce indictment of Britain’s woefully unenlightened, callously indifferent mental health care system lies a humane portrait of a shattered family. 108 min.

Friday, October 6, 8:00 p.m. T1; Monday, November 6, 3:00 p.m. T2

The Long Day Closes.1992. Great Britain. Written and directed by Terence Davies. Cinematography by Michael Coulter. With Marjorie Yates, Leigh McCormack, Anthony Watson, Nicholas Lamont, and Ayse Owens. Freud writes that the most difficult experience of any man’s life is the death of his father. For Davies, however, that experience was something of a blessing. “Between my father dying when I was seven and leaving primary school,” Davies remembers, “those years were just so happy I was almost sick with happiness.” The film portrays a boy much like Davies—the youngest of ten children in 1950s working-class Liverpool, only seven of whom survived infancy—emerging from a mercilessly dark, violent struggle with a bullying, alcoholic father into the nurturing bliss of life alone with his mother, brothers, and sisters, a life wanting in material comforts but leavened by mirth, song, and Doris Day movies. With a painterly beauty built on exquisitely choreographed camera movements and aged, washed-out color, the film tells a “story of paradise, but the story of a paradise that’s already being lost and will only survive as a memory.” 82 min. Children. 1974. Great Britain. Written and directed by Terence Davies. Cinematography by William Diver. With Philip Maudsley, Nick Stringer, Val Lilley, and Robin Hooper. Davies completed his first screenplay, Children, in 1973, while attending the Coventry Drama School, and with funding from the he was able to turn it into a

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short film. In stark black and white and in flashback, the film tells the story of Robert Tucker, a gay man haunted by the abuses he endured as a child at home and at school and by the long shadow cast across his life by Catholicism. 46 min.

Saturday, October 7, 1:00 p.m.; Tuesday, October 10, 6:00 p.m. T1

Les Enfants terribles (The Strange Ones). 1950. France. Produced and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. Screenplay by Melville and , based on Cocteau’s novel. Cinematography by Henri Decaë. Edited by Monique Bonnot. Music by Bach and Vivaldi. With Nicole Stéphane, Edouard Dermithe, Renée Cosima, and the voice of Jean Cocteau. “After seeing The Silence of the Sea, Jean Cocteau chose Melville to direct a screen adaptation of his novel . Melville preserved Cocteau’s voice and heart (figuratively and literally—he narrates the film, and it is his heartbeat we hear for that of Paul) in a film that deeply understands what its characters do not. It is the story of an obsessive love between a brother and a sister, isolated in a room intended to defend their union against the world but which instead sends their passion back on them….The baroque assemblage of sickbeds, bathrobes, personal mementos, and idiosyncratic movements (into which Vivaldi and Bach concertos are brilliantly integrated) was shot on a shoestring budget in ‘real’ settings. (André Labarthe, Pacific Film Archive). In French, with English subtitles. 107 min.

Saturday, October 7, 3:00 p.m.; Thursday, October 12, 2:00 p.m. T1

Zazie dans le Métro. 1960. Directed by . Screenplay by Malle and Jean-Paul Rappeneau, based on the novel by Raymond Queneau. Cinematography by Henri Raichi. Edited by Kenout Peltier. Music by Florenzo Carpi. With Catherine Demongeot, Philippe Noiret, Carla Marlier, Vittorio Caprioli, Hubert Deschamps. An adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s postwar novel about a precocious little girl’s adventures in , Zazie dans le Métro is a young Malle’s inaugural poem to the anarchical 1960s. Malle and Queneau both had something of Zazie in them, the kid whom François Truffaut called “an upright and unruffled little girl, who is always the only one who’s right, who is never affected by anything, who is a way of looking at things.” With the surrealist spirit of a rebellious adolescent, Malle attempted to do in cinema what Queneau did in literature, moving brashly between farce, satire, and slapstick and subverting conventional narrative through Byzantine experiments in visual and verbal gameplay. Malle later recalled that “what was absolutely central to Zazie, something that I keep discovering and putting into my films more and more, is the fact that people—adults especially—constantly say one thing and do the opposite....” In French, with English subtitles. 92 min.

Saturday, October 7, 5:00 p.m.; Monday, October 9, 6:00 p.m. T1

Zéro de Conduite (Zero for Conduct). 1933. France. Written, directed, and edited by . Cinematography by . Music by Maurice Jaubert. With Louis Lefèvre, Gilbert Pruchon, Constantin Kelber, Gérard de Bédarieux, Jean Dasté, Robert le Flon. Orphaned when his father died mysteriously in prison and mother died in childbirth, Jean Vigo spent an unhappy and sickly childhood being shuttled between relatives and in and out of provincial boarding schools—institutions so notoriously unkind and austere that Vigo rebelled against authority to endure them. In 1933 the boarding school became the brutal landscape of Vigo’s most overtly

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autobiographical film, Zero for Conduct, which was banned from the country until after the liberation of Paris because the censors had branded it as “anti-French” for its threat to the nation’s educational system. The film was rediscovered by postwar directors like Truffaut, Oshima, Kubrick and Lindsay Anderson, whose own cruel stories of youth bore Vigo’s unmistakable imprint. In countless reviews and recollections, they would celebrate the film’s slow-motion pillow fight as a poem of pandemonium. In French, with English subtitles. 45 min. Les Quatre Cent Coups (). 1959. France. Written and directed by François Truffaut. Adaptation and dialogue by Marcel Moussy. Cinematography by Henri Decaë. Edited by Marie-Josephe Yoyotte. Music by Jean Constantin. With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rémy, Guy Decomble, Georges Flamant, Patrick Auffay. On seeing his son’s semi- autobiographical film The 400 Blows for the first time, Roland Truffaut wrote François a bitter letter in which he called him a “child martyr” and the film “sheer hypocrisy.” Roland also confessed to what François had suspected for a long time: that he was his father in name only. François responded with an equally angry and pained letter, writing, “Of what happened to me, I only filmed what happens or could happen in other families. I didn’t show a little saint, but an adolescent who plays hooky, forges his parents’ handwriting, steals money from them, and constantly lies…. No, I wasn’t a ‘mistreated child,’ but simply one who wasn’t ‘treated’ at all, unloved and feeling completely ‘unwelcome’ from the time you took me in to my emancipation.…” In French, with English subtitles. 93 min.

Sunday, October 8, 3:00 p.m.; Monday, October 30, 2:00 p.m. T1

The Innocents. 1961. USA. Directed by . Screenplay by William Archibald and Truman Capote, based on the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw, as adapted by Archibald and John Mortimer. Cinematography by . Edited by James Clark. Music by . With Deborah Kerr, Michael Redgrave, Megs Jenkins, , Martin Stephens, Pamela Franklin. With its vertiginous images and hallucinatory sounds, The Innocents is a highly stylized rendering of James’s novella The Turn of the Screw, about a governess at a secluded country manor who becomes convinced that the two children in her care have become possessed by the spirits of a pair of lovers who once met with a violent end on the estate grounds. Deborah Kerr gives a wonderfully shaded performance as Miss Giddens, her prim restraint giving way to her morbid fantasy of saving little Miles and Flora from (imagined?) destruction. A master of psychological horror, James conjures a world where innocence and naiveté are often indistinguishable from sophistication and evil, and Clayton takes pains to remain true to James’s admonition that “the evil must not be reduced to the narrowness of the definable.” 98 min.

Sunday, October 8, 5:00 p.m.; Sunday, October 15, 2:45 p.m. T1

The Bed You Sleep In. 1993. USA. Written, directed, photographed, designed, and edited by Jon Jost. With Tom Blair, Ellen McLaughlin, Kathryn Sannella, Marshall Gadis, Thomas Morris, Brad Shelton. As dusk falls on the twentieth century, the forests of the American Northwest that had once stood immortal and majestic in the photographs of Carleton E. Watkins now lie permanently scarred by the clear-cutting practices of lumber mills acting out of greed or economic desperation. Ray Weiss, a mill owner in an Oregon logging town, is industrious and proud, refusing to let a generations-old tradition die. But a long-buried secret (or perhaps a false memory), once exposed, will seal his family’s doom, leaving him, his wife, and his daughter forever ruined. Jon Jost, who

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writes, directs, photographs, designs and edits all his films, plays down the potentially operatic dimensions of his story by establishing an atmosphere of profound melancholy. His camera moves with the heaviness of a grieving heart as it passes through the rooms of their home, the mill, the forest, and the streams. 113 min.

Monday, October 9, 2:00 p.m. T1; Friday, November 10, 8:15 p.m. T2

Les premières Armes (The Winner’s Circle). 1949. France. Written and directed by René Wheeler. Cinematography by Marcel Franchi. With Jean Cordier, Paul Frankeur, Albert Plantier, Michèle Alfa, and Julien Carette. A young Parisian boy is sent by his indifferent father to a dreary training school for jockeys in the south of France, where apprentices are pitted against each other in a poisonous atmosphere of hazing, petty jealousy, and ruthless competition. Although barely remembered today, the film was admired by François Truffaut for its strange infusion of noirish suspense in an otherwise sad tale of lonely adolescence. In French, with English subtitles. 87 min.

Tuesday, October 10, 2:00 p.m.; Saturday, October 14, 1:00 p.m. T1

La Première Nuit. 1958. France. Directed by . Written by Marianne Oswald and Remo Forlani, adapted by Franju. Cinematography by Eugen Shuftan. Edited by , Jasmine Chasney. Music by . With Pierre Davis, Lisbeth Persson. Bridging two phases in Georges Franju’s career, his starkly photographed documentaries and his hauntingly mysterious fiction films, La Prèmiere Nuit shares elements of both. Dedicated to any adult “who has not disavowed his childhood,” La Prèmiere Nuit evokes the unspoken romantic longings of a boy who dreams of pursuing a girl through the tunnels of the Paris Métro at night. Franju underscores the girl’s elusiveness through deep-focus compositions and fluid tracking shots. No dialogue. 20 min. Thomas L’Imposteur (). 1964. France. Directed by Georges Franju. Screenplay by Jean Cocteau, Franju, Michel Worms and Rafaël Cluzel, based on the novel by Cocteau. Cinematography by Marcel Fradetal and Gilbert Natot. Music by Georges Auric. With Emmanuelle Riva, Jean Servais, Fabrice Rouleau, Sophie Darès, Michel Vitold, Rosy Varte, narrated by . Drawing on his own adventures as a volunteer for a special ambulance unit on the Belgian Front in 1915–16, Jean Cocteau wrote Thomas L’Imposteur, his second novel, in 1923. Four decades later he enlisted Georges Franju to adapt the book to the screen, wondering, “What can one dreamer make of another?” The story’s hero, Guillaume Thomas, is a beautiful sixteen-year-old boy who pretends to be the nephew of a famous general, a lie he tells so convincingly that it wins him the love of a Polish princess and her daughter and gains him passage to the front. As rendered by Franju, the killing fields seem to spring from Thomas’s own night-enshrouded dreams, giving an air of poetic inevitability to the boy’s death on the battlefield. Cocteau thought of Thomas’s end as “the apotheosis of a fairy tale,” writing, “[Thomas’s] sudden death is like a child playing at horses who suddenly turns into one.” In French, English subtitles. 94 min.

Thursday, October 12, 6:00 p.m; Saturday, October 14, 5:15 p.m. T1

Lacombe, Lucien. 1974. France. Directed by Louis Malle. Screenplay by Malle and Patrick Modiano. Cinematography by Tonino Delli Colli. Edited by Suzanne Baron. Music by Django Reinhardt, André Claveau, Irène de Trébert. With Pierre Blaise, Aurore Clément, Holger Löwenadler, Thérèse

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Giehse. For decades after World War II, France’s official history of its wartime activities maintained that the French people as a whole were against the occupation, and denied the existence of anything more than several hundred Nazi collaborators. In 1971 Marcel Ophuls’s merciless documentary The Sorrow and the Pity put the lie to that story once and for all, making it possible for Malle to confront France’s fascist past in fictional film terms for the first time in Lacombe, Lucien three years later. Lucien is a seventeen-year-old peasant living in Figeac, a southwest region that was violently divided between Vichy collaborators and Resistance fighters in the closing years of the war. With his father a prisoner of war in Germany, Lucien tries to join the underground movement, but is rejected. He retaliates by becoming an informer for the Gestapo, occasionally joining in the arrests of his enemies. In French, with English subtitles. 137 min.

Friday, October 13, 2:00 p.m. T1; Friday, November 3, 8:00 p.m. T2

Te O Tsunagu Kora (Children Hand in Hand). 1963. Japan. Directed by Susumu Hani. Screenplay by Hani and Tasuhiko Naito, based on a script by Mansaku Itami. Cinematography by Shigeichi Nagano. Born in in 1928, Hani devoted much of his career to depicting women and children in adverse social conditions, often training his camera on nonprofessional and allowing them to interact spontaneously. The protagonist of this film is a mentally impaired boy from the provinces who struggles to accept his limitations. In Japanese, with English subtitles. 100 min.

Friday, October 13, 6:00 p.m. T1; Thursday, November 16, 3:00 p.m. T2

Dongdong De Jiaql (Summer at Grandpa’s).1985. Taiwan. Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien. Written by Chu Tien-wen. Cinematography by Chen Kwenhou. With Koo Chuen, Mei Fong, Wang Chi-kwang, and Lin Hsiao-ling. When their mother falls gravely ill, twelve-year-old Tung-Tung and his younger sister Ting-Ting are sent from Taipei to stay with their grandparents in the country for the summer. The children grow close to their grandfather, a gruff country doctor who has been running the local infirmary since the days of the Japanese occupation, and they become caught up in the lives the other villagers, including a madwoman, an uncle and his girlfriend, a pair of young thugs, and a peasant “birdcatcher.” Summer at Grandpa’s is constructed as a collage of seemingly random, mundane episodes that in their totality depict a vanishing rural world. The film is also the moving portrait of a family that struggles to preserve its fragile bonds, llustrating one of the director’s favorite Chinese proverbs: “Every family has a scripture which is actually the scripture of difficulties.” In Hokkien, Taiwanese, and Mandarin, with English subtitles. 102 min.

Friday, October 13, 8:00 p.m. T1; Monday, November 20, 3:00 p.m. T2

Muddy River. 1981. Japan. Directed by Kohei Oguri. Screenplay by Takako Shigemori, based on the novel by Teru Miyamoto. Cinematography by Shohei Ando. With Nobutaka Asahara, Takahiro Tamura, Yumiko Fujita, Minoru Sakurai, and Makiko Shibata. One of the first truly independent contemporary Japanese films, the film is the story of a friendship between two young boys in post?World War II Japan: Nobuo, who lives on a canal in Osaka where his parents operate a small lunchroom for dock workers; and Kiichi, who lives on a houseboat with his older sister and his widowed mother, a decent woman who plys her trade as a prostitute along the riverbank to support her children. Through their eyes we witness an older generation coping with the shame and devastation of the

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war and the difficult road to recovery. In Japanese, with English subtitles. 105 min.

Saturday, October 14, 3:00 p.m.; Tuesday, October 17, 2:00 p.m. T1

Kaino Tokubetsu Nenpohyo (Eternal Cause). 1972. Japan. Directed by Tadashi Imai. Imai was one of Japanese cinema’s most outspoken social critics, a fiercely committed Communist who championed the rights of workers and women without romanticizing them. He was blacklisted in the 1950s for his attacks on his nation’s imperialism during World War II, and as he grew older, his antimilitarist sentiments did not wane. Eternal Cause follows a group of young boys from their training as Junior Marines to their deaths in the Battle of Iwo Jima. Most disturbing are the opening boot camp scenes, in which the boys are robbed of their individuality, indoctrinated with dreams of heroic sacrifice, and programmed to kill. In Japanese, with English subtitles. 120 min.

Sunday, October 15, 12:30 p.m.; Monday, October 16, 6:00 p.m. T1

Baby Doll. 1956. USA. Produced and directed by Elia Kazan. Screenplay by Tennessee Williams, based on his one-act plays 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and The Unsatisfactory Supper or The Long Stay Cut Short. Cinematography by Boris Kaufman. Edited by Gene Milford. Music by Kenyon Hopkins. With Carroll Baker, Karl Malden, Eli Wallach, Mildred Dunnock, Lonny Chapman, Eades Hogue, Rip Torn, and the people of Benoit, Mississippi. Though tame by today’s standards, Baby Doll provoked such a scandal on its release in 1956 that Cardinal Spellman denounced it from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Elia Kazan and Tennesse Williams saw the film rather as a coy, but innocent, variation on the story of the “Fox and the Chicken,” for in the end the camera pulls away before we can ever really know whether Baby Doll, the thumb-sucking virgin child bride of a considerably older redneck husband, succumbs to the honey-tongued seductions of his rival, the Sicilian. Many years later Kazan said he liked the film’s combination of “comedy and social significance, of passion and farce,” and had been interested primarily in preserving the ambiguities of Baby Doll’s character, observing that “the awakening of desire is erotic, and so is the presence of desire before it’s fulfilled.” 114 min.

Sunday, October 15, 5:00 p.m.; Monday, October 16, 2:00 p.m. T1

Lolita. 1962. Great Britain. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by Vladimir Nabokov, based on his novel. Cinematography by . Edited by Anthony Harvey. Music by Nelson Riddle. With James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers, Sue Lyon, Marianne Stone, Diana Decker, Jerry Stovin. On paper, Kubrick was Nabokov’s perfect suitor, a literate filmmaker with a penchant for tales of lost innocence and, as befits a chess maven, a lover of impossible challenges—such as that of doing Lolita justice on the screen by satisfying readers’ expectations while avoiding the Legion of Decency’s condemnation. (The only one who claimed not to have read the book was Groucho Marx, who remarked, “I’ve put off reading Lolita for six years, till she’s 18.”) 153 min.

Tuesday, October 17, 6:00 p.m.; Thursday, October 19, 2:00 p.m. T1

Europa Europa. 1992. Directed by . Screenplay by Holland, based on the autobiography of Solomon Perel. Cinematography by Jacek Petrycki. Edited by Ewa Smal and Isabelle Lorente. Music by Zbigniew Preisner. With Marco Hofschnieder, Julie Delpy, Andre Wilms,

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Aschley Wanninger, Hanns Zischler, Klaus Kowatsch. Based on the memoir by Solomon Perel, now 73 and living in Israel, is the strange and terrible story of a German Jewish teenager who survived the war through a series of extraordinary chances, first by fleeing east in 1938 at the age of thirteen and taking refuge in a Soviet school for young Stalinists, and then, after being captured by the Nazis in 1941, by posing as an Aryan and conning his way into the most prestigious and elite Hitler Youth academy in Germany. Not since Louis Malle made Lacombe, Lucien in 1974 was a director excoriated so severely by some, and praised so effusively by others, for her portrait of a boy who is driven by force of circumstance to choose between entering an unholy covenant with the enemy of his people or near-certain death—a decision that, as Holland suggests, was motivated not only by a passive instinct for self-preservation but also by an adolescent need for acceptance. In German and Russian, with English subtitles. 110 min.

Thursday, October 19, 6:00 p.m.; Friday, October 20, 2:00 p.m. T1

The River. 1950. USA. Directed by Jean Renoir. Screenplay by Rumer Godden and Renoir, based on the novel by Godden. Cinematography by . Edited by George Gale. Music directed by M. A. Parata Sarathy. With Patricia Walters, Nora Swinburne, Esmond Knight, Arthur Shields, Thomas E. Breen, Suprova Mukerjee. “I read [Rumer Godden’s The River] and was greatly impressed, not only by the charm of the writing, but by the fact that the story seemed to me to offer the basis of a film of high quality which would nevertheless be acceptable to the Hollywood magnates— children in a romantic setting, the discovery of love by small girls, the death of the little boy who was too fond of snakes, the rather foolish dignity of an English family living on India like a plum on a peach-tree; above all, India itself with its exotic dances and garments…. The River, which looks like one of the most contrived of all my films, is in fact the one nearest to Nature…. If there were not a story based on the immemorial themes of childhood, love and death, it would be a documentary” (Jean Renoir, My Life and My Films). 99 min.

Friday, October 20, 6:00 p.m.; Saturday, October 28, 5:00 p.m. T1

Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road). 1955. India. Directed by . Screenplay by Ray, based on the novel by Bibhutibhusan Banerjee. Cinematography by Subrata Mitra. Edited by Dulal Dutta. Music by Ravi Shankar. With Kanu Banerjee, Karuna Banerjee, Subir Banerjee, Uma Das Gupta, Chunibala Devi, Aparna Debi, Tulsi Chakravarti. is the story of a poor Brahmin family living in its ancestral Bengali village: the boy Apu, through whose eyes we witness and experience the world; his mischievous, doomed older sister Durga; his eccentric Auntie; his father, a decent but impractical lay priest; and his strong-willed mother, who bears the burden of keeping the family from starving and falling deeper into poverty. Ray’s gifts as a filmmaker were his reverence for detail and his economy of expression, picking out the particular sound, gesture, or image that would ring true and take on the qualities of poetic metaphor. In this way, Apu and Durga’s first sight of a railway train as they play in a field of fluffy white flowers becomes for us, as for the children, a moment of discovery and grace. In Bengali, with English subtitles. 115 min.

Friday, October 20, 8:15 p.m.; Saturday, October 28, 2:00 p.m. T1

Two (A Parable of Two). 1964. India. Written and directed by Satyajit

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Ray. Cinematography by Soumendu Roy. Edited by Dulal Dutta. Music by Ray. With Ravi Kiran. Ray’s short parable is a universal story of impenetrable social and economic barriers. Two young boys compete over who is the happiest and most content: one, a chubby, bored child surrounded by expensive Western toys, and the other, in rags, playing his wooden pipe outside his solitary hut. Told with biblical simplicity and wisdom, Two is a gentle critique of the extremes of the Indian caste system and the social prejudices begun in childhood. No dialogue. 12 min. (Two Daughters). 1961. India. Directed by Satyajit Ray. Screenplay by Ray, based on the stories “The Postmaster” and “Samapti” (“The Conclusion”) by Rabindranath Tagore. Cinematography by Soumendu Roy. Edited by Dulal Dutta. Music by Ray. With Anil Chatterjee, Chandana Banerjee, Nripati Chatterjee, Soumitra Chatterjee, Aparna Das Gupta, Sita Mukherjee. Two Daughters was described by Pauline Kael as “a pure and simple masterpiece of the filmed short story form.” The first story is about an arrogant intellectual Calcutta boy from a lower-middle- class background who is assigned to a remote village as their postmaster. Ill-paid, forlorn, and restless, he gradually finds companionship in an orphaned ten-year-old servant girl who was shamefully mistreated by her former master. Part two is also the story of a girl’s awakening, this time taking the form of a clever, witty satire on the traditions of courtship and marriage in India (and of mother-son relationships the world over). A snooty young law student defies his mother’s wishes by marrying a wild, guileless girl from the village. Revealing on their wedding night that she was forced into the marriage, she leaves him, and only after she is permitted to love him freely does she return. In Bengali, English subtitles. 112 min.

Friday, October 20, 8:00 p.m.; Sunday, October 22, 1:00 p.m. T2

Joseph Cornell Program.In his films, as in his shadow boxes and collages, Joseph Cornell’s vision of childhood was ethereally beautiful and hauntingly unsettling, a virginal, fairy-tale innocence wistfully sealed off from the corruption of adult experience. A boy discovers an old volume of travel pictures at a bookstall and is transported to faraway, imaginary places. A young girl wanders through the streets and parks of Manhattan, her head lost in the clouds, tantalizingly unattainable to an unseen onlooker (Cornell, the viewer). A children’s party shines under the firmament of stars, its participants frozen in timeless, lifeless wonder. Among the films to be screened: Cotillion (1940; completed by Larry Jordan, 1968), The Children’s Party (1940; completed by Jordan, 1968), The Midnight Party (1940; completed by Jordan, 1968), The Aviary (cinematography by Rudy Burkhardt, 1954), A Fable for Fountains (cinematography by Burkhardt, 1955–57), Centuries of June (cinematography by , 1955), Angel (1957), What Mozart Saw on Mulberry Street (cinematography by Burkhardt, 1958), Seraphina’s Garden (1958). Total running time approx. 60 min.

Saturday, October 21, 1:00 p.m. T1; Sunday, November 26, 5:00 p.m. T2

Imitation of Christ. 1970. USA. Produced, written, directed, photographed, and edited by Andy Warhol. With Brigid Polk, Ondine, Patrick Tilden, Nico, and Taylor Mead. “A wasted young man, silent and moody, spends time with the family maid, who reads to him from Thomas Kempis’s Imitatione Christ (c. 1390–1440). Meanwhile, the young man’s mother and father argue in bed about their son, trying to determine what has gone wrong with him and lamenting their own state of affairs. Intercut are scenes of the son with a hobo, ambling through the streets of San Francisco” (AFI Catalogue of Feature Films, 1961–70). 85 min.

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Saturday, October 21, 3:00 p.m.; Monday, October 23, 2:00 p.m. T1

Badlands. 1974. USA. Produced, written and directed by Terence Malick. Cinematography by Brian Probyn, and Stevan Larner. Edited by Robert Estrin. With music by George Tipton, Carl Orff, Erik Satie, and James Taylor, and songs sung by Nat King Cole and Mickey and Sylvia. With Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Oates, Ramon Bieri, Alan Vint, Gary Littlejohn, John Carter. A former Rhodes scholar in philosophy, Terence Malick was twenty-nine when he made his film directing debut with Badlands, the ballad of Kit, a twenty-five-year-old garbage collector, and Holly, a teenage majorette, who fall in love and embark on a Midwestern murder spree that makes them famous in all the papers. Like Malick’s other films, and The Thin Red Line, Badlands is told in voice-over narration from the perspective of an innocent, Holly, who wonders, “Where would I be at this very moment if Kit had never met me, or killed anybody?” An aching loneliness pervades the air as the fugitive lovers drive by night across the endless plains of South Dakota. And for that brief, suspended moment when they dance in the headlights to Nat King Cole singing “A Blossom Fell,” Kit and Holly live in a state of grace. 95 min.

Saturday, October 21, 3:00 p.m.; Saturday, November 25, 3:00 p.m. T2

Stan Brakhage I: Three Births. Anticipation of the Night. 1958. USA. Stan Brakhage. “A child is born on the lawn, born of water with its promissory rainbow, and the wild rose….There is seen the sleep of innocents in their animal dreams, becoming the amusement, their circular game, becoming the morning” (Brakhage). 41 min. Window Water Baby Moving. 1959. USA. Stan Brakhage. A home movie of a home delivery. Brakhage transforms the birth of his daughter into a crystalline study of light and movement—an adventure in what he calls hypnagogic imagemaking, “the moving color patterns that children like to produce when rubbing their eyes.” 12 min. Thigh Line Lyre Triangular. 1961. USA. Stan Brakhage. “Only at a crisis do I see both the scene as I’ve been trained to see it (that is, with Renaissance perspective, three-dimensional logic…) and patterns that move straight out from the inside of my mind through the optic nerves…spots before my eyes, so to speak…and it’s a very intensive, disturbing, but joyful experience. I’ve seen that every time a child was born” (Brakhage). 7 min. Total running time: 60 min.

Saturday, October 21, 5:00 p.m.; Monday, October 23, 6:00 p.m. T1

Wildweschsel (Jail Bait). 1972. Federal Republic of Germany. Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Screenplay by Fassbinder, based on the play by Franz Xaver Kroetz. Cinematography by Dietrich Lohmann. Edited by Thea Eymèsz. With Eva Mattes, Jörg von Liebenfels, Ruth Drexel, Harry Baer, Rudolf Waldemar Brem, Hanna Schygulla, Kurt Raab. Hanni is a fourteen- year-old girl who’s stuck in a bleak Bavarian town with her overprotective truck-driver father, her frustrated, lonely mother, and a house full of crucifixes. She is easily seduced by a smooth-talking nineteen-year-old greaser, who wastes no time deflowering her in a hayloft. When Hanni gets pregnant, she compels her lover to remove the only impediment to their happiness: her father. Fassbinder’s thirteenth film, Jail Bait, made when he was twenty-six, seemed as much an homage to American teenage rebel movies of the 1950s, with their stories of forbidden lust and casual violence (Fassbinder used Paul Anka’s plaintive

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ballad “You Are My Destiny” as the leitmotif of the film), as an adaptation of Franz Xaver Kroetz’s controversial play. In German, with English subtitles. 102 min.

Saturday, October 21, 5:00 p.m.; Sunday, October 22, 3:00 p.m.. T2

Stan Brakhage II: . 1961-64. USA. Stan Brakhage. A landmark in experimental cinema, Dog Star Man is Brakhage’s ambitious, complex, and often whimsical vision of the Genesis myth. With a structure intended to evoke the passage of a single day or the cycle of the seasons, this epic film- poem celebrates Blake’s Romantic notion of the child as a visionary. At it is born, Brakhage’s own baby experiences a metaphorical baptism of fire—which the filmmaker conveys by burning and distressing the film emulsion itself—suggesting that with the act of creation comes the inevitable moment of corruption. 74 min.

Sunday, October 22, 5:00 p.m.; Tuesday, October 31, 6:00 p.m. T2

Stan Brakhage III: The Weir-Falcon Saga. 1970. USA. Stan Brakhage. A child’s illness produces hallucinatory, chaotic visions. 30 min. Sincerity III. 1978. USA. Stan Brakhage. “This film takes up the light- threads of our living from 1964, when the Brakhage family found Home and ‘settled,’ like they say, into some sense of permanence.” 37 min. Duplicity III. 1980. USA. Stan Brakhage. Duplicity: the doubling of imagery through multiple exposures, recurrent motifs, and positive/negative inversions. Duplicity: the quality or state of being two-faced, deceitful. Duplicity: the ghostly forest dance of masked children on All Hallow’s Eve. 23 min. Total running time 90 min.

Sunday, October 22, 2:00 p.m.; Friday, October 27, 2:00 p.m. T1

Megáll Az Ido (Time Stands Still). 1982. Hungary. Directed by Péter Gothár. Screenplay by Géza Bereményi and Gothar. Cinematography by Lajos Koltai. Music by György Selmeczi. With István Znamenák, Henrik Pauer, Sándor Söth, Péter Gálfy, Anikó Iván, Ági Kakassy. “The temptation to liken Péter Gothár’s Time Stands Still to American Graffiti (Jim Hoberman aptly dubbed it “Magyar Graffiti”) is overwhelming; not only is this atmospheric evocation of Budapest from 1956 through 1967 full of adolescent rebellion to the beat of American rock’n’roll, but it’s also a film about a culture constantly forced to read the cryptic writing on the wall. Will a freedom fighter’s escape from Hungary in 1956 bring political reprisals down on his wife and two sons? Can a cynical mother bribe a high school instructor to ingratiate her son with whatever authority prevails at the moment?…. And how do the children of the 1956 uprising cope with the mixed political and sexual messages of their parents?” (Carrie Rickey, The Village Voice). In Hungarian, with English subtitles. 99 min.

Sunday, October 22, 5:00 p.m. T1; Sunday, November 12, 1:00 p.m. T2

Dangling Participle. 1970. USA. Directed by Standish D. Lawder. “In Dangling Participle Lawder reassembles several sex education films from the 1950s into a hilarious spoof underlining the banal, patronizing, and profoundly anti-sexual nature of the original material. The filmmaker

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fixes on the silliest, most melodramatic aspects of these instructional films: people with eyes glazed, smoking cigarettes with an unnatural intensity; the cheerleader as personification of acceptable American sexuality; a voice made to repeat ‘He’s a perfectly normal male,’ which of course leads us to believe otherwise” (Film Forum). 17 min. Breakdown (The Loveless). 1983. USA. Written and directed by Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery. Cinematography by Doyle Smith. With Willem Defoe, Robert Gordon, Marin Kanter, J. Don Ferguson, and Tina L’Hotsky. Fugitive love and the fetishism of violence are driving concerns in Bigelow’s work. Her breakthrough film is a chrome-and-leather look at Beat bikers in the late 1950s and a story of incest that leads to patricide and suicide. Bigelow draws on the iconography and idolatry of Pop culture, making references to in The Wild One, Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind, Kenneth Anger’s study in sadoerotic fascism, Scorpio Rising, and Hunter S. Thompson’s journalistic novel Hell’s Angels. 85 min.

Tuesday, October 24, 2:00 p.m. T1; Sunday, November 12, 3:00 p.m. T2

491. 1964. . Directed by Vilgot Sjöman. Screenplay by Lars Görling, based on his novel. Cinematography by Gunnar Fischer. With Lena Nyman, Lars Lind, Leif Nymark, Stig Törnblom, and Lars Hansson. Still banned in Sweden as pornography, 491 was Bergman disciple Sjöman’s second film. Six criminal teenagers who are bound for prison or an institution are instead chosen by the authorities to participate in an experiment at rehabilitation. Placed in a house under the care of a young social worker, they are given license to do as they please, so long as they give a daily report of their activities to their welfare supervisor. Although the social worker shows them Christian charity with a forbearance that puts her in line for canonization—not just “until seven times; but until seventy times seven” as instructed in Matthew 18:22—the experiment fails dismally: the supervisor abuses his authority by sexually exploiting two of the boys, and the boys follow suit by taking a teenage girl home and forcing her into prostitution. In Swedish, English subtitles. 105 min.

Tuesday, October 24, 6:00 p.m. T1; Sunday, November 12, 5:00 p.m. T2

Dwaj ludzie z szafa (Two Men and a Wardrobe). 1958. Poland. Written, directed, and edited by . Cinematography by Maciej Kijowski. With Jakub Goldberg, Henryk Kluba, and Polanski. In Polanski’s absurdist short, made while he was a student at the Lodz Film School, two clownish men surface from the sea bearing an armoire and are greeted by a cruel and indifferent world, mocked and beaten up by a gang of thugs (including a young Polanski). A harbinger of later films like Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion, Two Men and a Wardrobe evokes the terror of being confined or entrapped, a terror Polanski knew well as a child hiding in Kraków’s Jewish ghetto during World War II. No dialogue. 15 min. River’s Edge.1987. USA. Directed by . Screenplay by Neal Jimenez. Cinematography by . With Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye Leitch, Daniel Roebuck, and Dennis Hopper. Rarely seen theatrically since its release in 1987, the film is based on a chilling incident that took place in suburban northern California in 1981: Jacques Broussard, a sixteen-year-old, 285-pound high school student, strangled his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, dumped her body in a gully, and for the next two days remained free as he showed off the corpse to his friends. For Hunter and Jimenez, the incident went beyond questions of adolescent rage and unfathomable evil, for although these outcasts and loners were indeed alienated from the larger society, they were also powerfully bound together in a code of silence. 99 min.

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Thursday, October 26, 6:00 p.m. T1; Thursday, November 30, 3:00 p.m. T2

You’re a Big Boy Now. 1966. USA. Directed by . Screenplay by Coppola, based on the novel by David Benedictus. Cinematography by Andrew Laszlo. With Elizabeth Hartman, , Julie Harris, Peter Kastner, and Rip Torn. So demented and daffy is this burlesque comedy that its 1966 press release can reasonably be described as understated: “Can a virginal young man, who uses roller skates to speed his way around the stacks of the public library, find happiness with a beautiful Off-Broadway actress, whose prize possession is the purloined wooden leg of a lecherous albino psychotherapist?” After a lucrative but frustrating period of writing scripts that underwent drastic revisions (This Property Is Condemned, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Is Paris Burning?), the twenty-seven-year-old Coppola hustled to make this film on his own terms, securing a whopping $1 million from Seven Arts Productions, luring an immensely talented cast from the New York stage, and shooting on location around the city in a breakneck twenty-nine days. 96 min.

Friday, October 27, 6:00 p.m. T1; Thursday, November 2, 3:00 p.m. T2

Ostre Sledované Vlaky (Closely Watched Trains). 1966. Czechoslovakia. Directed by Jirí Menzel. Screenplay by Bohumil Hrabal and Menzel. With Václav Neckár, Jitka Bendová, Vladimír Valenta, and Libuse Havelková, Josef Somr. J. Hoberman of The Village Voice described this film as “the droll family history of Milos Hrma, a sad-faced, thin-nosed youth who goes to work at a provincial Czechoslovakian train station during the waning days of World War II.… Milos’s sexual initiation suffers a serious setback when he wears his hat to bed with a pert conductress and fades in the clutch. Menzel himself cameos as the sympathetic doctor who diagnoses the problem as premature ejaculation after Milos slits his wrists. When the boy encounters a glamorous partisan, it’s like a dream come true; grimly, for such an earthy film, the rewards of sex are death.” In Czech, with English subtitles. 89 min.

Friday, October 27, 8:00 p.m. T1; Thursday, November 9, 3:00 p.m. T2

Il Posto (The Sound of Trumpets). 1961. Italy. Written and directed by Ermanno Olmi. With Sandro Panzeri, Loredana Detto, Tullio Kezich, and Mara Revel. With no previous acting experience, Panzeri plays a shy, sensitive boy of seventeen from a working-class suburb of Milan who expects nothing more from life than un posto sicuro, a steady job. After sweating his way through a battery of incomprehensible aptitude tests he is bestowed the lowly position of errand boy in the Technical Section of a large industrial firm, a vantage point from which he observes, not without awe, the humdrum rituals of his superiors. A comedy romance in pantomime (to borrow Chaplin’s tagline for City Lights), The Sound of Trumpets is composed of beautifully rendered vignettes, both tender and bittersweet. In Italian with English subtitles. 90 min.

Friday, October 27, 8:00 p.m.; Saturday, October 28, 5:00 p.m. T2

James Herbert: Three Films, 1977– 1992. For more than thirty years James Herbert has been using his personal technique of re-photography—in which thousands of individual images are optically manipulated and then edited for rhythmic synthesis—to investigate the sculptural play of light on

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flesh, and the strange effects of time on youth: frozen and eternal, immediate and fleeting. With their intimations of drama, Herbert’s films tend to mark the passage from an Arcadian state of luxe, calme, et volupté to the post-coital realm of experience and knowledge; the film critic Roger Greenspun has written, “I have rarely seen movies so aware of the mortal sadness of young bodies.” Clove. 1977. USA. James Herbert. “A nine-year-old boy is seen in a dark and sometimes sinister setting with an older boy, perhaps a brother, and a young woman who could be the mother. Bare light directed frontally on the nude bodies like a flash bulb adds a stark directness to the expressionism. In a climactic scene the nude boy lies at the feet of the woman, her swirling red satin dress caressing him in re-photographed dream motion” (Herbert). 20 min. Silk.1977. USA. James Herbert. “More than any film in the past, this documents the actual physical lovemaking of a young couple (who were in love)….The opposite of Clove with its childlike forebodings of forbidden sexuality….[In the last third the pair] couple to a climax, juices flowing in close up, dogs cavort around them, love-biting each other, prancing sexually, a counterpoint to the couple’s coital motion” (Herbert). 25 min. John Five. 1992. USA. James Herbert. “The theme of erotic love and tenderness, longing and desire, expressed through the innocent awakenings of two young men and a woman in three settings. The figures are, for the most part, nude, and move through lush environments of antique and contemporary rooms” (Herbert). 25 min. Total running time 70 min.

Sunday, October 29, 1:00 p.m. T1; Saturday, November 11, 4:00 p.m. T2

Fanny och Alexander (). 1983. Sweden. Written and directed by . Cinematography by . With Pernilla Allwin, Bertil Guve, Borje Ahlstedt, Erland Josephson, , and Mats Bergman. In The Magic Lantern, Bergman writes, “I can still roam through the landscape of my childhood and re-create the lighting, smells, people, places, moments, gestures, intonations, and objects. Seldom do these memories have any particular meaning: they are like bits of film, short or long, with no point, shot at random. This is the prerogative of childhood: to move in complete freedom between magic and oatmeal porridge, between boundless terror and a joy that threatens to burst within you. There were no limits except forbidden things and rules, which were like shadows, mostly unfathomable.” In Swedish with English subtitles. 190 min.

Sunday, October 29, 5:00 p.m. T1; Friday, November 24, 3:00 p.m. T2

A Perfect World. 1993. USA. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Screenplay by John Lee Hancock. With Clint Eastwood, , Laura Dern, T. J. Lowther, and Keith Szarabajka. Fathers who abuse or abandon their sons, sons who come to see violence as their only means of survival, a perpetual cycle of neglect and need—such is the way an imperfect world turns. In the performance of his career, Costner plays Butch Haynes, a hardened escaped convict who kidnaps a seven-year-old boy named Philip in trying to elude the law. Fleeing across the sun-baked Texas Panhandle, with Eastwood’s crusty, aging police chief and his team of Texas Rangers hot in tow, the con and the boy develop the only tender relationship either has known—Philip finding in Butch the daddy he never had and Butch finding in Philip the child he might have been. Set in early November 1963, only weeks before the end of what America has come to think of as its age of innocence, the film forms—along with the 1992 Unforgiven—

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Eastwood’s plaintive meditation on violence and its consequences. 137 min.

Sunday, October 29, 1:00 p.m.; Friday, November 17, 8:00 p.m. T2

Pixote. 1981. Brazil. Directed by Hector Babenco. Screenplay by Babenco and Jorge Durán, based on the novel Infancia dos Mortos by José Louzeiro. Cinematography by Rodolfo Sanches. With Fernandos Ramos da Silva, Maríla Pêra, Jardel Filho, and Reubens de Falco. The harshest films of slum life—Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine, Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados, Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Vidas secas, and Pixote among them—are devoid of romance. Babenco discovered da Silva, the young boy who would play Pixote, among the three million children living on the streets of São Paulo, who are forced to steal, turn tricks, deal drugs, even kill for a scrap of food. Da Silva was murdered by police several years after the film became an international success. In Portuguese with English subtitles. 127 min.

Sunday, October 29, 3:00 p.m.; Saturday, November 18, 3:30 p.m. T2

Los Niños abandonados (The Abandoned Children). 1974. USA/Colombia. Directed and photographed by Danny Lyon. Few have been blessed with Lyon’s sharp and sensitive eye in depicting poverty. In 1974, Lyon documented a group of homeless boys living on the mean streets of a seaside Colombian city, in this film and in a photographic series. In spite of Lyon’s resolutely unsentimental stance, one remains haunted by the boys’ faces long after the film has ended. Older than their teenage years, their hair thinning, their skin pallid, their eyes sagging under the weight of having experienced too much, the boys sing the sad ballads of abandonment, abuse, and impossible love. In Spanish with English subtitles. 63 min.

Sunday, October 29, 5:00 p.m. T2

Billabong. 1968. USA. Directed and photographed by Will Hindle. A young man’s thoughts meander back to the precipitous moment when he began his military service, a time of loneliness and apprehension. Images and sounds emerge and recede: the wail of a distant train and the chirping of crickets, young hustlers in a pool hall, a row of urinals, girlie pin-ups and muscular men in tight t-shirts, a barracks with mattresses folded on cots, the spine of an old copy of the Holy Bible. 9 min. Tattooed Tears.1978. USA. Directed and photographed by Nicholas Broomfield and Joan Churchill. Tattooed Tears is one of the first films by the documentary team of Broomfield and Churchill, a grim exposé of the California Youth Authority, an institute for male offenders aged 17 to 21, whose mission, according to one official, is not rehabilitation but “the safety and welfare of the public.” Sympathy clearly lies with the incarcerated boys, for whom the prospects of freedom and a new beginning dim with each passing day. The boys’ encounters with the adult male wardens are marked by unremitting mutual anger, resentment and mistrust: one complains of unsanitary food conditions and is met with bureaucratic indifference; another is subjected to a humiliating body cavity search that turns up no evidence of wrongdoing. The film ends with a teenager’s attempted suicide and the authority’s use of force and debasement to keep him alive. 88 min.

Monday, October 30, 6:00 p.m. T1; Sunday, November 5, 3:00 p.m. T2

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Carrie. 1976. USA. Directed by Brian de Palma. Screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen and Stephen King, based on King’s novel. Cinematography by Mario Tosi. With Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving, John Travolta, and Nancy Allen. “Carrie sat with her eyes closed and felt the black bulge of terror rising in her mind,” writes King in his contemporary horror classic. “Momma had been right, after all. They had taken her again, gulled her again, made her the butt again. The horror of it should have been monotonous, but it was not: they had gotten her up here, up here in front of the whole school, and had repeated the shower-room scene…only the voice had said (my god that’s blood) something too awful to be contemplated. If she opened her eyes and it was true, oh, what then? When then?” 98 min.

Tuesday, October 31, 6:00 p.m. T1; Sunday, November 5, 5:00 p.m. T2.

The Shining. 1980. USA. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by Kubrick and Diane Johnson, based on the novel by Stephen King. Cinematography by . Edited by Ray Lovejoy. Music by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind; with pieces by Ligeti, Bartok, and Penderecki. With Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers, Barry Nelson, Philip Stone, Joe Turkel. While acting as the winter caretaker of an isolated hotel, an author is driven to hunt down his wife and child with an axe. The roots of his violence are contemporary criminal defense arguments: It was the whisky or writer’s block, cabin fever or a haunted past. Formulaic as the horror genre may be, the humor of The Shining makes accessible, even palatable, the primal myth of the family romance and the Oedipal terror of the castrating father. The film’s co- screenwriter, Diane Johnson, hoped The Shining would have the “artistic satisfaction of a fairy tale.” Introduced on October 31 by Michel Ciment, Positif film critic and author of the definitive monograph on Stanley Kubrick. 135 min.

Saturday, November 4, 3:00 p.m.; Monday, December 4, 3:00 p.m. T2

Warrendale. 1967. Canada. Directed by Allan King. Cinematography by William Brayne. King’s verité portrait of Warrendale, an experimental residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed children, was intended for Canadian television. But the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation decided not to air it, ostensibly because of one boy’s prodigious use of a four-letter word. A more likely objection was the film’s unsettling content—principally, its depiction of the center’s controversial method of “holding”: encouraging the child to vent hostile, even violent, feelings, while at the same time restraining him in a cross between a half nelson and a bear hug. Warrendale was picked up by independent producers and went on to win the International Critics’ Prize at Cannes in 1967; over the years, reaction to the film has ranged from effusive to hostile, with some observers calling it profoundly compassionate and others accusing King of violating the children’s privacy and editing out negative aspects of the center’s therapeutic practices. 100 min.

Sunday, November 5, 1:00 p.m; Sunday, November 26, 3:00 p.m. T2

Heidi. 1992. USA. Directed and designed by Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley. Based on the novel by Johanna Spyri. Cinematography by Peter Kasperak. With Tim Martin. The bad boys of the California art scene give a perverse twist to Spyri’s sentimental tale of an orphan girl who must leave her beloved grandfather in the Alps to tend to a sick cousin in the city.

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Mocking what they regard as a treacly, artificial story, McCarthy and Kelley used a fabricated set, two large backdrop paintings, and partial and life-sized rubber figures in making this video. Video. 63 min. Deafman Glance. 1982. USA. Directed and designed by Robert Wilson. With Sheryl Sutton, Jerry Jackson, and Rafael Carmona. Avant-garde theater director Wilson produced this piece for PBS, basing it on the fourth-act prologue of his 1970 stage production of the same name. The piece was inspired by drawings by Wilson’s adopted son Raymond Andrews, an eleven- year-old deaf-mute boy who greatly influenced the artist’s interest in nonverbal storytelling. Describing the work as a silent opera, Wilson used slow, deliberate body movements and gestures and hyperreal sound effects rather than dialogue to tell his sinister tale of infanticide, a tale with echoes of Medea and undertones of racial violence. Video. 28 min.

Tuesday, November 7, 6:00 p.m.; Monday, November 13, 3:00 p.m. T2

Hope and Glory. 1987. Great Britain. Written and directed by . Cinematography by . With Sebastian Rice- Edwards, Sarah Miles, Ian Bannen, Sammi Davis, and Geraldine Muir. Hope and Glory is Boorman’s semiautobiographical account of the sublime pleasures he enjoyed as a seven-year-old living in the London suburbs during the Blitz. For Boorman the experience was like a “dream of war”: “To the children of the Blitz,” he said, “the war was a wondrous playground. We could loot and pillage. Small boys are anarchists anyway.” 113 min.

Friday, November 24, 8:00 p.m.; Sunday, November 26, 1:00 p.m. T2

Sadie Benning: Two Videos. Born in Milwaukee in 1973, Sadie Benning was an accomplished videomaker by the time she reached her late teens, widely admired for her sophisticated aesthetics and her sexy, playful confessional melodramas. Using the $100 Fisher Price toy camcorder she received at fifteen from her father, the experimental filmmaker James Benning, Sadie has chronicled her experiences coming of age and coming out in small-town America—all from the cloistered confines of her bedroom. The Pixelvision camera records both sounds and images on audio tape, and its pinhole lens creates extraordinary depth-of-field in low light. In the evanescent graininess of its black-and-white imagery, which vibrates between

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